A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  His parish of the Leewards included St Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla and Montserrat. Nevis is a very different island from Antigua. Its central mountain is so high that it is usually encircled by a cone of cloud, hence its name, a corruption of the Spanish nives, snow. During the first half of the twentieth century the tide of its good fortune ebbed, but in the first half of the nineteenth century its hot springs made it a fashionable resort, and the ruins of large plantation houses in the bush testify today to the extent of its former prominence. In Nevis, Nelson met the widow of a doctor, Frances Nisbet She had a small son, with whom it amused Nelson to romp on all fours under the drawing-room table. His kindness to the small boy touched her heart. She was three years younger than Nelson. She was not uncomely. Nelson had no illusions about himself; he had already been involved in two tempestuous love affairs, in Quebec and Paris. He was well aware that the emotion he felt for Frances Nisbet bore no relation to the high ardours he had survived and to which, at his age, he must surely expect successors. But he was in a mood to appreciate the attractions of domesticity, and in his twenty-ninth year he was married in the parish church of the county of Charlestown, Nevis.

  History, so Gibbon said, would have been different had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter. History might have been different if Nelson, when he landed at Naples, had had in England a wife for whom he felt a quarter of the devotion that he was to feel for Emma Hamilton, or if he had had no wife at all. If Nelson had not quarrelled with the Antiguans he would not presumably have married a woman with whom he was not in love. There were many repercussions to that enforcement of the navigation acts in the Leeward Islands.

  On the surface, life in the Caribbean was moving smoothly and pleasantly during those months which now, in the perspective of history, can be seen as the climax of an era. The land was fertile, Europe needed sugar, and on the African coast there was an inexhaustible stock of human machinery to supply that need. But below the surface there was a mounting tension.

  In an earlier chapter it was said that the difference in national characteristics between the French and English was to have important consequences later. The nature of those consequences had now become apparent. The French islands were as prosperous as, if not more prosperous than the British ones, yet there was an unhappy atmosphere in their cities, particularly in those of St Domingue.

  St Domingue had always been in a different position to Martinique and Guadeloupe. It had lain beyond the fighting of the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence. The pacte coloniale had been less rigorously applied. Special concessions had been permitted in its early days. It had obtained slaves more easily, by contraband from Jamaica. Prosperity had come to it quickly. It had a population of 480,000 blacks, 24,000 mulattoes and 30,000 whites. Like the seeds sown on stony ground, it had no deep roots; it was susceptible to each wind of change. And not only was France on the brink of bankruptcy, she had a sickness in her soul England had settled her issue over the divine right of kings; France still had hers to fight. There was an air of insecurity. In St Domingue, the rich planters were too concerned about their return to Paris to worry about the conditions under which they lived. They did not bother to furnish their houses suitably. They had no home life. According to contemporary reports, the towns of St Domingue were full of inns and travellers, but the streets of the Cap were infected by the stagnant waters of the streams that cut across them. The town was badly paved. Port-au-Prince was a conglomeration of five or six hundred cabins, one-storied, arranged in terraces, in an area that could accommodate twenty thousand houses. If it rained in the night, you could not walk in the streets next morning; they had become long, broad rivers of mud with ditches at the side and bullfrogs croaking in them. Of the Cap, Moreau de St Mery said, ‘There are few towns with so few police. The streets are cesspools, into which one throws any filth one likes.’ The citizens of Port-au-Prince were beseeched to keep their dogs shut up at night. They were so numerous that, attracted by the smells and dirt, their barking prevented anyone from sleeping.

  There was the appearance of gaiety; there were clubs in the cities, in particular the Cercle des Philadelphus at the Cap. There were Masonic lodges, which caused considerable concern to the Creole wives, who imagined that they were houses of assignation; there were public baths open to both sexes. There were gaming houses, there were theatres, and the mulattresses displayed their charms, ‘without prejudice and without religion’, in their classical costume, wearing with grace and skill the glittering scarves that adorned their heads. Six to eight inches high, drawn tightly round the base of the skull, twisted in front into the form of a fan, worn low over the forehead almost to the eyebrows, and pinned on to the hair, each scarf was decorated with brooches and jewels. The mulattress regarded it as sacred, and you could not offend her worse than by deranging it. Her blouse was made of the finest cambric, bordered with lace, which veiled rather than covered her bosom. It was embellished with flowers. The arms were bare below the elbows. The skirt was voluminous. Often they carried parasols. They walked slowly, swaying their hips. They usually held a piece of wood in their mouths with which they brushed their teeth.

  The balls given by these ‘ladies of the town’ to their male acquaintances were the chief social events of the community. Men went there in the certainty that they would enjoy themselves. Elsewhere it was very different. When a reception was organized by someone who could claim to be a member of society, questions were asked: ‘Who would be there? Whom would one meet?’ There were a thousand considerations that might combine to make a failure of the party. The society of Cap Français and Portau-Prince was very mixed. There were fresh arrivals every day; many of them were adventurers, many were fugitives from justice and their families, who had changed their names. The social life of the island was on its guard against such suspect riffraff. In a country where fortunes were made overnight, where money was the sole valid visa on a passport, one could not know who one’s associates really were.

