At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies

‘Fanqua!’ (indignant).

‘Fanqua!’ (argumentative).

‘Fanqua!’ (astonished).

‘Fanqua!’ (majestic).

‘Fanqua!’ (confidentially alluring).

‘Fanqua!’ (regretful).  And so on, through every conceivable tone of expression.

But Fanqua did not move; and the officer and bystanders laughed.

She summoned all her talents, and uttered one last ‘Fanqua!’ which was a triumph of art.

Shame and surprise were blended in her voice with tenderness and pity, and they again with meek despair.  To have been betrayed, disgraced, and so unexpectedly, by one whom she loved, and must love still, in spite of this, his fearful fall!

It was more than heart could bear.  Breathing his name but that once more, she stood a moment, like a queen of tragedy, one long arm drawing her garments round her, the other outstretched, as if to cast off—had she the heart to do it—the rebel; and then stalked away into the darkness of the paddle-boxes—for ever and a day to brood speechless over her great sorrow?  Not in the least.  To begin chattering away to her acquaintances, as if no Fanqua existed in the world.

It was a piece of admirable play-acting; and was meant to be.  She had been conscious all the while that she was an object of attention—possibly of admiration—to a group of men; and she knew what was right to be done and said under the circumstances, and did it perfectly, even to the smallest change of voice.  She was doubtless quite sincere the whole time, and felt everything which her voice expressed: but she felt it, because it was proper to feel it; and deceived herself probably more than she deceived any one about her.

A curious phase of human nature is that same play-acting, effect-studying, temperament, which ends, if indulged in too much, in hopeless self-deception, and ‘the hypocrisy which,’ as Mr. Carlyle says, ‘is honestly indignant that you should think it hypocritical.’  It is common enough among Negresses, and among coloured people too: but is it so very uncommon among whites?  Is it not the bane of too many Irish? of too many modern French? of certain English, for that matter, whom I have known, who probably had no drop of French or Irish blood in their veins?  But it is all the more baneful the higher the organisation is; because, the more brilliant the intellect, the more noble the instincts, the more able its victim is to say—‘See: I feel what I ought, I say what I ought, I do what I ought: and what more would you have?  Why do you Philistines persist in regarding me with distrust and ridicule?  What is this common honesty, and what is this “single eye,” which you suspect me of not possessing?’

Very beautiful was that harbour of George Town, seen by day.  In the centre an entrance some two hundred yards across: on the right, a cliff of volcanic sand, interspersed with large boulders hurled from some volcano now silent, where black women, with baskets on their heads, were filling a barge with gravel.  On the left, rocks of hard lava, surmounted by a well-lined old fort, strong enough in the days of 32-pounders.  Beyond it, still on the left, the little city, scrambling up the hillside, with its red roofs and church spires, among coconut and bread-fruit trees, looking just like a German toy town.  In front, at the bottom of the harbour, villa over villa, garden over garden, up to the large and handsome Government House, one of the most delectable spots of all this delectable land; and piled above it, green hill upon green hill, which, the eye soon discovers, are the Sommas of old craters, one inside the other towards the central peak of Mount Maitland, 1700 feet high.  On the right bow, low sharp cliff-points of volcanic ash; and on the right again, a circular lake a quarter of a mile across and 40 feet in depth, with a coral reef, almost awash, stretching from it to the ash-cliff on the south side of the harbour mouth.  A glance shows that this is none other than an old crater, like that inside English Harbour in Antigua, probably that which has hurled out the boulders and the ash; and one whose temper is still uncertain, and to be watched anxiously in earthquake times.  The Etang du Vieux Bourg is its name; for, so tradition tells, in the beginning of the seventeenth century the old French town stood where the white coral-reef gleams under water; in fact, upon the northern lip of the crater.  One day, however, the Enceladus below turned over in his sleep, and the whole town was swallowed up, or washed away.  The sole survivor was a certain blacksmith, who thereupon was made—or as sole survivor made himself—Governor of the island of Grenada.  So runs the tale; and so it seemed likely to run again, during the late earthquake at St. Thomas’s.  For on the very same day, and before any earthquake-wave from St. Thomas’s had reached Grenada—if any ever reached it, which I could not clearly ascertain—this Etang du Vieux Bourg boiled up suddenly, hurling masses of water into the lower part of the town, washing away a stage, and doing much damage.  The people were, and with good reason, in much anxiety for some hours after: but the little fit of ill-temper went off, having vented itself, as is well known, in the sea between St. Thomas’s and Santa Cruz, many miles away.

