Trinidad &

Tobago
Isles of the lmmortelles by
ROBIN BRYANS
TRINIDAD & TOBAGO
Isles of the Immortelles

ROBIN BRYANS

Trinidad and Tobago-now one inde­

pendent nation -are two beautiful
islands of the Caribbean, the most
famous for beaches, sunshine, rare birds
and plants and exotic foods. Robin
Bryans reveals that they are also among
the most rewarding in their unexpected
variety. Within less than two thousand
square miles, Trinidad contains the wild,
majestic mountains of the Northern
Range, the southern sugar plains, the
hunting forests of the interior, superb
bays for all-the-year-round bathing;
and in Port-of-Spain not only the charm­
ing squares, flowering trees and early
Victorian architecture of the old city,
but also all the exuberance of a modern
metropolis, breaking out at Carnival
time into colour as exotic as its gardens.
By contrast, Tobago is a place of pas­
toral tranquillity after the violence of
its past: a place of green mountains,
secluded beaches and lagoons, miniscule
villages and Georgian forts.
Robin Bryans traces the absorbing
and often bloody history of the islands
from the days of Columbus to the
presen� day; at the same time he bril­
liantly evokes the quality of life on the
islands, and the way the ancestral cul­
tures of Africa, Asia and Europe have
been transmuted into a new culture
whose arts combine each year in the
dazzling and unforgettable climax of
Carnival.

Jacket photograph by Noel Norton

42s net
Trinidad and Tobago
 by the same author
*
SUMMER SAGA: A JOURNEY IN ICELAND
DANISH EPISODE
FANFARE FOR BRAZIL
THE AZORES
ULSTER
MOROCCO
MALTA AND GOZO

*
LUCIO
a novel
*
as Robert Harbinson
NO SURRENDER
SONG OF ERNE
UP SPAKE THE CABIN BOY
THE PROTEGE

*
THE FAR WORLD AND OTHER STORIES
TATTOO LILY: AND OTHER ULSTER STORIES
Playin' mas-part of Carnival's spectacular procession
Trinidad and Tobago
ISLES OF THE IMMORTELLES

Robin Bryans

QUEENSWOOD HOUSE LIMITED

in association with
FABER AND FABER LIMITED
24 Russell Square London
 First published in mcmlxvii
by Faber and Faber Limited
24 Russell Square London W.C.1
Printed in Great Britain by
W. & J. Mackay & Co Ltd, Chatham
All rights reserved

© 1967 by Robin Bryans

For three Trinidadian friends:
James, fisherman and champion stick-fighter
Teresa, whose calypso singing rivals her Creole dishes
Polly, who left her island home too young to remember
the immortelle trees' shade
Work is the art of the lonely man.
From love were all the nations born.
But without the humble help of those who know how
To bake bread and make wine
To mend carts and milk cows,
What would become ofyour world, 0 Epistemon?
Anonymous Greek
 Contents

Maps of Trinidad and Tobago pages 10-12

Introduction 13

1. CITY IN THE SUN 15

2. QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN 41

3. THE GREAT GOD PAN 77

4. LAKE DISTRICT 112

5. BOTANY AND BAYS 140

6. SYMPHONY OF PALMS 161

7. JUMPIN' UP 187

8. BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTHS 211

9. THE WINDWARD ROAD 248

10. PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS 273

Index 299

7
 Illustrations
Playin' mas-part of Carnival's spectacular
process10n colourfrontispiece
Young Trinidadian steps out facing page 32
Roofs on the Maraval Road 33
Trees in Victoria Square 33
Heads are for carrying 48
Landscape with sugar cane 49
Seascape with moonlight 49
Birth of a steel drum-pan-tuner at work 80
Old houses, Port-of-Spain 81
Transport with message 96
Coconuts to quench your thirst 97
Bicycles to get you home 97
Harvesters of fish and cane 128
Field workers are not always men 129
Fantasy for Carnival 144
Paper mosque for Hosein 144
Madam Ramkhelawan Rampersad with Ramcharran, Chano
and Shandra 145
Keg 145
Far from the Ganges-Hindus' annual purification 176
Far from the Jordan-Gospel belle's baptism 176
Some of the old ways continue-both ashore and at sea 177
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 Introduction
Tropical islands magnetize the northerner, especially in midwinter,
when his world is dead. There are the South Sea Islands, which I
have not seen, and those of the Caribbean, which I have. And in par­
ticular there are Trinidad and Tobago just off the Atlantic tip of
South America. Twenty miles of sea separate the two islands, but
they have been a single, independent nation since 1962.
Any intentions I had of being objective vanished the moment I
arrived. The magic was too powerful. Bewitched from that moment
on I succumbed, and this book attempts to reveal the secret of its
spell.
Magic, however, is magic. The blue skies and lagoons, the supremely
beautiful tracts of plantation landscape, the mountain valleys blazing
with immortelle trees, the diminutive dolls' houses, the sweeping
palm-fringed bays, the country villages, Carnival in Port-of-Spain,
the coral reefs and pirate lairs and forts of Tobago, the wild effiores­
cence of colour in exotic plants, and, above all, the happy friendly
people-if all these appear exaggerated it is simply because in real
life they are exaggerated.
Life is the thing. Rioting, burgeoning, bursting life is the keynote
in Trinidad and Tobago. There is always talk, the islanders' pecu­
liarly animated, humorous talk, and laughter and music. I swam every
day, I ate succulent West Indian food, I drank rum and coconut
water, I teased my friends and plagued scores of others with endless
questions.
The Forestry Department was sympathetic with my fetish for
exact identification and even made a beautiful tree map for me; an
invaluable service, yet typical of the islanders' generosity. Similarly,
Mr. Donald Bain and his staff of the Trinidad and Tobago Tourist
Board put themselves out on more than one occasion to help me, and
asked Mr. Noel Norton to turn his sensitive eye and his camera on the
IS
 INTRODUCTION

kaleidoscopic scene to produce most of the photographs in this book.

Another eye peered into the islands' long-distant past, and this was
Dr. J. A. Bullbrook's. Hidden away amongst his books and archaeo­
logical finds at the National Museum, he opened immense vistas of
the past. Dr. Bullbrook is as well known for his generosity as his
learning, so he may have forgotten how I robbed him of his time­
though afterwards, through friends, he sent me a copy of his book
on the aborigines of Trinidad.
The plants and birds unfamiliar to British readers have been given
Latin labels, especially where local names offer no clue as to identity.
The Latin labels may occasionally seem superfluous, but I give them
because some species in the Caribbean have American local names,
and these often differ greatly from those in the Old World across the
Atlantic.
No Latin labels were attached to the people I met. They bear their
own names. But lots of other people are not mentioned at all, although
my experiences in Trinidad and Tobago would have been destitute
without them: players in various Port-of-Spain steel bands (notably
the House of Metronomes and Silver Stars), fishermen at Mayaro,
coconut workers on St. Anne's Estate, car-owners who gave me lifts,
village women who invited me to share family meals when there were
no restaurants, bus drivers on Tobago who specially slowed down or
stopped for me to absorb some spectacle of coast or mountain.
They were all magicians, every one. And if there is a way of break­
ing the spell they cast over me, I don't wish to know about it.

ROBIN BRYANS
Victoria,
Vancouver Island.
1966.

14
 ti 11t
City 1n the Sun
It was the same sun.
In the morning I had hardly been aware of it lurking sullenly
above the cold January mists which clung tenaciously to the upper
reaches of London's Thames. Looking from the porthole of a friend's
houseboat where I had been staying, I saw the flat river on one
side and the carefully manicured fa�ades of Strand-on-the-Green on
the other. Yet there was a sun above the Georgian roofs, because
twelve hours later I looked from another porthole and saw it. The
sun on its way down had started lurid fires in the clouds below. Even
the wing of the Boeing 707 bound for Trinidad looked red-hot as the
sun descended. I knew how prolific and prodigal the tropics could
be with colour. Except for the hues of lagoons and bays, tropical
colours were never more vivid than in the sunset sky.
A Caribbean sunset viewed from a porthole 33,000 feet up in the
air was better than the last act of Gotterdammerung at Bayreuth. At
least, I felt it must be so, though I had not seen Bayreuth's Valhalla
drowned in flames. But I was seeing the sky ravaged by the fire of
the sun over the Caribbean, which was something Wagner never
experienced nor probably ever imagined.
It would be difficult to imagine that sunset. The clouds below
looked like a forest, gilded as though some aerial Midas had been at
work. No stage lighting could reproduce the intensity and fierceness
of the sky stretching as a cyclorama above the golden cloud forest.
Distinct bands of colour divided the sky. The horizon deepened
from yellow through orange to red. Abruptly above this the cloudless
atmosphere became a band of Oxford blue and a stripe of Cambridge
15
 CITY IN THE SUN

blue. Then the absurd university scarf became black velvet on which
some careless celestial jeweller had dropped dozens of diamonds.
All these colours were switched off without warning when the
sun slipped below the horizon. The Boeing's porthole gave on to a
sky as dull as London's had been twelve hours earlier-except for
the hugeness of the stars cluttering this Caribbean firmament. In
compensation lights appeared below, not randomly strewn about like
the stars, but ranged in rows. This was Trinidad from the air. Then,
after 'No smoking, fasten seat belts', after the briefest of customs and
immigration formalities, it was Trinidad on the ground, and for me
familiar ground. My return was something of a little home-coming.
The driver raced from Piarco Airport towards Port-of-Spain.
'Hilton Hotel?' he asked.
No, I told him; no, I didn't want the Hilton, but the Rosary Guest
House in the middle of all the noise and bustle of downtown
Charlotte Street. I knew that this place, where I had often stayed
before, was a far enough cry from the Trinidad Hilton for the driver
to raise his eyebrows. But I remembered the Rosary Guest House
from the days when I was younger, when Trinidad had no Hilton
Hotel.
To my surprise, the guest house had changed not at all. And when
I found the same proprietor, Mr. Lo Ten Foe, sitting behind the same
desk at the top of the stairs up from the street, my pleasure was
complete. He looked quite untouched by the eleven years since my
last visit. More s"tartling was Mr. Lo Ten Foe's opening remark.
'How nice to see you again.' As if it was only last week: 'You left
a shirt behind,' he said.
'But that was eleven years ago,' I said, incredulous at his memory.
'Oh! So long?'
Shaken by this philosophical disdain for the passage of years, I
took the room key which he fished from rows of hooks behind him,
and also the card he gave me, printed 'Prop. C.R. Lo Ten Foe'. His
card had not changed since the days when I lived in Venezuela and
often slipped over to enjoy Trinidad's beaches. I remembered well
the pink card epitomizing the Rosary Guest House and the pro­
prietor's linguistic ability. 'Specialize in Chinese, European and
Creole Dishes, Holder of Certificate for Clean Food Handling.
16
 CITY IN THE SUN

English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German and Chinese spoken.

Courteous Service, Healthy Environment.' Before the key turned in
my door I heard Mr. Lo Ten Foe speak German with a late diner
who ate under several reigns of British Royal Family arranged in
photographs around the room.
Rosary House is not so much an hotel as a series of incidents, in
this way resembling Charlotte Street. A first-floor balcony looked
down from three sides of a courtyard which was occupied by a
business-'Narine for Sand from one bucket up.' The pension's
rooms opened directly from the balcony without ceremony and
practically without privacy. The wooden partition stopped short of
the roof and this space, barred with wooden slats, allowed air to
circulate. An old-fashioned china basin and ewer added an other­
worldly note to each sparsely furnished room, but for the modern­
minded basins with running water had been provided on the balcony.
One of the Rosary's incidents was the view from the dining-room,
which had another open first-floor balcony above the busy pavements
of Charlotte Street, Beyond the potted and exotic plants perched
precariously on the parapet, jagged mountains blocked the sky,
mountains clothed in the unmistakable dark, dense greenery of the
tropics which, whether actually so or not, always suggests impene­
trable jungle riddled with strange, dangerous creatures crawling,
creeping, sliding in its depths.
Diners at the Rosary's tables could also see tall palm trees with
airy fronds lifted high above everything except the hills. King-sized
cabbage palms grew to 200 feet, from which height their cylindrical
bunches of leaves looked deceptively small. The similar royal palms
were crowned with drooping plumes moved by every touch of
breeze.
At night, the pension's balcony became a sort of private box in a
theatre for the passing show below. The doorway from the street was
monopolized by an old Negress who sold peeled oranges from a
basket. Charlotte Street offers many delicacies to evening strollers.
Flambeaux light the pavement stalls for fruit or sticky sweetmeats
or oysters. I was half afraid the oyster-sellers would have been swept
away in a rush of post-Independence progress. But no, the oyster
boys' dark faces and gleaming eyes still smiled in the flambeaux's
17
 CITY IN THE SUN

light, and on the trays in front of them the tiny tree-oysters were still
laid out like the trays of a coin collection.
Within ten minutes of arriving once more at the Rosary Guest
House, I dashed downstairs again to enjoy my first feast of the
delicious tree-oysters. They perfectly justified their reputation of
being one of Trinidad's natural wonders. The oysters are a luxury
the poorest people can, and do, indulge. For the equivalent of six­
pence, one dozen succulent oysters can be consumed. Their flavour,
pronounced but delicate, is like no other sea-food. To check the
inevitable tendency to compulsive tree-oyster eating, I limited myself
to no more than two dozen at one session. Like everybody else, I
bought and ate them at a street stall.
After that first evening I always went back to the same stall,
because the youth who owned it had a knack of getting the largest
and most mouth-watering of these Ostrea mexicana. With a scraping
twist of a short-bladed knife the seller opened the shells he had
collected earlier in the day. The oyster boys and men go down to the
mangrove swamps near Port-of-Spain at ebb tide and collect the
oysters from the tree roots exposed by the retreating sea. On an
ordinary day he picked up a thousand oysters. There was no doubt
that the youth's wares were genuine tree-oysters, because I often
found pieces of bark stuck to the shells.
Getting past the old orange-seller stationed in the Rosary Guest
House doorway was easier than avoiding a chained dog on the back
flight of stairs leading to the upper rooms. Threatening to snap its
chain, this monster barked and bared its fangs, making in this display
of ferocity no distinction between the guests and the many skinny
cats. The cats knew better than to take any notice of such exhibi­
tionism. The guests took no chances with their shins and calves. But
the dog had a soft spot for children. He cocked his head and wagged
his tail and tried, as far as his chain would allow, to join in the ball
games, or roll in the piles of sand where anybody's or everybody's
children in their thin cotton shirts and dresses added dust to duski­
ness in a manner so unlike the immaculate children being shepherded
by nuns past the gate to the big Gothic church of the Holy Rosary
round the corner.
'Incident' is an apt description of the Rosary Guest House's im-
18
 CITY IN THE SUN

mediate neighbour, a popular small cinema which kept its audience

captive and responsive until midnight. Although I could not actually
see the film from my room, every word of the sound-track came
clearly through with laughs, boos and cheers from the audience
and a torrent of film music bred from Bruckner and Janacek. The
cinema had no qualms about broadcasting the aural part of its pro­
gramme to anybody within earshot. And this, though unintentional,
was ironical, for the cinema had been built in what was once the
garden of that extraordinary Trinidadian musical family, the Pitts,
whose brothers and sisters alike are remarkable singers of, and
authorities on, calypso.
The barrage of very loud neo-symphonic noises led me to reflect
on the curious nature of film-music writing. It seemed to consist of
taking a bit from here and a bit from there and gluing them together
quite unashamedly, just as the people going jauntily up and down
Charlotte Street came originally from a score of African tribes, mixed
since with a score of dialects from the Indian sub-continent, and
touched in one way or another with a score of creeds, ideas, customs
and fashions from Europe and the Orient, resulting in a handsome­
ness which startles the visitor on arrival and makes the rest of man­
kind look ugly when he leaves again.
Mr. Lo Ten Foe was not the only Chinese 'Holder of Certificate
for Clean Food Handling' in the lively thoroughfare of Charlotte
Street. Early next morning I wandered down by the 'Chinese Aged
House' and the 'Indian Night Shelter. No Idlers allowed by the
Gates', on past the Wing Chong Grocery, the Ling Nam Restaurant,
past Nam Mee Dealer in Dry Goods, past Lue Shue Safe-Way Food
Store. In this downtown area Chinese proprietors were everywhere,
quiet, efficient, and quaint in their use of English-though none of
the Chinese shop signs could compare with my favourite, to be seen
in Henry Street, which runs parallel with Charlotte Street, 'Celestine's
Men's sport shirts and Bridal dresses a speciality'.
It pleased me to find that in spite of new buildings and improve­
ments in many downtown areas of Port-of-Spain, Charlotte Street
could still be distinguished from its fellows of the grid-iron town
plan. The numerous shops and roadside pedlars sold every avail­
able kind of fruit and vegetable, and did a brisk business in live
19
 CITY IN THE SUN

chickens, while song-sellers took up large areas with boards covered

in postcard-sized song-sheets printed with the words of the latest and
not-so-latest hits, a trade eked out with a sideline in pictures ranging
from Sacred Hearts to evangelical texts.
Sadly, I heard that the old market on Charlotte Street was threa­
tened with demolition. But I found it thriving as of old, with its
multitude of stalls inside and the pavements of adjacent streets
heaped with farm produce-piles and rows and stacks and pyramids
of produce continually replenished and rebuilt by women going to
and fro with sacks and baskets balanced on their heads. And here a
powerful incense hung on the air, the pungent, pleasing odours of
freshly ground spices, of culinary tree barks and roots, of herbs and
dried seeds and leaves for a thousand and one recipes.
Not surprisingly, all this commercial activity generates a lot of
traffic in Charlotte Street, controlled by remarkably unexasperated
policemen in white cork helmets and navy-blue shorts whose pockets
do nothing to conceal wooden truncheons reaching down nearly to
the puttees which mummify their boots and stockings. Charlotte
Street is for all comers. Detroit's smoothest, newest automobiles take
their place beside taxis filled with passengers who split the fares
among themselves in South American fashion. Cyclists still wobbled
their way between other traffic, balancing sacks of meal-just-on
the handlebars.
Here, too, donkey carts creaked and clopped cheek by jowl with
CD-plated limousines. Simply by stopping at the kerbside these carts
became stalls for the sale of green whole coconuts whose milk is a
popular thirst-quencher. Incessant radio insistence that 'You're in
the Pepsi generation' made no difference to coconut-water consump­
tion. Coconut to the Trinidadian does not mean the small, coarse­
haired, shrunk.en-head-looking target of coconut shies, but a smooth­
cased, green shell almost as large as a rugger ball. Nor does coconut
mean chewing the hard white pith. It means first, the ·Sweet water
which looks like gin and perhaps, afterwards, a mouthful or two of
the pith, scooped out while still as soft as junket. The 'waternut'
seller serves his street customers by seizing the huge green shell,
cutting off one end and trimming sufficient of the outer casing to
allow a two-inch hole for drinking the sweet water. The whole
20
 CITY IN THE SUN

operation takes only a few seconds and a few deft and well-aimed
swipes from the seller's machete, or 'cutlass'.
Although Carnival was still six weeks away, an atmosphere hung
about Port-of-Spain like the first wash of an incoming tide. During
those weeks I came to understand that Carnival, held on the Monday
and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, was not merely an excuse for
living it up, but was an end in itself, a raison d'etre. This hindsight
explained the foresight I had of shop windows decked with incredible
woven materials threaded with gold and silver (or what looked like
gold and silver) gilt brocades and marvels of the kind I imagined
came into Renaissance Venice from India and the Orient. Carnival
costumes were used by people who wore a masquerade in the streets,
or, put in lively Trinidadian English, those who would be 'playin'
mas'. Woolworths already had displays of plastic masks and woollen
wigs. But thousands of people who played mas seriously, and who
hoped to win some of the costume prizes, did not buy ready-made
outfits from Woolworths or anywhere else. They spent months of
devoted work on making their masquerade, hammering every plate
of armour with elaborate designs, sewing on every sequin and
spangle, welding every wire frame, dyeing, gluing, painting, stitch­
ing, padding, embroidering. Backyard fowl would be killed for the
table and their feathers dyed for splendid head-dresses. Many people
spent a whole year's savings on a unique creation.
For the moment I was content with the day-to-day carnival of
living which took place in and around Charlotte Street. Spices and
roasting corn-cobs scented the air, and there was the acid tang of
oranges and always a dance-like flow of movement and colour as,
like overloaded galleons, Negresses sailed up and down with a
fulsomeness of figure Rubens's women never had in life or on canvas.
With gymnastic litheness lissom-limbed youths passed up and down
in purple shirts and white, tight jeans which had replaced the baggy
pants that were the rage on my earlier visits.
This downtown area teemed with incident and the heat and the
dust and the noise were inseparable from the vivid colouring and the
graceful movement of the people. It was my fancy that this core of
Port-of-Spain had kept much of the vivacity pirates and buccaneers
brought to the Caribbean, a romantic fancy in no way upset by such
21
 CITY IN THE SUN

contradictions as watching a large red convertible draw up beside a

donkey cart for its occupants to drink from the chopped coconuts.
Buying, selling, haggling, observed by toothless old women peering
from the louvred shade of demarara windows and by the newspaper
girl eating curry from an enamel bowl with a notice on her pile of
newspapers announcing 'Positively No Credit'.
But positive credit certainly should be awarded this part of the
town. I felt that Queen Charlotte herself, who gave the place her
name, would not be so astonished by the Port-of-Spain scene today
as she would probably be by the empty hardness of London's
modern streets. Although so much has remained untouched by
inevitable economic progress, Port-of-Spain as it was in Queen
Charlotte's day largely disappeared in the great fire of 1808. A
distinctive wooden architecture characterized the town before its few
Victorian monuments came to stay, their survival ensured by fire­
proof building. The city's masterpieces were in its own vernacular
style, but it had the blessing of a grid-iron plan allowing open
squares, cool with shady trees to relieve the closeness of the streets
themselves.
Woodford Square is the most important of these open spaces,
though to my mind by no means the most charming. Its importance
derives from the fact that Trinidad's and Tobago's Parliament and
Supreme Court lie along one side of the square and also from the fact
that free, and more often than not loudspeaker, speech is practised in
the manner of Speakers' Corner at London's Hyde Park, a free
speech ranging over the usual soap-box subjects of politics and
religion. Party politics did not exist in Trinidad until 1956, and this
forum for free and lively debates on island affairs was an important
aspect of life in Port-of-Spain-so important that the square's activity
was referred to as the 'University of Woodford Square'. The gospel
halls, however, regarded Woodford Square as the highways and
byways and were trying with the aid of electronics to compel them
to come in and taste the delights of redeeming love.
Students with piles of books balanced on bicycle saddles stared at
the ladies of the town wandering by with equally carefully balanced
frontispieces and eyes ready with a kind of love which might be
thought by some to be far from redemptive. Occasionally, a mother
22
 CITY IN THE SUN

sat in the dappled shade of a flamboyant tree patiently coaxing her

little girl's hair into the attractive, traditional topknots. The hot and
the thirsty cooled off at the garden's water-tap, some removing their
shoes to wash their feet. The bandstand, a prominent feature of the
square, was usually occupied by groups of argumentative students.
Indifferent alike to disputations and salvation, itinerant down-and­
outs unfolded bedrolls of large cardboard boxes and dozed in the
shade of the square's lofty trees.
On the side of the square adjacent to Parliament stands the
Anglican cathedral, opposite this the arcaded public library, and on
the fourth side another early Victorian church. The sides are made
up by the wooden fret-worked and verandaed dolls'-houses character­
istic of the city's residential areas. Greyfriars Church of Scotland has
a wall and gateway much favoured by maimed and aged beggars, a
type of unfortunate encountered remarkably rarely for a city in this
part of the world. Here also could be seen a famous flower-seller
carrying an immense basket of blooms on her head, a tropical
cornucopia of anthurium and amaryllis, spider lily and bird-of­
paradise. I saw in the square also a Greek Orthodox priest, hot-look­
ing in his dark blue robes and tall pepper-pot hat, from which his
hair peeped out in a tight bun.
But the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life in Woodford Square,
the variety of flowers on top of the Negress's head, did not surprise
me so much as the trees and shrubs around the square. I had not
expected in early January to see the yellow poui still dropping its
last season's blossom. I remembered the tree, Tecoma serratifolia,
from Venezuela, where its blossom is the national flower. The poui
reputedly flowers three times before the coming of the leaves which
herald the rains. But in Port-of-Spain the tall, majestic poui by the
Houses of Parliament displayed flowers and leaves simultaneously at
the end of the rainy season. Also, just across the road in the grounds
of the Anglican cathedral, the frangipani had an unseasonal burst of
deep red, heavily scented blossom. Pride of place in that consecrated
garden, however, was taken by hedges of jungle-flame ixora, a vivid
scarlet plant producing blossom unfailingly every month of the year.
Beneath a great mango tree near by I found lightly clad young
boys from Holy Trinity Junior School in a physical training class.
23
 CITY IN THE SUN

Inside the cathedral I found the heavily clad Sir Ralph Woodford
doing nothing at all in marble robes except recline with books in a
poetic pose which owes much to similar poses in Westminster Abbey.
But for fifteen years Sir Ralph did a great deal, because he was one
of the best governors ever sent to the island. He was in office from
1813 to 1828, during which time the cathedral was built. In spite of
such an imposing memorial, Sir Ralph was not interred beneath or
behind it, for he, poor man, came to a sticky end at sea when he died
on the way home to England. Despite the ship's captain's frantic
efforts to preserve Sir Ralph in a barrel of rum, the governor had in
the end to be committed to the sea.
Perhaps partly to compensate for this not altogether seemly end,
his effigy was more pretentious than the other modest memorials
placed on the walls between the stained-glass windows. I liked the
memorial to David Hart, who died in 1869. His plaque has a terse
verse, not unlike the Latin ones favoured at one time by the Knights
of St. John in Malta. They had their marble marquetry floor tombs
in St. John's Co-Cathedral at Valletta decorated with cautionary
lines. David Hart's in far-away Port-of-Spain was
Stop, traveller, ere you go by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you must be,
Prepare yourself to follow me.
Trinidad's early-nineteenth-century churches were keyed in
muted moods. None of Butterfield's excesses or Gilbert Scott's
pernicketiness touched them. Their richest passages of decoration
were wall tombs like David Hart's though the roof came second in
elaboration. The plainness of the Anglican cathedral in Port-of­
Spain serves to set off its quite extraordinary roof, which alone, apart
from the wall tombs, well rewards a visit. It is a sort of hammer-beam
affair, fantastical and elaborate. The principal brackets have been
coiled into huge drooping loops, expressive in some powerful way of
the prolific jungle and forest growths, and the season-defying forces
of life perpetually working to shroud the whole island in dense
growth. The hammer-beam roof was probably constructed from some
local hardwoods, for it displays the dark richness of jacaranda which
24
 CITY IN THE SUN

I knew so well from the elaborate ceilings and furniture of Brazilian

churches.
The cathedral's amazing wooden roof-structure completely
spanned the nave, for there were no aisles. The windows were tall
and pointed, their glass coloured by mass-produced repeat patterns
not uncommon in Victorian times. Generally the effect was public­
school chapel-ish, not surprising in view of the date of its foundation:
1818, the beginning of the public schools' long association with
empire building. This Englishness no doubt powerfully derived
from the fact that the workmen came out from England. Certainly
the Englishness extended to the cathedral's exterior, whose plain
yellow buff stone, also partly imported from England, holds the
windows between buttresses which end in pyramidal finials. Only
the clock tower becomes skittish enough to sport an ogee.
A path approaches the west door through clipped ixora hedges,
though the main entrance is on the south side, where a plain yet
elegant doorway faces directly down Chacon Street on the side of
the cathedral away from Woodford Square. Unlike Holy Trinity
Cathedral, the Red House does not turn its back on the square. On
the contrary, the square serves more than anything as a sort of
courtyard to this building where, in just over a month, Queen
Elizabeth II was due to open Parliament with a Throne Speech. Red
was the word and red the action in everything except politics for this
occasion. Before the red carpet went down for the royal feet, a red
coat of paint went all over the walls. It was a kind of brick red, very
fierce in the sunlight, effective because unexpected.
The Red House is one of those enchanting Edwardian edifices
('buildings' will not do, they were 'edifices'-Alexandra Palace at
Muswell Hill is a fine example) which will soon be overtaken as the
fashionable craze for Victoriana advances chronologically to the fin
de siecle and beyond. In fact, by leaning backwards from Art Nou­
veau, through Biedemeyer, serious art scholars are due any time now
to collide head-on with lovers of the eccentric who lean forwards
from Victoria to Edward, from the Boer of 1901 to the Boche of
1914.
The Red House sits very-nicely-thank-you in the Iniddle of this
period. Whereas in many respects Victorian architects, whether
25
 CITY IN THE SUN

followers of Classical or Gothic credos, kept themselves within limits

set more or less strictly by their historical models, Edwardian edifices,
on the other hand, seemed compulsively to have elements of the folly
in them. The Red House, for the most part solid and respectable
enough with its pilasters and pedimented windows, suddenly breaks
out with an extravagant, quite useless and charming centrepiece­
a square, hollow block open from floor to roof, pierced with tiers of
windows allowing glimpses from below of Trinidad's peerless blue
sky. It looks like a fire-gutted building but is not.
This folly reminded me somehow of French Riviera architecture
of the same period. Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders go up in their
correct sequence only to meet at the top with a square dome, which,
unlike its Classical predecessors, bares its construction in unashamed
nakedness: in this instance, riveted metal trusses supporting the
white-painted roof-boarding, so providing perfect perches for
pigeons to bomb unwary people ninety feet below. Shocked at first­
these Edwardian affairs always shock-I grew to admire the Red
House and to recognize its powerful presence as a kind of symbol of
national identity.
The large empty space under the folly dome serves as a public
right of way connecting through to Woodford Square. Many people
just went there to look inquisitively at the Marriage Notices dis­
played in glass-fronted cases. The forms were identical-Name and
Surname, Condition and Calling, Age, Dwelling Place and Length of
Residence. The first time I looked at the Notices I learned that
Joanne Augusta Claudia Brithwaite in spinster condition was about
to marry Jurgen Johannes Heinrich Ottermann, a twenty-five-year­
old managing director.
On the St. Vincent Street side of the Red House, where the im­
mense and splendid yellow poui grew, I always put my umbrella up
against the stinging sun, which by eleven o'clock in the morning was
hot enough to cause even the hordes of unattached dogs to cease
their carnival and lie panting beside the Police Headquarters across
the street. But however hot downtown Port-of-Spain might become,
I knew from previous visits that up in the Queen's Park Savannah a
cooling draught from the trade winds would be blowing across the
200 open acres which lie between the mountains and the city.
26
 CITY IN THE SUN

The Savannah was originally a sugar-cane plantation called

Paradise, and it belonged to a French aristocratic family named
Peschier. An old, walled cemetery in the centre encloses the de­
caying tombs of the former planters. Sir Ralph Woodhouse took a
personal pride in the rebuilding of Port-of-Spain after the disastrous
fire of 1808. He was affectionately known as Governor Chapeau
Paille, and was often seen out in the early morning while it was still
cool, wearing his large, battered straw hat, inspecting the new build­
ings and the planting of the squares. Sir Ralph was determined, as
Byron said of Valletta in Malta, to make Port-of-Spain a city built by
gentlemen for gentlemen. Yet though all this was done on the dark
substructure of slavery, the Governor was not, for his time and
situation, a proud man nor altogether unmindful of the poorer
citizens. He did away with the cane plantations of Paradise and
transformed it into the Savannah so that the poorer people could
pasture their cattle.
By virtue of its setting the Savannah is indeed one of the world's
loveliest stretches of parkland. It is as many things as the many
people who go there. The running-tracks and cricket pitches at­
tract young athletes and sportsmen while the racecourse and grand­
stand and stables lend the Savannah a distinctly French character,
heightened even more when the stable boys exercise the horses. A
painter of equestrian subjects would not fail to make sumptuous
pictures from the Savannah scenes. Stubbs or Munnings would have
exulted in the lean, powerful horses led by long halters so that they
could crop the grass, moving with lithe grace, the range of sheen on
perfectly groomed coats going from chestnut conkers to polished
jacaranda. The young Negro stable boys matched their animals, for
they, too, were lean and lithe, and dressed in bright-coloured shirts,
pink, purple, mauve, yellow, in stripes and checks, all harsh and
dazzling under the brilliant sky and against the green hills beyond
the park which were slashed at different places by road cuttings re­
vealing red earth.
But nothing in the Savannah can excel its magnificent trees. Here
and there an African tulip tree flared. These intensely hued trees are
most aptly also called flame-of-the-forest, for the enormous blossoms
appear to have flame in them. Their incandescence resembles
27
 CITY IN THE SUN

fiercely burning wood. The deeper red at the blossom's edges

gradates to a glowing orange-yellow towards the base. They were
splendid when the sun ignited a mass of the flowers over the whole
crown of the tree.
The Savannah trees which aroused my curiosity most were the
cannonball trees. The strong smell of a particularly tall specimen
first drew my attention one evening. I strolled along the edge of the
Savannah to enjoy the cool air flowing down from the hills and came
to a sudden pocket of oversickly sweetness. I was examining an
extraordinary house, now occupied by the Ministry of Labour, which
has a curious architecture with connotations of a Victorian Tea
Pavilion in a Public Park. Then I smelt the cannonball tree. The
trunk was festooned with rope-like strands with clusters of sticky
blossoms about four inches across, formed as a cup of rose-red-brown
petals, whose centre contained odd stamens folded over like the
rosettes worn at football matches and political conventions. The
cannonballs themselves hung on long strings from the tree, the
largest about eight inches in diameter. Those which had fallen from
the tree could easily have been mistaken for real boulet de canon lying
in the grass as though rusting after some long-forgotten battle. The
tree was a novelty anywhere and that particular one provided the
meeting-place of a club whose notices were nailed to the trunk.
On Saturdays the Savannah smelt sweetly of new-mown grass, for
Saturday was cricket day. Before the white-clad figures in the green
landscape left their pitches to the evening sky the cut grass had
already withered, and in the dewy evening airs yielded up the smell
of hayfields which always spirited me away on wings of nostalgia to
my boyhood in Ireland.
I had scarcely sat down during my first visit to the Savannah in
eleven years when a vendor came over, an old and tiny Chinese man
in shorts that flapped round his short legs. He wore a red shirt and
an Anthony Eden hat and looked altogether as though Arthur Rack­
ham had created him; bent, wizened, small spindlestick legs and
arms, his face kindly, the sack over his shoulder full of good things
for children-blue birds and golden balls, magic lamps and wishing
nngs.
In fact, the old man sold peanuts around the Savannah. So did Kid.
28
 CITY IN THE SUN

'Evening coming chilly now, man.'