  No one trusted anyone. The social structure was based upon mistrust. This was true of all the islands, but particularly of the French. The white planters were outnumbered by ten to one. Every month brought its fresh cargo of slaves to keep alight the spirit of rebellion and resentment. The labourers in the cane fields and the storerooms might have been able to accept their condition of servitude if they were not being constantly reminded of the freedom they had lost. The children of slaves, who had known no other kind of existence, might well have grown accustomed to it. It was not such a bad life at all; they were fed and clothed and housed; their old age was protected, their children cherished. Could the Irish peasants claim as much? But they were never allowed to settle down when every month new voices spoke to them of Africa. The planters were on their guard. They were outnumbered. They had to keep the blacks in subjection. They could not allow the black man to consider himself the equal of the white; nor could they allow the black man to consider himself the equal of a quarter-caste.

  The British classified people of colour as samboes, mulattoes, quadroons and mestizos; a sambo being the offspring of a black woman by a mulatto man, a mulatto of a black woman by a white man, a quadroon of a mulatto woman by a white man, a mestizo of a quadroon woman by a white man; the offspring of a mestizo by a white man being white by law. The Spaniards, from whom these appellations were borrowed, were more discriminatory, and they called the offspring of a mestizo by a white man a quinteron, and only the offspring of a white man and a quinteron was considered free of coloured blood. But the French indulged in far more elaborate definitions. Moreau de St Mery drew up a table showing the various proportions of mixed blood that could exist; a man with seven fifteenths of white blood was inferior to the man who was half and half. The strict regard of these distinctions was essential if the submissiveness of the slaves was to be maintained.

  Residents of the West Indies have always resented the European indifference to the fact of colour. In 1778 Robert Browning’s grandfather married a Creol
e from St Kitts. There is little doubt that she was partly African. Her son, the poet’s father, was so dark that when he went to St Kitts as a small boy, to visit his relatives, he was ordered to sit on the side of the church that was reserved for mulattoes. Browning himself had, as a young man, such an olive complexion that a nephew in Paris mistook him for an Italian. No one in England seems to have worried over this. But Dr Barrett’s fortune came from sugar estates in Jamaica. This may well provide a partial explanation of his refusal to accept Browning as a son-in-law.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, the French planters had become not only indignant but alarmed at the warmth of the welcome that was being given in Paris to the young mulattoes who were being sent to the Sorbonne to study. How could these pampered officials, seated in their comfortable offices, served by an obedient staff, with an army to maintain order in the streets, appreciate what life was like under this burning sun, with this seething, rebellious labour force that could only be restrained by whips and chains?

  Well, thought the planters, we have the remedy in our hands. When these popinjays came home, they would be taught their place; they would have no vote, no civic rights; they would not be represented in the island’s government; they could not sit in assemblies; they were not allowed to give evidence in a court of law when it was a white man’s word they were disputing. It did not matter how rich they were if they had one drop of black blood in their veins. Some parents, indeed, wondered whether it was fair to bring their sons back to the colonies after they had breathed the free air of Europe.

  The mulattoes resented their treatment, but they accepted the situation, partially. They accepted Moreau de St Mery’s list of distinctions; they considered themselves to be superior to the blacks, just as they considered their fathers to be superior to themselves; but they could not tolerate the insolence of the ‘poor whites’, the petits blanes, men who would not be endured by their friends in Paris; in Cap Français, when a poor white was walking on the pavement they had to step down into the gutter. If they struck a white man they might have their hand cut off. Who were these wretched grandchildren of bondmen and prisoners, to give themselves such airs? Yet they themselves had no redress. They would be sitting in a tavern, laughing and chattering together. A white man would walk in, and constraint would fall upon the group. They could no longer be natural together. They would be conscious of the white man. Although he would take no notice of them, all their conversation would be turned toward him. Everything they said or did would be for effect. If they had a girl with them he might beckon her across. She would meekly rise. A mulattress would prefer the sorriest white to the most distinguished quadroon.

  A mixed society was growing up in the West Indies. Each section of that mixed society had its own grievance, particularly in the French West Indies. The aristocrats, the sugar barons, had their disputes with the central government, as throughout the world and throughout history colonists have quarrelled with the home governments who have considered that the colonists existed solely for their own benefit, and have refused to recognize the special difficulties of each individual colony. The French colonies in general were continually complaining about the inelasticity of Colbert’s pacte coloniale, of the rigidity with which it was interpreted. They were not only handicapped but throttled by France’s refusal to allow them to make purchases from any but French merchants. They were short of slaves. Guadeloupe had never been so well off as she was during the Seven Years’ War, when for four years, 1759-1763, she was in British hands. The British, when they returned Guadeloupe to France, took away with them all the slaves that the French could not afford to buy.

