The Middle Passage

by V. S. Naipaul

  ‘He’s gone mad,’ Mr Mackay said.

  The emigrants were beginning to buzz.

  ‘Don’t handle him roughly,’ the purser shouted. ‘Captain’s orders. Don’t handle him roughly.’

  The pipe-smoker walked steadily on.

  ‘I’m gonna get you!’ the chief steward said. He didn’t speak menacingly. He was only speaking an American expression.

  ‘Terrible, terrible,’ Mr Mackay said at dinner. ‘To see that fine beast trapped.’ His heart was bad; he had been disturbed by the incident and could only nibble at a lettuce leaf. His words were a matter of habit; they were separate from the distress in his voice. ‘I talked to him once or twice, you know. He wasn’t a bad feller. Such a beautiful Negro. Terrible, terrible.’ His mouth was twisted with pain. ‘He must have had a damn hard time in England. Now they’re taking him back to his mother.’

  ‘They gave him an injection and put him in the sick bay,’ Philip said. ‘I must say I wasn’t expecting that at all. Insulting these Spanish officers in front of everybody.’

  ‘Saving on the bad food, if you ask me,’ Correia said. ‘I wish they could give me a injection. I not been sleeping on this ship at all. Is the food. All this hispanol this and hispanol that.’

  After dinner I went down to the sick bay. The doors were open. All the beds were empty except for one, in the corner, on which the pipe-smoker lay, still in his black serge trousers and blue shirt, a bit of plaster on his forehead. No doors were needed to keep him there.

  Very late that evening or very early next morning we were to load up with more emigrants at Grenada, the spice island. It was our last night on board and we had a little party in the bar. The barman had not prepared for us and we quickly exhausted his brandy and Spanish champagne. We roused purser and stewards but could get no more drink. While we were talking to a steward an emigrant from St Kitts said he could help us, if we wanted brandy.

  ‘Let the poor feller keep it,’ Mr Mackay said, his soft mood persisting. ‘Is probably the first and last bottle of brandy he ever going to buy. When the cold start busting his skin in England he going to be damn glad of that brandy.’

  But the emigrant insisted. He was short, middle-aged and fat, with spectacles and a scratched skin.

  Kripal Singh and I went down to the emigrant’s cabin, going lower and lower, picking our way past babies down polished, hot corridors, catching glimpses of choked little cabins, heads below sheets, one above the other, opened suitcases, hearing sounds of thick muted activity all round us, seeing men and women hurrying to and from lavatories. The emigrant did not let us into his cabin. He half opened his door – four bunks, each dotted with a head emerging out of sheets, and many suitcases – squeezed in, shut the door, and presently came out with a bottle whose label was all gone except for one corner with the word ‘brandy’.

  Kripal Singh, whom I regarded as an expert in these matters, looked satisfied. He gave the emigrant five dollars and the emigrant, retiring, shut the door of his cabin.

  We ran up with the bottle to the deck, where the fresh air revived us.

  Philip said, ‘This is rum. Even Spanish brandy isn’t that colour. This is a thing they call sugarcane brandy.’

  We all three went down again to the hot, airless lower decks. We knocked. The emigrant opened. He was in vest and pants, without his spectacles. He gave us our money back and took his bottle, without a word.

  ‘You see what I mean, Miss Tull,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘You see how these beasts treat their own people? And he ain’t even get to England. When a few white fellers jump on him and mash his arse he will start bawling about colour prejudice.’

  We were leaving Grenada in its early morning stillness when I got up next morning. The sun was not out. The sea was bright grey, the sky light, the hills a cool green, the water at their feet shadowed and still. It was like a Sunday morning. After breakfast the sun was high and hot and the emigrants were thick in the bow of the ship.

  Skirts and dresses flapped in the breeze; they chattered and pointed; they might have been on a day cruise.

  We now acknowledged Mr Mackay as our West Indian expert. Philip asked him, ‘How about these Grenadians? They does get on with people from St Kitts?’

  ‘You have me there. People from St Kitts don’t like people from Antigua. But I don’t know about Grenadians. I only hope they don’t start fighting before we reach Trinidad.’

  Suddenly at lunchtime the water changed from deep blue to olive, and the new current of colour was edged with white froth. We were in the flood waters of the Orinoco River. I had no idea they reached so far north; and I wondered whether it was true, as Columbus reported, that one could find fresh water on one side of the white line and salt on the other.

  We were approaching South America: a low grey range of hills in the distance. It was impossible to tell where South America ended and where Trinidad began. The hills could even have been another island. There was nothing, apart from the colour of the water, to tell us that we were near a continent. The hills grew higher, a dip became a separation, and we saw the channel. Columbus gave it its name: the Dragon’s Mouth, the treacherous northern entrance to the Gulf of Paria. Venezuela was on our right, a grey haze. Trinidad was on our left: a number of tall rocky islets untidily thatched with green, and beyond them the mountains of the Northern Range blurred in a rainstorm.