Kid was as friendly as if we had known each other for years. I
looked at the sunset appearing through the park trees which now
became inky silhouettes of Gothic tracery against the tangerine sky.
Kid fidgeted. Sunsets were not in his line. He was twenty-two,
not yet married, but proud nevertheless of his two children. He had
a basket containing paper twists of roasted peanuts.
'I mad,' he began again. Angry because he had not sold all his
peanuts that day. Still, he was philosophical about it and treated me
to a flow of racy talk, not all of which I could understand, because he
spoke rapidly and used a lot of slang like a Cockney.
His smoky eyes laughed. 'You know who looks after me?'
I didn't know.
'God. He looks after us all.'
What did he do with all the money he got last Sunday, a good day
on the Savannah?
'Put it all on a horse. Haven't seen that horse come in yet.'
From the direction of the Hilton Hotel a girl appeared, probably
an American tourist. Kid made a bee-line for her.
'I gone round the block,' he said as an excuse, meaning he would
go once more round the three-mile perimeter of the Savannah. But
I knew he would not, because the girl had put everything else out of
his mind.
After Kid's rapid departure the Savannah seemed quiet again.
Twilight was almost done. Bats and swallows lurched about in
sudden flurries from the trees. And then suddenly, as though
activated by a time switch, all the fireflies came on, small, hovering,
intermittent points of phosphorescent light, shedding pools of private
moonlight on the grasses beneath them. I loved to watch the fireflies.
They created an intimate fairyland with hundreds of their lanterns
winking everywhere in the Savannah.
Hardly less out of fairy-tale books are the houses overlooking the
Savannah, fantastic creations of fretwork peeping through luxuriant
gardens to the mountains rising above the flat expanse and tree-tops
of the parkland. Port-of-Spain's wooden houses are unique. Inspired
by lace and made with fretsaw, these beautiful houses look too frail
to survive, as the more sturdy All Saints' Anglican Church and its
29
 CITY IN THE SUN

modern neighbour, the small American Embassy, undoubtedly will

survive.
Along one of the roads bordering the Savannah a rare archi­
tectural treat awaited the curio-hunter. A little beyond the Queen's
Royal College stood No. 25 Maraval Road, a large house called, not
at all improperly, 'Mille Fleurs'. I peered through the railings at this
fantasia of seaside-pier baroque, all white and silver and curly
wrought iron. Something of my astonishment must have alarmed a
watchman, who came over when he saw me scribbling in a notebook.
'This,' he said with a sweep of his hand towards the house, 'is
Mistress Salvatore's.'
In the forecourt providence had provided a period-piece wrought­
iron fountain consisting of two children carrying umbrellas. The
whole thing was Shavian pre-1914. And an even finer example was
'Mille Fleurs" neighbour, also bowered in its own large garden fac­
ing the Savannah. This was 'Roomor', heavier and grander than the
other, a house of two tall storeys with dormers in the roof, the
elements composed with the asymmetry fashionable at the time, all
black and white and iron handrails and brackets, with an octagonal
tower and oval windows, all highly ornamental and ornamented.
Next door again, in another large and ornate and white-painted
house, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago has his office.
Whitehall, as it is called, looks its best at sundown seen across the
Savannah, when, together with the avenues of trees at the parkland's
edge, it resembles a Victorian cut-out silhouetted by the flaring skies
which die through all the hues of a blacksmith's fire.
Going up to the Savannah at sunset became a ritual just as I had
fallen into the habit of a daily two dozen tree-oysters taken from the
stall in Charlotte Street. It was not necessary to go downtown for the
oysters, because nightfall brought a whole army of itinerant caterers
to the edges of the Savannah. Those vendors whose carts were pulled
by donkeys or horses would tether and pasture their animals in the
park while they themselves sold water-nuts and oysters and other
street foods.
Hot-dog stalls were numerous and there were mobile kitchens
offering shrimps and potatoes, 'chick-'n-chips', ice-cream, hot Indian
curries, goat meat and hamburgers, and, of course, as in even the
so
 CITY IN THE SUN

smallest village lost in the remote countryside, hot 'roti'. This dish
is none other than the traditional East Indian chappatti folded up
and filled with various meats or dal puri. The mobile-kitchen
women bake the circular dough on griddles in their vans, turning and
basting it until the chappatti is cooked enough to be folded and filled.
One roti can wreak havoc on an appetite and often be a quite suffi­
cient meal in itself.
The biggest change I noted in these Savannah stalls and those in
Charlotte Street was in their lighting. I remembered the stalls having
oil-filled beer bottles and smoky rags stuck in the neck for wavering,
uncertain wicks. But now such old-fashioned devices had been
largely replaced by unshaded carbide lamps whose whiter, steadier
flame illuminated the oysters and coconuts.
Not unnaturally the Savannah has been an 'in' place for society
residences for a long time, and top of the ladder in this respect is yet
another, even larger, house across the park some distance from
Whitehall. Here the Governor-General lived. Although not officially
opened until 1875, this elegant structure has already mellowed and
grown thoroughly into the landscape. The nineteenth century seems
to have been more than generous architecturally to the island. The
light buff-grey stone of this house rose above the rich planting of its
garden and showed off the profile of its slate roofs against a back­
ground of stately trees where, above, the line of the mountains
against the sky swooped across the view. This house made me think
of the Lake District, or perhaps some contemporary building in the
outskirts of Cheltenham. Delicate balconies, their posts and balus­
trading picked out in sharp white, look over the gardens, making
what must be one of the prettiest houses occupied by British
Governor-Generals.
The house brought to mind the grass which grows in the Savannah
and along roadsides all over the island. This was the fascinating
Mimosa pudica, called sensitive grass or shame plant. Gardeners dis­
like it as a lawn weed, but children find endless delight in the sensi­
tive grass, for at the slightest touch the leaves and stalks fold up and
collapse as though worked by mechanism, while the minor branches
bend up like music stands. The movement is something like a snail
withdrawing into its shell. When collapsed the sensitive grass looks
31
 CITY IN THE SUN

long dead and decayed. After a few minutes, if left untouched, it

gradually opens up again.
Because I wanted to find the local name for this collapsible grass
I stopped a seventeen-year-old youth on his bicycle and asked if he
knew. He gave me his own name, too, one which suited his hand­
someness, Maximilian Carlton Christopher Goddard. He called
sensitive grass Ti Marie. Afterwards another friend told me the old
Trinidadian rhyme used whenjumping up and down on the sensitive
grass to make it close,

Ti Marie, Ti Marie,
Close your eye,
The Governor is passing by.

But though the Governor-General's limousine was not always

passing by, I could be sure of seeing a donkey pulling a large wooden
box mounted on rubber-tyred wheels. Sometimes the driver would
have a few pieces of scrap iron or two schoolboys in straw hats in his
tiny cart. But whatever his cargo the sign at the rear never changed:
'God is Love.'
While walking across the Savannah it was possible to close eyes
against the sensitive grass and its roundish flowers of pink down, but
ears could not shut out the insistent call of a tyrant flycatcher, the
ubiquitous kiskadee. Conspicuous in his yellow-chestnut and black
and white plumage, his cry, repeated endlessly was transcribed by
Trinidad's French settlers as Qu'est-ce-qu'il dit?-What did he say?
By corruption this became phonetically kiskadee. From sun-up to
sundown, in rose garden and cocoa plantation, the kiskadee asks its
question all day long. Although obtaining much of its food from the
ground, the kiskadee is not found among the sensitive grass of the
Savannah as frequently as the boat-tail. This ten-inch-long bird is
entirely a glossy black with pale yellow iris. It also holds its long tail
in a unique way, like the rudder of a boat; hence both its English
name and the French merle a queue en bateau. Flocks of them went
twittering over the parks and into the gardens, as cheeky and fearless
as starlings.
The Savannah had many of the characteristics of the park sur-
32
Young Trinidadian steps out
Roofs on the Maraval Road-Trees in Victoria Square
 CITY IN THE SUN

rounding an English country house. None of it had been formally

laid out, and its trees, isolated giants or groups of smaller ones, were
disposed about the grassy expanse in exactly the way of English
landscaping in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One
corner of the Savannah, near Whitehall, is called The Hollow. A
row of candle trees, Parmentiera cereifera, are planted there. These
trees, still small as yet, were already laden down with long brown
seed-cases, many more than a foot long and shaped like mourning­
candles or black pepperoni sausages.
The Hollow, a largish depression in the ground, flows naturally
from the flat expanse of the Savannah. The planting had been cleverly
done in informal groups. The grass was mown here and the trees were
lacy and beautiful in the wind. All around were the enormous and
lush trees of Trinidad's mountainous Northern Range, growing to
immense heights. I thought this place one of the cleverest examples
of park landscaping I had seen. The island's climate is hot enough to
allow the most beautiful of exotic flora to flourish, but not fierce
enough to burn them up having once produced them.
The perfect coolness of early evening on the Savannah encouraged
the grander kind of housewife to exercise her well-groomed dogs on
chain leashes. Long-distance runners and sprinters spurted round
the sandy running-track, athletic feats which they preceded and
followed by muscular gymnastics. Holy Ghost Fathers in white
habits crossed the park on constitutionals. American and Venezuelan
students played baseball. Forgetting their tiny square kites which had
zigzagged across the sky all afternoon, children rolled down the
grassy banks into The Hollow to look for a flash of minnows in the
rock-garden pools.
I never saw anybody remotely like a park-keeper here, nor any
hideous notices about keeping off this and not walking on that and
no dire threats against persons stealing flowers. Similarly all the
public telephones were in working order, whether here at the
Savannah or in country villages. I remembered my annoyance in
London's West End on the day before leaving for Trinidad when I
found at least a dozen phones smashed by vandals. But perhaps
Trinidadian children did not rob the public gardens because their
own streets were choked with every kind of flowering shrub,
33
 CITY IN THE SUN

oleanders, Antigua heath, Honolulu rose, Madagascar jasmine, alla­

mander, ixora and hibiscus, plumbago hedges and the spectacular
orange trumpet vine whose bunches of slender flowers blaze for
many months. And there were great cups of gold, Solandra guttata,
a native climbing vine which comes to bud in pale cream, gradually
deepening in hue until, after four days, it reaches full bloom with
both the colour and the smell of tinned peaches. This large, showy
flower has something of a rags-to-riches story. Nobody would suspect
on admiring the flower's splendid golden chalice, ornamented with
purple lines in the cup, that the plant belongs to the humble potato
family.
When I had been in Port-of-Spain for a few days it suddenly
occurred to me that I had not until that moment properly registered
one of the biggest changes to be seen in the downtown streets. It
concerned the Muslims and Hindus. Gone were all the saris, once as
colourful as tropical butterflies. Even the older Indian women could
only be distinguished from their neighbours by the smallest of
vestigial head veils. Similarly, turbans and fezzes, dhotis and shalwars
once worn by the men had given way to American hats and caps and
the universal jeans. But among the more ambitious concrete villas in
rich men's St. Clair suburb, Hindu families proclaimed their beliefs
by red and white triangular pennants which fl.uttered from the top
of tall bamboo poles stuck in the earth to make prayer flags.
Not only were old ways and customs going, but many of Port-of­
Spain's old buildings. Certain things such as the Anglican and
Catholic cathedrals and the Red House were inviolate. But quite a
number of new buildings had sprouted up between the old. None of
these could be claimed as masterpieces of modern architecture. On
the other hand, some show at least some sensitivity to the special
urban qualities of Port-of-Spain.
The new building for the Sugar Manufacturers' Association in
Abercromby Street sets an example in architectural good manners.
This is a small, single-storey building in a perfectly quiet American
style, neat and unfussy, with good proportion and exhibiting none
of those horrific features which pass as modern architecture in many
tropical countries.
A large modern building, probably Trinidad's best, is the Hilton
34
 CITY IN THE SUN

Hotel. I had come to the island quite prepared for the worst, up­
ended shoe-box offices and apartment blocks. The Hilton, however,
took me by surprise, mainly because of skilful landscaping which half
hides the hotel and screens it in a bower of bamboo and samans and
palms and lush shrubbery. This siting and landscaping make the
hotel belong both to the Savannah which it overlooks and to the
densely wooded hills behind. Through the trees I caught glimpses of
white railings and floor-to-ceiling glass doors opening on to private
balconies. The roof was planted with thick fronds of greenery which
trailed down the face of the building exactly as plants do in Frank
Lloyd Wright's drawings. Because of the steep terrain and difficulty
of access, cars drove up to the hotel's main entrance, which was at
the top of the building, with the public rooms, shops and airline
offices, and swimming-pools shaped like Trinidad and Tobago, at
the lower levels.
Just across the road, similarly placed in proliferating greenery, is
yet another new structure, the Queen's Hall. This entertainment
auditorium for 1,100 people is housed under a concrete shell-roof
shaped like a parabola and raised on short legs supporting the whole
structure. The stage stood at one end and at the other the main
entrance and bars. Down each long side tiers of seats faced each
other across the hall. Behind these tiers and below the arched roof,
fresh air blew through, for the hall was open along the sides, so pro­
viding a cheap and effective form of ventilation and allowing a
glimpse of the green and sunny gardens outside.
From this north side of the Savannah the sea can be glimpsed
between trees and the roofs of houses on the south side. It is good to
cool off in the sea, although to do this prospective bathers have to go
outside Port-of-Spain itself. The nearest of the larger beaches is at
Carenage, which can be reached by bus. The most fashionable beach,
Maracas, lies farther away, and necessitates a drive through the hills
in a private car or taxi, because, except at week-ends, no buses go
there.
For a reason I could never quite discover Carenage does not
enjoy the same reputation as Maracas, yet it is much nearer the city
centre, only four or five miles out, and is safer and altogether more
sheltered than the exposed north coast bay at Maracas. Trees of all
35
 CITY IN THE SUN

kinds, but particularly palms, make ideal shade for lying in after
swimming, and behind are the steep, tree-covered slopes of the
Northern Range, sweeping down almost to touch the offshore islands
dotting the coast here.
The ride in the Carenage bus from the city takes no more than
twenty minutes. It drops the swimmer at the gate of the American
base. Nicaraguan cacao shade trees full of lilac-pink pea-shaped
flowers lined the road. Behind, a score of native species rose up to
cover the bay's protective headlands with wind-blown woodland.
The wide crescent of shoreline terminates in a group of islets all as
thickly wooded as the enclosing spurs of mountain.
Strong and refreshing trade winds thresh the bay's rim of palms
which, like all the trees along the shore and the grassy places around,
are carefully tended. The lower parts of the trunks always look
newly whitewashed, and the whole place is kept scrupulously clean.
No litter, no abandoned newspapers, rusted cans or broken bottles
or any of the garbage that often disfigures English beaches could be
seen at Carenage. It is more like a multi-millionaire's private beach
than a public one, an impression upset not at all by the bauxite
loading plant half a mile along the coast. Trails of ochre-coloured
dust swept over the sea when the bauxite from Guyana, used in
the manufacture of aluminium, was being loaded or unloaded into
ships or barges.
Also at Carenage is the entrance to the large corner of the island
occupied by the American forces, but their presence at least had the
virtue of being discreet and in no way mars the innocent pleasures of
bathing. Navy ships occasionally called, but most shipping to be
seen from Carenage passed on the horizon, where cargo and tourist
boats plied in and out of Port-of-Spain's harbour. The whole bay
was such a pleasant, tidy place that it seemed as if the people actually
observed the notice-board injunctions, 'Discipline, Tolerance, Pro­
duction', and 'No Indecent Language. Note Your National Pride
and Dignity'. Large tangerine-coloured butterflies drifted about like
the children's small square kites going up blue in the blue sky. The
kites' long tails were made from used typewriter ribbons.
On my first visit to Carenage the tide was in and a delightfully
cooling breeze blew onshore. A little way along the beach sat two
36
 CITY IN THE SUN

girls surrounded by a noisy and laughing gang of boys. Their friends

splashing about at the water's edge kept chanting. I could not under­
stand what they were singing and asked another boy, called Claude,
what it was.
'They calling "Hold strain",' he said. 'They teasing the other
boys and telling them to take it easy.'
Claude was intelligent and wanted to travel and see the world,
and to do this would probably become a sailor. His Carnival costume
for that year would he a sailor's dark blue uniform.
'You're all right as a sailor,' he said. The girls liked sailors, real
ones or only boys playin' sailor mas.
Claude played in one of the dozens of steel bands, his being the
Shell Invaders. His particular kind of drum, or 'pan', was in the alto
range, called a cello, pronounced 'sello'. According to Claude his
great-grandfather had been an East Indian indentured labourer who
came to work in the sugar fields when the Negro slaves were emanci­
pated.
'The rest of my ancestors were slaves,' he added.
Children from two years up played in the bay's sandy shallows
with their young fathers. Their big brothers sprang like acrobats
from the tree branches overhanging the water. Rotund and weighty
women laughed and roared louder than the breakers' roar as each
wave came higher up their chocolate-coloured Matisse-shaped thighs.
Chocolate tones and mahogany hues were the colours of most bodies
threshing about in the warm water. Few of the people were really
very dark-skinned and nearly all were beautifully and enviably
tanned, and many of the men had body-builders' physiques as a
natural endowment.
Some of these athletic men, in fact, carefully encouraged Nature's
gift by using skipping-ropes to develop their noble bodies. Other
peacock males preened themselves and strutted up and down in
front of the girls. A group of youths went by oblivious of everything
except calypso music from their pocket transistor radio which set
their whole bodies in rhythmic, liquid motion.
Five girls of East Indian stock came out of the water combing
their long strands of glossy black hair, which fell straight as a
waterfall from head to waist. They were small-breasted, totally
37
 CITY IN THE SUN

unsophisticated, yet somehow aware of their beauty; the kind that

belongs to no particular time or place.
A young father placed a tiny boy on his shoulders. He was a
Negro workman wearing a tattered pair of cut-down trousers as
swimming-shorts, but with the little naked boy on his shoulder he
made a perfect Hermes with the baby Dionysus. After swimming he
served a rice dish from a huge bowl to his five sons. Then he joined
them in flying their kites in the strong wind. When a kite got caught
in a palm tree's feathery top, he shinned up the trunk with the
agility of a squirrel. This was Nathaniel, twenty-seven years old. He
said he brought the five children to the beach to give his pregnant
wife the chance of a rest at home. He earned his living by buying up
old tyres, most of which he sold again as fuel for cremations on the
banks of the Godineau River in the south of Trinidad.
Watching the large pouch-billed pelicans diving vertically for fish
the children shouted in chorus,
A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill holds more than his belly can.
I began to think of food also. In Carenage village was a bar where
couples were dancing to a steel-band record. They were playing a
'pan' arrangement of the Hallelujah Chorus.
Across the main road, on the sea side, was the modest Arrow
Beach Hotel. A shaded terrace directly overlooks the sea to afford a
magnificent view of the islands and the not-too-distant blue coast of
Venezuela, whose lights twinkle romantically across the water at
night. To the left is a spit of land on which an odd little chapel with
a bell-turret has been built. The bell-turret, threatening to come
down, had been propped up by a long pole. Just below the terrace
two boys were boxing in the water. As my meal was served they
waded inshore, bringing the sound of laughter from the sea. I had
ordered a shrimp curry from a menu chalked on a blackboard. But
this innocent-sounding dish eventually turned up as what a good
London restaurant would have called scampi and would have served
a third as much of at three times the price.
Between the mainland side of Trinidad and Venezuela, and con­
sequently well protected from the Atlantic, lies the Gulf of Paria.
38
 CITY IN THE SUN

This stretch of water is in effect almost a lake closed in by Trinidad's

two arms, which all but connected the island to the mainland. The
sea passage through the island's outstretched arms, the Dragon's
Mouths in the north and the Serpent's Mouth in the south, are
sufficiently narrow to make the Gulf of Paria as smooth as a natural
harbour. In these untroubled waters shrimp beds abound.
The cook at the Arrow Beach Hotel was a young Chinaman, born
in Trinidad, sent back to Hong Kong by his father, and now re­
turned again. As in so many of the island settlements, shops and
restaurants seemed to be monopolized by the Chinese. Across the
road at Carenage, for instance, the main general stores announced
'Egbert Chin Leung Fat Licensed to sell spirituous Liquors by
Retail'.
After the meal and a talk with the cook, who came from the
kitchen with solicitous inquiries as to whether I enjoyed it and had
sufficient, I wandered slowly back to the beach again. The afternoon
sky had started to fill up with silver cumulus sailing in from the open
stretches of the Caribbean. Cornbirds, brilliant in black and yellow,
became gregarious as they flew among the palms. But soon these
Cacicus cela celas were joined by other black fliers. When the sun at
last went down behind the tree-covered spur of hill, leaving a calm
buttermilk sky, the bats came out. The offshore islands faded to
camels' humps. Each blade of grass was silhouetted against the still­
bright water, which mirrored the buttermilk sky. A scissors cut-out
figure stood fishing. Then the water was broken by swiftly moving
black shapes. The fisherman said a school of cavalli were rising after
sardines.
As I talked with him I kept an eye on the sunset, and remembered
the one I had seen on the way to Trinidad from 33,000 feet in the
air. This earth-bound sundown at Carenage was the perfect tropical
one. In the tropics the westerly sun, though losing its power to
create colour, does not lose its intensity as evening sunshine does in
a northern twilight. Brilliance and sharpness of light remain until
the moment of the sun's extinction below the horizon. Under these
conditions, with the sun's rays coming almost horizontally across the
ground, there is a curious and most beautiful effect just before the
actual moment of sundown. In this light the tiniest discrete object,
39
 CITY IN THE SUN

such as a blade of grass, casts a shadow inordinately unrepresentative

of itself. This effect of heightened perception was enhanced because
the draining away of all colour immediately followed this exaggerated
chiaroscuro, plunging the landscape into monotones as soon as the
sun went.
I made a mental note to discover, in official United Nations terms,
whether Trinidad was rated as an 'underdeveloped' country. Exactly
how developed is Manchester on a raw, foggy afternoon in January?
I could tell exactly how developed Port-of-Spain was on a January
afternoon when the sun was shining, the sky blue, the flowering
shrubs saturated with colour, when the people moved about the
streets with the ease and lissom grace of thousands of years in the
sun, whether their ancestors came from Africa or India, China or the
aboriginal Indian hunting-grounds of Trinidad's mountainous
Northern Range.

40
 ii 21t
Queens and Washerwomen
The ecumenical age in Trinidad did not wait for Vatican Council
Two. Sir Ralph Woodford not only laid the foundation-stone of
Holy Trinity, the Anglican cathedral, and presented a chalice, 'a
supply of fair linen', complete uniforms for the beadles, a peal of six
bells and a copy ofMacklin's Bible in seven volumes, but, in the same
year of grace 1816, he also laid the foundation-stone of the Roman
Catholic cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. By reason of his
office Sir Ralph was head of the Established Church of England in
Trinidad, but he was also Royal Vice-Patron of the Holy Roman
Catholic Church. Although he was a Protestant, he invariably went
to Mass in the Catholic cathedral on days of obligation. It was only
just, therefore, that posterity should be reminded of him by a second
wall plaque in the Immaculate Conception, 'erected as a lasting
memorial of his many public and private virtues'.
The best gift Governor Woodford gave the Roman Catholic
community, which was in the majority a hundred and fifty years ago
as it is today, was the services of his secretary, Philip Reinagle, who
was also an architect. In the art section of the National Museum in
Port-of-Spain, I found among the interesting collection of water­
colours, done by Jean M. Cazabon in 1851, drawings showing the
two cathedrals. None of Cazabon's other drawings looked anything
like Trinidad at all. Cazabon seemed to have concentrated on what
he knew and could do rather than what he actually saw. The two
cathedrals, however, had come off rather well and were at least
recognizable. In fact, the Roman Catholic cathedral seems hardly to
have changed at all since Sir Ralph came to the big Corpus Christi
41
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

celebrations in his black state coach escorted by the Light Dragoons

and numerous outriders in full-dress uniforms.
The cathedral stands at one end of the long square near the docks,
once known as Marine Square, but since renamed Independence
Square. Two squat, octagonal towers of yellow brick topped by spiky
white lanterns gleaming in the sun make a stop to the long axis of
the square-or rather, must have done before some overlarge modern
office blocks replaced the charming and in-scale buildings which were
there in the early nineteenth century. Like its Anglican sister, this
church has light buff-to-brown walls and white painted trim. It has
blind tracery of tall lancets and a French double west door.
Marine Square has a sound about it like the seaside residence of
somebody's aunt in a Jane Austen novel. Independence Square is a
name peculiar to our own times. Perhaps in deference to times of
change, the new buildings in the one-time Marine Square spoke very
much of Trinidad's modern status. Certain kinds of modern archi­
tecture being more or less identical the world over, no special
eulogies could be spared for the mauling of the mall-like square
which, in its length, still mercifully retained some of its former and
more gracious architecture.
Business was business, I supposed, and the affairs of a small
nation and its main port could not adequately be carried on in a
patched-up two-storey wooden structure, however picturesque such
things may be. The banks congregate in Independence Square: the
Canadian Bank of Commerce, Chase Manhattan, Royal Bank of
Canada, First National City Bank, the Bank of Nova Scotia. There
also three large and separate branches of Barclays Bank vied with
each other in their air-conditioning and marble panelling. The pre­
sence of so many Canadian banks was explained by the large-scale
import and export business between Trinidad and Canada. This was
an old trade route which became so important to the West Indies.
Barbados benefited so much from this contact with Canada that as
far back as 1885 the island wanted to join the Canadian Confedera­
tion.
Trade between Canada and the West Indies is even more impor­
tant to both sides today. The stroller along the main street of any
Canadian town does not go far without seeing notices about Air
42
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

