by Alec Waugh
At sea he is a very different person, simple and direct, leading a healthy, pleasant, monotonous existence. His life is centred in his ship and his companions; he has no part in that which constitutes the life of the normal landsman. He rarely reads a newspaper, politics mean nothing to him; his conversation is not a fabric of murder trials and football results. He is concerned with currents and cargoes; with the day’s run, with the changing winds, with the infinite variety of the sea, with the interests that compose the sum of a communal and self-contained existence.
He has simplified life into two things, his ship and his home. Home does not mean to him a fabric of complicated relations, but two or three people—his parents, his wife, his children. A sailor, for all they may talk about the “wife in every port,” is an extremely domesticated person. He has no opportunity of knowing more than a very few people intimately, and his life is bound up in those few. The excitement of arriving at port is more often the thrill over a mail than the prospect of an hilarious evening.
We picture the sailor’s life in terms of adventure and romance. We think of the sailor as someone who has seen life widely; but in point of fact there is no class of person who is less familiar with what is held ordinarily to constitute life. In consequence, he retains that freshness, almost amounting to an innocence of outlook, that is his particular and peculiar charm.
§
And it is for this reason, I believe—namely, that the reward of travel is not the seeing of certain accepted beauties but the discovery of a series of special and particular sensations—that so many travellers will tell you that the biggest emotion that they have ever had is the crossing of the Panama Canal. The passing of those locks, that stepping in a few hours from one ocean to another, which is the stepping from a known into an unknown world, symbolises the whole spirit of adventure that lures men to travel. And here, too, there is the drama of the undramatic. There is no fuss. It is very quiet and orderly and efficient. There is no shouting, no display. The great gates close behind you; noiselessly the water fills the lock. Inch by inch you rise till the figures that were on a level with the deck are feet below it; till another gate swings open and the traction engines begin to climb; and once again there is the noiseless flow of water; and once again the figures on the side that were above you are at your level and then are passed. It is so quiet that you scarcely realise the immensity of the adventure; not even when you are in the Gatun Lake and see to right and left of you the stumps of the flooded forests; not even when you drift slowly past Mira-flores towards San Miguel, towards Balboa and beyond Balboa, to the slow waters of the Pacific.
If ever I write a travel-story it shall begin in Panama, with the first sighting after three weeks of the Atlantic of the breakwater of Colon. And as the boat rises slowly the hero will feel that he is being lifted out of the world of commonplace experience into the rarefied atmosphere of romance. To a love-story, the return by the Canal would give the perfect curtain. As in the first chapter the approach to Colon had symbolised the spirit of romance, so now would the return through Panama symbolise its death. As the hero looks behind him at those closing gates and upwards to the heightening shore and before him to the low Atlantic, he realises in one spasm of revelation all that he is saying good-bye to. He is descending from the heights of poetic living to the prosaic level of mere livelihood.
XI
London
It is at Plymouth that the traveller should land. The cool green of its hills will mean England to him after the gaudy tropics. And it is through landscape that contains the heart of England that the train will hurry him to London. You have not the same feeling of home-coming at Southampton. Certainly you have not if you arrive there in the early morning by the night boat from Havre.
The Pellerin had docked early in the afternoon. Eldred had caught the special train to Paris, and as I wandered round the streets, or sat in a café reading the Continental Daily Mail, I had the feeling of being back and yet not back. It was an impression that persisted. On the small Channel boat there was the restlessness of interrupted travel. There was shouting and a clattering of trunks. The cabins were small—the kind of cabin that is meant to be slept no more than a night in. It was by European labels that the suit-cases of the man who slept in the next bunk were covered. Next morning the familiar platform was busy with the familiar bustle: with the familiar faces draggled after a restless night and a hurried dressing. I could not believe that it was from the tropics and a six months’ absence that I was returning. I felt that, like all these other, I was coming back from a week-end in Paris.