The bottom of the crater, I was assured, was not permanently altered: but the same informant—an eye-witness on whom I can fully depend—shared the popular opinion that it had opened, sucked in sea-water, and spouted it out again.  If so, the good folks of George Town are quite right in holding that they had a very narrow escape of utter destruction.

An animated and picturesque spot, as the steamer runs alongside, is the wooden wharf where passengers are to land and the ship to coal.  The coaling Negroes and Negresses, dressed or undressed, in their dingiest rags, contrast with the country Negresses, in gaudy prints and gaudier turbans, who carry on their heads baskets of fruit even more gaudy than their dresses.  Both country and town Negroes, meanwhile, look—as they are said to be—comfortable and prosperous; and I can well believe the story that beggars are unknown in the island.  The coalers, indeed, are only too well off, for they earn enough, by one day of violent and degrading toil, to live in reckless shiftless comfort, and, I am assured, something very like debauchery, till the next steamer comes in.

No sooner is the plank down, than a struggling line getting on board meets a struggling line getting on shore; and it is well if the passenger, on landing, is not besmirched with coal-dust, after a narrow escape of being shoved into the sea off the stage.  But, after all, civility pays in Grenada, as in the rest of the world; and the Negro, like the Frenchman, though surly and rude enough if treated with the least haughtiness, will generally, like the Frenchman, melt at once at a touch of the hat, and an appeal to ‘Laissez passer Mademoiselle.’  On shore we got, through be-coaled Negroes, men and women, safe and not very much be-coaled ourselves; and were driven up steep streets of black porous lava, between lava houses and walls, and past lava gardens, in which jutted up everywhere, amid the loveliest vegetation, black knots and lumps scorched by the nether fires.  The situation of the house—the principal one of the island—to which we drove, is beautiful beyond description.  It stands on a knoll some 300 feet in height, commanded only by a slight rise to the north; and the wind of the eastern mountains sweeps fresh and cool through a wide hall and lofty rooms.  Outside, a pleasure-ground and garden, with the same flowers as we plant out in summer at home; and behind, tier on tier of green wooded hill, with cottages and farms in the hollows, might have made us fancy ourselves for a moment in some charming country-house in Wales.  But opposite the drawing-room window rose a Candelabra Cereus, thirty feet high.  On the lawn in front great shrubs of red Frangipani carried rose-coloured flowers which filled the air with fragrance, at the end of thick and all but leafless branches.  Trees hung over them with smooth greasy stems of bright copper—which has gained them the name of ‘Indian skin,’ at least in Trinidad, where we often saw them wild; another glance showed us that every tree and shrub around was different from those at home: and we recollected where we were; and recollected, too, as we looked at the wealth of flower and fruit and verdure, that it was sharp winter at home.  We admired this and that: especially a most lovely Convolvulus—I know not whether we have it in our hothouses [22 - Ipomæa Horsfallii.]—with purple maroon flowers; and an old hog-plum [23 - Spondias lutea.]—Mombin of the French—a huge tree, which was striking, not so much from its size as from its shape.  Growing among blocks of lava, it had assumed the exact shape of an English oak in a poor soil and exposed situation; globular-headed, gnarled, stunted, and most unlike to its giant brethren of the primeval woods, which range upward 60 or 80 feet without a branch.  We walked up to see the old fort, commanding the harbour from a height of 800 feet.  We sat and rested by the roadside under a great cotton-wood tree, and looked down on gorges of richest green, on negro gardens, and groo-groo palms, and here and there a cabbage-palm, or a huge tree at whose name we could not guess; then turned through an arch cut in the rock into the interior of the fort, which now holds neither guns nor soldiers, to see at our feet the triple harbour, the steep town, and a very paradise of garden and orchard; and then down again, with the regretful thought, which haunted me throughout the islands—What might the West Indies not have been by now, had it not been for slavery, rum, and sugar?