Canada's temptingly described trips to the sunshine islands. In

winter, in my own home-town in the Maritimes, I often wander into
the arcades to warm up, not fully believing the claims on travel
agents' posters that it is very much cheaper to fly to the Caribbean
islands, even as far south as Trinidad, than to fly across to Canada's
west coast. But for three months now I could forget the Blue Nose
world of snow and lost sirens filtering through the fog. The sunny
carefree atmosphere of downtown Port-of-Spain was another world.
Business was brisk in Independence Square. Trees and taxis took
up most of the centre, and commercial life went centrifugally round
and round, one-way now that Trinidad is beginning to catch up with
the rest of the world in the number of cars per capita. Yet the square
kept a few charming remnants of delicate cast-iron balcony railings
and brackets, especially in the old houses flanking the Immaculate
Conception cathedral. A jaunty eighteenth-century air of Handelian
liveliness was given by a timber-framed house with carved balusters
and square sash windows; architecture as smart as paint-or would
be if it were painted.
Next door was another wooden house called the Hotel La
Venezolana, a reminder of Venezuela's proximity across the Gulf of
Paria. Where the bottom end of Charlotte Street runs into Indepen­
dence Square there were some other fine examples of houses with
projecting verandas at the upper floor which not only provide a cool
sitting and neighbour-gossiping place, but also shade the pavement
below. Facing these houses, across the square, stood an old ware­
house, with dormer windows in its richly rusted iron roof, which
overhung the pavement on wooden posts.
I heard the sweet song of a cock picoplat, Sporophila intermedia,
rising above the noise of anxious taxi drivers and overcrowded buses.
The little ash-grey finch was, I discovered to my annoyance, bursting
his lungs in a diminutive cage on one of the first-floor balconies.
Right at the far end of the long Independence Square were the
docks which periodically disgorged groups of tourists from cruises
making a one-day visit. Waiting to trap this willing prey were the
souvenir vendors, offering a range of exotica in which stuffed alli­
gators and coconuts with faces carved on them and miniature steel­
band drums figured prominently among the normal type of tourist
43
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

baubles and Circassian bead necklaces, shack-shack seed baskets and

cascadura bracelets, brass trays and East Indian filigree jewellery. A
Negro specializing in sun-glasses had, no doubt as part of his sales
gimmick, dressed his hair in a manner known locally as 'dada head'.
Long ringlets like knotted cords sprouted all over his cranium. This
gave him an appearance similar to the male bell-bird which frequents
the island's high forests. Many black wattles hung from the bell­
bird's throat like the sun-glass man's ringlets.
When I was sitting on the low wall in the centre of Independence
Square one day a man came over and pulled half a dozen wrist­
watches from his pocket. Another man next to me on the wall stopped
paring the leather-like soles of his feet with a razor blade to aid and
abet the sale. A youth got off his motor-bike and joined in. He was
dressed completely in black leather, the trousers as tightly fitting as
ballet tights. When he took off his helmet I noticed a small piece of
wool threaded through his pierced ear lobe. Perhaps this was an
amulet like the rabbit paws on all the zips of his jacket and pockets.
None of the odd characters who frequented the square and followed
the tourists like gulls following a ship were more colourful than a big
Negress who came down Charlotte Street from the market.
A conservative estimate would not place her weight at less than
sixteen stone. But she carried herself with all the dignity of Queen
Salote of Tonga, the most regal-looking of all visiting royalty who
rode through London's rain to the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
Although she was obviously not wealthy, this magnificent-looking
Negress wore bright, well-chosen clothes. I often saw her in town
and thought of her as the Queen of Sheba.
Bounteous, bounteous she came
Dark Queen of the South.
My mind was occupied with royalty that day, because I had
planned to visit a uniquely distinguished Trinidadian family. Queen
Victoria had recognized this distinction and because of it made the
town they lived in a royal borough. This was Arima.
A bus goes through Port-of-Spain's east side to Arima, the island's
third most important town. The first part of the hour-and-a-quarter
journey by bus held no appeal for me, because this Eastern Main
44
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

Road is Port-of-Spain's backyard and consists of miles of dreary junk

piles and smashed-up cars, shacks and factories, dust, noise and
smells, particularly the sickening smell of copra. Fortunately, just be­
fore Arima itself this string of tawdry ribbon development peters out
and the road proceeds to the royal borough through wooded country.
Although the sixteen-mile journey took as long by train as by the
crowded bus, I preferred the train. The railway was only a shadow
of its former self and I did not know whether I was more sorry that
it had been so severely axed or more surprised that it had survived
at all. The almost deserted station, a short walk from the waterfront
side of Independence Square, had a ghostliness as if quaint Emmett­
like engines and carriages had once been run for Emmett-like
passengers in days when ladies wore black silk and bustles and
carried parasols.
Such an interpretation was not far wrong chronologically, for the
first line was opened in 1876, and ran from Port-of-Spain to Arima,
exactly as it does today. I travelled by train several times, not so
much for convenience as for the fact that the line was screened by
trees from the backyard mess of the Eastern Main Road.
The station in Port-of-Spain opened without let or hindrance to
the street. A few magazines lay scattered on the table in the first­
class waiting-room and they had something of the forlorn air of those
at the dentist's. On my first visit only a small boy wandered in from
the sunny world outside to lean on the table and with concentration,
much finger-licking and heavy breathing to flick the magazine pages
over. This done he went over and put his mouth to the drinking-tap
at a corner basin.
The ticket issued by the booking-clerk seemed to indicate that the
distinction of first-class travel was only nominal, since the difference
in the fare amounted to exactly one penny. But when the newly
released schoolchildren swarmed all over the station and train I was
soon disabused of my idea. Both boys and girls regarded it as a point
of honour among their fellows to stay as long as possible in the first­
class compartments before discovery by the ticket collector. Since
there was only one ticket collector and hundreds of children and
many ways of hiding, such as crouching underneath the tram-like
seats whose upholstery was slashed in precise cuts like an abdomen
45
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

on a surgeon's table, the ticket collector could hardly be expected to

win. But he did, after cheeky exchanges and dire threats with boys
who rode on the carriage steps whenever he appeared in spite of a
firm notice 'Standing on Carriage Step is Prohibited'. Some older
boys evaded paying any fare at all. They journeyed the whole way
clinging on the outside of the train, working their way along the
carriages like rock-climbers. At intermediate stops they mingled on
the platform and only jumped on again when the ticket collector was
safely in the train again.
I always enjoyed those quaint journeys to and from Arima. The
remains of rolling stock reposed along the track outside Port-of­
Spain, wagons abandoned to an advancing tide of undergrowth and
creepers. The shapes of wheels and buffers and wooden sides were
almost lost in the softening, strangling greenery. Whole cities, I
thought, could vanish in this way in a short time and leave no trace
at all. I remembered that scholars and explorers swore that the
jungles of Brazil concealed no fabled cities awaiting resurrection, and
that Colonel Fawcett's search for a lost city had been a wild-goose
chase. But the jungle-swamped trucks of Trinidad made it seem
absurd for any man to state categorically what had or what had not
existed in jungles. The jungle could swallow cities whole, I felt sure,
and nobody passing that way hundreds of years afterwards would
ever know that streets and temples and laughter, music, birth and
death had happened there. The weed- and creeper-covered trucks
were eerie and somehow disquieting.
The train runs the sixteen miles to Arima at the speed of country
trains in England. The line consists of a string of halts, each different
from its neighbour and each like an island, with the train as an inter­
island steamer. This was not entirely a fantasy, for although the busy
Eastern Main Road runs hardly more than a hundred yards from the
railway line, and even meets it occasionally at level crossings, the
two might have been a thousand miles apart, so different are the
railway's surroundings.
Numerous prayer flags stuck on tall bamboo poles, like lances for
a medieval jousting tournament, told of many Hindu settlements
along the way. Two bona fide first-class passengers in my compart­
ment clearly came of East Indian stock, with their head veils and the
46
 QUEENS AND WASHER WOMEN

tattoos of geometrical designs which suggested religious symbols

and which differed from the crude sailor-type tattoos favoured by
the Negro and sometimes the Negress also. Like many among the
trainload of schoolchildren, the two Indian women also sported gold­
filled teeth. Some of these gold fillings were mere thin frames or
borders round the sound remains of a tooth, giving it the appear­
ance of an ivory ikon sheathed in gold of Russian Orthodox opulence.
A young Negro friar sat opposite me reading his Office, taking not
the slightest notice of the tiny boys under his seat hiding from the
severely tried ticket collector in a way that the friar had probably
done himself not so many years earlier.
Suddenly, after leaving San Juan behind, the train passed into
open country and a vast parkland stretched away to the south, not
unlike some English landscapes. Those were not oaks standing about
in isolated grandeur on the grassy expanses of meadow, giving shade
to the cattle, but magnificent saman trees. Reputedly these splendid
giants were originally introduced to Trinidad from Central America
early in the nineteenth century. Yet, in contradiction of this idea,
many of the samans were so enormous, with trunks, for instance,
nearly ten feet in diameter, that they suggested a much greater age
than only from early in the last century. The saman rivals the oak in
magnificence, and I would almost say it is the finer tree. Its geo­
metry is more regular. Many of the branches are as thick as an
ordinary tree trunk, and spread low over the ground in a great circle
of shade and rise up in a mushroom-shaped dome of foliage. Grass
flourished beneath the trees and cattle sheltered in the airy shade to
eat the saman's long black seed-pods, which give the tree its local
name of cow tamarind. Grass grows so well under the trees perhaps
because the saman's leaves close up at night. Old legends suggest
that samans 'rain from the branches the juice of cicadas'.
Whatever travellers' tales have come down about the saman pro­
ducing mysterious rain at night, nothing of mystery surrounded
another species seen from the Arima train. The traveller's tree
contains a quart or so of water in its large, hollow stalks. It is the
most spectacular of the banana family. The precision of form in its
single and enormous fan of leaves radiating from the top of the short
trunk resembles the geometry of English Perpendicular fan-vaulting.
47
 QUEENS AND WASHER WOMEN

The stations along the line to Arima sustain the railway's Emmett
character first encountered in Port-of-Spain. Veteran railway-lovers
in danger of losing eccentric stations in Britain, either through
closure or modernization, would do well to see the Arima line in
Trinidad. Notices can still be seen bearing immortal phrases: 'Ladies'
Latrine. Apply to StationMaster for the key.'
At St. Joseph's Junction a throng of bicycles had come into the
station in spite of signs 'No parking of bicycles'. Perhaps the
cyclists had ridden in from the country to pray at St. Joseph's mosque,
the Jinnah Memorial, the largest and most architecturally ambitious
I saw in Trinidad. A stranger might be just getting adjusted to what
he thought was Trinidad's character and landscape and habits when
the whole balance would be thrown by something like the Jinnah
mosque. Without warning it transports the visitor to Imperial India.
The exotic green and white domed and twin-minaretted building,
shady with fretted, curly arches, the whole topped by the Muslim
crescent and star, all in an exotic green setting, created a kind of
surrealist vision. But there was nothing surrealist about the hun­
dreds of neat schoolchildren thronging the fields by the mosque.
The population of Trinidad hovers around the million mark, but
only 56,000 are Muslims. Nevertheless, their celebration of Islam's
Hosein ranks next to Carnival in terms of celebration and outdoor
spectacle. Hosein originated as a purely religious event commemorat­
ing the murder of two warrior brothers, Hosein and Hassan. In
Trinidad the festival has become commonly shared by all Indian
communities, including the more numerous 200,000 Hindus.
Hosein, pronounced Ho-say, is a feast as movable as Easter, and
often falls inMay, ten days after the new moon, in theMuslim month
ofMohurrum. Although Christian Lent, whose imminent approach is
the cause of Carnival, hardly resembles the Muslim Hosein, the
secular aspects of the two celebrations are not dissimilar. Nothing, of
course, can take the place of Carnival in any true Trinidadian heart.
But Hosein also is marked with music and drums, colour and proces­
sions, and even the stick-fighting which occurs in country districts
in the weeks before Carnival.
For Carnival, ingenuity and time and money are spent on cos­
tumes. In Hosein similar efforts are expended on the 'tadjahs'. These
48
Heads are for carrying
Landscape with sugar cane-Seascape with moonlight
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

are portable mosques built and covered with mirrors and tinsel,
coloured glass and gaudy paper and anything which glitters but is
not actually gold. The style of these elaborate decorated shrines is
remarkably Indian, and yet in their use of bright and highly coloured
materials leaving not an inch of surface undecorated they also have
something of Byzantine church mosaics. The tadjahs have greater
and lesser domes, plain or onion in form, with barley-sugar columns
and panels and tympanums loaded with diaper and floral patterns,
and corner pavilions with round-headed arches all brilliant as
jewels.
Mounted on low trolleys, the tadjahs, as resplendent as the multi­
coloured temples in the Muslim festival of wax in Morocco, are
paraded through the streets on the last day of Hosein, followed by
large crowds in which women predominated, chanting Indian songs
in honour of the two saints. The climax comes when the bamboo and
paper mosques are taken to the sea or to a river and given to the
evening tide as a symbolic burial. One tadjah at least has escaped a
watery end, for the National Museum in Port-of-Spain has it on
display.
The many Muslims I saw on several occasions in the field by the
Jinnah Memorial mosque were not following the Hosein procession,
but trying to follow their school lessons under the shade of a tree.
But any scholar would need to be strong-minded indeed not to be
distracted when the Arima train passes by, with its running-boards
and carriage steps forming a foothold for daredevil clinging school­
boys.
To the north, the mountains run parallel with the railway, their
dense forest broken by no signs of habitation or cultivation. Some­
times the nearer hills gave hints of yet higher hills behind. From
one of these ridges Mount St. Benedict monastery commands a
spectacular view of the whole Caroni Plain and the Gulf of Paria.
As adjuncts to the spiritual life centred round the abbey church, the
monks run a seminary and a boys' school, and among these hives of
learning hum the bees that supply the guest house with honey. A
newly married couple on the flight from England had astonished me
when they said they were going to a monastery for their honeymoon.
But having sampled the way of life in that mountain retreat I could
49
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

well understand why its guest house was a much-sought-after rest

centre as well as an ideal and beautiful place for spending the first
days of marriage-which, after all, is a sacrament.
A short way beyond St. Joseph's Junction a wide gap allowed a
view through to the seaboard range and its steep-sided hills. Nearer
the train an old cow with a remarkable pair of crumpled horns grazed
in a churchyard and blue tanagers gave off-key calls as they stripped
seed-pods or as they went on their restless flights to and from nests
high in the mango trees.
At Tunapuna, Z. Mohammed proudly announced on a notice
by the side of the railway 'Certified hairdresser, specialist in silver,
ash, platinum, also straightening'. After Tacarigua the country
again assumes an English air. Wide sweeps of lyrical landscape went
slowly by the train's open windows. But there were mighty samans
instead of elms and the fastidious white egrets instead of the crow.
Anyone travelling to Arima by car or bus along the Eastern Main
Road would not regard the little settlement of Five Rivers as a
country village, yet from the train it appears to be so. Even Five
Rivers station is a railway enthusiast's dream of a country station
stuck down in the middle of lots of trees with little houses scattered
among them.
When the train inches slowly out of Arouca it is impossible to
keep up the pretence that this is high summer in a southern English
county, for here the sugar-cane fields and extensive groves of
coconut palms begin.
The railway line stops at Arima, the station eccentrically placed
with respect to the town's centre of gravity. This displacement, in
fact, amounts to nearly a mile from the old centre. The man who
deliberately planned this inconvenience dismissed the distance as a
'few yards'. This was Sir Henry Irving, Governor at the time of the
railway's construction. He wanted to save £8,000 for the colonial
purse. In the end, the diversion of the line cost nearly three times
what it would have done had Irving allowed it direct to the town. But
fumbling and mismanagement of this kind was the hall-mark of
colonial government and no worse than might have been expected;
certainly no worse than the appointment of Sir Henry in the first
place. Over the matter of Arima station he thought the 'natives' [sic]
50
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

capable of walking the remainder of their journey. His achievement

was to find a place in local history as an obnoxious, pretentious man,
loud in his disapproval of all coloured races. The Colonial Office
itself came off badly in the affair, for what kind of office was it that
sent such a man to govern an island whose population was mostly
Negro?
Railway stations frequently provide the worst possible introduc­
tion to a town. Oxford, for example, approached in the train is a city
of dreaming wires and poles and the backs of buildings which are no
better at the front. But Arima ! It was a garden under a blue sky
filled with loose, luminous clouds, a garden cooled by a breeze that
strayed away from a trade wind somewhere off the coast beyond the
noble line of the Northern Range, whose forests clothe the crown of
the undulating ridges and peaks.
Immediately outside the station a tiny mosque, square and domed,
shone in the sun. A road wound between small and delicately fret­
worked wooden houses up into the town proper. Associations at
Arima, however, are not linked so much with Islam in Trinidad as
with the island's aboriginal Amerindians. The focal point of this
connection with the earliest days of colonial conquest and exploita­
tion of the Caribbean is Arima's parish church of St. Rose of Lima.
The present building, bright with light reflected from the sunny
world outside, is not old, but built, as were many nineteenth-century
structures in Trinidad, partly of solid wall and partly of wood.
Wooden columns on clustered piers support the fretwork roof. There
are statues and Stations of the Cross, a stained-glass window over the
grey and green and tawny marble and gold mosaic of the altar. It is
a simple, unpretentious church serving the daily needs of its parish,
undistinguishable in this from scores of such parishes in Trinidad.
But for the feast day of St. Rose of Lima, on every 29th August a
transformation takes place. From all over the island descendants of
the Amerindians go to Arima and walk in procession to the church,
led by their Queen in company with the Borough Council. Until
some years ago the Amerindians were summoned to the festivities
by horns made from large pink conch shells. Then in 1930 the
Governor, Sir Claude Hollis, presented a cannon worthy of the
Queen to summon her people.
51
 QUEENS AND WASHER WOMEN

When I left the church I walked up Woodford Street to a small

tin-roofed house, whose charm would have been considerably en­
hanced by a coat of paint. In answer to my knock a tiny, toothless old
lady opened the door and said, 'Yes, I'm Mistress Martinez, the
Carib Queen.'
With gestures of great hospitality I was shown into a frugally
furnished, bare-boarded room. Yet these surroundings and the fact
that the Queen's feet were bare and her frail body was draped in
shapeless clothes in no way detracted from the deep impression she
made on me. There was no need to look at photographs of members of
the British Royal Family and governors or to read the lists of
V.I.P.s in the visitors' book to sense that Mistress Martinez was
indeed a queen. Although she is designated 'Queen of the Caribs',
scholars of Trinidad's pre-history cannot agree as to whether
Mistress Martinez is leader of the Carib or the Arawak tribe.
Before meeting the Queen in Arima, I had talked with Dr. J. A.
Bullbrook of the National Museum in Port-of-Spain. He is an
authority on many aspects of West Indian life, but his special
expertise is Amerindian culture. Much of his knowledge derives
from extensive excavations of graves and middens in early Amerin­
dian settlements, digging which he first started on arrival in Trinidad
in 1913. Some of the objects unearthed during this work can be seen
in the National Museum. They provide a glimpse into a civilization
hardly known except to experts. These aborigines had certainly
been civilized and they used craftsmen's skills. A Mexican quality
distinguished the sherds and fragments of pottery. In the National
Museum the assortment has been classified into unpainted, mono­
chrome and polychrome fragments, though the wear and tear of
centuries has reduced them to a common red and ochre colour, with
the delightful surface texture possessed by all old pottery.
Buried treasure from the past has been dug out of the famous
Pitch Lake as if it were a peat bog. The finds are most spectacular
with respect to wooden artefacts, including a wooden mortar, a bowl,
and a five-foot-long canoe paddle made of tonka wood, shaped like an
oversized spoon. There were two stools carved with animal forms,
giving ample evidence that Trinidad's early inhabitants had a lively
sense of observation and design. I liked best the low stool, which is a
52
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piece of adzed sculpture, a dished seat growing into a cat-like head

and standing on four short thick legs.
Some of the pottery remains collected from various places around
the island also demonstrate the fascination animals and birds had
for these early Trinidadians. Playful interpretations of the human
form decorate handles for pots, together with various kinds of
mammals as well as birds and reptiles. Although highly stylized, all
the types are recognizable. I noted a particularly benign-looking
alligator head about three inches long, and a number of amusing
birds who would do well on children's television. These figurines
had formed part of domestic vessels, handles ofjugs and jars, which
archaeologists called 'adornos'. None of them had been made as
decorative ornaments as such, but all were the adornment of every­
day utensils.
Easily the most beautiful in the Museum's adornos collection is a
strange and beautiful pottery container made in the form of a highly
stylized sitting bird whose head, though turned like a duck's along
its back, is human. The colour and texture are mottled in a marvel­
lous way and decorated with incised lines, though whether this was
original or acquired through burial or exposure I could not tell. This
work of art, officially titled 'Aboriginal water jug', was 'buried in a
mortuary offering with a man who was probably of high importance
in the community'.
These ancient people did not appear to have used metals. Four of
the main sites examined revealed four cultures with a certain amount
of overlapping between them, but all belonged to the Newer Stone
Age, or Neolithic times, and the tools used were sharpened stones or
polished wood. They also employed blades of bone and knives of
shell. Unlike the fierce Caribs, the tribe who produced such beautiful
adornos as a squirrel eating a nut do not appear to have used ordinary
bow and arrow weapons, a conclusion reached because hardly any
bird bones were found with the other remains or any recognizable
arrowheads. Similarly, Dr. Bullbrook's findings at the kitchen
middens and burial sites seemed to rule out cannibalism, which
again distinguishes this tribe from the Caribs, who were well-known
as man-eaters-so well known that their name became the origin of
the word 'cannibal'. The vast numbers of shells found in the middens
53
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led Dr. Bullbrook to conclude that the staple protein diet of the
aborigines was molluscs. To this the people added cassava, knowing
how to extract its poisonous juice.
Dr. Bullbrook holds that the Caribs themselves were never
actually indigenous to Trinidad, though they certainly lived in the
vicinity, as the peace-loving, civilized Arawaks often learnt to their
cost. The Carib's resort to cannibalism may not always have been,
indeed if it was at all, the result of hunger. Certainly the Amerindians
of whatever tribes that used the Neolithic middens did not live
exclusively on three square meals of molluscs and cassava cakes a
day. The gentle Arawaks called their island Iere-the Land of the
Humming Bird. They cultivated sweet potatoes, maize and tobacco.
And they had luxurious tropical fruits for the taking-custard
apples, pineapples, mammee apples and the sweet succulent star
apples, besides guava and the melon-like papaw, tannia and pump­
kins and various kinds of beans. Not all these plants were indigenous
to Trinidad, but they were on the mainland where the tribes origin­
ally came from. Those South American tribes, who still today remain
largely untouched by Western civilization, are not so primitive that
they have simple tastes in culinary matters, as I found by living with
some of them in Brazil.
During his third voyage to the Indies, Christopher Columbus
discovered Trinidad, in 1498. Before starting out on this particular
expedition he made a vow to name the first land he sighted in honour
of the Holy Trinity. Some people prefer to believe that Columbus
named the island for another reason-that he sailed by the south­
eastern part of the island and sighted the three peaks dominating the
Southern Range, a natural feature which led the explorer to call his
newest discovery La Ysla de la Trinidad.
For whatever reason he named it Trinidad, Columbus had noth­
ing but praise for his new island and its climate. He remarked how
like Spain in springtime it was, yet the discoverer did not actually go
ashore but contented himself with admiring the gardens, which were
probably plantations of cassava. After receiving gifts from the
Indian canoes which came out to his caravel he sailed on to greater,
and no doubt what he regarded as richer, horizons. By West Indian
standards Trinidad would not be considered a small island. Its 1,862
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square miles formed a rectangle roughly fifty miles long and thirty
wide, with the addition of two landward arms which almost connect
the island with Venezuela. But since Christopher Columbus and
many bloodthirsty adventurers after him wanted gold and silver they
regarded Trinidad as small fry in this respect.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain became quite accus­
tomed at one period to having an island a day added to their kingdom.
I imagined them yawning politely as the growing list of acquisitions
was read to them each time a convoy returned safely from the
Caribbean. Certainly they did practically nothing to colonize
Trinidad, as the island was without the all-important gold- and
silver-mines. In theory the whole exploration and domination of the
Caribbean was undertaken so that the Faith could be preached to
the Amerindians. But the greed of the Conquistadors and the finan­
cial straits of successive Spanish courts soon swapped the pearly
gates of heaven for the golden gates of an earthly El Dorado.
The Gilded One drew thousands of men in hundreds of ships
from Europe's Atlantic ports. It seemed almost as if the western sun,
reflected from the Gilded One's golden body, dazzled all those souls
who crossed the sea in tiny boats only to die of fevers and dysenteries
in tropical jungles which they entered in vain attempts to reach the
fabled kingdom of this Gilded One-El Dorado. His was one of
those ancient civilizations which were supposed still to flourish in
Central and South America when Columbus set sail in the pay of the
Spanish crown. I often wonder if any of those adventurers ever
reached their goal and actually saw El Dorado in unimaginable
splendour, as, at sunset, he bathed in a lake and then had his body
powdered with gold dust, but perhaps the Gilded One was only a
propaganda figure invented by the Indians to drive the barbarous
Europeans mad with a gold thirst which could never be quenched,
least of all in the rain-drenched equatorial forests where so many
perished.
Although it may be malicious to say so, insufficient of the plunder­
ing Europeans perished. They swarmed over the Caribbean paradise
and turned it to hell with butchery and cruelty on a monumental
scale. Duped and doped with promises of eternal life by their Spanish
masters, the Amerindians soon found themselves forced to leave an
55
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innocuous life of agricultural pursuits and idyllic innocent pleasure

and sweat themselves literally to death mining gold and silver for the
invaders. Their destruction was a work of genocide which casts
European civilization in a dark role. It was not to be wondered that
tales of cities deep in the treacherous mainland interior of South
America, tales of palaces and temples roofed with gold and encrusted
from floor to ceiling with jewels, were circulated in the vain hope of
deflecting the Europeans from their bloody massacres on the
Caribbean islands.
To do Columbus at least some justice, he could not have guessed
at the abuses to which his discoveries were later to be subjected.
Nevertheless, even the discoverer's own carefully kept journal was
full of pious remarks such as 'May Our Lord favour me by his
clemency, that I may find this gold.'
Trinidad was discovered, but proved not to be the kingdom of El
Dorado. Columbus was in such haste to explore the islands that he
could not spare time to land on Trinidad, and he dismissed it as of
no consequence. His royal employer was more cautious. On 23rd
February 1512 the King of Spain wrote to his representative in Puerto
Rico, 'It is of importance to me to know definitely or not if there is
gold in Trinidad.' When it was definitely reported to him that there
was no gold in Trinidad, the King and his adventurers lost all
interest in the island. A hundred years went by before this tiny
fragment of Spain's vast American empire saw the building of a
settlement large enough to warrant the presence of a resident
governor.
The official record of this town's founding reads: 'On the
15th May 1592 Antonio de Berrio found it necessary to take posses­
sion of this Island so as to bring the light of the Faith to the Indians,
to obstruct the French and English corsairs, who have been refitting
and refreshing here for fourteen years, to prevent the capture of
Indians and their sale as slaves in Margarita, to prevent the attacks
of the Caribs from Dominica, Grenada, Metalino and other islands
and the killing and eating of the Indians of this island.'
Here was one historical document to support Dr. Bullbrook's
claims that the Amerindians of Trinidad were not of the Carib
tribe. But this Notarial Record of the founding of the Town of San
56
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Jose[phe] de Oruna also makes it clear that Trinidad was chiefly

occupied as 'a port and principal base from which to enter and settle
El Dorado'.
And so St. Josephs, which I had passed through in the train,
became Trinidad's first capital town. For long St. Josephs was
Trinidad's only town. As such, it was the island's main attraction
for passing buccaneers. The town was plundered and burnt several
times, once by Sir Walter Raleigh. But after each raid the place was
built up again and eventually it became such a beautiful town that
when Charles Kingsley visited it he afterwards wrote in his book At
Last, or Christmas in the West Indies: 'I looked at San Josef, nestling
at the mouth of its noble glen, and said to myself,-if the telegraph
cable were but laid down the islands, as it will be in another year or
two, then would San Josef be about the most delectable spot which
I have ever seen for a cultivated and civilized man to live, and work,
and think, and die in.'
Governor Antonio de Berrio had other ideas. He did not regard
St. Josephs so highly as the English novelist who came there long
after him. The Spaniard was accustomed to living in splendour and
he could not see his new town on Trinidad as anything but a
stepping-stone in his endeavour to discover El Dorado. During one
attempt to reach the 'Imperial and Golden City of Manoa' some two
thousand people went with him, including ten priests and twelve
Observantine monks and many grandees who had sold ancestral
estates in one desperate bid to reach the golden city. This vast
expedition proceeded up the Orinoco, following a route set by Diego
de Ordez, one of the Conquistadores of Mexico who had been there
before the Governor of Trinidad. It was the story of Juan Martinez,
a Spanish soldier in Ordez's party, that inspired de Berrio and so
many other fortune-hunters to go up the Orinoco and penetrate the
Venezuelan forests. Martinez's claim to have actually seen the golden
city drove other men to the point of frenzy. De Berrio's well-organized
party fared no better than others before it. Out of the two thousand
who set out only thirty returned. Carib bows and arrows finished
off those whom the fevers did not. Those that came back were bank­
rupt and defeated for the time being. De Berrio was probably, at
that moment, grateful for the comparative security of his Trinidadian
57
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capital. But his contentment did not last. Before long he was off
agam.
Fanatical desire drove Governor de Berrio and men like him.
Their gold lust was so powerful that they set out into the South
American rain forests with only the haziest of notions about direc­
tion. In the early sixteenth century the Spanish, besides many
German expeditions, believed that the fabled city of gold, Guatavita,
lay somewhere near a lake shore where Bogota stands today. Over the
century the site of the lake and its coveted city gradually moved east­
wards, until by 1595 it was believed to be called Manoa, lying in the
mainland just off Trinidad.
So frequently was Antonio de Berrio away in search of El Dorado
that the leading citizens found it necessary to organize some sort of
government for themselves. They formed a council called the
'Illustrious Cabildo'-and this became Trinidad's first attempt at
self-government. The Governor returned to find discontent among
the Spanish settlers, who were still comparatively few. Thousands
were willing to follow de Berrio in search of El Dorado, none of
them wanted to settle in Trinidad. In fact, the Governor was writing
to the King of Spain that he had only seventy men against six thou­
sand Indians preparing for battle.
Antonio de Berrio probably felt sore at the indifference of the
Government in Spain to the island's needs, an irritation intensified
when he found that the Illustrious Cabildo had been set up behind
his back. The Governor's patience, however, must have reached its
limit when Sir Walter Raleigh turned up in the Gulf of Paria in 1595
with three ships. Not only did Sir Walter sack and burn St. Josephs,
but had the impudence to carry off de Berrio as a prisoner, making
him go back to the South American mainland in yet another abortive
search for the kingdom of El Dorado.
Perhaps similar ideas motivated de Berrio on this occasion as
moved the earlier Indians when they led the Spanish conquerors
astray by telling them fantastic stories about gold on the mainland.
At any rate, the Governor told Sir Walter Raleigh the history of the
Spanish officer Juan Martinez, who, after his capture by the Caribs,
lived in the Essequibo-Rupununi region. No doubt de Berrio had
hopes of getting Raleigh to leave Trinidad. The story was to the
58
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effect that though an officer Juan Martinez failed in his duties as a

gentleman, and as a punishment had been made a castaway on the
River Orinoco, where he was found by Indians out hunting. They
took him to their Emperor, whose main residence was at Manoa. The
journey lasted two weeks, during which time Martinez was blind­
folded, the bandages only being removed when he and his escort
reached the Emperor's fabulous palace. Not only was the King gilded
after bathing, but at certain moons all the chiefs would assemble and
strip naked while teams of servants anointed their bodies with white
balsam for others to blow powdered gold all over them through
hollow reeds. And in this way, glittering from head to foot, all the
chiefs sat down to a banquet which lasted non-stop for a whole week.
After spending seven months amongst these golden chieftains, Juan
Martinez was again blindfolded and led back to where the Indians had
first found him.
Governor de Berrio must have smiled as he watched the effect of
this story on Sir Walter Raleigh. The English adventurer responded
exactly as the Governor had hoped-or almost exactly. Raleigh
could hardly wait to leave Trinidad to find the fabled city, but-and
this was where the Governor miscalculated-Sir Walter forced de
Berrio to accompany him. When Sir Walter eventually returned to
London and published his findings in The Discoverie of Guiana,
everyone laughed, despite his outrageous flattery of the Queen. The
blustering little seaman must have hated the ridicule of painted and
bejewelled Londoners. His story, they said, confirmed him more
than ever as a liar, more 'than all the questionable acts of his life put
together'. Elizabeth I's courtiers considered the most outrageous
fabrication in Sir Walter's book to be his report on the tree-oysters
he had found growing in the mangrove swamps of Trinidad. Lost
cities of immense wealth had been found before now in the New
World, but to believe in eating oysters that grew on trees was too
much for the court of Tudor England.
Spanish governors and English pirates came and went, but St.
Josephs remained, successively built over its own ashes. By 1815 the
parish church had fallen into such a bad state of repair that they
began a new one and, of course, invited the egregious Sir Ralph
Woodford to lay the foundation-stone.
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Had Columbus been able to see the triple-peaked island two

