I flew to the island in a very small plane which had taken off from the neighbour-island of Antigua. My companion was a red-headed Scot from Kirkintilloch, a diplomat from the British High Commission in Barbados. He called the island ‘Monster Rat’, and was going there on a curiously non-diplomatic mission. The Governor’s safe had a combination lock, and while he was admitting nothing, it seemed that someone had forgotten exactly what the combination number was. It wasn’t written down on any piece of paper to be found, and so the Governor couldn’t get at his secret papers (nor his hidden supplies of Marmite, or Glenfiddich, or whatever else this particular expatriate missed so far from home).
My friend, it turned out, had been sent out from Barbados with the specific task of opening His Excellency’s safe and changing the combination, and making sure those in line to know it, knew it. The Governor had prudently chosen the time to take his leave, back home. The job only took the little Scotsman ten minutes, and he spent the rest of his diplomatic mission lying in the sun and enjoying the view.
For Montserrat is a spectacularly lovely place. It is a teardrop-shaped island, covered with dense, green rain forest, and dominated by three huge volcanoes (but only one active). The settlements are scattered along the coast, where the land makes an effort to be flat. But scores of little rivers course down from the jungles, and the road crosses dozens of bridges under which fierce torrents race busily down to the sea.
The airport is on the eastern side, with one runway jutting out into the ocean, and the islanders professing themselves certain that before long a plane will end up in the surf. (A Pan Am jet hit one of the volcanoes in 1965, and everyone on board was killed. The volcano, Chances Peak, is the only active one.) I was collected by an elderly driver called Rudolph, and when I asked him where I could hire a car he said he would gladly give me his for a few days, ‘and don’t you waste your money hiring no car, no suh!’ I tried to protest, but he insisted, saying he wasn’t planning to do any driving for the next few days. ‘I won’t need the car. I’ll jes’ cool my brains for a while.’
The road wound steeply up and over the range of hills, the views becoming ever more spectacular as we gained height. We stopped under a giant tree to let the radiator pressure ease. As the steam hissed from the radiator a pair of hummingbirds were floating in the warm afternoon air, wafting liquidly like tiny, brilliantly coloured kites tugged by invisible twine. Three types are said to live on Montserrat—one that is green with a curved beak, one just the same but with a crimson throat, and one that has a straight beak and a crest of pure emerald colour. These had long, aquiline beaks, and their crests were tiny feathers of deep angelica.
There were butterflies, too, and lush carmine flowers with big waxy petals and leaves that were thick and rubbery, like great green ears. Rain had just fallen, and the asphalt was steaming in the hot sun. A rich and humid smell seeped lazily from the depths of the forest, but it was not a decaying smell, nor was it in the least bit sinister. This was a friendly, cosy, manageable jungle: no snakes, I remembered reading, nor any unpleasant animal or bird. Just doves and rabbits, a type of wild guinea pig, and a species of yellow oriole. Down in the valleys I could see islanders picking cotton bolls from the bushes, and on the hilltops the turrets of old sugar mills, like ancient fortresses silhouetted against the pale blue sky.
Islands in the northern tropics usually have their principal towns tucked down at the south-west corner. It is all a matter of the wind. In the northern tropics the trades blow almost constantly from the north-east, and the easterly coasts are thus lee shores, easy to be blown on to, difficult to sail away from. The western coast, by contrast, is a sheltered shore—sailing boats can come in to port without danger, and can get away with ease and speed. And there are always the sunsets—islanders like the idea of gazing into the setting sun: ‘It’s like I’m looking at tomorrow,’ one old man said to me on a verandah one evening, as we watched the sun slip downwards and the sky change through salmon and orange to purple, and then into night.
While there are exceptions, most Caribbean islands do have their capital towns down in the south-west, or the west: Antigua, Grand Cayman, Aruba, Curacao, Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent, Martinique, and Nevis all do—and so does Montserrat.