  France had immense financial difficulties of her own; her ministers were irritated that her colonists could not appreciate those difficulties. The colonists must wait in patience. Foreign fleets must not be allowed to profit by France’s weakness. So the argument ran; an endless reiteration of complaints and politely evasive answers. The financial insecurity of France, which was to lead to the revolution, exacerbated and accentuated the difficulties of the French planters. France was worried by the number of sugar factories that were being built in the islands; they would interfere with the sugar factories in France. Paris tried to limit the number of factories in the islands; she urged the landowners to plant less sugar and concentrate on the secondary crops, indigo, cocoa, ginger, cotton. There was bitter opposition to these ordinances. The various currency restrictions were exasperating. The colonial money issued from France was no use in France. Spanish money became legal, with the franc as an ancillary. Small proprietors could no longer afford to manage their sugar estates and were driven to farming land in the mountains. Guadeloupe was also long resentful at being treated as a colony of Martinique that could not trade directly with France. The British, during their brief occupancy, established the port of Pointe-a-Pitre, but after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the port was abandoned until the protests of the planters became uncomfortably insistent. There was among the sugar barons a feeling of loyalty for the Crown, but little for the ministers of the Crown. In spite of their wealth, they were discontented.

  The least discontented section of the community was the group for which poor whites is a misnomer; there is no precise English equivalent for petits blancs. They were the descendants of the bondmen, they were the artisans, shopkeepers, minor landowners, who had been sent out with government assistance, most of whom had improved their situation and were living more comfortably than they would have done in Europe; they also had a feeling of superiority through the authority they could exert over a subject race. One of the attractions of colonial life for the European is the sense of importance he acquires through being white. He has the status of a pukka sahib. He may have felt envious of his superiors; but if he had had an envious nature, he would have been more envious in the country of his birth. He could feel secure about his future; a white man was looked after in the tropics, and he had every opportunity of improving himself. He had probably done so, to some extent, already. The petits blancs might be the most disliked section of the community, looked down on by the grands blanes, despised and resented by the freed mulattoes, hated by the slaves; yet they were in themselves the most contented section; as they were too poor, for the most part, to own more than a few domestic slaves, they were spared the constant anxiety of the big landowners against a slaves’ revolt.

  The most discontented class was that of the freed mulatto; he felt that everybody’s hand was against him. He was an object of official distrust and disapproval. Each country drew up different regulations concerning the liberation of a slave, and those regulations were changed to meet changing day-to-day conditions. At the start it seemed logical that a man should be able to dispose of his own property, but French lawyers argued that a slave was part of a man’s patrimony and therefore was subject to the royal will. The central governments were glad to approve certain kinds of liberation; freedom could be awarded to a slave who had shown courage in a crisis, at an invasion, who captured an enemy, who reported a plot against authority or the nature of an unknown poison. Poisoning was very widespread; arsenic was the main ingredient. Female jealousy was one of the main reasons for poisoning. Sometimes slaves would poison their comrades, so as to reduce the value of a property and prevent a master from starting projects that would entail too much work for them. Nurses in a hospital would poison soldiers to save themselves the trouble of looking after them. Poisons were given in small doses. In pillows and mattresses would be put herbs whose fumes would gradually destroy their user. The lockjaw which afflicted so many children was believed to be the result of poisoning.

  Authority often felt that it was pitted against a world of maniacs; the men who had proved their loyalty to the régime deserved reward, but the uncontrolled liberation of mistresses and illegitimate children would soon create a class that would threaten the stability of the régime.

  The government was also afraid that haphazard liberation would create a parasitic class of �
�rogues and vagabonds’. The regulations controlling the freeing of slaves became so strict that planters were driven to divers devices to circumvent them. French planters would go to British islands, organize a bogus sale and return with someone whom they described as a freed slave; but though these laws were passed, it was impossible to control the free unions which produced the steady flow of mulattoes and mulattresses, most of whom became free at an early adult age. The river of brown blood grew deeper, broader, stronger. Authority was aware of the problem it presented, but saw no means of stemming it, and as a background to these three groups, the sugar barons, the poor whites and the freed men and women of colour or mixed blood, was the growling, anonymous labour force, surly, impatient, ready for revenge; whose grievances were kept alive by angry compatriots who had been torn only a few weeks back from the freedom of their homes.

  The planters had other causes for concern. After the surrender at Yorktown, the French and Spanish governments could congratulate themselves on having contributed so substantially to Britain’s loss of face, but they had established precedents that were later to cost them dear. They had encouraged ideas that were to prove injurious to their own constitutions. A people had risen against a king and had prevailed. The American Revolution was very different from a revolt of nobles in which one king had replaced another. In this, a republic had been proclaimed. Phrases like ‘the rights of man’ had been given a new significance by the Declaration of Independence. Men had begun to question the principles under which their lives had previously been ordered. The horizons of men’s minds had been enlarged by the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau. It was a period of doubt, yet at the same time it was a period of hope. There was a belief that man’s lot might be bettered, that ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ was a realizable objective; certain truths had at last become self-evident, and among the principles that had been accepted unquestioningly for centuries, and that were now for the first time under examination, was the right of man to keep a fellow man in bondage except in punishment for crime. Was there any justification for the slave trade?