centuries after his discovery of it, he may have had second thoughts
about his pious hopes. Because of intertribal wars between the
aggressive Caribs and the docile but courageous Arawaks, because
the Indian males were killed with overwork or shipped as slaves to
the other islands, because of death by diseases brought by the
Europeans and because those who resisted fell to the ever-ready
Spanish swords and muskets, by 1777 the Amerindian population was
reduced to a mere two thousand. Today only a fraction of that
number remain who can go to Arima for the feast day of St. Rose of
Lima. Arima itself was called after the Arawak word meaning
'water'. One of Trinidad's oldest Indian settlements was situated
there. After 1784, when the other ancestral lands were appropriated
by European settlers, Arima was chosen as the place of resurrection
for such Amerindians as had survived.
In her tiny wooden house on Woodford Street, I asked the Carib
Queen what she thought about all the recent scholarly inquiry and
controversy about herself and about her people being descendants of
the Arawaks rather than of the warlike Caribs. But it was the Queen's
Venezuelan Consort who answered, eighty-year-old Ruffino Martinez.
He, too, was very small and like the Queen spoke English with a
marked Spanish accent.
'Go and get your cross,' he commanded his wife.
And the tiny Queen returned from an inner room with the vener­
able cross. It was six inches high, made of flat silver bars mounted on
a cylindrical base which could be slipped on top of a nine-foot staff
and so carried in the St. Rose procession as the symbol of her
sovereignty. Besides the Amerindian families themselves who came
for the festival from all over the island, thousands of other Trinida­
dians attended the spectacle which had taken place annually since
the church was built in 1820 when it assumed sponsorship of the
activities. The occasion had previously served more or less simply as
a tribal reunion.
The mother of the shy and frail little lady to whom I talked had
reigned as Queen for many years. Queen Victoria held her in such
high esteem that she gave Arima a distinction unique in the Carib­
bean by granting the town the Charter of a Royal Borough. Al-
60
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though Sir Henry Irving thought the 'natives' capable of walking

the mile from the railway station, his Queen did not, for among the
gifts sent to honour the old Carib Queen was a Bath-chair from
Windsor. But the Amerindian Queen long outlived the Queen
Empress and died aged 113 years, so that the present Queen was
already long past middle age when she succeeded.
'How old?' I ventured to ask.
'Help me.' She turned large eyes on her husband.
After a consultation they thought about seventy. But I had seen
this figure quoted in newspaper articles about the royal couple which
had been published some years ago. I wondered if their answer was
only a polite way of checking my rudeness. Not that we were on
anything but the friendliest of terms, because the Consort, well
dressed and shod compared with his Queen and a grandchild, kept
her busy running to and fro bringing out various tribal heirlooms
and regalia for me to see.
From the point of view of the annual ceremony the most impor­
tant of these was an Infant Jesus placed into the arms of the Santa
Rosa statue in the church during the festivities. But for me the most
interesting was a wooden carving of Christ on the Cross. The royal
couple claimed that this was very old indeed, and I could well believe
them. The carving was beautiful, done in a style common in South
America during Spanish times of three hundred years ago. What
made this work of art particularly interesting, besides its obvious
signs of a rough passage through the centuries, was the fact that
Christ was a Negro. I thought of the marvellous carvings I had seen
in Brazil, especially the masterpieces of O Aleijadinho, the mulatto
cripple and genius who had been born of a Negress slave in the gold­
mining regions of Rococo Brazil.
The Queen of the Caribs' throne lived in the even smaller kitchen
off the sitting-room where we talked. The throne was made of hard­
wood and was far too heavy for the Queen to fetch herself, so we
went in to see the large and simple chair. Two poles stood in the
corner like oars in a boathouse; on these the throne was borne in
procession on the 29th August of each year.
We returned to the larger of the two rooms with its two rocking­
chairs, plastic curtains at the windows, and the Queen's Sunday hat
61
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heavy with imitation fruit hanging from a nail in the wall. Whether
it was merely a quaintness of language or whether the Consort really
felt the diminutive house to be big, I could not tell, but he said,
'Marriages and christenings take place in this very hall with the
blessings of countless priests.'
They would not hear of my leaving without adding my name to
the visitors' book, whose pages bore the signatures of governors and
journalists and radio interviewers and American professors. As a
further gesture of hospitality Ruffino Martinez produced a bottle of
rum and we drank a series of toasts, most of them elaborate, with
some extra pious ones expressed by my host, who interrupted his
toasting to take the cigarette from his lips and kneel on the floor to
kiss the Infant Saviour's hand.
The Queen sat holding the silver cross of her office like a sceptre,
her large dark eyes filled with an admiration for her husband which
many years of marriage seemed not to have blunted at all, admiration
for his flow of rhetoric suitable for the occasion and for his command
of English and so many long words. When the bottle was empty and
the last blessing called down upon me-'May God Almighty bless
you and protect you and Santa Rosa of Lima keep you in all your
distant journeyings'-and when the Consort had given me the last
of his fond embraces round my neck, the Queen took my hand in a
gentle and regal manner and kissed it.
The husband stood waving in the road as I went down Woodford
Street, again passing the Catholic school and flocks of panic-stricken
chickens, past the cobblers and tailors busy in their open wooden
workshops, past the house of A. G. Singh the 'Licensed Bailiff' and
the neighbour with 'Live Broilers for Sale. Free Plucking'. But I
did not get far, for I heard light feet running after me and a panting
and puffing. A tiny brown hand plucked my sleeve. It was the
royal Consort. How could I possibly leave without seeing Queen
Victoria's Bath-chair, which we had forgotten amid all the other
excitements?
My conversation with little Ruffino Martinez, who came of
Venezuelan Indian stock, reminded me how many of his people had
crossed the mainland border into British Guyana during the libera­
tion period. They had also taken Arawak wives and their children
62
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became known as Moruka Indians. The mission at the Moruka reser­

vation in Guyana was also dedicated to St. Rose of Lima. Both the
West Indian Caribs and Arawaks were offshoots of the same tribes
in South America. Columbus said that these people had travelled
as far as Florida in quest of the Fountain of Perpetual Youth. The
Arawaks, like the Caribs and Warraus, believed that their tribe was
made in the heavens and then placed on the Orinoco delta.
After that first enchanting experience in Arima, I made many
visits to the beautiful little town, though I did not always return to
the Queen of the Carihs' house in Woodford Street. On most occa­
sions I only passed through, changing buses or taxis for other and
remoter places beyond. The crossroads at the heart of the royal
borough is marked by a clock with four faces standing on a cast-iron
pillar. The townspeople are as friendly as the Carib Queen and her
husband. A man hurried across the road one hot midday when I
stood in the shade of an overhanging first floor waiting for a taxi.
'I'm proud to welcome you to my country,' he said. 'I hope you
enjoy your stay.' With a smile he was gone.
The main streets around that area are full of dozens of shop­
keepers and traders. Opposite the bus terminal stands a building I
liked immensely, Smith Bros., built in, and untouched since, 1908,
a superb period piece of wood and corrugated iron, roofed with two
elaborate lanterns, its first floor girdled by a delicate veranda which
created a cool, arcaded space in the street below. Arima was neces­
sarily a point of exchange for many places in the north and the
interior of the island and for settlements along the Atlantic coast.
Buses and shared taxis plied to and fro, but I could find nothing
going over the mountains to Blanchisseuse. Although this seaside
village was only ten miles away on the map, by road it was almost
three times as far, for the road wound through the heart of the
Northern Range.
Buses and taxis were not forthcoming, but with typical Trini­
dadian friendliness a car soon stopped and the driver asked if I
wanted a lift to Blanchisseuse. Selwyn Luquay, a twenty-year-old
fish trader was driving his fisherman friend, Lennox Cardinez,
home across the mountains with some new fishing-tackle bought that
morning in Arima. Lennox was twenty-seven years old, a handsome
63
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man of light colouring and blond crinkly hair. His boat only carried
two men and they specialized in sea drifting. Selwyn and Lennox did
not say much, because a retired roadmender shared the back seat
with me and he did most of the talking most of the way. And I was
very glad he did, for Joseph Benoit, as he introduced himself, was
the most informed guide that any traveller could wish for.
Joseph, a tall, thin ageing Negro, seemed old to me. But he laughed
at this, his deep-set eyes twinkling, his large expressive hands gestur­
ing as he said I should see his father, who was still alive at 102. As
soon as my interest in trees made itself known Joseph never stopped
talking. He had a lifetime of observation behind him. We passed no
tree or plant whose name he did not know or when and how it
blossomed, what its fruits were and how they could be used. I never
found anybody else on the island who could tell me so quickly what
I was looking at, not even among my friends of the island's Forestry
Department, who were more patient with my telephone calls than
they need have been.
The road to Blanchisseuse consists of one engineering feat after
another. Every hundred yards provides a precipice or a bend or a
narrow bridge approached from terrifying ledges, all looking as if
they could be dislodged at any moment by the collapse of cuttings
or high embankments, if not actually swallowed whole by the thick
growth of trees and undergrowth which crowds the road on each
side and hangs over it with heavy branches. In many high places the
green walls relent and splendid panoramas appear through the gaps,
peaks and steep-sided mountains and valleys far below. On the left,
the range is dominated by El Tucuche at 3,072 feet, and to the right
El Aripo at 3,085 feet.
Few roads penetrate the Northern Range, and this isolation makes
the mountains mysterious. Not many miles from the thronging
streets and squares of Port-of-Spain begin the mist-shrouded unin­
habited forests, where, except for occasional hunters, nobody ever
goes. One of the roads which does go into the mountain is that to the
Aripo Valley. Although it ends half-way to the aloof El Aripo, this
road at least allows the ornithologist reasonable access most of the
way up to the Aripo Caves. A three-mile walk concludes the journey
to the caves where the extraordinary oilbirds, Steatornis caripensis,
64
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

live in darkness with colonies of bats, breeding throughout the year

among the stalagmites and stalactites.
The oilbird is a large creature like a nightjar, with a wing span of
three feet. Like bats, it only emerges at nightfall and feeds on fruit
trees, its favourite being the oily pericarps of palms. This habit
probably accounts for both the bird's name and its excessive amount
of fat. Their fat is responsible for extensive slaughter, because they
were much-prized eating in Trinidad, as in Venezuela, where I
tasted them years ago.
The experience of going into a dark cave where the oilbirds con­
gregated was an eerie one. Bats' eyes glinted down evilly and the
oilbirds wheeled out in terror at the intruder's torch beam and flew
madly out of the cave mouth into the unwelcome light of day, their
wings fanning up air already fetid from the stench of guano. Their
cries too, were terror-stricken when they were forced into the
blinding sunlight. Sepulchral screaming and hysterical laughter
echoed round the caves, as blood-chilling as the spooky wailing of
Manx shearwaters at their breeding-grounds.
The Aripo Valley road is a cul-de-sac and not in any way compar­
able for landscape with the drive right through the mountain range
down to the northern coast at Blanchisseuse. Although not high in
comparison with the Andes, even the tail-end of the Andes which
finally die away in Venezuela, the Northern Range of Trinidad
looked immense because the island is not extensive in area and much
of it is low-lying. The abrupt rise of the Northern Range also helps
to create a dramatic effect of size, as the hills immediately behind
Port-of-Spain's Savannah demonstrate. Driving up from the Vene­
zuelan coast to Caracas on the autopista would take the visitor higher
in a few minutes than the highest peak in Trinidad. But the scale is
different, the total effect not so startling or so beautiful as the wind­
ing drive up and down to Blanchisseuse.
Certainly the Venezuelan motorway passes no landscapes as
wonderful as those I saw unfolding in steep sweeps of near-vertical
forest ablaze with the flames of bois immortelle. This Erytlzrina
micropteryx is perhaps the loveliest of trees in Trinidad. For some
people the whole enchantment of the tropics can be captured by
seeing the night-blooming cereus come to life in an effiorescence of
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 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

gold and silver on its one night of glory. Others will be haunted all
their lives by walks they have taken beneath cool avenues of feathery
jacarandas whose blue blossoms fall gently to the ground or by the
sight of millions of the delicate bottlebrush flowers which smother
patriarchal samans for months. Photographers know that when they
show their friends films or transparencies of the African tulip trees
somehow the fire of the scarlet does not appear the same as in
reality. The scarlet canopies of flamboyant look pallid on the film
screen compared with the incomparable splendour they remember.
These were images I had in my inner eye of enchanted lands in
the sun. But I hardly thought any of them more marvellous than the
mountain forests on the Blanchisseuse road when the tall flame-red
immortelles were in bloom. Port-of-Spain's pre-Lenten Carnival
justly enjoys fame for its spectacle and colour. But not many of the
Carnival visitors would think of going to see the greater spectacle of
hillsides and valleys which stretch for miles, all on fire with the
brilliant coral flowers of the immortelle trees. Carnival lasts only two
days. The immortelles' fiery extravaganza begins in November and is
not extinguished until March.
Trinidad's immortelles do not exactly grow by accidents of
nature, for wherever they reach far into the sky cocoa trees are likely
to be found flourishing in the grateful shade beneath them. It was,
in fact, the immortelle's fine performance as a shade tree which en­
couraged their use and gave them their local name of cocoa mama.
For eleven miles Selwyn Luquay forced his heavily loaded car up the
winding roads, revealing at every turn another sweep of hill or valley
gorgeously apparelled in scarlet immortelles. Close beside the road
women picked coffee beans and others went up to their hillside
houses balancing sacks of cocoa beans on their heads. Other women
busied themselves with the tonca trees, the kind of wood which had
been used for the prehistoric paddle in the National Museum.
Tonca beans are not gathered until fully ripe and fallen. Then the
women spread them out to dry, though not in the sun like cocoa
beans. After 'curing' by soaking for two days in rum and then being
dried in the shade once more, the beans are ready for market.
I remember one particularly beautiful little bridge wedged in a
cranny of the hills, a clear mountain stream tumbling beneath it.
66
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

Thickets of tall, graceful bamboo transformed the landscape into a

Chinese painting. These impenetrable clumps with star-like leaves
were called 'male bamboo', and also 'lances', for at one time there
was a grandiose scheme for exporting the huge spiny branches to
make lances.
Selwyn Luquay made many stops in our ride to Blanchisseuse
specially to point out the rivers, the interconnecting valleys, the
cocoa and tonca bean estates, the wild-looking hollows of nutmeg and
citrus fruits with the lordly immortelles taking precedence over all.
During one of these halts I spotted the first woodpecker I had seen on
this visit. It was a Kirk's red-rumped-or petit charpentier a tete rouge,
as he was called locally. The bird has a penchant for cocoa planta­
tions, a habit he shares with the much more common sabian thrush.
We could have got across to Blanchisseuse much sooner than we
did, but I was glad that Selwyn slowed down so often so that Joseph
Benoit could name extraordinary trees and explain their habits and
say whether their bark was usable as well as the fruit.
'That cyp good for lumber,' Joseph would say, pointing out a
ninety-foot Cordia alliodora overburdened with masses of white
flowers and beseiged by armies of bees pillaging their nectar.
The mountain road slices its way through rocks, and at the
highest point of the mountain ridge, before we began the descent to
the coast, we all got out of the car to look over the green hollow of the
Lopinot Valley and the scores of lesser rifts and mountain passes
leading to it. Minor peaks ranged one behind the other against the
sky. Forest grew densely right to the very top of each peak. The
loftiest part of the long seaboard ridge was hidden by moist, woolly
clouds which drifted slowly, dragging mists through the high forests.
Even from the elevated point on which we stood the enormous trees
on the slopes above us looked no bigger than shrubs. The view back,
looking down into the valley Selwyn's car had tackled so well, was
one of great splendour, a sweeping vista of glowing immortelles
shading the plantations, which then opened beyond, far out over the
plains of Trinidad where sugar fields stretched without end beyond
Arima. This panorama from the silent Northern Range made Joseph
Benoit silent in awe, though he must have seen it many hundreds
of times during his long life.
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 QUEENS AND WASHER WOMEN

Back in the car, however, Joseph had much to say, for as we left
the Morne Bleu Pass behind and started the long winding downhill
road to the sea, cool mountain air blew through the open windows
and precipitous gorges dropped immediately from the edge of the
narrow road.
'Balisier! Balisier!' old Joseph cried as we passed clumps of
leaves, fleshy and slashed like the leaves of the banana tree. The
balisier is a native member of the heliconia family. Although incon­
spicuous amongst the large clumps of leaves, the red lobster-claws
of the blossoms are much sought after for floral arrangements. In
Trinidad the balisier, probably because it gew in such thick pro­
fusion everywhere over the island, provided the emblem for the
political party, The People's National Movement, headed by Dr.
Eric Williams, which formed the first independent Government of
Trinidad and Tobago.
On this shadier, northern face of the mountains the immortelles
were not so plentiful, although here and there I saw unusually tall
trees supporting a mass of long orange-red flowers. Joseph Benoit
insisted on calling these flowers wild vine. Every time we passed
such a tree and he said 'Wild vine' I thought he missed the tree I
was pointing at. A few days afterwards, however, in the Botanical
Gardens at Port-of-Spain I saw a tree bearing the colourful bracts
of this vigorous climber on its highest branches. Old Joseph Benoit
had been right all the time; this was wild vine, the Norantea guian­
ensis. The old man had been correct about all of his identifications
during that drive over the mountains. Sometimes the local names he
gave trees or plants were in French or Spanish. He called the bread­
fruit tree chataigne.
Now that the immortelle ceased to be the landscape's dominant
motif Joseph's enthusiasm turned to the ceibas, silk cotton trees. The
height of the tree and its powerfully buttressed trunk are sufficiently
characteristic to make the silk cotton stand out in this and any other
forest throughout tropical America. Although Joseph Benoit fre­
quently pointed out the silk cottons, no mention was made of the
tree's sacredness. The ceiba's religious connections were some of the
things to catch the attention of Melville and Frances Herskovits, an
American couple who made a meticulous study of life in Toco, a
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 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

town farther along the north coast from Blanchisseuse. Their

observations, published in 1947 as Trinidad Village, had much to
say about the silk cotton in this region.
They discovered that the villagers regarded the ceiba as sacred,
believing it to contain the spirits of the dead, or vampires, were­
wolves, jumbies, and otherwise the dwelling-place of evil forces.
Before land could be cleared of such a tree, a 'lookman' had to be
paid and brought to see whether the hidden powers were good or
evil. Offerings of unsalted food had to be made to the tree with
generous helpings of rum and chicken blood poured as libations
around it. The lookman, who could interpret dreams as well as
divine tree spirits, then had to decide whether the silk cotton could
be cut down without disaster befalling the family.
All this, Mr. and Mrs. Herskovits decided, was 'quite African'.
Much of Africa pervades Trinidad in a thousand subtle ways.
Customs and beliefs resembled similar ones I knew in Brazil and
which had clearly come from Africa. Trinidadian villagers' diet also
contains many distinctly African dishes. But it seems to me that the
villagers' high regard for the ceiba was not an African cult, so much
as one of the few survivals of Amerindian customs. Throughout the
ancient Maya civilization the silk cotton tree was regarded as the
shrine of supernatural powers, and offerings remarkably like twen­
tieth-century Trinidadian ones were made to it. 'History was said
to have its beginnings with the sacred ceiba tree', according to the
oldest Mexican legends. Such legends knew nothing of Eve being
created from Adam's rib, but they held that out of the noble ceiba
tree came forth the first man.
Joseph Benoit was anxious to point out the medicinal properties
of a multitude of plants and trees, but he did not touch on the subject
of divination and magical properties which I had come across on
earlier visits. Promptings produced nothing and I had to be content
with names and remedies, for which I was in any case grateful to
Joseph.
Whenever Joseph spoke to Lennox Cardinez he also used a quaint­
sounding French patois. The persistence of the French language was
living evidence of the days when Spain had neither the men nor the
money to govern its New World empire either efficiently or securely
69
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

The use of French patois in the remoter northern parts of the island
brought old contentions to life again, for neither France, England
nor Holland agreed with the papal recognition of Spain's claim to
exclusive rights to ownership of the New World. Francis I of France
demanded to see the clause in Adam's will that kept his own French
subjects from enjoying the fruits and riches of the West Indies.
Spain was quite incapable of developing Trinidad properly and
out of sheer necessity reached a compromise. In 1783 the King of
Spain allowed emigrants from other nations to enter Trinidad, on
condition that they were Roman Catholics from countries in alli­
ance with Spain. Such emigrants were given strong inducements and
exemption from tithes for ten years. The results were startling.
Within ten years, 15,000 settlers and their slaves had moved into
Trinidad, mostly from the French West Indies. And since this new
population far outnumbered the Spaniards, they continued to speak
their own French language. Even the island's council, the Illustrious
Cabildo, now consisted of seven Frenchmen and one Irishman and
only two Spaniards.
Though nominally Spanish, to all intents and purposes the island
was run by the French-though not for long. The kings of England,
no more owing obedience to the Pope, also saw no reason why they
should not enjoy the wealth which lay in the West Indies ready for
the taking. The spoils already lifted from Spanish galleons by Sir
Walter Raleigh and the whole gang of English seadogs had whetted
the British appetite for gold and silver. The Spanish-French situa­
tion in Trinidad was never established on a sound basis. Economy of
the West Indian islands depended utterly on African slave labour.
When the storm of the French Revolution swept across the Atlantic
the slaves saw the tricolour cockade as a symbol of their own freedom
from bondage. Hundreds of the republican-minded Negroes and
mulattoes fled from the English bombardment of the French islands
and flocked in disturbing numbers to Trinidad.
When excitement in the Caribbean was at fever pitch eighteen
British warships sailed into the Gulf of Paria on 17th February 1797.
Some of these ships bristled with as many as eighty-four guns. They
could hardly have come at a more opportune moment. Britain was at
war with France, which had Spanish support. So not only had the
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 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

Spanish Governor of Trinidad, Don Jose Maria Chacon, to con­

tend with thousands of slaves demanding freedom, but also with his
own garrison, seriously weakened by epidemic, and with a Spanish
fleet decimated by yellow fever. The British commander, Sir Ralph
Abercromby, who sailed boldly into the calm waters of the Gulf of
Paria with his eighteen ships, outnumbered the combined land and
sea forces of Don Chacon.
When the townspeople saw the great cloud of British sail, and the
Spaniards burning their own ships, they fled to the hills, closely
followed by the civilian Militia, who had no desire to test their mettle
against such an armada. Governor Chacon knew that any battle he
might start was lost before it began, and failing to gather the fever­
ridden army together, he signed the Articles of Capitulation pre­
sented by the British. In this way, without a shot being fired,
Puerto de Espana became Port-of-Spain, which it has remained ever
since. But in spite of all this, 170 years afterwards, Joseph Benoit
and many of his neighbours around Blanchisseuse were still speaking
the Trinidadian version of French and Spanish which the island had
known in those more troubled times.
Before the car went down the last mile or so to Blanchisseuse, old
Joseph got out to climb a steep path up to his house half hidden in
the woods above us. The rest of us seemed to have nothing to say,
but suddenly, in the silence left by the old man's departure I heard,
and smelt, the sea. And then it came into sight, a moving surface of
changing blues and greens, running into rocky coves overhung with
palms, expanding itself on the sandy beaches in trails of foam like
Honiton lace which curled around outcropping boulders.
Selwyn drew into a dusty side road and the new fishing-gear was
taken out. I stretched my legs. Blanchisseuse sprawled luxuriantly
along the top of steep cliffs. The wooden buildings were widely
spaced among a green screen of bananas and brilliant shrubs and
tall, leafy trees, more prolific and more riotous, if this was possible,
than anything I had yet encountered on the island. Each wooden
house gave the appearance of being set in its own plantation, their
low, square forms glimpsed through the growth around them, only
their corrugated-iron roofs in various stages of rustiness showing
completely.
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 QUEENS AND WASHER WOMEN

If he saw it, Charles Kingsley may well have thought Blanchis­

seuse the ideal living, working, thinking and dying-in place. And
perhaps more so than today's St. Josephs, for here, too, apart from
being shut off by the mountain barrier, Blanchisseuse has its superb,
sandy bays, deserted, intimate, shaded by a mixture of coconut
palms and dense shrubs. The soft, fine sands slope down to the
water. A triangular rock stands out of the water in the bay where I
swam, which is hidden from its neighbours by low headlands,
while in the farther distance other headlands lift blue, rounded
humps over the sea.
Part of the village has an unfenced field with notices saying 'Any
animal found tethered or astray in this playground will be Im­
pounded. By Order C.E.O.' Large anthills cling like a disease to
tree trunks. At another part of the village road the Travelling Officers'
Quarters had been built. Flyscreens had been fitted to the doors and
windows so that sandflies and mosquitoes would not disturb the rest
and quiet of the Government officials who stayed there while on the
rounds of duty. In contrast with some of the more shaky-looking and
tumbledown wooden houses, the officials' overnight house had such
a clean and efficient appearance that I was reminded of the dak
bungalows I stayed in so gratefully in remote villages of the Hima­
layan foothills. Near by, a number of men were engaged in cutting
up mora wood for the flooring of a new house. The reddish, heavy
wood, Mora excelsa, had been felled in the forests that stretch all
around and right up the mountains dominating Blanchisseuse. The
plans of the new house had been chalked out on the side of a hut in
the same way as William Butterfield drew mouldings for his masons
on thewalls of his extraordinary striped and multi-coloured churches
in Vic-torian Britain.
Blanchisseuse is innocent alike of Victorian mouldings or fancy
modernity. One indication of this is the way its advertisements are
just nailed on the wooden shops, many of them faded and bent or
illegible altogether. A village shop I patronized only measured eight
feet square. It bore a sign advising that its owner was 'Mrs. E.
Cooper Prop. Opening and Closing from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.' The
reason I went into Mrs. Cooper's was because Blanchisseuse's free­
dom from sophistication entails the absence of restaurant or cafe.
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 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

But Mistress Cooper willingly supplied me with bread rolls, a tin of

sardines (which she kindly opened) and fat, red tomatoes and 'One
Imperial Pint of Nestle sterilized milk' and, as a special treat for an
unforeseen picnic, three chocolate-brown, glutinous balls called
tulum which Mistress Cooper herself had made from coconut,
molasses, sugar and spices, all vigorously boiled together and
stirred and finally doled out as irresistibly rich round dollops.
Mistress Cooper was a Negress and wore a white towel turban.
She took a motherly concern in my picnic and in the end, besides
opening the sardine tin, also cut open the rolls and laid the fish on
them, clearly not trusting my own capacity for sandwich-making.
Protestations of my own ability were of no avail and while I waited I
watched some of the village people coming and going to the public
water tap which stood almost on Mistress Cooper's doorstep. A
Creole woman with her hair braided in tiny pigtails came to wash
her feet before drawing a bucket of water. Other women passed on
their way home from gathering fuel, balancing baskets of sticks on
their heads. Woodmen also returning from the forests for a midday
meal and a rest during the day's worst torpid hours, wore shorts,
American G.I. tin hats and carried machetes in leather sheaths
which swung at their sides.
Outside another shop in the village I found four young Negroes
sitting on benches and upturned wooden boxes, defying the con­
siderable midday heat to play draughts with a home-made board and
beer-bottle tops. They were fishermen, and although it was only
one o'clock their work was done for that day. The rest of it, a kind of
dream of paradise, stretched in front of them. They were more than
lords, living without cares in one of the world's most beautiful places
in a way that even millionaires could not do. These youngsters,
handsome, muscular, their dark skins shining, were totally happy and
relaxed. I could tell from their deep-throated laughs and the way
their eyes blinked like contented cats' as they bent in concentration
over the draught-board or sat back to raise a bottle to their lips.
I ate my impromptu sandwiches and the delicious tulum balls on a
cliff overlooking a cove where the sea threshed and foamed over
fallen rocks. Powerful waves came in and churned into thick white
foam which hissed and roared and seemed loth to dissolve into water.
73
 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

Up there on the cliff I got the best of the cool, moist wind blowing off
the sea. Woolly clouds drifted across the blue sky, the lowest of
them touching the mountain ridge.
Whenever I saw the sea at Blanchisseuse the turbulent water
round the rocks curdled into thick foam, white with salt. I won­
dered if it was this which had given the place its name Blanchis­
seuse, 'Washerwoman'. Certainly the village is not without its
washerwomen, although most of them seemed to go to the wide
lagoon at the river's mouth just beyond the village. I came upon this
river on my first visit. Finishing my lunch, I went down to the sandy
bay and walked in the shade of the palm grove and at the end saw
washed clothes spread to dry on the sands. Here, unexpectedly, a
gash in the hills came quite close to the shore and a wide, apparently
motionless river wound its way between walls of steep and dense
tropical vegetation. Some women stood knee-deep in the amber
shallows, washing bright-coloured clothes.
Les Baigneuses was a popular theme of French art, but no models
for those serene and monumental compositions so beloved of French
painters could ever have been as artless as those demoiselles of
Blanchisseuse. Nor, I should imagine, was any French artist ever
confronted with the bloomers and bras of the river bathers I sur­
prised on the coast of Trinidad's Northern Range. Far from being
embarrassed at the satyr who so unwittingly emerged from the
woods, those rotund dusky nymphs laughed uproariously and made
great play with the water, splashing it and shooting it out in long
spurts with their hands.
But the blanchisseuses de fin did not stop work because of me and
they fell to chattering like birds or to singing. What songs they were I
could not tell. Calypsos, perhaps, for Carnival was not far off and
calypsos vibrated all day long on the radio. And the women probably
had their own anyway, for the calypso registers any event, sometimes
within hours of its occurrence. The Trinidadian ear has always been
a quick one, making music out of sticks and poetry out of names,
whether names of rivers or mountains, villages or streets, whether
from French or Spanish, English or Amerindian, Hindu or Chinese
originals-delightfully sounding place names like Blanchisseuse
itself, or El Cerro del Aripo, or Guayaguayare, Busy Corner,
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 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

Devil's Woodyard, Chin Chin, Point-a-Pierre, Tacarigua Ward,

Oropuche Lagoon, Hard Bargain, Sixth Company, Indian Walk,
Carapichaima, Pluck, Flanagan Town, Fyzabad, Sum Sum, Palo
Seco, Cipero Ste. Croix, Maqueripe Bay, Buen Intento, Sisters,
Harmony Hall, Realize, and so on endlessly in a kind of mellifluous
chaconne.
Similarly, local names of wild flowers and trees are as vivid as
those in the England of Shakespeare's day. These names often differ
from district to district and the most colourful terms in English,
French and Spanish are used to distinguish birds. One of the many
species of tyrant flycatchers went by the name of 'white-shouldered
washerwoman' and was also called 'the nun', although I did not see
either this quite common bird or any nuns near the laughing black­
shouldered washerwomen of Blanchisseuse.
But these boisterous ladies are not the only ones I shall remember
from the sea village. Besides Mistress Cooper of the shop, I soon
found myself talking trees, shrubs and flowers with another woman.
Her house and its extraordinary garden stood opposite the shop
where the four young fishermen played draughts into late afternoon.
Seeing me pry into her garden and making what must have seemed
highly suspicious notes in my book, she came up smiling as bright
as the sun and introduced herself as Mistress Coa. She must have
been amused that I thought the rambling village hedges of hibiscus
and ixora and the busy lizzies which grew like weeds around the
houses worthy of special attention. What particularly attracted me
was a flood of red showing under her own hedge, a lavish display of
fallen Turk's cap flowers, the Malvaviscus arboreus, which made the
roadside look as if the village pig-sticker had been at work.
'Oh, that's only Christmas flower,' Mrs. Coa explained, though
Joseph Benoit had earlier called it the more usual 'sleeping hibiscus'.
There were many more things inside the gate and she invited me
in. She had been out turning and turning cocoa beans spread to dry
in the sun on a wide, shallow wooden tray standing on legs. I wanted
to know how long the beans had to be treated.
'If you sweat it plenty it takes six days, but usually eight days,'
she added, picking out a prize bean for me which tasted surprisingly
like or, rather, exactly like cocoa. Mistress Coa, talking in a musical,
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 QUEENS AND WASHERWOMEN

lilting voice with rising and falling intonations which sounded

strange and pleasant, showed me her coffee beans. These were
similarly exposed to the sun.
'Not jus' coffee,' Mistress Coa corrected me. 'There's Arabian
coffee beans and Robusta coffee beans.'
Then we went to the little stable and peeped at the donkey which
brought the cocoa and the coffee beans home from the plantations. I
couldn't leave, Mistress Coa insisted, without going in to meet her
husband.
'He gone blind,' she said sadly.
And so he had, only four months previously, and now he sat all
dressed up at the kitchen table.
'Here's a gentleman come to see you,' she called out. I doubted
whether any misfortune would get Mistress Coa down for long. She
was a tower of strength, a big happy woman of African stock who
could do a man's work when required to. I talked to Mr. Coa, who
wanted to know where I came from and what I thought of Trinidad.
After a few minutes I was outside again, going among the garden's
various citrus trees and admiring the fine sugar cane which Mistress
Coa cut herself. Besides all this, there were many trees and shrubs I
could not name from which my new friend made jams or jellies or
wines. I could not help feeling how like Mistress Coa was to the
ample, capable red-faced countrywomen whom I had known in my
childhood in Ireland. They had all been as friendly and as generous.
'Have some figs,' she said, pointing at some bananas. I had been
in Trinidad often enough to know that they were called 'figs'. She
gave me a whole bunch and when I protested at the quantity, she
merely repeated once more, 'We're all God's children.'
By that time in the afternoon my thoughts were all on the last and
crucial bus back to Arima-crucial because no other transport would
be going over the mountains again that day and also because there was
nowhere to stay in Blanchisseuse itself. Luckily the bus terminal was
simply the roadside by Mistress Coa's hedge. So she leaned over the
gate and shouted to the driver.
'Don't you done go without this gentleman,' she called.
And he didn't.