Plymouth, the tiny Georgian town with well-proportioned houses made of Portland stone that was shipped in as ballast on the early sugar boats, is a pretty and dignified place—an Imperial capital that has been cared for, and of which the local people are proud. They are forever repairing the roofs and touching up the pointing, painting the old walls in whites and blues and yellows, keeping the place cheerful and spotless, even though they have few visitors and have very little money to spend.
It is a very English town, despite the supposed Irishness of the countryside. The suburbs are called Dagenham and Amersham and Jubilee Town, and there is a Richmond and a Streatham, and St George’s Hill overlooks the place. In the town centre, where John Street and George Street meet Strand Street and Marine Drive, there is a war memorial. Nearby is the old Custom House, the market, the abattoir, the post office, the prison and the clock tower. There always is a war memorial, and here in Plymouth it is where the Boy Scouts and the Montserrat Volunteers and the Guides paraded on Empire Day each May, when the schools were all closed and the Governor could be seen in his white uniform and his feathery hat, and when the children sang ‘God Save the King’ and fidgeted during the speeches and then lined up for sticky buns and lemonade. Empire Day seems less appropriate now, so they celebrate the Queen’s birthday instead, in June; but the war memorial is the focus of it all, as it is in every remaining outpost of the Empire. Some memorials are in shabby and forlorn corners; some, like those in Jamestown, the capital of St Helena, and here in Plymouth, the almost-perfect capital of Montserrat, seem more properly Imperial, and the children and their parents seem to have an extra spring in their step and sing just a little more heartily, believing, as they look around at all the lovely constructions of their mother country, that they do in fact possess something of which they can be proud.
The British Empire today sports only two active volcanoes: one, Chances Peak here in Montserrat, the other one is on Tristan da Cunha (it erupted in 1961, sending the entire colony into brief exile). Chances Peak is exactly 3,000 feet high. I walked there one afternoon, past the disused sugar mills of Galway’s Estate, towards a long ochre scar of sulphur which smoked gently on the mountain’s jungle-covered western flank.
The rocks were soft and crumbly, and there was a smell of cooking and bad eggs, and the place was warm and steamy, like a kitchen in which something was boiling on the range. The river—called the White River where it spilled into the sea, but it was yellow and cloudy where it gurgled here—was scalding hot. From tiny fumaroles that peppered the floors and walls of this tiny, enclosed valley, steam jetted in random bursts, and the sound of a groaning and cracking suggested some fearful being below ground, struggling to escape. Blobs of brilliant purple mud would suddenly erupt from nowhere, and I once set my foot on what I thought was solid ground and went through the crust into hot yellow mud, right up to the knee.
High above the valley and its steam and noise and cooking smell, the jungle was silent. Occasionally a bird, iridescent and cawing softly, would rise from the trees and flap its way towards the sea, and once a donkey appeared at the edge of a cliff and inspected me, chewing disconsolately. Otherwise all was peaceful on the borders of hell. I suddenly had the terrible realisation that if I were to fall in one of the pools of bubbling mud, or became embedded in the hot yellow earth, I would roast away without anyone knowing, and would be folded into the bowels of the earth, become a small fixture in colonial geology and be regurgitated on a tectonic whim many millennia later. So I clambered, perspiring and panicky, up to the Galway’s Estate road, and made my way back to Plymouth, and the rickety cosiness of the Coconut Hill Hotel, where I had tea on the verandah and tried to shake the sulphur out of my jeans.
Few tourists
come to Montserrat. The volcano spews black sand on all the beaches, and those who worship the sun feel that white sand is somehow better than black, and stay well away. There is one white sand beach at the northern end, where a few rich Americans congregate. One British record-maker has set up a studio above the bay, and rock-music stars come and live in his house for months at a time, secure in the knowledge that they won’t be bothered by their public, and that the Montserratians, as a kindly and down-to-earth people, won’t bother them either. Paul McCartney brought Stevie Wonder to Montserrat, and he played the piano in one of the Plymouth bars; and Elton John met his wife on Montserrat—so the island is well-known to students of the pop world, who associate it wholly with the production of their particular kind of music.
