Martinique continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 49

The day had started in brilliant sunshine, but huge boxing-glove clouds had collected along the slopes
of the volcano, and the rain soon came hammering down on the flat leaves like the fists of pugilists;
leaving everything smashed, sodden, steaming and inert. But the rain stopped, the air was clear and wind-
less and watery, and almost Nordic. As we gazed northwards, the Trade Wind revived, and sent a steady
breath along the water. The clouds began to move ponderously towards the west. Only the British island
of Dominica remained static.
This was the point, our companion explained, from which the Martinicans have been accustomed to
make their escape to the English island to join the Free French. They usually went there by oar and sail
in dug-out canoes, a good forty miles over very rough sea. Dominica became inundated with these vo-
lunteers, and the capital, the little town of Roseau, was for a time a kind of Gaullist reception camp and
depôt, where they sometimes had to wait for months till they could find a passage to Europe and the
theatre of war.
Travelling eastwards from Grande Rivière, we passed through innumerable valleys, down each of
which a stream rushed into the sea. Arcades of bamboo closed over our heads. Their stems shot upwards
in hundreds of dark, diverging jets, and wound away in mazy and glaucous tunnels.
We reached the little town of Macouba at nightfall. It was the parish of Father Labat. All students of
the history of the West Indies owe a great debt to this extraordinary monk. And, as one reads his volumin-
ous memoirs, [1] it is the personality of the author, quite as much as the subject of which he treats, that
prompts one's admiration and gratitude and one's amusement. He is a sort of monastic West Indian Pepys.
He has the same devouring curiosity and sense of humour and practical flair, and, above all, the same
lucid and indefatigable garrulousness. Nothing is too important or too trivial for him to set on record in
his vigorous and entertaining prose. France has a rich Antillean bibliography, but none of them approach
the Dominican in value, except Father Du Tertre, who is the first of these monkish private chroniclers of
the West Indies on whose writings one's knowledge of the early days of the islands is based. The oth-
ers—Rochefort, de la Bare, Feuillée—fall a long way behind.
Jean Baptiste Labat was born in Paris three years before the great fire of London, of a bourgeois family
from the Landes, near Bordeaux. He entered Holy Orders at the age of twenty-two, and took his final
vows as a monk in the Order of Preachers. For a while he taught mathematics and philosophy in Nancy,
and then accompanied the French army as a regimental chaplain to the wars in Flanders, and in 1693 he
joined a mission leaving for Martinique. His memoirs open just before his departure for the New World,
where he remained altogether about twelve years.
Few pages of his voluminous memoirs are concerned with the religious life of the West Indies, unless
it has a bearing on some more pressing topic, like the sovereign rights of the French crown, or the way to
handle slaves. The things that really interested him were the flowers, trees, animals and insects of the An-
tilles, the wars against the English, the personalities of the islands, economical and agricultural problems,
the life and customs of the English, Dutch, Spanish, Africans and Caribs, and their history and language.
Any excuse was sufficient to get away from his cure of souls, and he contrived on the flimsiest of pretexts
to visit a large number of the Windward and Leeward islands and even some of the greater Antilles far
away in the west; talking, arguing, quarrelling, observing, and, fortunately, making notes.
A contemporary portrait depicts him as a fleshy, full-faced Rabelaisian divine with a humorous curl
to the mouth, and an expression in his large bright eyes that is a curious mixture of coarseness and sub-
tlety; a kind of Friar Tuck with the grossness leavened by intellect and learning. His gastronomic in-
quisitiveness is boundless, and he never omits to give a full catalogue of the provisions— les munitions