76
 �I 3 It
The Great God Pan
Puerto de Espana, which Sir Ralph Abercromby took without a
fight, bore as little resemblance to the Port-of-Spain today as it did
to the Amerindian fishing settlement it supplanted. The man who
endeavoured to build up the original Puerto de Espana, and who
transferred the Illustrious Cabildo from St. Josephs, was the last
and, by general consent, the best of the Spanish governors, Don Jose
Maria Chacon. Unhappily, eleven years after the British take-over
the wooden capital went up in flames. Calle de Infante and the other
few streets with romantic names had been built on each bank of the
unromantic Rio Santa Ana until Don Chacon, with the help of 638
slaves and 405 free people of colour, diverted its course. The dangers
to life which the filthy, mosquito-breeding river harboured were now
overcome, but its water was not at hand when the dangers of life
swept the new capital away. The great conflagration began, not from
a dramatic cannonade by warships in the gulf, but from a fire in a
chemist's shop.
This fire, though unfortunate for the 3,647 rendered homeless,
led to an auspicious reconstruction. The British could not be
reckoned amongst the best of the empire-builders from an archi­
tectural point of view. The British Empire hardly left legacies as
splendid as the Spanish or the Portuguese. Yet Port-of-Spain must
be one of the best, not so much on account of the buildings as for
the town plan with its gardens and squares. London, Bath, Brighton
and Cheltenham and many other towns up and down the British
Isles all had their squares and public parks and gardens by this time,
and it was a charming, as well as expedient, decision on somebody's
77
 THE GREAT GOD PAN

part to lay out the new Port-of-Spain on a similar pattern. To this

day the most attractive aspect of London and of those once-fashion­
able provincial towns in England is their tree-filled squares and the
quiet orderliness of the buildings around them. So with Port-of­
Spain. Although in modern times the city spawned suburbs, and
collected its quota of tall modern blocks, Port-of-Spain retained an
air of grace and space because of its squares and open, shady places,
and above all because of its great green open space up at the
Savannah. What Hyde Park was to London, and the Old Steine was
to Brighton, so the Savannah was to Port-of-Spain. Trinidad's
graceful, early-nineteenth-century capital was never strangled by a
ring of Victorian industrial workers' housing as were most English
cities. Nor had there been any consequent move to establish garden
cities. Port-of-Spain was a garden city, or at least a city in a garden,
for the green hills, rioting unrestrainedly with flowering trees and
exorbitantly coloured shrubs and flowers and creepers, were
always so much part of the scene that even the largest of the city's
twentieth-century buildings, the Hilton Hotel, hardly emerges
from its own surrounding tide of greenery.
Although some magnetism always drew me to the noisy carousal
of the downtown areas like Charlotte Street, the city's squares
within a few minutes' walk of the bustle always seemed the most
beautiful part of the town. I discovered that all sorts of charming
squares were hidden away and that besides the central Woodford
Square there were others, quieter, less ambitious in scale and more
captivating, places like Adam Smith Square and Siegert Square. King
George V Park sounds like a muddy public acre in England's black­
ened Midlands. In Port-of-Spain it is another delightful unfenced
square studded with samans, which dropped dappled shade on the
stiff, short grass; a park fenced only by the cone-shaped ends of the
Northern Range's seaboard hills and the swooping valleys between
them. This park lies a little away from the town centre, which
probably explains its rural atmosphere. In spite of a genuine parks­
and-gardens notice advising that 'The parking of vehicles, and the
pasturing of animals on these grounds are strictly prohibited', every
time I passed it two Friesian bulls were grazing under the samans,
fortunately both tethered.
78
 THE GREAT GOD PAN

If I lived in Port-of-Spain and if I were a rich man, then I would

undoubtedly choose a house in Jackson Square, which lies immedi­
ately behind the Whitehall grounds and the other architectural
treasures of Maraval Road. It would be difficult to do this, even for a
rich man, because although the square is a large enclosed space
smoothly grassed, only two or three houses occupy each side, so
large are their gardens. Jackson Square has a strong Englishness
about it, something village-greenish, cathedral-closeish which the
tall palms and wide samans do nothing to dispel.
This indefinable English atmosphere reminded me powerfully of
the Rawalpindi cantonments left over from the days of the British
Raj in what is now Pakistan. Not that there was anything military
about Jackson Square's central lawn raised a foot or so above the
surrounding roads. I discovered the square during one of my evening
strolls when the dark space was illuminated by scores of hovering
fireflies emitting their intermittent light. I was not sure at first
whether I had stumbled on some platform specially made for viewing
the Carnival processions. Another visit in daylight revealed the
quiet square where Christopher-Robin-type nannies were abroad
with their infant charges. Here, in the hour between the closing of
offices and the onset of twilight, members of the diplomatic corps
exercised their boxers and alsatians, for the square lies in the elegant,
exclusive St. Clair district. Unlike Woodford Square, Jackson Square
gives no hospitality to tramps with their portable beds of cardboard.
Nor do lovers tryst here as they do in Victoria Square, another
favourite place of mine nearer the town centre.
Young and by no means frustrated love was Victoria Square's
nocturnal leitmotiv. The kiskadee grew tired of his insistent ques­
tioning and the shrieks and laughter of playing children were not
heard after sunset. But silhouettes in close-coupled pairs could be
discerned in the velvet dusk. Even people who suffer from a phobia
of public parks should go to Victoria Square, because it is not very
much like a public park and because it contains some of Port-of­
Spain's most beautiful trees. Paths radiate from a central circle, and
the trees are planted along the paths. What could have been ordinary
and dull in fact forms a lovely place.
Branches of both West Indian and Honduras mahogany wave
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there in the breeze and there is a fine example of the barringtonia's

heavy, spreading limbs and dense, leathery foliage, which, lacking
its own large white flowers, plays host to clumps of orchids. There
are horse cassias and a bay-rum tree and naturally there are palms,
lofty and remarkably like duchesses wearing extravagant ostrich
feather head-dresses. But the square is most remarkable for its
divi-divi trees, the Caesalpinia coriaria, which not only form the
major part of the avenues but are tall and robust as well. These
divi-divis are not the wind-sculptured, undernourished-looking
specimens that are a curiosity in other Caribbean islands such as
Aruba. Those in Victoria Square make stately avenues of flourish­
ing forest trees, their generously spreading branches of feathery
leaves providing the centre of the square with wide pools of shade,
and their blossoms adding pointillist touches of yellow.
Most frequenters of the square go there to take advantage of the
divi-divi shade. Not so the black-throated mango humming-bird. He
loves the small yellow flowers on the very tops of the divi-divis,
much of which is never seen by human eye until it falls and withers
on the paths. Should the visitor during a January morning, on hear­
ing the bare-eyed thrush's song, louder than the raucous kiskadee,
be beguiled into thinking himself in a corner of Paradise, he could
be forgiven. But the 'City Engineer, by Order' sees to it that the
said stroller in Paradise shall not, at the same time, forget that this is
a Public Garden; for 'The games of football, cricket and rounders, or
any other dangerous games are not allowed in this square'. But like
the brave bulls in King George V Park, the schoolboys in Victoria
Square closed a blind eye to this notice, though the way they played
cricket using a thirty-foot-high palm for stumps, probably was
dangerous. However, I spent many hours off and on in Victoria
Square and was never damaged, and the only complaints came from
the kiskadees calling protests as they commuted from tree to tree.
When I came up to Port-of-Spain from the country I preferred to
sit in the square rather than in my room. It was always cool, even at
the hottest time of the day, and I could read there and make notes or
simply sit watching people walk across from one side to the other
with their languid, liquid grace of movement. I never lacked for
somebody to talk to. Students or message-boys, longshoremen or off-
so
Birth of a steel drum-pan-tuner at work
Old houses, Port-of-Spain
 THE GREAT GOD PAN

duty police officers would share the bench and include me in their
conversation. As Carnival drew nearer, talk was often about the
newest calypso composed for the two days of 'jumpin' up' or about
the costumes they would wear if they were 'playin' mas', and if they
were not, then about costumes they had worn in previous Carnivals.
'George Bailey goin' out real to get it,' a lad called Dolman said as
he came wandering across the grass singing calypso to himself.
Although we had never spoken before, Dolman knew I had
become one of the square's regulars. His opening words to me meant
that George Bailey and his large group were doing all they could to
win the coveted first prize for their Carnival presentation.
'Man,' continued Dolman, 'Ijus' waitin' for that bell onJ'Ouvert
morning.'
He was like thousands of other people working up excitement for
the great moment at five o'clock on the Monday morning, when the
Jour Ouvert, opening day of Carnival, was ceremoniously signalled
by a bell.
Dolman chattered on, telling me about his own weeks of hard
work getting costumes and properties ready for the Carnival street
parade.
'I bend the wire, make boots, do a bit of tailorin',' he said, 'and
paint up thing smart, real real real.'
Dolman was immaculate in beautifully pressed tight white jeans
and a bright purple shirt-jacket. He carefully dusted the bench before
sitting down.
'Yeah,' he began again, 'las' year I was a Indian with feathers,
man. Had to get a ladder to put the headpiece on. When the wind
come it blow me backwards-but it real nice.'
A couple of days later Dolman came to Victoria Square again,
holding a wide-eyed but contented bird in his half-open hand.
'See this bird? That's a johnny head-in-air.'
Dolman, I thought, might well appropriate this local name of the
yellow-bellied elaenia for himself, because he had recently been to a
hair-straightener, but his Negro hair stuck out rather like the
elaenia's non-erected crest. The bird, however, was of little conse­
quence. Dolman was already talking about the next year's Carnival,
although the one for 1966 was still over a month away.
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 THE GREAT GOD PAN

He tapped his forehead. 'We study, man.' He told me how the

boys and girls in the various groups went to see all the epic films that
came to the cinemas, so that they could get inspiration for the
Carnival costumes and presentations from such diverse historical
celluloid characters as Cleopatra, Ben Hur, or any other Biblical or
ancient Roman story including the King of Kings.
I wondered if Dolman in his own gay-coloured clothes, like the
crimson and orange, brightest greens and yellows worn by the
passing girls after whom he wolf-whistled, had been inspired by the
gaudy colours which burgeoned in the gardens of even the meanest
streets in Port-of-Spain. Whenever I think of colour in the gardens
of Trinidad the brilliant red of poinsettia immediately flashes in my
mind's eye. In the tropics, poinsettia is more a symbol of Christmas
than holly. And its crimson-dyed leaves still brightly dominate
hedges and gardens when the steel bands roll out on the high days of
Carnival just before the beginning of Lent. The scarlet Antigua
heath, beloved of so many birds, the trailing tapestries of multi­
farious bougainvillaea, the splendour of the most sophisticated
hybrid hibiscus hedges, the orchid stands, the clambering Mexican
creeper, the phallic spadix of anthurium rising from a spathe pool of
crimson wax, all fade into the background while the poinsettia
persists. I have seen poinsettia in other countries, but never with such
intensity of colour as here. I wondered if Port-of-Spain's bright
street lights were the cause of the poinsettia's lingering, for such
lamps are known to prolong their life. In Venezuela I remember
them being called the jlor de noche buena, although the brilliant
colour came from its red bracts, and the plant was cultivated for
these rather than its inconspicuous flowers.
One corner of Victoria Square touches Port-of-Spain's central
area streets and the opposite corner leads out into the suburbs, the
nearest being Woodbrook. The houses here, however, bear no
resemblance to the endless rows of identical semi-detached which
form the suburbs of English towns. The gardens which overflow
with poinsettia belong to dolls' houses. Most of these dolls' houses
are small and many are raised on stilts, leaving an open space be­
neath where Muscovy ducks and scraggy hens run to and fro to their
hearts' content. Chained to posts are the dogs which bark and yap
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the whole night through. In spite of fierce barings of teeth and

sudden terrifying rushes to the length of their chains, or to the bars
or wire mesh of the front gate as I passed, these thin dogs were gen­
erally friendly and frantic tail-waggings would accompany the feigned
attack and give the lie to notices on gates, 'Beware of Bad Dogs'.
In Woodbrook, as in most of the suburbs nearest the town, a
large number of the houses were built of wood. As these decayed, or
as their owners became more affluent, the wooden ones were torn
down and concrete ones put in their place. Sufficient, however,
remain of the dolls' houses embedded in prolific gardens to give
Port-of-Spain a unique character of the greatest charm. The grand
houses facing the Savannah on Maraval Road were just beginning to
attract the attention of local architects and city fathers with a view
to preserving them from future demolition at the hands of greedy
property developers. But the lesser houses are also worth considera­
tion in this way, for they represent a vernacular style as valuable
architecturally as the Edwardian grandeur of the city's magna opera.
With a naive charm these smaller houses are placed close together,
their gardens almost climbing over the turned wood balusters of the
verandas facing the streets, where occupants sit on rocking-chairs or
tubular ones with plastic coverings. The veranda posts have also
been turned on a lathe or carved. And all along the eaves and form­
ing brackets and canopies is a delicate filigree of fretwork, a white­
painted lace of wood cut in intricate patterns on a large fretsaw.
Fretwork is a dated craft and as much a period piece as poker­
work. Time was when hobbies filled evenings now filled by tele­
vision, and for a period fretwork was king of the handicrafts. To find
whole streets of houses which look, at any rate from the front, like
fretwork dolls' houses, was a delight I never tired of, and one which
compensated for the closeness of the streets after the open freshness
of the country or seashore. With inexhaustible inventiveness the
builders and carpenters of these fretwork houses made variations on
basic themes of verandas and front porches and steps, eaves and
bargeboards and roof finials and ridge decorations. Some houses had
whole outdoor rooms built like bandstands, with curly fretwork and
balustrades and little ornate roofs made from corrugated iron cut
into fantastic shapes to shield the verandas from glare and heat,
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 THE GREAT GOD PAN

baskets of fresh-looking staghorn or baby's breath ferns hung like

lanterns from the eaves.
Partly because of its proximity to both the centre of the town and
to the Savannah, but also because of its dolls' houses, I decided to
live in W oodbrook, and found a room with a Trinidadian family in
Gatacre Street. I was moving constantly in and out of the city, but
nevertheless wanted a permanent base which I could be certain of
having on my return. And a room rented by the month suited this
purpose better than the Chinese pension in Charlotte Street. I de­
canted into Gatacre Street, well pleased with the clouds of greenery
I could see from my windows. Flowers and poinsettia sprang up
from between the houses. There were the square-edged, torn leaves
of bananas moving in every breeze like punkahs, shining like
varnished wax in every warm shower that passed.
The gardens are not only for looking at but for being constantly in.
They earn their keep by providing shade and giving fragrance to the
air and making a scratching-yard for turkeys and hens. From these
crowded shrubberies also comes the dawn chorus of mocking-bird
and bare-eyed thrush. But long before dawn, indeed long before
nightfall had really settled over the tin roofs of Woodbrook, the
backyard cockerels begin their round-the-clock session of raucous
crowing. The dogs, at least, wear themselves out with barking and
just before daybreak snatch some sleep before starting again at the
first clink of milk bottles.
A cockerel in one of the gardens I could see from my new room
was a particularly magnificent creature, got up in a gaudy livery of
golden-glossed feathers and crowned with a wattle as red as the
poinsettia he strutted through. The impression of a farmyard he
and his fellows created with their inattentive harems was backed up
by the presence of fruit trees which were by no means merely orna­
mental. Ornamental, of course, the fruit trees certainly are, like all
the other richly clad trees and shrubs of these suburban gardens.
The extravagant pattern of extravagantly shaped leaves, of bread­
fruit and papaw, of banana and avocado pear, of ficus and palm,
guava and Surinam cherry, Java plum and water lemon, would make
the most elaborate wallpapers of William Morris or any of the plush
and plum-colour designers of the 1890s look as wan as Rossetti's
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women. The breadfruits and papaws bear fruits which the house­
wives ofWoodbrook and a dozen other suburbs came out to cut and
cook, or serve as dessert, or chop up with spices, along with the
loquats or mammee apples, the prickly pears and breadnuts, soursop
and sweetsop, custard apples, Cape gooseberries for preserves, the
fruit of the cucumber tree for curries, guavas for jellies and cheese,
and, above all else, the mango 'king of fruits' borne by the stately
tree whose star-shaped clusters of dark leaves fill many a garden
corner. Many varieties of mango exist in Trinidad. Those in the
gardens ofWoodbrook are mostly the Julie. Its sweet andjuicy fruit
already falls overripe to the pavements before February is out and
continues to ripen and fall in abundance until October, to the equal
delight of children and marauding birds.
My Gatacre Street windows always stood wide open and from
them I could see many of these trees coming to flower or fruit. So
close that I could almost touch them were the fleshy dark green
leaves of a breadfruit. And shielding the sky were the fan-vaulting
veins and louvred leaves of the palms creaking dryly in the winds
from sea or mountains. Whatever gaps remained in this unrestrained
garden the red-rusted tin roofs peeped through, together with the
yellow or green or pink or white or bare wood walls of the dolls'
houses, neat in their fretted eaves and finials. This was a gentle,
tranquil scene, in no way suburban, and I came to love it so that I
did not mind so much returning to the city from the even more
beautiful places of the island's countryside and beaches. I could be
sure to see every day a homely sign I had not noticed before fixed
above somebody's door or on a front gate, such as 'Cake icing done
inside' or 'Buckles, Eyelets and Button Covering done here'.
This was like a world half remembered from some voluptuous
dream-beyond this little, intimate world of Gatacre Street, beyond
the tops of the shiny rubber trees, rode the profile of the hills, steep­
sided under their covering of forest where the golden-headed mana­
kin cleared the forest floor to perform his nuptial dance and where
Swainson's motmot was truly king-of-the-woods. Yet even the light
turquoise, the black and purple, rufous and green plumage of the
motmot could not compare with the tubfuls of feathers I looked down
on from my Gatacre Street window.
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Buller Street ran immediately at right-angles and the back garden

of one of its houses lay directly under my window, so that I could
watch the antics of the ducks and hens. But the fowl became only a
minor diversion as Carnival drew nearer, for day by day, and towards
J'Ouvert morning and sometimes far into the night also, two men
worked busily at dyeing the fowl's feathers every colour of the rain­
bow-and then some never seen in the rainbow. The back garden
had become a Carnival workshop like thousands of other back
gardens not only in Port-of-Spain but all over Trinidad.
The more elaborate the costume, the more ingenious its con­
struction of papiermache and wire frames and its coverings of rich
stuffs and sparkling sequins and imitation jewellery, the sooner its
manufacture has to begin, especially in the groups, 'bands', with
large numbers of people involved. The garden beneath my window
still had last year's papiermache eight-foot Red Indian totem pole
lying on top of the wired hen run. The clay mould on which the
layers of paper had been glued was still there also, though now
cracked by a year's sun and quite abandoned, because Leonard
Carty was preoccupied with his costume for the coming Carnival.
Patiently, hour after hour, he sat fixing the brilliantly dyed feathers
on to a new and enormous wire frame. Leonard lived in a small
wooden hut at the back of the garden and another hut housed the
piece de resistance of his costume, a head-dress so elaborate that it
had to be suspended by a pulley from the rafters. Every day a bit
more of the wire frame disappeared under the patiently applied
feathers interspersed with a mosaic of tiny mirrors. A curious smell
came up from this garden sometimes, different from the boiling glue­
pots and dyeing feathers, and looking out I could see green bread­
fruit roasting over a coal-pot.
Across the road in Buller Street was the headquarters of George
Bailey's band. This was the man who according to my friend
Dolman, was 'Out real to get it'. I had not been long at Gatacre
Street before I, too, was hoping George Bailey and his band would
'get it' and any other prizes that were going. The headquarters
occupied a modest concrete house. But every evening crowds of
people came to sit on the porch steps and on the veranda balustrade
for hours on end to discuss the costume designs which were pinned
86
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up for review and comment by members of the band and its followers.
Here the cashiers from the supermarkets, the Chinese laundry boys,
the ice-cream vendors, the young girls and not-so-young girls, and
those rounded ladies whom the word 'girl' would not fit at all, the
Indian shopkeepers and the brewery workers came to study and
criticize the designs of costumes they would eventually wear. The
hubbub of talk, laughter and music created excitement weeks before
Carnival itself exploded over the town. Everybody knew, even
across on Trinidad's Atlantic coast, that George Bailey's presentation
that year was Kings Go Forth.
And go forth they did in a blaze of glory. When, after days of
mounting tension, Carnival actually came, I was astounded by the
richness of George Bailey's display. In no pageant or theatre or
opera house had I ever seen such a bewildering crowd of fantastically
dressed players. One after the other, forty-seven kings with forty­
seven queens emerged, each more elaborately costumed than the
last, each with a court of attendants and musicians, pages and dancers,
until at last a band of a thousand players was assembled in a long
line six or eight abreast at the starting-point of their processional
route. I goggled at this spectacle. I began to understand now why
fires were stoked so carefully for this unsuspected furnace of colour
and music and dancing. For two days life in Port-of-Spain was
different, time was dislocated, the poor became rich, the rich sent
empty away. Reality cowered in its lair. Thousands of people like
my friend Dolman became kings for a day.
But at the time, when I began to watch the first, unrelated pieces
of the final spectacle being painstakingly assembled, when I looked
at the costume drawings and saw rolls of wire and bales of materials
and saw lights in huts burning far into the warm nights and watched
girls at sewing-machines through scores of windows, I had no inkling
that all this work and organization was the fabric of a dream which
would come true. Meanwhile, there were five weeks to go before the
bell rang to signal J'Ouvert morning. Five weeks in which to specu­
late who would be crowned Queen of Carnival and who would be
the King, and who would be Queen of J our Ouvert and who the
King. And which melody would carry off the much-prized Road
March title. By a slow process of elimination certain calypso tunes
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were already being played in preference to others by the town's

dozens of steel bands. And everybody was trying to guess which of
these tunes would prove to be most popular and played most often
when the bands of players with their steel band music came on to
the road. Often impervious to mass enthusiasms, proof alike against
football or cricket, indifferent to this or that politician, I found
myself caught up in the pre-Carnival whirl of speculation and anti­
cipation. I had no patience with people who disagreed with my idea
as to which was the best tune and the best band.
Coming down from the Savannah one Sunday evening just after
I arrived in Woodbrook, I passed by the Metropolitan African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Woodford Street. I stopped outside
to listen to the extraordinarily sweet and powerful electric organ
music which seemed to be pouring from the wide-open doors and
windows. But when I peeped through the door all I could see was a
woman singing a gospel song to the accompaniment of an upright
piano. Then I realized that the throaty organ was no organ at all,
but the music of the Silver Stars steel band rehearsing on a waste
site behind the church. And added to this, with the effect of a con­
certo for double string orchestra, was the sound of another steel
band just across the street from the church, this time the music of
the Metronomes, also practising on a vacant lot which looked directly
down Gatacre Street.
I had already noticed how the Trinidadians were never still.
Fingers beat complex, off-beat rhythms to inaudible music. Feet
tapped and twisted to the movements of some invisible dance. While
leaning over a shop counter, or drinking a Coke, or sitting on a bench
in the Savannah, a far-away look would descend on people as the
music in them took control of mind and muscles. On the street where
you lived in Trinidad there was always music, especially at night and
raised to fever pitch in the weeks before Carnival, when the steel
bands and calypso orchestras worked themselves up into the last
stages of preparation. I saw many steel bands rehearsing on waste
sites around the city. The Star Land group had their steel drums,
the 'pans', set out on an empty site between two houses right in the
centre of town.
The musicians were local boys who had learnt to play in the same
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way as the younger boys were learning-by watching their older

brothers and friends, by having music in the blood. Some of the boys
in the steel bands were the newest players and standing beside them,
keeping an ear open for a wrong note or a wrong rhythm were the
experienced youths. Each orchestra had a leader, who in most steel
bands also made the instrumental arrangements, but he did not
conduct. There was no conductor. By an incredible magic the
musicians played their complicated parts without printed scores,
without a baton, but with the unity and aural telepathy which dis­
tinguishes the jazz band and the string quartet. Perhaps the most
amazing factor of the steel-band technique is the impression that the
orchestra was a single instrument, and this probably accounts for my
mistaking the Silver Stars for an organ.
It is as natural for the Trinidadian teenager in Port-of-Spain to be
a 'pan man' as it is for teenagers elsewhere to have the current pop
music with its legendary heroes like the Beatles and the Rolling
Stones and the Pretty Things and all the other fantasy-making groups
who climb into the recording companies' best-selling lists. And the
steel band in Trinidad, far from being under-dog to pop music on
records and radio, is strong now as never before, with its popularity
on the increase. Not only are there more steel bands now, all manned
by local boys who knew nothing of musical theory, but the music
itself and the instruments are in a continual process of improvement
and refinement. Not so long ago the steel band was not altogether
socially acceptable. The players came from the poorest districts and
the rowdy hooliganism that earned certain areas in Port-of-Spain an
infamous name was connected with the pans. Steel band was at one
time almost synonymous with delinquency. But not any more. The
steel band had arrived to stay and it was not emasculated by social
acceptance and a respectable status, but liberated and technically
improved by it.
The technique of steel-band music is the fundamental part of the
music. An ear for melody and harmony, a pulsating sense of rhythm
which, quite untutored, copes with highly complex cross-rhythms
and syncopations, is the birthright of the Trinidadian. These did not
need to be imparted, if indeed such qualities can be. What has to be
taught is the handling of the steel drums themselves, a skill coupled
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with the changing development of the pans as instruments, for the

steel bands I heard had come a long way from their origins.
Steel band as such seems to have made a first appearance around
the early 1930s in the form of dustbin lids being banged double­
forte by back-street boys intent on providing percussion rhythm for
the Carnival 'jump-ups'. Dustbin lids were used because by the late
1920s the authorities had already prohibited the use of hollow
bamboo for percussion. The trouble with bamboo was that rival
gangs in the city tended to use the bamboo sticks for concussion as
well and Bamboo-Tamboo ended up with stick fights and broken
heads.
Besides, dustbin lids made more noise. In their protests against the
din of the bin outraged citizens of Port-of-Spain made nearly as much
noise as the backyard boys. But having discovered the delights of
metallic noise, its carrying power, and the infinite variety of sounds
which different metals produced when struck, the city boys went on
undaunted. Soon dustbin lids were joined by scrap metals gleaned
from the waste dumps. The oil drums and parts of cars like gears and
brake drums made an excellent range of sounds, and played in
groups with infectious rhythms set people 'jumpin' up' in Carnival
with a new energy. By the time bugles were added it seemed that
nothing more could happen to this new steel band, which now
seemed the perfect accompaniment for people dancing and jumpin'-
up at Carnival time in the streets. Unlike the percussion section of a
symphony orchestra, the steel band was mobile. The players could
walk around the streets with their miscellaneous collection of car parts
and oil drums.
And so the steel band might have remained and perhaps even
have dwindled away when the juke box and later still the transistor
radio brought American and English pop music direct to Trinidad's
doorstep. But one of the earliest 'Steel Bands Badboys', Winston
'Spree' Simon, found that the bottom end of an oil drum, when
struck in the centre, made a different sound from when struck at the
rim, and that an oil drum with dents in it produced even further
sounds. In this way the steel band acquired the range which enabled
it to play melody in harmony while still retaining its percussion.
Melody was king now. The instruments, however, remained per-
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cussion and melodies were produced by rapidly repeated notes