  It was from the South, through what he called the Serpent’s Mouth, that Columbus came into the Gulf of Paria in 1498. The strong currents set up by the flood waters of the Orinoco River as they forced their way into the Gulf of Paria delayed him and nearly wrecked his ship. The currents roared continuously, he wrote; and once, in the middle of the night, when he was on deck, he saw ‘the sea rolling from west to east like a mountain as high as the ship, and approaching slowly; and on the top of this rolling sea came a mighty roaring wave … To this day I can feel the fear I then felt.’ When at last he came into the Gulf he found that the water was fresh. It was this that encouraged him to announce his most startling discovery. He had discovered, he wrote Ferdinand and Isabella, the approaches of the terrestrial paradise. No river could be as deep or as wide as the Gulf of Paria; and, from his reading of geographers and theologians, he had come to the conclusion that the earth here was shaped like a woman’s breast, with the terrestrial paradise at the top of the nipple. The fresh water in the Gulf of Paria flowed down from this paradise which, because of its situation, could not be approached in a ship and certainly not without the permission of God.

  Keeping close to Trinidad, hearing the thunder roll around us out of a blue sky, and watching the lightning play on the hills, we swung in a slow wide arc to the left, so that standing amidships on the port deck we could see our wake quickly subsiding to a dimpled glassiness.

  The emigrants gesticulated.

  ‘I hope Immigration keep an eye on these fellers,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘Trinidad is a sort of second paradise to them, you know. Give them the chance and half of them jump ship right here.’

  We took on the pilot. We took on the immigration officials.

  ‘Let them look,’ Mr Mackay said, referring to the emigrants. ‘We have launches here. No damn rowing-boats.’

  Flag fluttering stiffly, the launch marked POLICE in heavy, reassuring white letters raced beside us, its occupants immaculately uniformed.

  ‘It ain’t a bad little island, you know,’ Mr Mackay said. ‘I hear they taking college boys in the police these days,’ Philip said.

  Port of Spain is a disappointing city from the sea. One sees only trees against the hills of the Northern Range. The tower of Queen’s Royal College pierces the greenery; so does the blue bulk of the Salvatori building. At the bauxite loading station at Tembladora the air was yellow with bauxite dust.

  We docked. The emigrants massed on deck and choked their way down the gangplank to get a glimpse of Trinidad (and a few, according to Mr Mackay, to stay).

  ‘Let the small islanders go first,’ he said.


  ‘The prop, man,’ someone whispered in my ear. ‘The old propagandist.’

  It was Boysie.

  In my disembarkation suit and with my typewriter (never to be used) I felt I looked the part.

  Correia was in a temper. The ship’s agent had not arranged for his aeroplane ticket to British Guiana. His angry voice boomed out over the ship, down the gangplank; and I continued to hear it even when he disappeared into a customs shed, Kripal Singh at his heels, looking respectable and unhappy in his suit, smoking nervously, his studying days over. And that was the last I saw of them. Philip disappeared. The Mackays disappeared. Miss Tull disappeared; seventeen days with the emigrants awaited her.

  The sky was pastelled in spectacular shades of scarlet and gold; the palm trees and the saman trees were black against it. The bar was empty and alien as it had been that afternoon in Southampton. The barman wanted someone to buy him a short-sleeved Aertex shirt. He was negotiating with the lunatic-keeper who, already red-faced, was in his tourist clothes: red shirt, straw hat, khaki trousers, sandals, with a camera slung over his shoulder.

  We drove out of the dock area. The way was choked with emigrants, many of them Indians who had flown from British Guiana. Emigrants everywhere, and everywhere the people who had come to see them off. Cars everywhere. We drove very slowly. At the gates we were stopped, our passes checked.

  A policeman said, ‘Will you out your cigarette please?’

  I outed it.

  * These quotations, and many others in this book, are taken from Sir Alan Burns’s History of the British West Indies.

  * In her articles for the London Evening Standard, ‘I Sail with the Immigrants’, Anne Sharpley gives a Jamaican view:

  ‘ “These little dunce breadfruit niggers” (he meant the small islanders). “I voted for Federation, but since I come on this ship I seen what barefoot niggers them be. When us said no to Federation I so hurted I couldn’t eat for a day.

  ‘ “But now them’s so insulted me – all from these little islands, St Kitts, Montserrat, Antigua – them’s so small that if you started running on them and develop speed you’d land up in the sea.

  ‘ “They’re going to a dream in London, they don’t know what they’re going to, but when they ask them in London where them comes from, these yam and breadfruit little niggers, them’s got to say Jamaica, ’cos nobody heard of dem islands.” ’ (‘The Night the Knives Came Out’, 26 October 1961).

  2. TRINIDAD

  Because several of their generations had lived in a transitional land, pitching their tents between the houses of their fathers and the real Egypt, they were now unanchored souls, wavering in spirit and without a secure doctrine. They had forgotten much; they had half assimilated some new thoughts; and because they lacked real orientation, they did not trust their own feelings. They did not trust even the bitterness that they felt towards their bondage.

  Thomas Mann: The Tables of the Law

  In place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable – arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when really they were only a feature of enslavement.