Other generations will know it for its production of limes. Montserrat Lime Juice was world-famous. The Lancet, quoted by the India Planters Gazette of 1885, said: ‘We counsel the public to drink their lime juice either alone or sweetened to taste and mixed with Water or Soda Water and a little Ice if obtainable. Care should be taken that Montserrat Lime-fruit Juice only is used, as it has the delicate aroma and flavour peculiar to the Lime Fruit and found in no other Lime Juice.’ One can imagine the burra-sahib planter of Darjeeling, sitting in the cool of an evening gazing at the slopes of Kanchenjunga, a cheroot smouldering in one hand, a glass of nimbu pani in the other. After 1885, no doubt, the nimbu would have come across two oceans, all the way from Montserrat.
The lime estates were started by a remarkable man—Joseph Sturge, a devout Quaker from Birmingham who insisted he would grow his limes without the use of any slaves and with the hitherto unprecedented policy of ‘fair and just treatment of the native labourers’ as a spur to profitable production. He loaned money to the freed slaves, helped them pay for school, went to America to agitate for their freedom there. He would describe his principal interests as ‘peace, anti-slavery and temperance’, campaigned against the Corn Laws and the war in Crimea, and founded the Friends’ Sunday schools in Birmingham. The city fathers erected a fountain and a statue to his memory in Edgbaston; in Montserrat, though, there is no memorial, and the lime factories have all but closed down.
In 1885 the island sold 180,000 gallons of juice to Crosse and Blackwell, in 1928 some thirty-five puncheons went to Australia. They made lime oil, too, for perfume and soap. But the crop was badly damaged in a hurricane, and by 1931 cotton had taken over as the major commodity exported from Plymouth dock. Sturge’s Montserrat Company was sold in 1961. When I ordered a glass of lime juice at the hotel one afternoon there was nothing fresh available. I was given a bottle of Rose’s Lime Juice, with a label that said, ‘St Albans and the West Indies’ but the company later explained that this was a polite fiction, and that Rose’s limes now came from Mexico and Ghana.
The cotton grown on the island is unlike any other. A sample of Carolina Sea Island cotton seed was brought to the island in 1909 and planted in an experimental field. It grew with tremendous vigour, and produced a fibre that was as soft as cashmere and as strong as silk. For a while exports boomed—three-quarters of a million tonnes were shipped in 1938, and Montserrat was second only to Barbados in the Caribbean cotton league. But then came the weevils, and the rain was erratic for a few seasons, and another hurricane flattened everything—the sad story of so many small West Indian islands—and cotton failed, too. Sugar had vanished from the island economy fifty years before for much the same reason; the lower slopes of the hills were, by the 1980s, littered with the ruins of abandoned projects—empty cane fields (which islanders used to burn by dipping a mongoose in petrol, setting it aflame and letting it run in between the cane stands), bedraggled cotton bushes, overgrown lime plantations.
Just as in Grand Turk, where the islanders feel somehow shamed that tax-avoidance and tourism have taken over from salt raking and fishing, so the Montserratians today are saddened to realise that what they see as the nobler labours associated with lime, sugar and cotton have been subordinated to ignoble schemes—the making of pop records, and (the biggest export at present) the manufacture, in a factory, of plastic sandwich bags. A Canadian plan to get cotton-growing under way again, and sell Montserrat Sea Island cotton as a luxury, is breathing a little hope into one old industry, but no one is very optimistic.
On my last day on Montserrat I came across something quite unexpected, and quite dreadful. An old resort hotel, built on a bluff to the north of Plymouth, had been bought by a group of young Americans who were running it as a clinic for cancer patients, men and women who were desperate to cling on to life at almost any cost, and at almost any risk. The clinic, which charged phenomenal sums of money, offered treatments with drugs that did not, at the time, have the approval of the American Government. Laetrile was one, dimethyl sulphoxide the other. Neither was a proven cure for cancer, but to a patient eager enough and financially able, they did offer a possibility of life, if nothing else. The old hotel had truly become, as a cynical Montserratian remarked, a last resort, and I should go and look at it.