We got down to the steamer again, just in time, happily, not to see a great fight in the water between two Negroes; to watch which all the women had stopped their work, and cheered the combatants with savage shouts and laughter.  At last the coaling and the cursing were over; and we steamed out again to sea.

I have antedated this little episode—delightful for more reasons than I set down here—because I do not wish to trouble my readers with two descriptions of the same island—and those mere passing glimpses.

There are two craters, I should say, in Grenada, beside the harbour.  One, the Grand Etang, lies high in the central group of mountains, which rise to 3700 feet, and is itself about 1740 feet above the sea.  Dr. Davy describes it as a lake of great beauty, surrounded by bamboos and tree-ferns.  The other crater-lake lies on the north-east coast, and nearer to the sea-level: and I more than suspect that more would be recognised, up and down the island, by the eye of a practised geologist.

The southern end of Grenada—of whatsoever rock it may be composed—shows evidence of the same wave-destruction as do the Grenadines.  Arches and stacks, and low horizontal strata laid bare along the cliff, in some places white with guano, prove that the sea has been at work for ages, which must be many and long, considering that the surf, on that leeward side of the island, is little or none the whole year round.  With these low cliffs, in strongest contrast to the stately and precipitous southern point of St. Lucia, the southern point of Grenada slides into the sea, the last of the true Antilles.  For Tobago, Robinson Crusoe’s island, which lies away unseen to windward, is seemingly a fragment of South America, like the island of Trinidad, to which the steamer now ran dead south for seventy miles.

It was on the shortest day of the year—St. Thomas’s Day—at seven in the morning (half-past eleven of English time, just as the old women at Eversley would have been going round the parish for their ‘goodying’), that we became aware of the blue mountains of North Trinidad ahead of us; to the west of them the island of the Dragon’s Mouth; and westward again, a cloud among the clouds, the last spur of the Cordilleras of the Spanish Main.  There was South America at last; and as a witness that this, too, was no dream, the blue water of the Windward Islands changed suddenly into foul bottle-green.  The waters of the Orinoco, waters from the peaks of the Andes far away, were staining the sea around us.  With thoughts full of three great names, connected, as long as civilised man shall remain, with those waters—Columbus, Raleigh, Humboldt—we steamed on, to see hills, not standing out, like those of the isles which we had passed, in intense clearness of green and yellow, purple and blue, but all shrouded in haze, like those of the Hebrides or the West of Ireland.  Onward through a narrow channel in the mountain-wall, not a rifle-shot across, which goes by the name of the Ape’s Mouth, banked by high cliffs of dark Silurian rock—not bare, though, as in Britain, but furred with timber, festooned with lianes, down to the very spray of the gnawing surf.  One little stack of rocks, not thirty feet high, and as many broad, stood almost in the midst of the channel, and in the very northern mouth of it, exposed to the full cut of surf and trade-wind.  But the plants on it, even seen through the glasses, told us where we were.  One huge low tree covered the top with shining foliage, like that of a Portugal laurel; all around it upright Cerei reared their gray candelabra, and below them, hanging down the rock to the very surf, deep green night-blowing Cereus twined and waved, looking just like a curtain of gigantic stag’s-horn moss.  We ran through the channel; then amid more low wooded islands, it may be for a mile, before a strong back current rushing in from the sea; and then saw before us a vast plain of muddy water.  No shore was visible to the westward; to the eastward the northern hills of Trinidad, forest clad, sank to the water; to the south lay a long line of coast, generally level with the water’s edge, and green with mangroves, or dotted with coco-palms.  That was the Gulf of Paria, and Trinidad beyond.

Shipping at anchor, and buildings along the flat shore, marked Port of Spain, destined hereafter to stand, not on the seaside, but, like Lynn in Norfolk, and other fen-land towns, in the midst of some of the richest reclaimed alluvial in the world.

As the steamer stopped at last, her screw whirled up from the bottom clouds of yellow mud, the mingled deposits of the Caroni and the Orinoco.  In half an hour more we were on shore, amid Negroes, Coolies, Chinese, French, Spaniards, short-legged Guaraon dogs, and black vultures.