played with sticks in the manner of the xylophone.
During the years after the Second World War the steel band was
developed until it became today's sensitive, sweet-sounding instru­
ment. The pans possess a surprising range of pitch, key and tonal
variety. The repertoire expanded as the steel orchestra's technique
expanded. When I had first visited Trinidad eleven years previously
it would have been quite impossible for any steel band to have played
any sort of arrangement of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.
The technical development of the pans will presumably go on for
years, because there are a number of ways of exploring and exploiting
the basic principles. One of the steel band's peculiar charms is that
no two are alike, either in sound, the form of the pans, or the tonality.
The steel-band world had something of the diversity which music in
western Europe had before Bach bullied the makers and players of
keyboard instruments into being well-tempered. Steel bands are not
well-tempered, in the sense that the maker and tuner of the pans could
give the band any kind of key system and thus harmonic colouring he
wished. Also, the steel band is entirely individualistic in its choice of
pitch. Long after European music agreed on the principles of the
well-tempered keyboard, there was, until quite recent times, no
standard pitch from which the tuning of all instruments could be
taken, and only a few years ago was the international 'A' fixed-the
note which warns London's Royal Festival Hall patrons that the
interval is ending. Trinidad's steel bands have no agreement as to
pitch and this is one reason for the immense variations of sound
between the different bands.
An instrument-maker such as Lionel Tertis, whose violas trans­
formed the instrument, understood that the expressive power of the
instrument depended to a large degree not on the emotional power
of the player but on the technical possibilities of the instrument. The
'tuner' of the steel band's pans has the same power over the orchestra
he deals with. His is a skilled art; his sure touch acquired from much
experience could make or mar a hand. Because the sweetness of a
steel band's tone depends upon harmonics and sympathetic reson­
ance between the individual notes on any one pan and also, more
amazingly, between all the pans in the orchestra, the tuner's job is
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vital. Since Winston 'Spree' Simon's discovery that different parts of

the steel drum produce different notes successive generations of
tuners, without any scientific knowledge of acoustics or even any
craft skills in instrument-making, developed their art of marking out
the bottoms of the steel oil drums in such a way as to produce notes of
different pitch exactly tuned to the key system chosen. This tuning
has become highly sophisticated. Expert tuners can earn their living
by going from band to band.
These 'maestros' often advise on the musical direction of a band,
while the group leader, or 'captain', is to the steel band what the
producer is to a film. Tuning the pans is a simple operation, but
simple in the way that walking the tightrope is. Just one small mistake
could mean the ruin of a whole pan. When the steel oil drum has
been sawn off to the required length it is tempered over a fire; and
while still malleable the end is beaten into a concave surface. It is
on this surface that the tuner marks out and, by means of a chisel or
'groover', makes the segmental divisions, each of which produces a
different note.
The number of divisions on any one pan depend on the drum's
'voice'. The highest notes require a smaller division of the oil drum's
bottom and so more of them can be placed on the steel circle.
Similarly the lowest notes require larger divisions and fewer can be
got on to the drum. Various bands use various kinds of pans and
have various names for them. Melody-producing drums have been
called piano pans, ping pongs, soprano ping pongs and tenor ping
pongs. Only one bandman will play each ping pong, for his pan may
have twenty-three different notes (some pans have thirty-two) and
the player has to be very nimble indeed to beat out a melody with
his two six-inch drumsticks tipped in rubber. In these ping-pong
pans experience showed that notes adjacent in a scale should be
placed on opposite sides of the drum. Notes near each other harmon­
ized together. A ping-pong pan ranges through as many as three
octaves. The division of the ping-pong drum is a problem in arith­
metic combinations, and, for the actual grooving process, a problem
in geometry which the tuner solves in addition to the acoustical
problem of producing sweet tone, all of which he has to do with the
skills he has learnt by practice alone.
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The difficulties decrease with the lower-toned pans. The drums

used primarily for harmonizing with the melody or for producing
sharp cords like the pizzicato of a string orchestra have fewer notes.
These have names like second pans, tenor kitties or kettles, tune
boom; as well as several kinds called gitter or guitar pans. With
these, the depth of the cylinder cut from the original oil drum in­
creases from the six inches of the melody-making ping pongs to about
fifteen inches. On the concave top there will be only sixteen notes,
larger in area than the ping-pong notes and covering only two
octaves. Sometimes two of these alto drums share just over twenty
notes between them, so they are fixed together and played by one
pan-beater.
With the next lowest pans, the cellos, three drums are beaten by
one player in a manner similar to the timpani of a symphony orches­
tra. Two drums may have eight notes between them and the third
five notes. Like a timpanist in a symphony orchestra playing modern
music is the steel-band 'bass' player, with five drums around him,
each made from the whole oil drum with only one of its ends cut
away. Alone of the whole steel band these bass pans actually sound
like drums, although they have the musical pitch and resonance of
the symphony orchestra's timpani.
The steel band was born in the open air and was developed for
playing on the road, culminating in the Carnival Road March, and
it was in the open air in the tense excitement of Carnival that the
steel band had to be heard. Its carrying power was equal to that of
the military brass band, which was also developed for outdoor uses.
To hear a steel band in the clinical conditions of a concert hall or on
gramophone records would be to hear an emasculated sound de­
prived of its sensuousness. Yet as I wandered around Port-of-Spain
in those weeks before Carnival, listening to different bands, acquir­
ing sufficient discrimination to distinguish their widely different
tonal qualities, I could not help wondering what use modern Euro­
pean composers would have made of this unique music. Possibly
nobody ever scored for orchestra as richly as Ravel. I tried to imagine
the flowing melting sweetness of the steel band if it had been used
by Ravel in some of his swathes of voluptuous harmony. The
Roman Carnival was a favourite programme for some late Romantic
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composers. What would the bright-eared Berlioz have thought about

steel bands? Would he have written an overture called Carnival de
Port d'Espagne?
Perhaps, I thought, in years to come Trinidad's Carnival will
have been completely taken over by commercial sponsors. Perhaps
the long processions will be mounted on motorized floats as in Cali­
fornia and the South of France, and perhaps the spontaneity of the
jump-ups in the streets will have vanished and the dancing have
been absorbed into the ballrooms of fashionable hotels. I hoped not.
But perhaps also by then the steel band will have advanced through
scientific technology to a state of blissful perfection, just as the
xylophone, that shining indispensable instrument of the modern
symphony orchestra, advanced from humble African origins.
African origins, of course, lie behind the steel band. Untold cen­
turies of African music, now being painstakingly collected by
Western music scholars, preceded the dustbin-lid clanging in Port­
of-Spain in the 1930s. Drums began it. For as long as the people of
Africa have danced, and in the dancing have expressed life and
death, war, peace, love and hate, so long have they had drums, a
multitude of drums, some of which made music and some of which
talked, carrying messages over long distances. When the Europeans
took thousands of Africans by force across the Atlantic and made
them work on the Caribbean islands, they also tried to kill the African
people's way of living and their ideas. The drum was often forbidden.
But the rhythm was not in the drums but in the blood, and so the
Africans, in spite of slavery's degradations, preserved their need for
music and dancing, until in a later, happier age they could dance
agam.
The calypso story is similar, a tale of origins half obscured by
time, a story of transformation under various influences and final
emergence in the twentieth century as a form of music known all
over the world. Most scholars who have tried to trace the story of
calypso agree that the word itself is not connected with the divinity
who lured Homer's Odysseus to her island. Most probably the name
began with the French carrousseaux and went through patois and
anglicizations-carrisseaux, calisseaux, caliso and so to calypso.
Suggestions have also been made that the name originated with ex-
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clamations of encouragement to the soloist shouted by the chorus or

audience.
But whatever processes brought the word calypso into everyday
use, the main thing is the calypso itself. Unlike the steel-band music,
the calypso music is secondary to the words, which are a racy,
Cockney-like comment on life in general and local life and gossip in
particular. The calypso verse has never made any pretence at verbal
respectability, and remains as bawdy as Shakespeare. No sacred cow,
human or institutional, is safe from the wit of the calypsonian.
Calypsos are popular all the year round, with a gesture towards
silence attempted during Lent. Calypso's climax comes at Carnival,
where weeks of competitions culminate in one calypso emerging as
the most popular. Calypso allows the Trinidadian genius with word­
play unrestricted opportunity. Even the names of some of the famous
calypsonians have extravagance, the Iron Duke, Small Island Pride,
King Pharaoh, Richard Creur-de-Lion, Mighty Panther, Zebra
Killer, Attila the Hun, Viking, Roaring Lion, Spitfire, Lord
Kitchener.
Quick wit, knowing observation of human behaviour and com­
ment on its absurd aspects, are the bill of fare offered in the calypso.
During the pre-Carnival weeks, rival groups of calypsonians pre­
sent their rich menu in various places around Port-of-Spain. These
locales are called 'tents', remembering the days when calypsos were
performed in makeshift booths of bamboo thatched with palm
leaves. But because calypso was always an activity to which anybody
could contribute and in which everybody could join, its origins and
development will probably never be exactly unravelled. Whether
the calypso was originally African and picked up Spanish melodic
influences on the way, or whether it all began with the carieto which
the Amerindians sung in love and battle, will probably never be
known for certain. But tantalizing though the calypso's past is,
especially to those with a taste for musical history, it still today
involves anybody and everybody. And this is probably the calypso's
greatest virtue in these days of recorded entertainment and music.
Samuel Selvon, the Trinidadian author, illustrated the birth of
one of these folk songs in his amusing short story Caf:ypsonian. It
tells of a singer called Razor Blade who met his friend One Foot.
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Their friendship had earlier been cemented when somebody stole

poor One Foot's crutch while he slept under a tree in Woodford
Square, so causing him to be marooned under the weeping willow
for a day and a night until Razor Blade appeared and lent a helping
hand. The Blade got an idea for a calypso and the two friends held
a session of composition behind an Indian tailor's shop. One took
an empty bottle and a stick and the other beat on a table, and together
they set music to the words they hoped would become Road March
of the Year. 'Is so a calypso born, cool cool, without any fuss,' author
Selvon wrote. One Foot had been known as King of Calypso in his
day, and although he was now a poor man he was still a proud one
and consequently tried to discourage Razor Blade, also down on his
luck, from stealing. 'Us calypsonians have to keep we dignity,' said
One Foot to his would-be criminal friend.
This active participation is taken for granted, not only in calypso
but in steel bands also. My friend Dolman, often lost in dreams of
Carnival costumes and music beyond even dreams, presumed that I
played in a band, for to him beating the pans was as natural as eating
your dinner.
'Hallo,' he greeted me one day in Victoria Square. 'You sweet
pan-man?'
Where we sat under the divi-divi trees in the square, and where
the House of Metronomes hammered pans in the vacant lot at the
top of Gatacre Street, and where the Silver Stars played Lord
Kitchener's My Brother, your sister, all this for many thousands of
acres around had once been green fields of sugar cane, where
Dolman's forebears had worked till they dropped in heat and sweat.
The development of the sugar industry came to Trinidad with the
French immigrant settlers which the Spanish Government allowed in.
It became the island's principal crop. A further enticement the King
of Spain used in his immigration offer of 1783 was that when the
cane was firmly established refineries were to be set up. The first
settler to take advantage of this was a Monsieur Picot de Lapeyrouse.
His sugar factory stood almost on the site of what later became
Victoria Square. But in the eighteenth century no less than today,
world economics was the master to whom even the masters were
slaves. The business acumen of the French and the Spanish and
96
Transport with message
Coconuts to quench your thirst-bicycles to get you home
 THE GREAT GOD PAN

European markets was not enough to bring prosperity to the island.

An important point in the Spanish King's decree, both for the
French and for anyone who wanted to make profits from a West
Indian plantation, was that from 1785 the duties payable on trading
in slaves from Africa were abolished for ten years. This encouraged
immigrant planters to set up establishments who might otherwise
have been deterred by the State levies on their source of labour. With
these removed, they could acquire as much labour as they could
afford to buy in the slave markets. No other considerations entered
their heads, certainly no ideas that the slaves were also human like
themselves. This was the situation throughout all the 'Sugar Islands',
where one planter indignantly defended the trade with 'The Negroes
come here ready made, the bags of sugar have yet to be made'.
As early as 1444, 250 Negro slaves were taken from Lagos by the
Portuguese for the European market. Ten years later 5,000 Negroes
slaved in Portugal and Madeira. Trading in slaves and their forced
labour in overseas possessions soon became indispensable to all the
European empire-building nations and their economy. So long as an
attempt was made to save the slave's soul, God at least could not
object to the slave trade. Having settled God's score by forced
baptism, without a twinge of conscience the King, the Church, the
slave trader and the planter could therefore squeeze the last drop of
sweat and blood from their African slaves, which was an ideal situa­
tion for cultivating money-making sugar in places like Madeira.
Apologists and theologians invented justification for centuries of
inhumanity and worked up fanatical hatred of the Muslims, a form
of devotion which had the added advantage of being profitable.
French and Spanish and Portuguese Grand Masters who ruled Malta
from Valletta Palace as heads of the Order of St. John vowed to
break the power of Islamic shipping by the use of their Christian
galleys manned by slaves of every possible nationality and colour.
Much sympathy, then, could a letter from the King of the Congo
receive, when he wrote in 1526 to King John III of Portugal,
'Thieves and men of evil conscience take our subjects and cause them
to be sold, and so great Sir is their corruption and licentiousness that
our country is being utterly depopulated. And in order to avoid
them [the slavers] we need from your Kingdom no other than priests
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and teachers, and no other goods but wine and flour for the holy
sacrament. This is why we beg of Your Highness to help and assist
us in the matter, commanding your ministers that they send us
neither merchants nor wares because it is our will that in these
kingdoms there shall not be any trade in slaves nor markets for
slaves.'
The Africans who were attacked and carried off as slaves did not
all come from bush tribes and straw huts. The African continent
had its highly sophisticated and civilized societies and splendid
cities. In the interior of Morocco lay Fez, a city of noble architecture,
and a city which had a municipal sewage system when Europe
wallowed still in the cesspool of the Dark Ages. Not all African
leaders sent abortive pleading letters to the King of Portugal. The
Kings of Morocco put great armies against the Portuguese plunderers.
In the same century as the King of the Congo wrote to John III,
Elizabeth I of England was addressing the great warrior and patron
of the arts, the Saadian King, Ahmed the Golden, as 'Our Dear
Brother after the law of Crown and Sceptre'. The tomb pavilions at
Marrakesh of the Saadian kings have recently been rediscovered and
restored to the light of day, revealing architecture whose beauty is
second to none in the contemporary world of the sixteenth century.
Denigration of the African was, for a long time, a professional
occupation for serious English writers. They were at pains to prove
the African 'naturally inferior to the Whites'. David Hume, for
example, went so far as to declare that there were 'No ingenious
manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences'. But the philosopher
must surely have known that one of Europe's architectural gems, the
Giralda Tower in Seville, was built by an African, and that the
writings of Leo Africanus had been published in England long
before Hume's own. And there had been the culture and writings
and above all the architecture during the reign of the Great Black
Sultan (Abou el Hassan) of Morocco in the fourteenth century. What
of the famous scholar and ascetic lbn Toumert in the twelfth century
or of the later Negro author of Timbuktu, Mahmoud Kati? David
Hume, of course, could not have known of the twentieth-century
archaeologists' discoveries of ancient Negro civilizations all over the
African continent, but as a man of letters he should have known of
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the Karouiine University which flourished under the hot sun of

Africa long before either Oxford or the Sorbonne opened their
doors.
But neither Portugal nor England could afford to listen to 'the
poor blacks'. Wars with other European nations had to be financed.
There was no quicker way of providing money for the State, and for
private pockets, than by the slave trade. Charles II of England had
spent so many years as a penniless exile that on his restoration noth­
ing seemed more important to him than money, lots of money
quickly. He married a Portuguese princess who brought with her
one of the biggest dowries on record, and substantial proportions
of this were invested in the Company of Royal Adventurers of
England into Africa, which claimed 'the sole and entire trade in
Negroes on the African Coast'. Even if other nations did not recog­
nize these rights, any more than England recognized the papal sup­
port of Spanish claims in the New World, England very soon reached
the top place in the volume of slave trafficking. France was second
and Portugal third.
Records of the Company of Royal Adventurers show that in 1673
some 15,585 slaves were sold for 3,500 tons of sugar. By this date
sugar had become a precious cargo. When France first displayed an
interest in developing Trinidad some 383 white families from other
Caribbean islands supported the scheme and were prepared to take
with them to Trinidad their possessions of no less than 33,322
African slaves, because the larger the number of slaves they brought,
the larger the tracts of land they were given. In only a few years part
of the virgin land was cleared and what I knew as Woodbrook and
neighbouring suburbs were planted with sugar, and Monsieur de
Lapeyrouse established Trinidad's first sugar factory. Spain's long
indifference to the island's economy was shown by the comparatively
late introduction of captive Africans for slave labour, a form of
labour which Spain had already been using on its mainland posses­
sions from the time of the earliest settlers. On the neighbouring
Margarita Island, Negro slaves had long worked as pearl divers.
It still remained a wonder that any of the Africans captured by the
slave traders, or by fellow Africans whom the traders paid well for
a supply of men and women, ever reached the West Indies alive.
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They started captivity chained together and marched to the coast, a

journey lasting nearly a month in itself. At the trading 'factories' the
slaver would closely examine the human merchandise for missing
toes, bad teeth, the state of joints and limbs. These evil men were
experienced in telling at a glance those whose pulse would stand up
to crossing 'the Middle Passage', as the Atlantic was known. The
rejected slaves were killed, their bodies thrown into the sea so that
the incoming tide around the factories always bore female corpses
face downwards, the males floating on their backs. Some of the largest
factories were in Guinea, and to honour such a profitable trade
Charles II had a special coin minted-the guinea.
The slaves who passed the traders' close examination were
stripped of all their clothing before being put on board for the six­
to eight-week passage. The holds of the slave ships were crammed. In
the tropical heat the lack of sanitation of any kind made death by
suffocation, thirst, heat-stroke and disease inevitable for large
numbers, often hundreds, in each ship. Sailors of other merchant
vessels could tell the whereabouts of a slaver by the stench carried
by the wind for miles across the sea. Yet in spite of such brutality
thousands of Africans did survive to be paraded completely naked
in the markets while prospective buyers pinched muscles and
examined teeth. Only half of those first bound in Africa lived
to be effective sugar workers. Under the lash they cleared forests,
planted, cut the cane and carted it for crushing at factories such as
Monsieur de Lapeyrouse's in Trinidad. The captives brought their
belief in spirits good and bad to sustain them in misfortune. Under
the threat of flogging they outwardly confessed the Christian religion
of their captors. I feel sure that the work songs and jingles they made
up in their own languages about their French and later their English
masters while cutting the cane and keeping a look-out for deadly
lurking snakes had the African rhythms which I heard the steel bands
rolling out so sweetly.
When the British took over from the French planters and Spanish
administrators in 1797 no great change affected either the elite of
Trinidadian society or the mass of the people still held in suppres­
sion. Bristol and Liverpool and other English cities which built
their wealth on the slave trade demanded their dividendi;. How
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aptly named were ships like the Lancashire Witch, with its evil bills of
lading in human life. In 1805 Trinidad's slaves attempted to take
their freedom, but the ringleaders were promptly hung, their heads
cut off and stuck on high poles and their bodies displayed in chains
as a warning to any Negro who dared to raise hand or voice against
bondage. Twenty-eight years more were to pass before the Emanci­
pation Bill became law and 629,823 West Indians were given their
freedom, including 88,306 children under the age of six years. This
act cost the British Government £16,416,360 in compensation. This,
oddly enough, was not distributed among those who had lost every­
thing through slavery, but to those who had gained from it. The
planters were compensated for the loss of their slaves, while the
unfortunate Negroes themselves got nothing. But in spite of this,
they doubtless considered themselves well off compared with their
fellow victims in Brazil, who had to wait until 1888 for emancipa­
tion, a move so unpopular in Brazil that it cost Dom Pedro II his
throne.
The Brazilian Emperor's imperial cloak with the toucan's maw
was one of the few royal robes not represented by George Bailey's
cavalcade of Kings Go Forth, which moved up Gatacre Street in
contingents to converge on the main Carnival stream. The elaborate
head-dresses and clever stylizing of historical costumes, the pre­
occupation with royalty and ancient civilizations were wonders I
had to see to believe. And not only is such effort and time and
money spent on the Carnival of the Christian calendar, but similar
expenditure is made for Hosein in the Muslim calendar. Sadly, both
celebrations are ephemeral, leaving hardly a wrack behind, except for
discarded gilded masks or the tinsel mosque tadjahs. Memorials and
mosques for the dead, however, have a permanence not enjoyed by
the skilful and beautiful things made for Carnival and Hosein. The
dead are housed in or under solid affairs which, though long-lasting,
do not indulge in such a wide or inventive range of taste. Where
once the Lapeyrouse sugar factory stood, there now lies the Lapey­
rouse Cemetery, which, being half-way between Gatacre Street and
Victoria Square, allows the sugar-refining Frenchman an unde­
served place in posterity. The cemetery is notable because of its
splendid trees and the pleasant, garden atmosphere made by its
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samans and palms screening the omnipresent hills beyond the

Savannah.
The Lapeyrouse Cemetery also has an Eastern flavour, not only
because of the frangipani trees which are so much part of Eastern
graveyards, but also because of the marble and stone testimonies of
those who believe in the Koran or the epics of Ramayana and the
Bhagavad-gita. At one side of the cemetery a Muslim tomb stands,
built of marble and bronze in the form of a small mosque complete
with corner minarets and bulbous domes grouped around a central
dome, topped by the crescent of Islam and a bronze plated circular
door surrounded by curious Art Nouveau lettering. On the next plot
is a Christian chapel, where hornets' nests hang from the soffit twelve
feet above the door. The individual tombs are not so phantasmagoric
as some I have encountered in cemeteries around the world. Lapey­
rouse Cemetery certainly could not compare with the Recoleta
Cemetery in Buenos Aires with its tomb lifts and glittering mosaics,
which all add up to a twentieth-century version of the Nile Pyramids.
Nevertheless, like its Argentinian cousin, the Lapeyrouse is laid out
like a city, with all the paved roads given street names, making it not
so much a necropolis as a necro-suburb. The most inspiring thing
about this cemetery, however, is that all nationalities and creeds are
admitted and actually agree to be cheek by jowl, the lion lying down
with the lamb. Here are Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus,
Buddhists and Confucians, Japanese and Chinese, Turks and
Cypriots, Lebanese and Syrians, Dutch and French, Spanish and
Portuguese, Indonesian merchants and Irish nuns, Englishmen and
Germans.
One of the grave-diggers, of East Indian descent, saw me walking
round and insisted on appointing himself my guide. After telling me
'I can go down nine feet', he rushed me off to see the nuns' com­
munal grave, followed by the suitably grand Siegert memorial. This
was the order of preference taken by another willing guide later in
my stay. The guides naturally attached importance to 'J. G. B.
Siegert, Doctor of Medicine and Surgery, a native of Prussia, Ger­
many, who died at Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, in the year 1870 at the
age of 74 years'. What the large memorial did not say was that
Ciudad Bolivar had previously been called Angostura, the house-
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hold name which, together with calypso and the Pitch Lake and
tree-oysters, completed the family of unique Trinidadian possessions.
Dr. Siegert had originally compounded his now world-famous bitters
while serving as Surgeon-General of the Military Hospital at Angos­
tura in the days of Simon Bolivar. The inimitable formula is still a
closely guarded secret, jealously kept by the doctor's descendants.
And what the estimable Prussian doctor had given Venezuelan
troops for stomach upsets and loss of appetite has become an essen­
tial ingredient in many modern cocktails, as well as an additive in
stews and ice-cream.
The doctor's memorial was erected by his sons, who transferred
the Angostura bitters manufacture to Trinidad in 1875. The triple­
arched arcaded affair ensconcing his bust is on the cemetery's Main
Street, and not far along is a full-blown Gothic temple with four­
light leaded windows and a fair ration of crockets, finials, cusps and
roundels, corner buttresses all enclosed by a Gothic iron fence. The
humble and meek who have not been exalted by fine mausoleums
and temples have often to be content with no more than miniature
versions of the residential dolls' houses just over the cemetery wall
in Woodbrook. These graves have tin roofs and wood fretwork and
glass-fronted altars with religious emblems and framed photographs
of the deceased. When passing the Lapeyrouse at night I always
looked to see if the few candles of night vigil had been lit on certain
graves, and sure enough the small symbol of dominion over death
burned comfortably and more steadily than the cemetery fireflies
which disappeared altogether on All Saints' Day, when this and all
other cemeteries throughout the island blaze with Christian candles.
Another feast associated with light is the Hindu commemoration
of Shri Lashmi, Goddess of Well-being. This is called Dwali, the
Festival of Lights. To see childhood fairy stories come to life is to
go to one of the island's predominantly Hindu villages as the three
days of Dwali come to an end; and to watch the wonder of houses
and gardens, roadsides and temples radiant with thousands of tiny
votive oil lamps called deyas.
Festoons of Mexican creeper trail over the Lapeyrouse Cemetery
wall and make a major attraction for bees. But bees are not the only
thing connecting this member of the buckwheat family with love. In
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spite of his Muslim-crescent and Christian-cross tattoos, his gold Star

of David and St. Christopher medal round his neck, Dolman had
superstitious beliefs about cemeteries and would not come in with
me. But he had nothing but approval for the strings of pink hearts of
the Mexican creeper's flowers.
'Spanish men call it cadena del amor,' he assured me.
Just at that time, however, Dolman was not given to talking much
about chains of love. He was unhappy because of Marcia. She had
been Dolman's steady girl-friend since last Carnival until without
any warning she went religious. Dolman was beside himself with
disgust as well as sorrow.
'Man,' he complained one day on our usual bench under the divi­
divi trees in Victoria Square, 'she no want Catholic religion or
Presbyterian religion as long as I knows her. Now she turned
Shouter religion. Man, I kill her.'
Of course, he had not the slightest intention of killing her, be­
cause he was still so in love with Marcia that he was more likely to
kill himself first. Eventually, Dolman begged me to go with him and
see his dusky beauty go through the waters of baptism up at the
famous Blue Basin in the mountains. For fear that Dolman would
do something violent, and because I had not yet visited that parti­
cular place, I agreed. I was used to such invitations, though the
traditions and names of the various sects and societies never ceased
to astonish me. In the week after Carnival, for instance, came the
consecration of Brother George Jones as High Priest of the Inde­
pendent United Order of Scottish Mechanics at their Star Temple
in Clarence Street. By mischance I missed the beautiful Marcia in
her baptismal clothes, because I did not return from the Atlantic
coast in time. All that remained of the ceremony when I got to the
Blue Basin next day were small stalagmites of wax where the previous
night's candles had illuminated the mountain forest and pools and
waterfall.
Whenever I was in Port-of-Spain I only went twice to the beach
at Maracas Bay, reached through gaps in the hills behind the city.
Carenage or the Blue Basin could be reached more conveniently and
quickly, for buses going there passed the end of Gatacre Street. The
Blue Basin had the added advantage of a walk through superb, un-
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frequented countryside and plantations up to the mountain foothills.

