Dominica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 76

fierceness of the strange labyrinth through which we had ridden for so many hours. The sky was almost
bare of clouds, and, miles away, at the end of the wooded valley, the Caribbean Sea flung back the sun
from an infinity of brilliant points. Our height seemed to have lifted the horizon three-quarters of the way
to the zenith. A peasant, climbing from Roseau, halted in the shade of a tree to mop his brow and ask us
what it was like 'on windwardside.'
The watersheds of these islands are the boundary lines between different countries. Windwardside is
the region of daybreak and morning, and of thousands of clouds blown up by the wind from the turbulent
Atlantic onto the sodden mountainside; a country of terrible rocks and waves. Leewardside is the king-
dom of the afternoon and sunset, of the clear sky where the clouds have shed their harm; of smooth reefs
and lagoons and the glittering waters of a sea walled in by a drowned mountain range and machicolated
by islands. An afternoon world.
Far beyond the horizon, fifty leagues due west of the mountain where we stood lay the little desert
island of Aves. It floats there quite by itself in the empty Caribbean. The pleasant isle of Aves, celebrated
by Kingsley and Kipling, played a great part in the time of the buccaneers. Père Labat was blown there
on board a French corsair a hundred and fifty miles off his course. He found two English ladies, Mrs.
Hamilton and a friend, stranded on Aves with the crew of an English frigate that had come to grief, but
for whom succour was expected daily. The monk gallantly rescued them, and carried them to St. Kitts, as
they were on their way from Barbados to spend Christmas in Antigua.
He describes it as a pleasant little island, looking, from a distance, like a sand-bank, but when they
dropped anchor—“in clear water, three and a half fathoms deep, with sandy bottom, half a pistol shot
from the land”—it turned out to be plentifully covered with bushes and cashiman, soursop and guava
trees whose presence there was due, he presumed, to sea birds which had swallowed the seed in the Wind-
ward Islands, and dropped them here. Aves, and the little reefs lying nearby, were white with bird-lime,
and the thousands of sea birds were so thick on the sand “and so proud” that they refused to make way
for him. Only by inflicting severe correction with his walking stick could he clear a passage through their
midst. Gulls, plover, widgeon and all kinds of water-fowl, including flamingoes, abounded. It is a favour-
ite nesting ground for the frigate or man-o'-war bird (a turbulent black creature with a white chest and a
forty-inch wing span that we often saw flying restlessly along the shores of the islands). 'But if,' he says,
'orange and lemon trees are discovered there in later times, I take pleasure in informing the public that
they will have me to thank, as I sowed a number of seeds of both of them, which might be of great relief
to those that Providence takes thither….'
The monk stayed several days in Aves. They caught some of the turtles which swim round the island
in scores, and he taught the Englishwomen to make a 'boucan' of turtle à la Guadeloupéene which they
washed down with draughts of cider, beer, Canary and Madeira, of which they had salvaged several pipes
from the English wreck. They in turn taught him to cook a breast of Irish beef in the English way, and
how to make pâtés en pot and black-puddings of turtle-meat, 'and I know not how many stews, besides,
with which I could fill an entire volume, if the yearning should take me to print an Anglo-American
cookery book with instructions for serving a dinner of a hundred and twenty-five places magnificently,
and without expense, on a desert island.' They became great friends, and, when they weighed anchor, the
monk says that they 'let no opportunity slip of praising the politeness of our filibusters.'