CHAPTER III: TRINIDAD

It may be worth while to spend a few pages in telling something of the history of this lovely island since the 31st of July 1499, when Columbus, on his third voyage, sighted the three hills in the south-eastern part.  He had determined, it is said, to name the first land which he should see after the Blessed Trinity; the triple peaks seemed to him a heaven-sent confirmation of his intent, and he named the island Trinidad; but the Indians called it Iere.

He ran from Punta Galera, at the north-eastern extremity—so named from the likeness of a certain rock to a galley under sail—along the east and south of the island; turned eastward at Punta Galeota; and then northward, round Punta Icacque, through the Boca Sierpe, or serpent’s mouth, into the Gulf of Paria, which he named ‘Golfo de Balena,’ the Gulf of the Whale, and ‘Golfo Triste,’ the Sad Gulf; and went out by the northern passage of the Boca Drago.  The names which he gave to the island and its surroundings remain, with few alterations, to this day.

He was surprised, says Washington Irving, at the verdure and fertility of the country, having expected to find it more parched and sterile as he approached the equator; whereas he beheld groves of palm-trees, and luxuriant forests sweeping down to the seaside, with fountains and running streams beneath the shade.  The shore was low and uninhabited: but the country rose in the interior, and was cultivated in many places, and enlivened by hamlets and scattered habitations.  In a word, the softness and purity of the climate, and the verdure, freshness, and sweetness of the country, appeared to equal the delights of early spring in the beautiful province of Valencia in Spain.

He found the island peopled by a race of Indians with fairer complexions than any he had hitherto seen; ‘people all of good stature, well made, and of very graceful bearing, with much and smooth hair.’  They wore, the chiefs at least, tunics of coloured cotton, and on their heads beautiful worked handkerchiefs, which looked in the distance as if they were made of silk.  The women, meanwhile, according to the report of Columbus’s son, seem, some of them at least, to have gone utterly without clothing.

They carried square bucklers, the first Columbus had seen in the New World; and bows and arrows, with which they made feeble efforts to drive off the Spaniards who landed at Punta Arenal, near Icacque, and who, finding no streams, sank holes in the sand, and so filled their casks with fresh water, as may be done, it is said, at the same spot even now.

And there—the source of endless misery to these happy harmless creatures—a certain Cacique, so goes the tale, took off Columbus’s cap of crimson velvet, and replaced it with a circle of gold which he wore.

Alas for them!  That fatal present of gold brought down on them enemies far more ruthless than the Caribs of the northern islands, who had a habit of coming down in their canoes and carrying off the gentle Arrawaks to eat them at their leisure, after the fashion which Defoe, always accurate, has immortalised in Robinson Crusoe.  Crusoe’s island is, almost certainly, meant for Tobago; Man Friday had been stolen in Trinidad.

Columbus came no more to Trinidad.  But the Spaniards had got into their wicked heads that there must be gold somewhere in the island; and they came again and again.  Gold they could not get; for it does not exist in Trinidad.  But slaves they could get; and the history of the Indians of Trinidad for the next century is the same as that of the rest of the West Indies: a history of mere rapine and cruelty.  The Arrawaks, to do them justice, defended themselves more valiantly than the still gentler people of Hayti, Cuba, Jamaica, Porto Rico, and the Lucayas: but not so valiantly as the fierce cannibal Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, whom the Spaniards were never able to subdue.

