Martinique continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 50

de bouche —with which, for the slightest departure, he equips himself; the kegs or demijohns of canary,
the cold boiled capons and guinea-fowls, the patés, the baskets of fruit. He emerges from his pages as a
gluttonous, intelligent, voluble, practical, pugnacious, argumentative and, above all, immensely likable
busybody.
His picaresque and resilient spirit carries him safely through every kind of activity. At one moment he
is bargaining for a dozen Negroes from an African slaver, at another he is chastising a sorcerer from the
Guinea coast; laying out plans for the fortifications of the French islands, manning and firing a cannon
during the English invasion of Guadeloupe, building sugar mills and refineries, expostulating and win-
ning his way with the governor and the generals on questions of strategy or tactics, dining with filibusters
and buccaneers and haggling over the price of their loot; wandering through the hinterland of Haiti, hunt-
ing wild hog in the Virgin islands, arguing about religion with the captain of a Spanish galleon, helping
to capture an enemy ship as a member of the boarding party; being himself in turn captured by pirates.
We find him learning the Negro dialects of the Guinea coasts, or living in the High Woods of Dominica
with the Caribs, making collections of their jewels and bows and arrows; scribbling down the names of
tropical herbs and flowers and their medicinal properties, describing how a turtle should be cooked, or
how the manicou carries its young ones upon its back with all their tails looped round the parent-tail to
prevent them from sliding off.
The prints that illustrate his memoirs are amazing. The tropical flora, already strange enough, here
goes mad. Shapeless monsters nibble and wallow under giant rhubarb leaves, pterodactyls blacken the
sky, corkscrew-snouted swine gimble and gyre in gloomy equinoctial wabes.
But whatever else he was doing one factor is always constant: his insubordination and restlessness
keep him at loggerheads with his ecclesiastical superiors. He was for ever having battles of words, from
which, to judge by his writings, he always emerged the winner.
But when he finally left the islands to represent the interests of his order in Paris, he was not recalled.
He had made things too hot for himself there, and the local authorities were glad to see the back of this
stormy petrel. We find him as confessor to Vauban in the War of the Spanish Succession, or later, wan-
dering through Spain and Italy on mysterious errands, eating enormously, drinking, talking and always
writing. In 1706 he was travelling from Genoa with another Dominican, 'who, for his sins, was escorting
to Paris, for the Archbishop of Rouen, a musician with a clear voice who had undergone an operation to
prevent his voice breaking.' He died at last in Paris, in 1738, at the age of seventy-five.
Père Labat is the best of the writers on the background of this topic, in any language; and, as his travels
took him to a number of the Spanish or English islands, he is almost as rewarding a source on these as on
his own French ones. I have introduced this ribald, perceptive monk at some length as his name, like the
robust shoots of a tropical creeper, will appear many times among the branches of this traveller's tree. It
is noteworthy that another monk, an English one this time, the amusing renegade Father Gage, should fill
the same gap for the Central American republics as his French colleague for the Caribbean islands.
A friend was waiting in the hall of the Vieux Moulin with a queer little figure by his side. As soon as
we were sitting in one of the arbours of the garden, the stranger put his hands on his knees and, leaning
forward, said:
'And how are you getting along with these animals, sir?'
Thinking he was referring to the insects or possibly the snakes, which, although we had not seen any,
infest the island, I made a suitable comment, which was interrupted by a noise like a faulty soda-water