I caught the one which came first, the Carenage bus or the bus to
Diego Martin. Both went north out of the city for the first part of the
journey, and then the Diego Martin bus left the coastal road and
turned into the long, flat valley of the same name which ran in a fold
of the Northern Range. A string of villages once littered the valley
floor, but in modern times they have merged one into another, mak­
ing a large, formless dormitory for Port-of-Spain, which suffers from
the same problems of overspill as every large city.
Here and there along the way some of the older, more gracious
buildings have survived, such as the quaint, dull-red two-storey
empire period piece now occupied by a Government department. It
lies on the north side of the road, set well back behind a curiously
formal, almost treeless garden with a tin-roofed pavilion in the
centre. Although the pavilion looks like a bandstand, I could never
imagine what a bandstand was doing in such a remote place. The
house itself, trim with white-painted verandas extending all round
the building, has a steep roof. Steep pitches are unusual in Trinidad,
and this may have given the whole building and garden its dream­
like character, as if some modern Primitive had first created the
house on canvas, and then the real thing had been built by imitating
the painting.
When the bus stopped under trees in a side road off the main part
of the suburb it was possible to jump in a shared taxi and go up as
far as Beausejour. But this was to miss one of the finest walks to be
had in the vicinity of Port-of-Spain. When time was of no conse­
quence it was delightful to walk from the bus to the Blue Basin,
passing through long avenues of immortelle-shaded cocoa planta­
tions. Even on the hottest afternoon I used to walk, because the
plantation roads are flat and tunnel between trees where cool air
blows down from the mountains. This is not the wild scene of the
mountain forests, but a calmly ordered landscape. The long, per­
fectly straight avenues, intersecting at right-angles, the precise rows
of cocoa trees, equally spaced and all about the same height, have
the atmosphere of the large-scale formal French garden. It is as if
Le Notre had been there, taking time off from Versailles and Vaux­
le-Vicomte. And this, upon reflection, is not surprising in a part of
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the island particularly influenced by the French planters, and where,

in places like Blanchisseuse and the mountains round about, the
people still converse in a French patois and live in tiny settlements
with names like Beausejour.
And it was beautiful indeed to stroll in a leisurely way along those
avenues sheltered from the sun by the tall stately immortelles burn­
ing with incandescent blossoms. How complete a paradise this
isolated place would have been had I possessed an ear for perfect
pitch like Sibelius, who could tell in which keys songbirds sang!
What music his solemn northern ear would have heard along those
roads to Beausejour! There were many birds I had not heard else­
where. They trilled and rhapsodized, hidden in the depths of the
thick, dark groves. Before he went to study in Germany and ac­
quired the heavy Teuton tone he never afterwards lost, the young
Sibelius used to go alone into the Finnish forests and play his
violin, trying to catch the unalloyed music of birds. Here, near
Beausejour, in profound silence, he might have heard a sunnier, less
tragic music.
But for the eye, as well as the ear, there were delights in those
avenues, humming-birds, white-breasted emerald and ruby topaz
and the common emerald. Almost faster than the eye could follow,
these minute, jewel-like birds flashed over the tops of trees, their
iridescent bronze-greens and brilliant reds glittering like Christmas­
tree decorations.
Where the plantations stop, there are maize fields and citrus
groves, many of them hedged with Cordyline terminalis, called
boundary marks or garden vars. Some grow to twelve feet high
on slender stems. These are all dark green, so unlike the brilliant
red variety, dragon's blood, which are still used as boundary markers
elsewhere in Trinidad in the way that gospel oaks once defined the
limits of English parishes. Dragon's blood may also be planted to
ward off the evil eye.
I expected music in Port-of-Spain, but not in the country. So
when I got off the bus at Diego Martin I was pleasantly surprised to
see seven bounding, dancing teenagers armed with a guitar and im­
promptu percussion making a serenade in the sun. Although their
'Feelings of joy on arriving in the country' (as Beethoven prefaced
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his Pastoral Symphony) were clearly spontaneous, they sang and

leapt about like a troupe of professional performers. They rushed
on ahead of me. They gambolled like spring lambs, they marched
abreast, they danced in single file, they sang in groups, they broke
ranks, they jumped nimbly into ditches and out again. Their song
was a calypso with a chorus, a chant song by one section answered
by another. Once they broke into a fast run, leaping like the youths
of ancient Knossos, not once interrupting their dance-song. They
only halted twice. Once to make saucy remarks to a young girl com­
ing demurely in the opposite direction, and once to pick up an old
tin and a stick to beat it with, adding to the other tins and sticks of
their percussion. As the roads through the cocoa plantations were
straight I could follow them for quite a distance. And when they
finally danced themselves out of sight I could hear their music getting
fainter as they went up into the mountain forest.
This unrehearsed, modern choreography made me a little sensi­
tive to the fact that I was twice the age of those youngsters at Diego
Martin. The leisureliness of my stroll could hardly have become the
humming-bird swiftness of the singers. Whether I would or no, I
could not keep pace with the plantation troubadours, and was soon
alone on the road again except for a fiddle-string snake recently
flattened by a passing car. The snake's remains were being attended
to by a procession of ants.
This snake enjoyed the privilege of being the only one alive or
dead, outside captivity, I encountered during the whole of my stay
in Trinidad. I had hoped at least to glimpse a few of the thirty-seven
species which breed on the island. The snakes range from the tiny
white-faced worm to the twenty-five-foot-long water-boa known
locally as the houillia. Boa-constrictors are protected in Trinidad
from destruction by shooting. Although their nasty habit of squeez­
ing their victims to death in powerful coils of solid muscle can
involve human beings, the powers-that-be regard boas' enormous
consumption of vermin as worth their weight in gold. I was hardly
comforted the following week when a Port-of-Spain newspaper
spread a story and picture of downtown Broadway. A watchman
suddenly saw a twelve-foot-long boa-constrictor crawling out of
a drain by the pavement. A nonchalant-looking policeman was
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 THE GREAT GOD PAN

photographed stowing the boa in the boot of a car which took it to

the zoo.
When I emerged from the plantation avenues the sounds of farm
life reached me. I had not nearly reached Beausejour. The plaintive
cry of calves demanding to be fed, the sight of turkey cocks shim­
mering with passion, and men going home to dinner with field im­
plements over their shoulders could have been in an Ireland I
remembered. Or almost, for some of the men were carrying yams
and sweet potatoes and fresh-cut bunches of green bananas, things
which even the most loquacious Irish storyteller could hardly claim
as the produce of his native isle. Also, a girl went by from picking
coffee. She was very young indeed, but, as she walked, she happily
suckled a child.
The road began to rise gently and human habitations appeared,
some quite smart, Port-of-Spain type bungalows complete with car
ports with cars in them. Then a rough shed of open planks and a
tin roof stood by the road bearing a notice 'Beausejour Village
Council Temporary Meeting Centre. Built 19th January 1964.' The
only sign of life about it were four cows tethered to the trees. At
Beausejour the paved road ended and a dusty track ascended the
mountains thereafter. Everyone I asked said 'straight on' for the
Blue Basin. I hardly thought this a fair direction when the mountain
track promptly proceeded to twist and wind and sprout side tracks
and junctions. Undaunted, I trudged through ochre dust that
glittered with minute particles of a mineral which shone like silver
or mica. Immediately at the edges of this road the undergrowth
sprang up, climbing up almost sheer on one side and dropping
almost sheer on the other. Occasionally the forest had been hacked
away at sharp bends in the road and the northern landscape sud­
denly came into sight. Majestic vistas of the valley floor showed the
plantations lying far below, a dark green-blue dusted by the fire of
the blossoming immortelles. These shade trees swept across the flat
plantations to the astonishingly vertiginous mountainsides and their
drapery of forest which, as everywhere in the Northern Range, grew
with violent, unrestrained life right up to the highest peaks and
ridges.
I had, of course, missed the path leading to the Blue Basin. The
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 THE GREAT GOD PAN

sound of rushing, falling water and the yelps of the seven dancing
youths came across from flanks of the forest quite clearly. But every
time I thought I was getting nearer the farther away the Blue Basin
seemed to get. Except for the splendour of the views, I would have
begun to feel a certain amount of sympathy with the victims of
Prospero's Ariel. And an aerial I eventually came to, on the top.
From here was yet another astonishing panorama of this north­
western extremity of Trinidad, with a bland, blue Caribbean im­
prisoning the land, and in the distance, rising in a haze that softened
outline and obscured detail, the mountains of Venezuela.
The people at the radio station lent their binoculars for me to
scan the view. They laughed when I told them about the Blue Basin.
I had struggled on foot up the entire mountain track for what seemed
like hours in the baking midday sun, when I could have reached, and
later did reach, the Blue Basin only a few minutes' walk out of
Beausejour. The radio station crew told me how to find the narrow
path which dived into the undergrowth off the main track. Prospero
is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare's most tedious characters, but
his tantrums are benignity itself compared with my own temper as
I sweated once more on the downward track, getting dustier and
hotter at every step.
I reached the almost-hidden path down near Beausejour, followed
its erratic humps and turns, listening to the sound of running water
getting louder. Just at that moment as I drew near, every pore open
and sweat trickling all over me, the sound of the waterfall and the
pools was the sweetest music of the whole day. Full fathom five, I
thought, and then burst upon the chasm and the water and the flat
rocks glistening and the waterfall tumbling . . . and I was in. The
cold deep water gave me a new body. I stayed in the water until the
coolness and freshness seeped into me.
My first somewhat traumatic experience of the Blue Basin proved
not at all a distorted vision and I went many times afterwards to
swim in the round pool where the waterfall fell. The pool lay as
though at the bottom of a circular well, whose sides were rocks and
hanging forest and trailing lianas and prehensile heliconias. Above,
was a disc of blue sky, higher even than the tree-tops 150 feet above
the water. Between the creepers hanging or climbing to display
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 THE GREAT GOD PAN

foliage slashed and pierced in extravagant patterns immense blue

butterflies drifted drunkenly, uncertain of destination or purpose.
Even at midday the sun barely filters into this cool cylinder of
rock and vegetation, so that the pool never warms from its rays. At
noon the water is more green than blue, changing colour near the
waterfall, where it is very deep. This upper pool, which in turn
sluices and tumbles between rocks to feed lesser and lower pools, is
full of 'sweet-water fish' and fat tadpoles lying in hundreds along the
water's edge. Lower down, where the water overflows, the high
banks convert it into a fast-flowing stream gurgling in and out of the
rock pools. This is the place to which men and boys from the village
come after work, equipped with soap to wash themselves. But during
the three hours I stayed at the Blue Basin on that first, hot, exasperat­
ing day nobody came up to swim in the circular, upper pool except
two Hindu boys. They lived near by, and because of all the exercise
they took each boy had a slim figure like an oiled mahogany carving.
It was these two boys who pointed out the candle-wax remains of
the previous night's Spiritual Baptists' immersion ceremonies. They
said the Blue Basin was a favourite locale for Shouters to be bap­
tized. The Shouter religion demanded 'living water' to represent the
River Jordan, and the believers could hardly find any water more
living than the waterfall and cool embracing pools of the Blue
Basin.
Even at noon the place, for all its beauty, had a weird atmosphere.
At night, gloomily lit by candles and a few remote stars at the top of
the chasm, or better still, at the popular hour before dawn, the Blue
Basin must have provided an ideal setting for a spiritual experience.
Like so many people who joined the Shouters, Marcia received her
summons to a new life in the form of a vision. The prophetic trance
had led her to the local temple teacher who had the power to inter­
pret visions and dreams. Like so many of the evangelical sects, the
Shouters placed emphasis on a strict code of behaviour. To train for
baptism Marcia had broken up her relationship with poor Dolman.
When the 'spirit moves' the Shouters, whether to 'speak in tongues',
pray or sing, they do so with violent passion. Just as the seven
youths from the bus danced and sang and ran and skipped as the
calypso music awakened their bodies, so the Shouters are seized in
llO
 THE GREAT GOD PAN

their services, becoming 'possessed' and singing Sankeys, those

evangelical hymns from the Sankey and Moody hymn-book.
The Shouter religion, however, contains activities which would
shock evangelicals, for there is a dabbling in spiritualism and more
than a dash of mysticism to satisfy the Negro's genius for those
experiences nowadays described as extra-sensory. Some Shouters
indulge in extreme methods of working up passions. Novices to the
religion have initiation ceremonies which, depending how you look
at it, could be called simply a release of inhibitions or obscenity. The
novice, blindfolded, can sometimes be subjected to floggings, the
whole ceremonies attended by a complicated symbolism of colours
and by rigorous fastings and mournings to get rid of old sins.
Certainly the Shouters roused the ire of the imperial British, who
must have thought it all very un-English and smacking too much of
pagan Africa. At any rate, the Prohibition Ordinance of 1917 forbade
Shouters to meet or go through the initiation ceremonies.
I could imagine Marcia coming along the pitch-dark road with
other baptismal candidates in their robes, holding lighted candles
and marching with the church members to the lusty singing of suit­
able Sankeys. Candle in hand, each candidate would have been
immersed three times in the 'living water' of the Blue Basin, watched
by all the Elders, the Temple Preachers and Teachers, the Spiritual
Leaders and the Medicine Healers, Prophets and Apostles, the
Pumpers who have their ears attuned to Mother Earth and the
Surveyras who kept the spirit vampires at bay, the Divine Messengers
and Astronomers, Fortune Tellers who read the flesh and Queen
Teachers of the spirit.
I stood by the circular pool at the Blue Basin, looking down at the
piles of candle wax on the rocks which the Indian youths pointed out.
'They get real big shakes,' one of them said as he described the
'spirit possession' of the Shouters' bodies. But his own brown body
leapt through the air again, as lithe and muscular as a young salmon,
as though he could with ease take the great silver leap of the water­
fall. Twelve hours earlier the Blue Basin had been 'living water' for
the Shouters. Now, to the two Hindu boys, it was the water of life
as they cut through the balmy air, disappeared below the surface and
then climbed out to dive from even higher rocks.
111
 ti 4 It
Lake District
'Attendant Mohammed, please come to the office,' cried the loud­
speakers.
'Excuse me, sir, are you a missionary?' asked an old Negro.
'One thousand dollars to be won every week,' intoned an even
older one. 'Big money to be won. Every week in the Tobago Sweep.'
Big money to be won, but in the meantime the bringer of such
glad tidings would not say no to 'a few cents for a cup of coffee'.
Again the babble of voices was drowned by the strident blare of the
loudspeakers.
'Will passengers travelling to Paradise go to platform two.'
This scene was a typical one in the downtown Port-of-Spain bus
terminus. Because I rode on the buses I was, ipso facto, poor. And
since I was not only poor but a white man carrying my own dusty
bag, I must therefore be a missionary. I was asked this on several
occasions, and as it was far too complicated to explain otherwise, I
answered with non-committal grunts. When I had no dusty travel­
ling-bag and was not actually seen in connection with public trans­
port, my appearance in some out-of-the-way country places was
greeted with questions which raised my social status from poverty
to riches. Was I Ringo of the Beatles? people asked, for that famous
young man was currently on holiday in Tobago. This was easier to
refute. But such inquiries, whether about Bibles or Beatles, were
always kindly meant and served as opening moves towards a new
acquaintance.
Buses whose routes originated from the Port-of-Spain terminus
were prone, euphemistically speaking, to irregularities which, in the
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 LAKE DISTRICT

heat, did not leave nerves and tempers in the best state of agreeable­
ness. Delays and overcrowding could, if not endured in the true
spirit of adventure, lead to an eschewing of the bus service altogether.
However, once well away from the metropolis, and spinning along
country roads with welcome winds rushing in the open windows, the
bus became, after all, a civilized and not unexciting mode of travel,
and reliable also in the sense that what went out of Port-of-Spain
usually came back the same day.
San Fernando in the south-west of the island was served by both
stopping and express buses, and I had never travelled on anything
where 'express' meant more exactly what that word implies. San
Fernando bound, then, I boarded the bus and was lucky enough to
find a window seat. My fellow traveller was a lean but not hungry­
looking Negro who was dignity personified. He was grizzled and
elderly and possessed of that old-world gentlemanly politeness which
American producers find invaluable for films about the Deep South
of the last century, where Negro family retainers move quietly
through white-pillared halls serving the white-skinned masters with
the deference which a superior race expects as its due. I was not at
all surprised when my companion said his name was Solomon, 'jus'
like the Governor-General'-who was Sir Solomon Hochoy, of
Chinese origins.
Thus introduced we settled for the journey, Solomon with tooth­
less mouth ajar and eyes twinkling as he acknowledged salutes from
friends. His great joy in life was a pocket transistor radio. 'You like
to listen for the cricket score?' he asked generously.
Two students behind us were already leaning over, elbows on the
seat, trying to catch the summary. Between these vital statistics of
cricket and other sports bulletins or programmes like 'Nurse Jane's
Advice', or, 'Back to the Bible', there were the Death Announce­
ments. These exercised a morbid fascination over me, so that when­
ever I was in the vicinity of a radio I found myself straining to catch
the repeat broadcasts of the Death Announcements which came over
several times a day, and which on the other radio station were called
Obituaries.
The bus now left the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, built by the
U.S. Army during the Second World War as an approach to one of
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 LAKE DISTRICT

their bases, and entered the more recently opened Princess Margaret
Highway leading down to the south of the island. For the first four
miles of this new road the seaward land comprises the Caroni Swamp.
This marshland and mangrove covers ten thousand acres, part of it
kept as a sanctuary for the swamp-loving scarlet ibis. I had been to
Caroni the year the sanctuary was set up, going by boat in the breed­
ing season when the magnificent birds hung insubstantial nests in
large colonies from the branches of the mangrove trees.
To the patient bird-watcher there can be few sights more specta­
cular around the Caribbean than the sundown splendour of the
scarlet ibis flocking home to roost in the green mangrove. I did not
revisit the Swamp on my last visit, because the hunting season, which
went from the beginning of October to the end of March, was in full
swing, when outside the sanctuary thirty wild duck, five scarlet ibis,
five heron either black-crowned night, boatbilled, or yellow-crowned
night, might be bagged in one day with a relatively cheap hunting
licence.
The nature-lover, however, would doubtless want to avail him­
self of a visiting permit from the Chief Game Warden, for apart from
the ibis colonies, the many herons, both American and snowy egrets
can well be seen if the Swamp is penetrated deeply enough. Here
also are bittern, snipe, plovers and many kinds of duck. Friends told
me that Mr. Oudit Nanan of Bamboo Settlement, No. 1 Princess
Margaret Highway, was a most patient and clever guide to bird-life
in the Caroni Swamp.
Birdless, therefore, and at that time of day also tree-oysterless, I
sped in the bus along the highway southwards. My neighbour
Solomon succumbed to the soporific effects of cricket scores and
obituaries and went sound asleep, leaning on the seat in front. But
the passing landscape, more than the rush of fresh air at the window,
kept me wide awake. Although San Fernando was thirty-seven miles
to the south, I wished in some ways that I had taken a stopping bus
that would pull up at the crossroads, where young boys sell enormous
heaps of prawns. The countryside is flat, mostly given over to farm­
land, where houses stand on stilts amid palm groves and banana
trees. Red and white Hindu prayer flags flutter among the high
greenery, like picadors' lances. Overhead, fat Baroque clouds sailed
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 LAKE DISTRICT

unhurriedly across the plain towards the soft blue Northern Range
in the background.
Men and women work side by side in the fields, many of which
are used as rice paddies in the rainy season. At this time of year they
were vegetable gardens surrounded on all sides by apparently end­
less sugar fields. A visitor newly escaped from the worst winter
months of Europe and North America must always be astonished
not only at the amount but the quality and variety of vegetables pro­
duced in Trinidad's so-called dry season. Salads are not made from
forced greenhouse tomatoes, but from succulent marglobes and
manaluices which grow throughout the year. Green and brown
mignonette lettuce travels to Port-of-Spain and comes out of the
supermarkets fresh and crisp, and though no rain falls for weeks cu­
cumbers and watercress missed by land crabs never fail to appear.
Docile and bulky water-buffaloes, encrusted in coats of mud,
grazed with ewes and goats along the roadsides. Flocks of sedate
egrets followed the field herds. What appeared to be undernourished
rooks were the rice-grackles, endowed with the Latin name Scaphi­
dura oryzivora oryzivora. Although they were gleaning, the rice­
grackles behaved in a very lordly manner and moved like rooks
across meadowland.
Hammocks hung in the open space between the houses' stilts,
hammocks home-made for the most part from flour bags or sugar
sacks. Half an hour before midday many of the hammocks already
bulged with sleepers who had been at work since five or six o'clock
in the morning. This land was an utterly different land from the
mountain country and the northern seaboard. An ambience of peace
and timelessness possessed the flat plains. The twentieth century
only obtruded when Pepsi Cola and Old Oak Rum signs appeared.
Long, uninterrupted stretches of country stretched between the
cane fields and reached to the horizon almost like the sea.
The Caroni and Naparima Plains are Trinidad's biggest cane­
growing areas. More than half the crop is reaped by one firm, Caroni
Limited, which also manufactures 90 per cent of the island's total
crop. But in spite of this near-monopoly many thousands of small
sugar farmers operate in the country, and bring and sell their cut
cane to the factories.
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 LAKE DISTRICT

When I went down to San Fernando, the dry season had advanced
sufficiently to mature the waving cane and would soon bring on the
harvesting of the island's principal crop. When people in Port-of­
Spain see the night sky reddened by unnaturally delayed sunsets, or
find black ash descending on their gardens, they know the first of
the sugar harvest has begun. This is called 'crop-over burning',
when the sugar fields are burnt to get rid of unwanted trash. I saw
such fires raging through green cane from the bus windows as we
rushed to San Fernando. This burning is a signal for frantic activity.
The burnt stems have to be cut and rushed to the mills to be crushed
and boiled within thirty-six hours of being set on fire.
Modern factories with the most up-to-date machinery deal with
the important sugar output, and cane in the fields is forced to high
yields by use of chemical fertilizers, and saved from insect depreda­
tions by sprays and powders. Yet in spite of these modern mechanical
and agricultural devices, which even extend to special ships for
carrying the bulk sugar across the world, the small farmer and his
beasts of burden still play a part in cane cultivation. I could see
caravans of heavy wooden carts pulled by mules and horses, oxen
and buffaloes, waiting to be loaded after the sweating cane-cutters
had felled the burnt stems. This could have been a pastoral scene
from Biblical times. Somehow, the day-and-night running of the
factories' machinery had not yet swallowed it whole.
But with its history of blood and slavery perhaps sugar is not the
best subject for romantic idylls. The presence of so many Hindus
and Muslims driving their farm carts, and the batteries of prayer
flags outside dwellings, are constant reminders of how the sub­
continent of India came to the rescue of the Trinidadian sugar
trade. Long before Emancipation the Government of England
realized that the valuable sugar estates could not be run indefinitely
on Negro slave labour. This was neither humane feeling nor moral­
ity, but plain industrial fact. Slave labour was highly uneconomical
and its continued use threatened to run sugar off the world markets.
Without slave labour sugar would never have been produced at all.
Yet it was an uneconomical form of labour at best, although it had,
of course, amassed fortunes for planters and brought prosperity of a
kind to the island. The Negro, however, found himself in a para-
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 LAKE DISTRICT

doxical situation at the Emancipation Bill of 1833. In one and the

same legal breath he was told he was free but that he must also for a
miserable pittance serve a long so-called 'apprenticeship' to his
former taskmaster. Victorian Englishmen obsessed with notions of
morality seldom made improvements in public morality which in­
volved them in loss of money. It was not at all out of character that
the high moral purposes of emancipation coincided with the rapidly
decreasing economic efficiency of the slave system. Doubtless the
emancipators thought their work done with the passing of the Act.
The sweet name of freedom, of course, was sweet as an abstract
moral concept. The former slaves, however, faced with the abstract
turned concrete, not unnaturally remained as discontented as they
had been previously. From every part of the island the newly freed
'apprentices' converged on Port-of-Spain, demanding to know what
all the millions of pounds expended by the British Government had
done for them in terms of freedom. Such demonstrations were not
to be tolerated. Although there was no drunk or disorderly conduct,
the crowds laughed openly at the Governor's defence of Whitehall's
conditions. Such disrespect to the King's representative could, of
course, hardly be allowed to pass unnoticed, so the Riot Act was
read. The troops were called out. Seventeen ringleaders were sen­
tenced to the familiar floggings and turns of hard labour. So much
for freedom in the glorious Empire which the young Victoria was
soon long to reign over.
This absurd state of affairs continued for many years. Notable
British authors were loud in their condemnations of the Emancipa­
tion Bill. The bigoted and vociferous Thomas Carlyle tub-thumped
on the divine right of white over black men. In the November 1849
edition of Frazer's Magazine he wrote his Occasional Discourse on
the Nigger Question. 'Not a square inch of soil in these fruitful isles,
purchased by British blood, shall any black man hold to grow
pumpkins for him, except on terms that are fair to the British.' Fair
to the British! Not many drops of British blood had been spent on
the conquest of Trinidad. But a good many pints of Negro blood
had gone into the soil to make the island fruitful. Carlyle's only
solution was to shed more Negro blood under the reintroduction of
slavery for perpetuity.
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Another eminent Victorian who turned the weight of his intellect

upon the Caribbean at this time was James Anthony Froude. This
Professor of Modern History at Oxford, a man of power and in­
fluence, bestirred himself to see the scene of the crime at first hand
and he actually travelled out to Trinidad and other islands. Described
as the 'most prominent English historian of his day', this man earned
at least some fame because the West Indians, with their sharp wit,
incorporated him into their vocabulary where his genius for euphem­
ism and missing the essential point of a situation became known as
'Froudacity'. Anthony Trollope also made a lightning island-hop­
ping trip to the West Indies and concluded that emancipation had
ruined the islands. His visit led to the phrase 'A-Trolloping we will
go'.
The great Froude, supposedly writing for posterity and sup­
posedly putting the whole Caribbean situation into proper and im­
partial perspective, was hardly less jaundiced than Carlyle. One of
his visit's main purposes was to see how the Negroes ruled themselves
in the Republic of Haiti. He went ashore one morning before break­
fast to begin his serious research. Precisely one hour later he was
back again on board ship, the whole country, its people and tradi­
tions sufficiently observed for him to pour forth his pronouncements
and prejudices. Being such an important person, the meal on board
ship could not be served until his return. But in his own words,
'Before breakfast could be thought of or any other thing I had to
strip and plunge into a bath and wash away the odour of the great
Negro Republic of the West which clung to my clothes and skin.'
Professor Froude's pathological distaste for the West Indian
could hardly have derived from pigmentation alone, for possibly
greater than his hatred of Africans and Asians was his hatred of the
Irish, and, worse still, his hatred of Roman Catholics. This pompous
empire-builder posing as sociologist was hardly the person to stop
over in Trinidad and make profound statements on the island's
future. But his book, The English in the West Indies, which resulted
from his trip, was good in a way he never suspected. It gave an
excellent picture of how Crown Colony government operated with­
out consulting the electorate.
Froude attended one of Trinidad's most important political
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 LAKE DISTRICT

gatherings up on the Savannah, and came to the conclusion that half

the crowd had 'probably collected to see His Excellency at the
wicket'. The Professor of Modern History made no mention of the
Negro and Indian discontent with the voting system. Froude's
pomposity was so preposterous that he himself had eyes only for the
sight of the Governor condescending to play in a public cricket
match.
Froude's hasty decisions and completely distorted picture of what
was really happening, not only in Trinidad but throughout the West
Indies, were so outrageous that they did not pass without critics. J. J.
Thomas from Trinidad wrote his splendid Froudacity: West Indian
Fables by James Anthony Froude. Thomas dared to deflate the
puffed-up Professor and to expose his specious nonsense for what
it was, a thing one hardly did to giants of the Establishment in those
days. Going even further, Thomas dared also to enter the portals of
Government House itself, with his pen at least, and condemned in
round terms the many men who had been sent to rule Trinidad with
iron fists and empty heads. Typical of these was Sir Henry Irving,
whose scandalous truncation of the Arima railway line was as well
known as his personal loathing for any coloured person, whether
Negro or East Indian. And there were plenty of both Hindus and
Muslims in Trinidad by the time Irving went to Government House
in 1874.
By that year the iron rings which can still be seen let into the
quays of Liverpool Docks, were empty of captured slaves awaiting
shipment to the colonies. Trinidad's sugar planters were demanding
new sources of cheap labour. Whitehall was, for once, quick with an
answer, for it knew the valuable sugar market must be maintained.
In those days, as now, India was overpopulated, and Whitehall said
that since slavery was no longer legal, why not lure Indians across
the world with tempting jobs in the cane fields at $2.40 a month.
Women, of course, would not be paid such a princely sum as the
men, but this could be offset by the promise of a free passage home
to India again for all the family, after working for only five years in
the sugar fields of Trinidad. For those Indians who decided to stay
in Trinidad a free plot of land awaited them after the five years.
To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, starvation wonderfully clears the
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mind, and off went the eager Indians to their own dream of a rupee
El Dorado. This system of indentured labour was begun in 1844. It
continued on a similar basis of backbreak and sweat for a pittance
until the First World War. Then, with the ungrateful response to
British rule that seemed so strangely common in the Empire, the
Indian Legislative Council attacked the indentured labour contracts
as being little more than a form of slavery.
By 1916 many thousands oflndians had settled in Trinidad. Free
passages home to the sub-continent were all very well, but often
there was nothing to go back for. A span of zebra cattle and personal
effects were not the only possessions the more prosperous of the
Hindus and Muslims brought with them from India. The pride of
every Hindu heart was his caste-mark, even though most of the
people belonged to the lower castes, the Sudras. Indians who
accepted indentured labour in Trinidad automatically went down a
caste degree. To go back to India and redeem themselves would cost
more in pundits' fees than they had saved. So they stayed, willing to
undertake the plantation work which the Negro not surprisingly
hated, and clung for dignity to their caste-marks, believing them­
selves indelibly stamped as superior beings from an ancient civiliza­
tion. Their five-year term in the sugar fields served, they took up
small farms. Around their villages temples and mosques sprang up
and their calendars of holy days and festivals became part of the
island's way of life.
Other immigrants also arrived and stayed. In 1834 and 1846 many
Portuguese from Madeira and the Azores fled to Trinidad because
of religious persecution, but their fair skin did not save them the
planters' wrath or whip. Denied even Christian burial, the survivors
sent a petition to the Governor of Trinidad which read, 'Men,
women and children, have suffered the greatest misery and oppres­
sion on the several estates where they have been forced to work far
beyond their strength by coercion of the whip, without proper
shelter at night or adequate food during the day. Few are left to
tell their tale of woe.' There were even fewer people prepared to
listen to their tale of woe.
As far back as 1806 labourers had come from China, and immi­
grants came continuously from other islands. Long-established
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French planters escaped to the valleys of the Northern Range when

the Negro insurrection swept Haiti. Scottish merchants and English
officials in pith helmets vied with each other in architectural taste
around the fashionable Queen's Park. And sallow-complexioned
Venezuelans in wide-brimmed sombreros came to spend exile in
Trinidad, lost in memories of confiscated haciendas and town
quintas in Caracas. Not all were lucky like the Siegert family, which
had been able to bring the greater part of the family fortune nicely
secured with the closely guarded recipe for Angostura bitters.
Traders came from Syria and Corsica, nuns and priests from Ireland.
And in the days of Nazi persecution in Germany, hounded Jews
found a promised land in Trinidad. To be a Trinidadian was to have
the blood of one or many of these races, it was to be the heir of one
or many of these nations and cultures and religions old and new, it
was to have a dim psychic consciousness of the degradations of
slavery, of the fraudulence of indentured labour, of the indignities
and absurdities of Crown Colony government. Yet to be a Trinidad­
ian was also to be in the mid-twentieth-century part of an emergent
nation alloyed from many divergent elements, yet able to venture on
an autonomous existence free of many evils which affiict other parts
of the world.
It would be wrong to claim that Trinidad is a paradise without
problems. Rather it is a paradise with problems. And since hope in
the future is a driving force in a man, whether he is a slave or free,
the young men of modern Trinidad still have their dreams of finding
El Dorado. But they seek it, not in the rain-forests of South America
but in the rainy streets of England. Many of the youngsters I talked
to were discontented with Trinidad and its limitations. Their rela­
tives in England had unsettled them with hints of 'big money'.
Brothers worked in North Country coal-mines, or on the railways in
the Midlands, or sisters living in the ghettoes of London eked an
existence hidden from the light of day in the Underground stations.
There was nothing I could say. What could be said to young men
who, like all young men everywhere, want to make their fortune in
the world, and who feel that if they stay at home they will not make
it? In the warmth and colour and brilliant sunshine and happiness of
Trinidad it was difficult to paint a convincing picture of England as
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it really is for the West Indian immigrant, a grey, damp country of