And yet, perhaps, it is in that way, anonymously, that one should return to a city so vast that one can be free in it. You can do what you like in London because no one in London has the time to wonder what you are doing. It may be that that is so also in Berlin and Paris and Vienna. Probably it is. I do not know them well enough to tell. Only in London and New York have I ever been without the uncomfortable sensation of living in a glass house. One has no private life. One is under constant observation. Even in Tahiti, where one can do what one likes, everybody knows what one is doing. London is big enough to mind its own affairs. And as the train rattled through Hampshire I felt that this was the way in which one should come back: in a breakfast car surrounded by the clatter of many courses, among people who seemed to have spent the last fortnight in precisely the same way, though as likely as not the experiences of each person in that car were as diverse and varied as my own. That is, I suppose, one of the paradoxes of the English, that about the most personal and individual race in the world should give the impression of having been turned out to pattern.
I drove straight from Waterloo along the Embankment, up Regent Street, towards my club. The porter received me as though I had never been away. His “Good morning, sir,” had its invariable intonation of respectful and indifferent welcome. The boy who took my trunks and suit-cases from the cab cast no inquisitive eye upon the labels. I walked into the club. It was a little after nine. Breakfasts were still being served. There was only one man in the reading-room. I knew him fairly well. We would exchange the conventionalities of small talk two or three times a week. And once a month or so we would sit next each other at lunch or dinner. He must have known I had been away. But he had taken as little count of it as he had of such other things as we may have heard of one another, but to which it would never have occurred to us to refer. In a London club you leave your private life with your hat and overcoat in the hall. He turned his head as I came up to him.
“Ah, Waugh,” he said, “there’s something I wanted to ask you. I was thinking of getting a first edition of Avowals. How much ought I to give for it?”
“Three guineas,” I suggested, and I sat beside him, and for half an hour or so we talked of limited and first editions.
And later, after he had gone, and I had settled myself in a corner chair with a pile of newspapers beside me, it was with the same feeling of having always been there that I turned the pages of the Tatler. The same people were being photographed in the same company. The gossip column was filled with familiar names. The same parties, the same guests. In the literary page I saw that the same authors were producing the same books with the same measure of success. Nothing had changed. I might never have been away.
§
“Does London seem very strange,” I was once asked. “when you’ve been so long away? Does it seem smaller, when you’ve been so many miles from it?”
“You see it differently,” I said.
Or rather, you see it against a different background. In the same way that by reading history you have a standard for the political columns of the daily newspaper, and by reading the literatures of France and Rome and Greece you have a standard for that of your own country, by travel you come to see from a different angle the stir and conflict of London. Which is not to say that London seems any the less important.
There are people who will say that London does not matter, that London is not Eng
land, that Manchester is England, that Sussex is England, but that London is not England. Though what else it is, considering the number of Englishmen who inhabit it, I have been unable to discover. The provincialism of such a contention is surely as narrow as that of those few Londoners whose world is bounded by a few streets, a few houses, a few names, to whom no one unestablished within that circle matters, whose scale of values does not recognise the existence of those huge spheres of commerce and administration which develop and safeguard the interests of the country.
Travel does not make London seem either small or strange. On the contrary, there are sides of London life whose stature is infinitely increased by travel. You cannot travel through the Antilles and Australia and Malaya without feeling how immensely important is the headpiece that directs this vast and varied Empire. For that is what London is. To London come the best brains of England, and from London come the ideas that are to control those immense tracts of land, those haphazard minglings of warring nations, those young peoples of the new world that are rising to significance. London is the administrative centre. It is hard to exaggerate the value of what that section of London that is representative of England’s larger interest thinks and feels and says.
§
It is oneself chiefly that travel alters. It gives one an “other-worldliness,” the kind of “other-worldliness” that at Oxford comes to one through “Greats.” For it is not possible to linger among those green islands whither no newspapers ever come, where life follows its tranquil course, indifferent to what is happening in Europe and America, without wondering whether anything really matters beyond the setting of oneself in harmony with those eternal forces of birth and growth and ultimate decay that weave their gracious pattern by the palm-fringed beaches. Of this I am very sure, that whatever may lie ahead of me of success and failure, of happiness and disappointment, I shall have to counsel me against too ready a surrender to the moment’s mood, the memory of that little island to which no echo of our western turmoil can ever reach.