It was in 1595, nearly a century after Columbus discovered the island, that ‘Sir Robert Duddeley in the Bear, with Captain Munck, in the Beare’s Whelpe, with two small pinnesses, called the Frisking and the Earwig,’ ran across from Cape Blanco in Africa, straight for Trinidad, and anchored in Cedros Bay, which he calls Curiapan, inside Punta Icacque and Los Gallos—a bay which was then, as now, ‘very full of pelicans.’  The existence of the island was known to the English: but I am not aware that any Englishman had explored it.  Two years before, an English ship, whose exploits are written in Hakluyt by one Henry May, had run in, probably to San Fernando, ‘to get refreshing; but could not, by reason the Spaniards had taken it.  So that for want of victuals the company would have forsaken the ship.’  How different might have been the history of Trinidad, if at that early period, while the Indians were still powerful, a little colony of English had joined them, and intermarried with them.  But it was not to be.  The ship got away through the Boca Drago.  The year after, seemingly, Captain Whiddon, Raleigh’s faithful follower, lost eight men in the island in a Spanish ambush.  But Duddeley was the first Englishman, as far as I am aware, who marched, ‘for his experience and pleasure, four long marches through the island; the last fifty miles going and coming through a most monstrous thicke wood, for so is most part of the island; and lodging myself in Indian townes.’  Poor Sir Robert—‘larding the lean earth as he stalked along’—in ruff and trunk hose, possibly too in burning steel breastplate, most probably along the old Indian path from San Fernando past Savannah Grande, and down the Ortoire to Mayaro on the east coast.  How hot he must have been.  How often, we will hope, he must have bathed on the journey in those crystal brooks, beneath the balisiers and the bamboos.  He found ‘a fine-shaped and a gentle people, all naked and painted red’ (with roucou), ‘their commanders wearing crowns of feathers,’ and a country ‘fertile and full of fruits, strange beasts and fowls, whereof munkeis, babions, and parats were in great abundance.’  His ‘munkeis’ were, of course, the little Sapajous; his ‘babions’ no true Baboons; for America disdains that degraded and dog-like form; but the great red Howlers.  He was much delighted with the island; and ‘inskonced himself’—i.e. built a fort: but he found the Spanish governor, Berreo, not well pleased at his presence; ‘and no gold in the island save Marcasite’ (iron pyrites); considered that Berreo and his three hundred Spaniards were ‘both poore and strong, and so he had no reason to assault them.’  He had but fifty men himself, and, moreover, was tired of waiting in vain for Sir Walter Raleigh.  So he sailed away northward, on the 12th of March, to plunder Spanish ships, with his brains full of stories of El Dorado, and the wonders of the Orinoco—among them ‘four golden half-moons weighing a noble each, and two bracelets of silver,’ which a boat’s crew of his had picked up from the Indians on the other side of the Gulf of Paria.

He left somewhat too soon.  For on the 22d of March Raleigh sailed into Cedros Bay, and then went up to La Brea and the Pitch Lake.  There he noted, as Columbus had done before him, oysters growing on the mangrove roots; and noted, too, ‘that abundance of stone pitch, that all the ships of the world might be therewith laden from thence; and we made trial of it in trimming our shippes, to be most excellent good, and melteth not with the sun as the pitch of Norway.’  From thence he ran up the west coast to ‘the mountain of Annaparima’ (St. Fernando hill), and passing the mouth of the Caroni, anchored at what was then the village of Port of Spain.

There some Spaniards boarded him, to buy linen and other things, all which he ‘entertained kindly, and feasted after our manner, by means whereof I learned as much of the estate of Guiana as I could, or as they knew, for those poore souldiers having been many years without wine, a few draughts made them merrie, in which mood they vaunted of Guiana and the riches thereof,’—much which it had been better for Raleigh had he never heard.

Meanwhile the Indians came to him every night with lamentable complaints of Berreo’s cruelty.  ‘He had divided the island and given to every soldier a part.  He made the ancient Caciques that were lords of the court, to be their slaves.  He kept them in chains; he dropped their naked bodies with burning bacon, and such other torments, which’ (continues Raleigh) ‘I found afterward to be true.  For in the city’ (San Josef), ‘when I entered it, there were five lords, or little kings, in one chain, almost dead of famine, and wasted with torments.’  Considering which; considering Berreo’s treachery to Whiddon’s men; and considering also that as Berreo himself, like Raleigh, was just about to cross the gulf to Guiana in search of El Dorado, and expected supplies from Spain; ‘to leave a garrison in my back, interested in the same enterprise, I should have savoured very much of the asse.’  So Raleigh fell upon the ‘Corps du Guard’ in the evening, put them to the sword, sent Captain Caulfield with sixty soldiers onward, following himself with forty more, up the Caroni river, which was then navigable by boats; and took the little town of San Josef.