  Tacitus: Agricola

  AS SOON AS the Francisco Bobadilla had touched the quay, ship’s side against rubber bumpers, I began to feel all my old fear of Trinidad. I did not want to stay. I had left the security of the ship and had no assurance that I would ever leave the island again. I had forgotten nothing: the wooden houses, jalousied half-way down, with fretwork along gables and eaves, fashionable before the concrete era; the concrete houses with L-shaped verandas and projecting front bedrooms, fashionable in the thirties; the two-storeyed Syrian houses in patterned concrete blocks, the top floor repeating the lower, fashionable in the forties. There were more neon lights. Ambition – a moving hand, drink being poured into a glass – was not matched with skill, and the effect was Trinidadian: vigorous, with a slightly flawed modernity. There were more cars. From the number plates I saw that there were now nearly fifty thousand vehicles on the road; when I had left there were less than twenty thousand. And the city throbbed with steel bands. A good opening line for a novelist or a travel-writer; but the steel band used to be regarded as a high manifestation of West Indian Culture, and it was a sound I detested.

  When one arrives for the first time at a city, and especially if one arrives at night, the people in the streets have, just for that moment, a special quality: they are adepts in a ritual the traveller doesn’t know; they are moving from one mystery to another. But driving now through Port of Spain, seeing the groups lounging at corners, around flambeau-lit stalls and coconut carts, I missed this thrill, and was distressed, not so much by the familiarity, as by the feeling of continuation. The years I had spent abroad fell away and I could not be sure which was the reality in my life: the first eighteen years in Trinidad or the later years in England. I had never wanted to stay in Trinidad. When I was in the fourth form I wrote a vow on the endpaper of my Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer to leave within five years. I left after six; and for many years afterwards in England, falling asleep in bedsitters with the electric fire on, I had been awakened by the nightmare that I was back in tropical Trinidad.

  I had never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it. I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical. The only professions were those of law and medicine, because there was no need for any other; and the most successful people were commission agents, bank managers and members of the distributive trades. Power was recognized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.

  It was a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure: brilliant men, scholarship winners, who had died young, gone mad, or taken to drink; cricketers of promise whose careers had been ruined by disagreements with the authorities.

  It was also a place where a recurring word of abuse was ‘conceited’, an expression of the resentment felt of anyone who possessed unusual skills. Such skills were not required by a society which produced nothing, never had to prove its worth, and was never called upon to be efficient. And such people had to be cut down to size or, to use the Trinidad expression, be made to ‘boil down’. Generosity – the admiration of equal for equal – was therefore unknown; it was a quality I knew only from books and found only in England.

  For talent, a futility, the Trinidadian substituted intrigue; and in the exercise of this, in small things as well as large, he became a master. Admiration he did have: for boys who did well at school, such academic success, separate from everyday life, giving self-respect to the community as a whole without threatening it in any way; for scholarship winners until they became conceited; for racehorses. And for cricketers.

  Cricket has always been more than a game in Trinidad. In a society which demanded no skills and offered no rewards to merit, cricket was the only activity which permitted a man to grow to his full stature and to be measured against international standards. Alone on a field, beyond obscuring intrigue, the cricketer’s true worth could be seen by all. His race, education, wealth did not matter. We had no scientists, engineers, explorers, soldiers or poets. The cricketer was our only hero-figure. And that is why cricket is played in the West Indies with such panache; that is why, for a long time to come, the West Indians will not be able to play as a team. The individual performance was what mattered. That was what we went to applaud; and unless the cricketer had heroic qualities we did not want to see him, however valuable he might be. And that was why, of those stories of failure, that of the ruined cricketer was the most terrible. In Trinidad lore he was a recurring figure; he appears in the Trinidad play, M
oon on a Rainbow Shawl, by Errol John.

  Though we knew that something was wrong with our society, we made no attempt to assess it. Trinidad was too unimportant and we could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which was, as everyone said, only a dot on the map of the world. Our interest was all in the world outside, the remoter the better; Australia was more important than Venezuela, which we could see on a clear day. Our own past was buried and no one cared to dig it up. This gave us a strange time-sense. The England of 1914 was the England of yesterday; the Trinidad of 1914 belonged to the dark ages.

  There was an occasional racial protest, but that aroused no deep feelings, for it represented only a small part of the truth. Everyone was an individual, fighting for his place in the community. Yet there was no community. We were of various races, religions, sets and cliques; and we had somehow found ourselves on the same small island. Nothing bound us together except this common residence. There was no nationalist feeling; there could be none. There was no profound anti-imperialist feeling; indeed, it was only our Britishness, our belonging to the British Empire, which gave us any identity. So protests could only be individual, isolated, unheeded.

  It was only towards the end of the war that stories of limited success began to be known, stories of men who had served with distinction in the R.A.F., of men who had become lecturers in English and American universities, of singers who had won recognition abroad. These people had all escaped. ‘Conceited’ at home, they had won distinction abroad; and as theirs was not the despised local eminence Trinidad accepted them with a ready generosity and exaggerated their worth.

  The threat of failure, the need to escape: this was the prompting of the society I knew.

  From the Trinidad Guardian:

  LITERATURE IS OUR HERITAGE