In the same way that the shepherds recall by the site of Uricon “the Roman and his trouble,” I shall remember the long curve of that little harbour with the nestling schooners and the painted bungalows, and across the lagoon the many pinnacles of its sister isle. I shall remember the gentle manners of its people, the dark-skinned Polynesians, the French officials, the Chinese traders. I shall remember their soft singing and the glimmer on the water at nightfall of the torches by which they fish. I shall remember their cool verandahs, the red and white of the hibiscus, the yellow amanda flower and the purple of the bougainvillea. I shall remember how the sun shines and the earth is fertile and nobody is sad.
And I shall know that were I to return there, I should find the same merrily laughing group drawn up along the wharf. They would know nothing of how life had fared for me in Europe. The things that make for one’s reception here, the opinion of one’s fellows, the sales of one’s books, one’s prices from the magazines, one’s quarter or half column notices in the Sunday Press would count for nothing to one returning to that green island.
There would be the hailing of a remembered face. “Ia ora na,” they would shout to me. They would wave their hands. There would be a drifting towards the café, a laughing together over ice-cream sodas. And after the sun had set, a miracle of golden lilac behind Moorea, there would be a wandering to the Chinese restaurant for a chop suey, with afterwards a riding out along the beach with the moon shining upon the palm trees, and the warm air scented with the white bloom of the tiare. There would be the singing, the laughter and the dancing, a sense of unity with primæval forces.
And ultimately that is, I suppose, what death will prove to be: a stepping away from what is transient into the waveless calm of an eternal rhythm.
Author’s Note
In a travel book such as this, I feel that footnotes could only be an inconvenience to the reader. So I have let the section about Haiti stand without any quoting of authorities.
The bibliography of Haiti is not long. Anyone who cares to spend a few hours in the British Museum reading-room will be in a position to dispute my interpretation of those facts one can be sure of. They are not many. Vaissiére’s Saint Domingue is a scholarly study of the island’s life up till 1789. But from then onwards the historian has to rely very largely upon guesswork. The documents on which accurate conclusions might be based do not exist. Lothrop Stoddard has written a careful and dramatic account of the years 1789-1803. But he has had necessarily to base his opinions on French official documents. He had no means of seeing the other side of the picture. With the surrender of Rochambeau and the massacre of the white, planters, darkness descends. There is no impartial witness. The various histories of Haiti have been written by men with an axe to grind: by French colonials trying to explain their failure; by mulattoes concerned with an attempt to attribute the island’s misfortunes to black mismanagement; by negroes blaming those misfortunes upon mulatto weakness; by mulatto and negro apologists who denied that there were any misfortunes to be blamed on anyone; by Englishmen who were terrified lest the Jamaicans should follow the example of their neighbours; by casual tourists who accepted the testimony of the first history they picked up; by Americans who approved and Americans who opposed Washington’s interference. The most balanced history is H. P. Davis’ Black Democracy.
In the outline of Haitian history that I have sketched I have relied upon that evidence that seemed to me least partial: in particular upon the Nugent papers in the Jamaican Institute.
They have not, as far as I know, been quoted from before, and my gratitude is very great to Mr. Frank Cundall and his assistants, who helped me to find a path through them. The official English in Jamaica were relatively independent and well informed. Colbert’s despatches to Nugent and Nugent’s to Hobart are the honest expressions of opinion of men who stood above the battle. But they are quite likely to have been mistaken. One has to accept out of one’s general knowledge of the period, of the country, of negro and mulatto characteristics what appears most probable. There is, for instance, no proof that Christophe was concerned in the murder of Dessalines. I do not believe, however, that Christophe, had he been innocent, would have protested his innocence so indignantly and so self-righteously.
Throughout I have used the word ‘coloured’ in the West Indian sense of half-caste, and the word ‘Creole’ in its original sense of ‘born in and native to the colonies.’ The word has nothing to do with colour. There were black, white and mulatto Creoles.
1 The actual chica is a slightly different dance, somewhat similar to the Hula-hula. The couples do not touch each other as they dance.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Alec Waugh
First published 1930 by Chapman & Hall Ltd.
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