It is not clear whether the Corps du Guard which he attacked was at Port of Spain itself, or at the little mud fort at the confluence of the Caroni and San Josef rivers, which was to be seen, with some old pieces of artillery in it, in the memory of old men now living.  But that he came up past that fort, through the then primeval forest, tradition reports; and tells, too, how the prickly climbing palm, [24 - Desmoncus.] the Croc-chien, or Hook-dog, pest of the forests, got its present name upon that memorable day.  For, as the Spanish soldiers ran from the English, one of them was caught in the innumerable hooks of the Croc-chien, and never looking behind him in his terror, began shouting, ‘Suelta mi, Ingles!’  (Let me go, Englishman!)—or, as others have it, ‘Valga mi, Ingles!’  (Take ransom for me, Englishman!)—which name the palm bears unto this day.

So Raleigh, having, as one historian of Trinidad says, ‘acted like a tiger, lest he should savour of the ass,’ went his way to find El Dorado, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices: and may God have mercy on him; and on all who, like him, spoil the noblest instincts, and the noblest plans, for want of the ‘single eye.’

But before he went, he ‘called all the Caciques who were enemies to the Spaniard, for there were some that Berreo had brought out of other countreys and planted there, to eat out and waste those that were natural of the place; and, by his Indian interpreter that he had brought out of England, made them understand that he was the servant of a Queene, who was the great Cacique of the North, and a virgin, and had more Caciques under her than there were trees in that island; and that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such nations about her as were by them oppressed, and, having freed all the northern world from their servitude, had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest.  I showed them her Majesty’s picture’ (doubtless in ruff, farthingale, and stomacher laden with jewels), ‘which they so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to make them idolatrous thereof.’

And so Raleigh, with Berreo as prisoner, ‘hasted away toward his proposed discovery,’ leaving the poor Indians of Trinidad to be eaten up by fresh inroads of the Spaniards.

There were, in his time, he says, five nations of Indians in the island,—‘Jaios,’ ‘Arwacas,’ ‘Salvayos’ (Salivas?), ‘Nepoios,’ and round San Josef ‘Carinepagotes’; and there were others, he confesses, which he does not name.  Evil times were come upon them.  Two years after, the Indians at Punta Galera (the north-east point of the island) told poor Keymis that they intended to escape to Tobago when they could no longer keep Trinidad, though the Caribs of Dominica were ‘such evil neighbours to it’ that it was quite uninhabited.  Their only fear was lest the Spaniards, worse neighbours than even the Caribs, should follow them thither.

But as Raleigh and such as he went their way, Berreo and such as he seem to have gone their way also.  The ‘Conquistadores,’ the offscourings not only of Spain but of South Germany, and indeed of every Roman Catholic country in Europe, met the same fate as befell, if monk chroniclers are to be trusted, the great majority of the Normans who fought at Hastings.  ‘The bloodthirsty and deceitful men did not live out half their days.’  By their own passions, and by no miraculous Nemesis, they civilised themselves off the face of the earth; and to them succeeded, as to the conquerors at Hastings, a nobler and gentler type of invaders.  During the first half of the seventeenth century, Spaniards of ancient blood and high civilisation came to Trinidad, and re-settled the island: especially the family of Farfan—‘Farfan de los Godos,’ once famous in mediæval chivalry—if they will allow me the pleasure of for once breaking a rule of mine, and mentioning a name—who seem to have inherited for some centuries the old blessings of Psalm xxxvii.—

‘Put thou thy trust in the Lord, and be doing good; dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.

‘The Lord knoweth the days of the godly: and their inheritance shall endure for ever.

‘They shall not be confounded in perilous times; and in the days of dearth they shall have enough.’

Toward the end of the seventeenth century the Indians summoned up courage to revolt, after a foolish ineffectual fashion.  According to tradition, and an old ‘romance muy doloroso,’ which might have been heard sung within the last hundred years, the governor, the Cabildo, and the clergy went to witness an annual feast of the Indians at Arena, a sandy spot (as its name signifies) near the central mountain of Tamana.  In the middle of one of their warlike dances, the Indians, at a given signal, discharged a flight of arrows, which killed the governor, all the priests, and almost all the rest of the whites.  Only a Farfan escaped, not without suspicion of forewarning by the rebels.  He may have been a merciful man and just; while considering the gentle nature of the Indians, it is possible that some at least of their victims deserved their fate, and that the poor savages had wrongs to avenge which had become intolerable.  As for the murder of the priests, we must remember always that the Inquisition was then in strength throughout Spanish America; and could be, if it chose, aggressive and ruthless enough.