So I walked up the hill, through the steel gates and the welcoming signs, and made for the bar. The ballroom next door opened out on to a terrace, which overlooked a still and silent sea. Inside the ballroom a band from Antigua was playing reggae music. Its leader, in red-and-yellow blazer, was doing his best to lighten the atmosphere of the place, giving encouraging smiles and imploring some of his audience to come on to the floor and dance.
But no one wanted to dance that night. Nor any night, I suspected. There were about twenty people in the room. Each was slumped back in an armchair, peering wanly at the band through eyes that were heavy with sleep, or narcotic drugs. Behind most chairs was a steel rod from which was suspended a bag of saline solution, a plastic tube carrying the liquid to each bandaged arm. One or two tapped fingers, or toes, to the rhythm. There was a strong smell of garlic, and when one of the ‘guests’, a woman in her fifties, saw me wrinkle my nose, she beckoned, and whispered an apology.
‘I’m sorry about the smell. It’s the drug—the dimethyl stuff. It goes through you so fast, and leaves this garlic smell. I guess it’s bearable if you know the stuff is doing you good.’
And was it? She thought so, yes; she had put on three ounces in the first week she had been a resident, more than she had put on in the last month back home. She was no more than a bag of bones, her face was drawn and grey, her skin was translucent, yellowish, like parchment. She wasn’t fifty at all: she was thirty-two and she had had cancer for a year. The visit to Montserrat was costing her three thousand dollars a week, and she was sure it was doing her good. An elderly man—or was he young?—in the next chair nodded his head in vigorous agreement. ‘You tell ’em, Sal. You are getting better, sure you are.’
But Sal wasn’t getting better. She died two weeks later on her way home. She was an ounce heavier on departure than when she arrived; she had spent nine thousand dollars. Perhaps she had been given a measure of hope, and considered her money well spent. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of distaste, even anger; and most Montserratians loathe the clinic, and wonder how the Government ever allowed it to open for business. ‘The death house on the hill’ was how I heard it described down in Plymouth.
Six years ago the politicians in Plymouth were ruefully contemplating an indefinite future as a colony. ‘The Last English Colony?’ was the title of a pamphlet published in 1978, and there was a general acceptance that, as it said, ‘Montserrat will probably be a colony long after Britain has shed all her other responsibilities.’ But after the American invasion of Grenada the perspective shifted. The Montserrat Chief Minister became chairman of a local power bloc, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States; he asked if he could send a token force of the Royal Montserrat Police to Grenada, and Britain said no, he couldn’t, since Britain was keeping strictly neutral and expected her colonies to do so as well.
That did it. Why, the Chief Minister asked, should Montserrat be subject to ‘the overruling and sometimes my
opic colonial power’ any longer? Was it not embarrassing and degrading? Should not the islanders accept ‘the dignity of managing their own affairs’? He said he would be formally requesting independence from Britain; the Foreign Office, with the languid superciliousness for which it is renowned, simply replied that it was unaware of any request, but would study the matter in due course. And there the matter remains.
For the politicians doubtless the independence of Montserrat is of crucial import. For the islanders I suspect it is, and will be for some time, a matter of less immediate moment. They are as unhurried and untroubled a people as any in the West Indies, without much undue passion, without a burning sense of injustice or a pervasive feeling of subjection.
Perhaps it has much to do with their Gaelic spirit. As a local columnist once wrote, from old Sweeney’s sugar estate in the north to O’Garra’s deep down in the south, this truly is ‘our Ireland in the sun’. Every bit as content to be under the rule of Whitehall, or Plymouth, or even Dublin all over again.
There have been many government committees in Whitehall, and most of them have been deservedly forgotten. The people of the Cayman Islands, one of the wealthiest and most successful of British colonies, have good reason to remember, and indeed raise a glass to one of them—a committee which is generally regarded as having been a total failure, and which only stayed in existence for six years.
Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire Page 29