By the end of the seventeenth century there were but fifteen pueblos, or Indian towns, in the island; and the smallpox had made fearful ravages among them.  Though they were not forced to work as slaves, a heavy capitation tax, amounting, over most of the island, to two dollars a head, was laid on them almost to the end of the last century.  There seems to have been no reason in the nature of things why they should not have kept up their numbers; for the island was still, nineteen-twentieths of it, rich primeval forest.  It may have been that they could not endure the confined life in the pueblos, or villages, to which they were restricted by law.  But, from some cause or other, they died out, and that before far inferior numbers of invaders.  In 1783, when the numbers of the whites were only 126, of the free coloured 295, and of the slaves 310, the Indians numbered only 2032.  In 1798, after the great immigration from the French West Indies, there were but 1082 Indians in the island.  It is true that the white population had increased meanwhile to 2151, the free coloured to 4476, and the slaves to 10,000.  But there was still room in plenty for 2000 Indians.  Probably many of them had been absorbed by intermarriage with the invaders.  At present, there is hardly an Indian of certainly pure blood in the island, and that only in the northern mountains.

Trinidad ought to have been, at least for those who were not Indians, a happy place from the seventeenth almost to the nineteenth century, if it be true that happy is the people who have no history.  Certain Dutchmen, whether men of war or pirates is not known, attacked it some time toward the end of the seventeenth century, and, trying to imitate Raleigh, were well beaten in the jungles between the Caroni and San Josef.  The Indians, it is said, joined the Spaniards in the battle; and the little town of San Josef was rewarded for its valour by being raised to the rank of a city by the King of Spain.

The next important event which I find recorded is after the treaty of 27th August 1701, between ‘His Most Christian’ and ‘His Most Catholic Majesty,’ by which the Royal Company of Guinea, established in France, was allowed to supply the Spanish colonies with 4800 Negroes per annum for ten years; of whom Trinidad took some share, and used them in planting cacao.  So much the worse for it.

Next Captain Teach, better known as ‘Blackboard,’ made his appearance about 1716, off Port of Spain; plundered and burnt a brig laden with cacao; and when a Spanish frigate came in, and cautiously cannonaded him at a distance, sailed leisurely out of the Boca Grande.  Little would any Spanish Guarda Costa trouble the soul of the valiant Captain Teach, with his six pistols slung in bandoliers down his breast, lighted matches stuck underneath the brim of his hat, and his famous black beard, the terror of all merchant captains from Trinidad to Guinea River, twisted into tails, and tied up with ribbons behind his ears.  How he behaved himself for some years as a ‘ferocious human pig,’ like Ignatius Loyola before his conversion, with the one virtue of courage; how he would blow out the candle in the cabin, and fire at random into his crew, on the ground ‘that if he did not kill one of them now and then they would forget who he was’; how he would shut down the hatches, and fill the ship with the smoke of brimstone and what not, to see how long he and his could endure a certain place,—to which they are, some of them, but too probably gone; how he has buried his money, or said that he had, ‘where none but he and Satan could find it, and the longest liver should take all’; how, out of some such tradition, Edgar Poe built up the wonderful tale of the Gold Bug; how the planters of certain Southern States, and even the Governor of North Carolina, paid him blackmail, and received blackmail from him likewise; and lastly, how he met a man as brave as he, but with a clear conscience and a clear sense of duty, in the person of Mr. Robert Maynard, first lieutenant of the Pearl, who found him after endless difficulties, and fought him hand-to-hand in Oberecock River, in Virginia, ‘the lieutenant and twelve men against Blackbeard and fourteen, till the sea was tinctured with blood around the vessel’; and how Maynard sailed into Bathtown with the gory head, black beard and all, hung at his jibboom end; all this is written—in the books in which it is written; which need not be read now, however sensational, by the British public.