high wages and higher prices, of bad housing, of the Englishman's
inherent xenophobia, of the colour bar, unofficial, illegal, insidious
and real.
I thought on these things as I looked from the bus window going
down to San Fernando. How different was this land, different from
any English scene of either town or country. This part of Trinidad
was marked with contrasts. There were tractors like specks on rolling
plains and women with cutlasses in maize plots. Morning glory
rioted over old shacks side by side with new concrete villas already
disappearing under yellow clouds of allamanda. Catholic convents
stood next to conventicles called Church of the Nazarene, Hindu
temples were as exotic as the gardens in which they confronted the
horned moon of Islam. Yet in all the hundreds of communities, from
the island's Northern Range to the Trinity Hills of the south which
Columbus had sighted, there were other clusters of blue burgeoning
with vigour and life in the sun like morning glory. These were not
flowers but children who were not less beautiful or colourful than
flowers. Instead of tumbling over garden walls and hedges, the
children tumbled in the playgrounds and fields of the village schools,
the government primaries, the private secondaries, Muslim nurseries
under mango trees, Sacred Heart colleges under palm groves.
Wherever I went in Trinidad and saw schoolchildren I found the
same immaculate uniform, if uniform is the right way to describe
the impeccably washed and ironed blue shirts and khaki shorts of
the boys and the girls looking neat and nimble-o in every high
degree in cotton dresses.
Though extremely well-behaved, the schoolchildren were full of
life and impudence, and clearly did not get up to any less mischief
than children anywhere. But it remained a mystery to me how they
always managed to look as band-box new at the end of the day as
they did at the beginning when proud mothers sent them out as
smart as guardsmen. I thought the uniforms an admirable idea, for
not only did such smart clothes express respect for the schools which
were, after all, the key to Trinidad's future survival as a nation, but
more importantly the crisp uniforms served to camouflage some of
the differences to which children are particularly sensitive. Because
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the children dressed alike nobody could distinguish the son of the
cane-cutter from the son of the bank manager, or Hindu parents from
Baptists.
Solomon opened his friendly old eyes when the bus jogged to a
sudden halt for an invasion by women selling hot roti and youths
with paper twists of peanuts.
'Know Derby?' my neighbour asked.
This question had an effect of surrealist lack of connection with
that hot road in Trinidad. I had to focus my mind to far-away Derby.
It turned out, however, that the old man's granddaughter had trained
as a nurse there.
'State Registered,' he said in the same tone as a man might say of
a cow that it was tubercular-tested. Solomon was less pleased with his
granddaughter's subsequent career.
'She become a Seven Day woman and marry a Coolie man. Plenty,
plenty money.'
The idea of his clever granddaughter becoming a Seventh Day
Adventist and marrying a rich man of East Indian ancestors did not
appeal to Solomon, who was himself a Roman Catholic, as could be
judged by the much-used rosary hanging from his pocket and the
way he crossed himself devoutly each time we passed a church or
shrine. Christian shrines in this part of the island tend to be out­
numbered by Hindu ones, a fact underlined when the bus stopped
at Calcutta and women with saris, head veils, nose jewellery and
tattooed hands and feet came aboard. Though cold towards his
granddaughter's misguided religion, Solomon could not help but be
impressed by her husband's wealth, which above all else meant
freedom from any sort of manual work.
'Big estate,' Solomon repeated. 'Him not know how to hold
cutlass. He sit in gallery all day drinking Cocoa-Cola.'
'How big?' I asked, picturing a Gone-With-The-Wind-sized
plantation, stretching for miles beyond the eye's limit.
Solomon considered. 'Plenty, plenty acre,' he said.
I could hardly wait.
'Thirty acres, or forty,' he finally reckoned, 'or maybe fifty. But
all good coconut estate. Could git livin' plenty jus' on copra. Yes
man, plenty, plenty.'
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There was the faintest suggestion that somehow Solomon did not
approve of all this, yet had in part to admire, in part to envy. He
talked in a flow of images, coloured by Trinidadian idioms and
double negatives and the peculiarly effective use of especially bad
grammar to emphasize a point. And Solomon's voice, like many of
the islanders', was rich and reedy in tone, so that talk was a kind of
music, full of forgotten accents and dialects and sweet vowels never
to be heard in England, not even in the spoken sounds of Devon
and Cornwall country people. I wondered if the English spoken in
Trinidad is a direct survival of the common English spoken in the
eighteenth century, as some philologists believe to be the case with
certain accents in the U.S.A.
Hindu villages scattered across the region through which the San
Fernando bus hurried have their own kind of talk. And this quick,
quaint banter caught the ear and pen of another grandchild who
went to England, not one of old Solomon's, but the grandson of an
indentured labourer from India. V. S. Naipaul's novels should be
read for their own sake. A House for Mr. Biswas is, in anybody's
terms, a remarkable novel. Its portrait of Trinidad is vivid and the
vigorous, comical conversation captures Trinidadian talk exactly.
Mr. Biswas, Naipaul's hero, went on a kind of progress through a
number of extraordinary dwellings and menages until he finally
bought the odd structure in St. James, Port-of-Spain, where he lived
till he died. Like other admirers of A House for Mr. Biswas, in
Trinidad I tried to find the location of Mr. Biswas's triumphs and
defeats.
One of the ironies Mr. Biswas had to contend with was the sad
fact that his father's smallholding in the south of Trinidad was sold
for next to nothing in a family financial crisis. An oil strike was made
on the land and Mr. Biswas's family lost a fortune by a hair's breadth.
Perhaps many such situations had blessed and cursed the oil country
through which the bus now began to travel, where oil derricks were
taller than the tallest palms. Texaco signs took the place of shrines,
and at last the cane fields stopped and an aluminium oasis began
glittering with vast cylinders and towers and acres of parked cars.
In spite of desperate attempts to shore up the shaky sugar in­
dustry, mainly by shipping in the thousands of East Indians, the
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British Government watched the main industry of its Caribbean

territories slip through its fingers. By 1897 sugar was no longer king.
Paradoxically, the country whose industrial revolution a century
before had also revolutionized the whole world, was now too blinded
by self-satisfaction to save its sugar trade by industrial technology.
By the end of the nineteenth century Cuban sugar factories were
modernized and German chemists and industrialists had the economic
mass production of sugar from beet well under way. There was a glut
of sugar on the world market. Britain probably thought that God
would never side with the Dago and the Hun. But Britain thought
wrongly and the misguided idea that cheap Indian labour was better
than science and technology ran the British out of business. The
West Indies continued to produce sugar, but its importance in the
world market was no longer of any interest to Whitehall.
Britain's attitude to her Empire was nicely shown up by. sugar
figures: 63 per cent of all the sugar Britain imported in 1861 came
from the colonies. In 1900 this had plummeted down to 2· 5 per cent.
The Board of Trade recommended the cheapest market, putting its
pocket before its conscience. When the Germans learnt how to mass­
produce sugar from beet they dealt a death blow to the old, ineffi­
cient methods dating from the first days of slavery. The Palmiste
Estate in Trinidad illustrated the drastic effects of industrialized
production. In 1883 its four factories were kept busy turning the
cane from the plantation's 2,200 acres into muscavado sugar at
£14. 2s. 7d. a ton. But when the glut of beet sugar came the Palmiste
planter had to scrap his four old factories and introduce a modern
one to bring his price down to £11. 7s. 8d. But this outlay of capital
did not save the situation, for Trinidadian sugar simply could not
compete in price with European subsidized beet sugar.
Interest did not revive until Trinidad's oil was being produced in
sufficient quantities to make the Admiralty prick up its ears on the
eve of the First World War. Trinidad became again rather more
than an unimportant pawn in the Board of Trade's game of chess.
When the first few wells spread to become hundreds, when scores
of companies clamoured for the rights of exploitation, yet another
kind of El Dorado seemed just within sight.
Major Albert Bridges of the Trinidad Constabulary summed up
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the situation in 1911: 'We need all the oil you can pump as fuel for
our battleships. Trinidad is the one oil-producing district under the
British flag. These fields are shifting the whole balance of political
power. Since these and others in Venezuela were discovered the
German Government has been making soundings all around Mar­
garita Island, which they say the Kaiser is trying to get as a naval
station. The British Admiralty is planning to beat them out by
establishing a huge naval base at Port-of-Spain.' So that just over
three centuries after the British Navy under Sir Walter Raleigh
burnt the island's Spanish capital an incomparably more powerful
British fleet was sailing in to protect its valuable oil assets.
Trinidad's geological formations are as varied and as unpredict­
able as the island's people. In the south around the oil regions, the
birdwatcher, for instance, may find himself suddenly on the edge of
a mud-volcano in the undergrowth. He will soon appreciate the
kinds of forces that are still at work deep beneath the green valleys.
There must have been a number of astonished oil technicians in
1936 when one of their derricks at Barrackpore, complete with
drilling rig, was swallowed whole by a new crater. Grapling devices
and tubing a hundred yards long could not reach the submerged
steel tower.
Oil towns like Pointe-a-Pierre are more fabulous after dark than
any Arabian Nights' city imaginable. The cylinders and towers of
tubes, the silver drums and domes are hung with thousands of
lamps, and above them all, flapping like flags, are the blackberry-and­
custard yellow and purple flames of burning waste gases. Castles in
the medieval landscape must have looked like these oil refineries,
their round strong forms contrasting boldly with the land and the
small houses scattered beneath their walls, as these in the south of
Trinidad, where the houses and small farms begin immediately be­
yond the refinery's gates. By day the silver castles are no less romantic
and not without hints of Africa. Beyond the supermarkets and
surgically clean residences built for the oil-company employees, and
beyond the 'Exclusive Building Sites' for sale under street banners
announcing a 'Grand Evangelical Gospel Crusade by Nelson Sammy
from Canada', Negresses sit vending their peeled oranges and home­
made cakes, dipping into the little wooden churns in which they
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make ice-cream. The sea is close and there are boys selling bundles
of crabs whose claws they have neatly tied with strips of palm leaf.
After some heated and humorous bargaining which went on until
the bus was on the point of departure again, old Solomon brought a
pair of large crabs. His eyes shone.
'For the Sunday calaloo,' he said happily.
His eyes closed momentarily as he anticipated the crab soup which
comes to Trinidad's Sunday table as inevitably as roast beef and
Yorkshire pudding to the English table. Although I had eaten the
delicious calaloo over the years throughout the Caribbean, Solomon
concluded I had not tasted the genuine thing. Because it was only
Friday morning, I asked the old man if his crabs would keep fresh
until Sunday.
'Not good to eat right away,' he explained, 'but keep alive and
purge plenty plenty with peppers. They like bad things too bad.'
When thoroughly cleaned the crabs are boiled and the meat
cooked with split peas and onions, grated coconut, the dasheen tops
which give it a spinach taste, and the ochroes which impart the
faintest texture and flavour of slippery elm. The thick, green soup
which results is unbelievably delicious and unlike any other soup or
fish chowder. Perhaps this is a recipe the Africans brought with
them in slave days. Dasheen, an essential ingredient of calaloo,
originated in the East Indies and the large, heart-shaped, peltate
leaves resemble the much smaller spinach leaf. Dasheen is principally
cultivated for its tubers, but bundles of the leaves are found in all
the city's supermarkets no less than in smallholdings down country
lanes were 'Dasheen For Sale' notices can be seen frequently.
Once away from Port-of-Spain it is impossible to get far without
learning that country lanes and forest tracks are called 'traces', as
clearly marked as official signs everywhere. Traces frequently have
fascinating names, though they may be no more than bridle-paths
into 'high woods', as virgin forest is termed. My favourite was in the
eastern part of San Fernando and simply known as The Coffee.
Solomon was most anxious to help me, but his own knowledge of
San Fernando was limited, for he was only there to make a family
visit. The place he directed me to was not the Y.M.C.A., where I had
intended stopping for a few days. My inquiry at the new concrete
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building made the woman cleaner grin. It was the Y.W.C.A. Further
inquiries revealed that the Y.C.A. with the M did exist, but at the
other end of the town, and in any case did not open until the nurses
got home from the hospital in the evening! The pantomime in the
Y.W.C.A. had put an edge to my appetite, and before the matter
of a bed should become even more complicated I went in search of
food, surprised that even in midday San Fernando in no way seemed
to slacken its intense and lively business, which somehow sharply
contradicted the steep-streeted town's appearance of being a hill
station like Murree in Pakistan. This illusion was reinforced be­
cause the townspeople were mostly of Indian origin. In the first days
of the oil industry, with refineries and wells surrounding it, San
Fernando was a boom town. But when the boom tide receded it left
a litter of buildings no longer prosperous, that still remain shabby
among the town's smart new buildings and the sedately shaded
Harris Promenade.
I hurried past the important-looking Carnegie Library and
reached The Coffee. There I found Mahammed Cafetta, and for
thirty cents had a generous bull-jowl sandwich and a bottle of sea­
moss to drink. I sat down to eat under a picture of the Sacred Heart
with the text underneath, 'In God we Trust. Everybody else cash.'
Coming into the town through its hilly suburbs I had especially
noticed the enormous and weirdly shaped rocky outcrop which
dominates the town. As I set out for the Y.M.C.A. I saw that Napari­
ma Hill was almost eaten away by quarries. The old Spanish-French
street names of Port-of-Spain, like the town itself, were quickly
changed upon British occupation. Rue d'Anglais became Frederick
Street, Calle de Mercado became George Street. But San Fernando,
which was founded in Governor Chacon's days and called after the
newly born King Ferdinand VII of Spain, retains at least part of its
original full name of San Fernando de Naparima. French sugar
planters from Martinique and Guadaloupe, who were given Napari­
ma Plain to develop and who founded the town, would find the once
familiar landmark of Naparima Hill almost gone. Their original
town, built around the Plaza San Carlos, vanished completely,
because ten years after Port-of-Spain went up in flames a similar fire
wiped out San Fernando de Naparima. I had not been in the town for
128
Harvesters of fish and cane
Field workers are not always men
 LAKE DISTRICT

eleven years and the changes that had occurred, many of them for
the better, made the town unfamiliar. Most people accepted the new
hospitals and schools and technical college as part of progress. But
the recently-laid-out Skinner's Park gave San Fernando an open
space worthy of the town's status as the oldest municipality in the
nation. Skinner's Park, a pleasantly cool escape from the streets, can­
not be called a second Queen's Park Savannah, a comparison often
made. Port-of-Spain's Savannah is unique.
San Fernando's topographical advantage over Port-of-Spain is its
hilliness. When I left The Coffee and walked to the suburbs around
the Southern Main Road a prospect of wooded slopes beyond the
town came into sight. To see primeval forest so close was an antidote
to the feeling the town's modern industry engendered. With the
forest waiting out there, the days of the buccaneers suddenly seemed
near, the high romantic days when San Fernando was a Capuchin
mission for the Amerindians called Purissima Concepcion de
Naparima. I wondered if today's oil domes, the factories, were any
more permanent than the wooden mission had been, for the forests
had grown there for many thousands of years, swallowing who­
knows-what human life and activity. The pleasant suburban streets,
like the one where I eventually found the Y.M.C.A., almost offered
exposed flanks to the advance guard of the forest roots and creepers
and saplings. Here the gardens were large and overgrown. Tangled
profusions of fleshy leaves and exotic blooms sprang up immediately
the cutlass was idle.
Nobody answered my knocking at the upper floor of the Y.M.C.A.
house. I peered into windows and saw signs of occupation, but the
place was locked. An East Indian family lived in the basement. A
veiled woman summoned from his siesta a youth who repeated what I
had heard earlier. Nobody could get in upstairs until the nurses
returned from work later in the afternoon. I got one stage further,
however, for the Indian youth told me that the nurses referred to
were male ones.
As an alternative I was recommended to a woman in the next street
who took in lodgers. Four o'clock had gone. All I wanted was a
shower and a rest before exploring more of the town. When the front
door of the lodging-house opened a beaming Negress welcomed me.
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'Ah,' she cried, 'you've come for the frolic!'
It was, I thought, at least an unconventional and direct form of
greeting. I did not discover until later that she referred to numerous
posters around the town which advised that on the following night a
'Pre-Carnival Frolic' was to take place at the Good Shepherd Hall.
One of the first buildings set up in the old Spanish town of San
Fernando was a wooden casa real, a traveller's rest-house. Capuchin
friars arriving for the missions, off-duty soldiers from the garrison,
French planters riding in from the Montserrat Hills who used the
old inn, would, I thought, have felt perfectly at home in the room
where I woke after a delayed siesta of my own. Night had already
come. Cicadas hummed like a machine running at high speed. Also
running at high speed were the number of words-per-minute coming
from an excited group on the other side of the wooden partition
dividing my room from theirs. I presumed that the rapid-fire talk
which came clearly through the rail at the top of the partition to­
gether with a cool evening breeze was a French patois. Twice within
the few hours of my arrival the teenage son of the house brought me
ice-cold water covered with a head-fringed net which tinkled against
the glass jug like a Chinese wind-hell. Possibly the Spanish soldiers
had iced water, too, at the old casa real, for even in those days blocks
of ice wrapped in straw were shipped to the West Indies from
Canada.
Going up to the Main Road, I found a score of pavement cafes
centred around charcoal-burning coal-pots on which corn-cobs were
roasting, sending out the delectable aroma which, together with the
smell of spices, was the first thing I remembered of the West Indies.
Corn-cobs are like coffee beans in that the smell of them being
roasted is infinitely better than the actual taste. A quota of hot roti
makers had their pavement stalls out also, their roti-making process
accompanied by sizzlings on the flat griddles and slappings and
pattings of the dough discs with wooden spatulas. The Chinese
restaurants and bars did not seem to mind these itinerant cafes
operating on their doorsteps.
In the town centre only a few people waited at the terminus for
last buses. The shops and warehouses and everything around the bus
station were closed, hoarded and shuttered for the night. Somehow
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the deserted place had a haunted atmosphere. Even in the baleful

glare of modern street lighting, the old buildings around St. Vincent
Street seemed to be listening to sounds of voices long since silenced.
Beneath long, pitched roofs the Georgian sash windows looked
down from wooden upper floors on to empty streets. Had this been a
film, some figure would have moved at one of the windows. A sigh,
possibly, would have been heard against melancholy music. But
there was nobody, not even a ghost, to gaze from those blank bars.
At the other end of the bus station was a no-man's-land of bars.
In the lofty, board-bare upstairs rooms, to the sound of bottle clink­
ing against glass, and desultory talk and sudden shrill laughter and
the muffled sounds of muscular arm round seductive neck or waist,
sailors lounged drinking rum and letting their eyes rove and their
hands rove as they decided which girl should comfort their midnight.
At street corners round about, hangers-on hung on, waiting for their
own particular Godots. Taxi drivers were the only people who
accosted me and clearly did not take seriously my intention to wander
on foot through the seductive-mood-inducing scene of nocturnal San
Fernando. After all, I decided, San Fernando had its ghosts. The oil
companies, the ever-growing factories and the new concrete villas
and neon signs of industrial prosperity had not completely frightened
away the lingering spirits of the old days. San Fernando was still
active as a port and there were still places where the young sailor's
dream of exotic, tropical adventure could still almost come true.
My boyhood education was deficient in many ways, although I
have since come to the conclusion that all systems of education are.
Mine at least told me of the wonders of the world, and among them,
of course, the Pitch Lake of Trinidad. Charles Kingsley wrote of
'that famous Lake of Pitch, which our old nursery literature de­
scribed as one of the Wonders of the World'. On a return visit to San
Fernando a week later I boarded the bus for the Pitch Lake. It was
like going to see the Eiffel Tower for the first time.
From San Fernando the bus took an hour. For five miles beyond
the village of Canaan the road ran beside the sea and then passed
through a tropical Arcadia where palm groves shaded grassy slopes
all the way. Everywhere there were the delicately beautiful little
wooden houses, even more beautiful in decay, when the wood
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was weathered, and shutters and jalousied doors askew with time.
At St. Mary's Oropuche some of the people got out to continue
their journey along the inland road leading toSiparia. The church of
La Divina Pastora is a place of pilgrimage, because it contains the
celebrated Black Virgin of Siparia dressed in leather. Throughout
the year many go to ask favours or return with thank-offerings for
favours received by the intercession of the Black Virgin. The village
ofSiparia overflows with activity when the April festival in honour of
the leather Madonna occurs.
Farther on theSouthern Main Road the bus stopped again at what
looked like an abandoned airfield. I asked the conductor where the
Pitch Lake was.
'Over there,' he said.
The bus rushed off in a whirl of dust and I realized that what
appeared to be the asphalted area of an airfield was, in fact, the Pitch
Lake itself. The weed-dotted uneven surface of asphalt was very
different from what I had expected-even though I had not known
what to expect. There it lay anyway, only a hundred yards or so from
the road, the famous world wonder. One of the first people ever to
write about the Pitch Lake, as far as evidence goes, was Sir Walter
Raleigh himself, although Europeans must have known about the
lake ever since Columbus discovered Trinidad.
'At this point,' Raleigh wrote, 'called Tierra de Brea or Piche,
there is that abundance of stone pitch that all the shippes of the
world may be therewith laden from thence, and we made triall of it in
trimming our shippes to be most excellent good and melteth not in
the sunne.'
And so for four hundred years the strange-looking Pitch Lake has
been in use, though organized as a commercial enterprise only since
the late nineteenth century. Because I grew up in the shipbuilding
city of Belfast I knew very early on in life what a caulker was and how
he ran the hot pitch to make ships' decks watertight. Nowadays the
pitch is used for roadmaking more than anything else, its valuable
property of melting under great heat being exploited as in ship­
building, but this time to coagulate small stones in tarmacadam
surfacing.
Before I actually got to the flat surface of the Pitch Lake itself I
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could see that very few stones had been incorporated in the main
road near by. Great quantities of pitch had simply been laid so that
in the heat it took on a smooth surface, oozing out at the sides in
huge black dribbles. At the present time the asphalt 'lake' extends
over more than a hundred acres, and in the last seventy-five years
thirteen million tons have been taken away. When I walked on the
grey, dull surface of the lake, I put my umbrella up against the strong
sun. Heat beat off the asphalt, though it was not so hot underfoot as
an earlier writer who claimed 150°F. as a record temperature on the
lake.
The second month of the dry season was well on by now, but
there were still occasional, short, heavy showers which refreshed the
land and kept the city gardens and countryside lush. Prosperous
green weeds even grew from the cracks in the hoary hide of the Pitch
Lake. And here and there puddles still remained from the last rain,
making the place not unlike an Irish bog. The most remarkable
feature of the lake is its ability to replenish itself. When holes are
dug and the heavy lumps carried off for refining, the stiff material
closes in again. Although the lake's resources are probably not
completely inexhaustible and the level of the lake drops about six
inches every year, the depth in the middle is reckoned to be 285 feet.
The centre of the lake sometimes grows active. It becomes soft and
wells up as bubbles of natural gas burst from it.
The place was eerie, reminding me of the hraun of Iceland, those
desolate lava deserts where nothing lives. Yet here exotically coloured
dragonflies darted across the shallow rain pools. I saw a man prising
great lumps of asphalt from the ground throw down his mattock and
run to head off a buffalo which was ambling towards the centre. The
Pitch Lake could be dangerous as well as sinister.
Soft areas of the asphalt lake tend to suck at any object or living
creature whose weight is placed on them. There are legends about
accidents of that kind. One tells of a tribe of Chayma Indians being
sucked under whole as a punishment of the gods for eating humming­
birds which contained the souls of their ancestors. Certainly legends
must have been based on some real occurrences. Dr. Bullbrook's
aboriginal objects from the Pitch Lake displayed in the National
Museum give adequate demonstration of the lake's hunger. The
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adzed wood stools with carved animal heads were found in the depths
of the pitch during digging. Tree stumps had also been dug out, like
the bog-oaks in Ireland, which are a menace to the peat-cutter. Even
knowledgeable scientists had cause to wonder at one particular tree
and the uncanny, slow-moving undercurrents of the lake. In 1928 the
tree started to emerge from the elephant-hide surface. For a month it
protruded more and more as if growing, finally reaching a height of
ten feet. The scientists examined this extraordinary tree and pro­
nounced it to be five thousand years old. Then, as slowly as it had
risen from the asphalt, it sank once more into the black depths and
vanished without trace. People still talked about it as the 'mystery
tree'.
'Merely a very odd, quaint, unexpected, and only half explained
phenomenon,' was Charles Kingsley's verdict on the Pitch Lake.
Quaint it may have been, but another Victorian, Lord Dundonald,
whose eye had already lighted on oil for the British Navy, had a
further scheme. This hero of the Navy tried to extract oil from the
pitch, a process which might have clarified the 'half explained
phenomenon' to the unscientific Kingsley. But as long ago as 1792 the
Spaniards set up machinery for extracting keroseno for lamp-lighting
from the pitch. Today paraffin, which comes from oil wells, is still
called kerosene or pitch oil on the island.
Oil and pitch deposits frequently occur together, as, for instance,
in Trinidad, and also in Venezuela. The oil runs in long seams of
oil-sand imprisoned below the earth's surface by layers of heavy clay
or shale. When an oil drill pierces this seal the oil either gushes out
under pressure or has to be pumped out. Sometimes, as in California
and Trinidad, the erosion of countless centuries wore away the top
seal of clay and shale. As the layers grew thinner gases escaped very
gradually from beneath and eventually the oil itself filtered through
the layers, until the clay and rocks disintegrated and sank into the
oily morass. Still exposed, the oil evaporated out of the sticky mix­
ture, taking a few million years to do so, until eventually nothing
remained except the heavy residue, which formed a natural pitch
lake.
In the countryside round about oxen dragged primitive ploughs
through rice paddies, yet not far away would be the most modern
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 LAKE DISTRICT

tractors spraying insecticides against frog-hoppers and cane-borers in

rolling sugar plains. So in a similar contrast men cut tremendous
lumps of pitch with nothing but their bare hands and a mattock near
the powerful scooping and scraping machines which provided for
commercial exploitation of the lake. Stripped to the waist, muscles
taut and bulging, sweat running, workers cut and levered lumps of
pitch that looked like rocks made of cork and liquorice, then heaved
them up into waiting lorries.
Overhead, far up in the blue sky a flock of black vultures skidded
about on currents of air, their five-foot wing spans braced like sails.
But though they looked no more than floating fragments of black ash,
the carrion-lovers would soon know if an unlucky animal got bogged
down in the Pitch Lake, or if a car killed one of the curs yapping at its
tyres. Although this corbeau is on the list of birds which can be
hunted or captured during the open season, no one seemed to waste
shot on it. The vultures would in any case be as easy to catch by
hand, for when fishermen bring in their catch, the birds flock to­
gether and walk unafraid among the men. As scavengers the black
corbeaus keep the beaches clean of dead fish and devour unpleasant
things around factories and abattoirs.
The asphalt began to make my shoes uncomfortably hot. I was not
surprised to see the wheels of a car which had driven down begin to
sink in the grey lake when the car stopped, and cameras appeared at
the windows. To get started again the driver and his passengers had
to get out and rock the car free. They passed me on the road a short
time later when I was walking to a settlement of long and low and
white-painted houses built for workers employed in the asphalt com­
pany's refinery. For paving, the earth all around was thickly coated
with asphalt spread freely like icing on a cake. A few mango and
citrus trees grew from the slopes also well cemented by supplies
from the lake. While I was there some men wearing aluminium hel­
mets came off duty from the refinery. A mobile clinic waited outside
one of the houses and, peeping inside, I saw a fine up-to-date doctor's
surgery complete with dentist's chair.
Between the camp settlement and the old part of La Brea lie a
series of green hills and fields as trim as a gold course. La Brea's outer
fringe of houses began and I saw that people here were industrious
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 LAKE/ DISTRICT

and used their verandas, or 'galleries', as workshops where cobblers

bent over their lasts, nails in mouth, and where sewing-machines
buzzed like the cicadas outside my room in San Fernando. The people
here were also inventive, for I saw a contraption which served not
only as a reminder of Heath Robinson. In the garden of a small house
stood a marvellous machine for collecting rainwater-a disused
engine boiler, as large as the wooden house to whose roof its rusted,
riveted belly was connected by devious pipes and cocks and gauges.
Along this stretch of road, as in other parts of the island, many of
the front gardens made little pretence at being more than a fowl run
decorated by a few bushes or a hedge of crotons. It was often diffi­
cult to believe that their kaleidoscopic foliage was made up from the
extraordinary range of colours and types of pattern for which the
Codiaeum leaf is famous. I picked up half a dozen leaves at random
from a single hedge, some stained crimson like a single page of a
Victorian edge-painted book, others of green whose veins were
dyed red and yellow, and leaves like ivory with green spots and long
dragons' tongues of shiny red Chinese lacquer inlaid with specks of
ebony. The hedge nevertheless failed miserably at keeping ducklings
and turkeys from death in the afternoon from passing traffic. A
garden's livestock would frequently include a frizzle fowl, its bare
neck and erect feathers making it look ridiculously like a feather
duster. The fowl's strange appearance is perhaps responsible for it
being a lucky charm and for it being credited with the power to
scratch up evil spells from the garden.
Like an iceberg, the greater part of the Pitch Lake is hidden. This
immense and invisible part extends underground for miles. Slow
undercurrents occur as the submerged mass rises to fill the holes
made in the lake by excavation. This means that on the surface of
the surrounding land roads occasionally cave in and buildings tilt.
The twisted houses and the gardens and backyards and boundaries
distorted in this movement have led to fantastic litigation over the
years.
La Brea Police Station, Courthouse and Magistrate's Office were
all housed in a Gothic-windowed building with sedately peeling
cream paint and inevitably an asphalt forecourt. One side of the
Courthouse, in the interests of ventilation rather than landscape, was
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open, and afforded a view of the sea and diving pelicans. I moved
into a pew. The case before the Bench was not the delicate one of
Mr. Jones's backyard being landed on Mr. Smith's front lawn by
subterranean asphalt movements, but the even more delicate one of
a Hindu market vendor who had recently borne the child of a man
who suffered from lapses of memory, which had apparently occurred
at every critical event and led eventually to the courtroom. I was most
impressed by the polemics of counsel (as one always is impressed by
lawyers in court), but more particularly with the quite unruffied
judgement of the young Magistrate.
When a Chinese shopkeeper was summoned to the witness box,
the clerk asked his religion in order to give him the appropriate scrip­
ture to swear on. The shopkeeper promptly said he was a Christian,
whereupon he was requested by the Magistrate to substantiate this
claim by saying the Apostles' Creed. The Chinaman did not under­
stand, nor did he appear to have heard of the Apostles. The Magi­
strate's expression indicated that he had suspected as much. This
procedure seemed odd to me, until the situation was explained to me
afterwards. For a Chinese tradesman to appear in a court was in itself
a rare occurrence. The Chinese in Trinidad generally hate going to
court, and would rather lose large sums of money than involve them­
selves in litigation. The Magistrate at La Brea consequently had to
satisfy himself that no pressure had been brought to bear on the
Chinese shopkeeper. Heated, exasperated, demonstrative counsel
might have been, but the Magistrate remained as calm as if he were
at his own dinner-table. His rich, Negro voice was audible, but only
just audible, his manner betraying no bias towards any party in­
volved, his tone level, his words incisive, penetrating, weighty with
familiarity with human nature's weakness.
Slowly, the anatomy of the situation was dissected, slowly ascer­
tainable fact was separated from supposition, hearsay and faulty
memory. The sun moved round. The sea shone. The pelicans dived.
I did not stay to the end of the case. It seemed likely to go on for days
and I had arranged to meet some friends for a swim. Fearing the
squeak of a floorboard would distract the Court's attention from that
quiet voice, I crept out.
Behind La Brea's main street water-meadows with tethered
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 LAKE DISTRICT

buffaloes gave on to the shore. A dozen boys and girls were swimming
there and another group of youths wrestled in the shallows of the
coast. To the left buckets moved on an aerial cable, carrying refined
pitch to waiting ships. My map called it Brighton Pier.
Besides pitch, tankers take on oil from the Brighton wells, which
have been working since before the First World War. Far out to sea
the superstructures of immense drilling platforms probing untapped
oil sources protrude from the glittering Gulf of Paria. Other sea
derricks, already in operation, keep the refineries and bulk carriers
busy. La Brea never notices these things. Its pastoral life goes on, its
gardens and paddies flourish as though big business cutting the
throat of big business had never descended on its coast to suck oil
from under the sea and the lands just beyond high-water mark.
Negro households prepare meals that might be found today in Africa.
They still try to drive away maijo, the 'bad eye', by making the sign
of the Cross on a child's forehead. The village Hindus still eat
curries wrapped in roti and use camphor flame to incense their
family gods. And the Chinese storekeepers grown modestly well off
still do not aspire to the Club at the Point where the big refinery is
situated farther along this south-west road.
But, for all its apparent lack of change, La Brea not only means
pitch linguistically, but is pitch. The daily movements of its popu­
lation, besides the movements of its subsidence-prone houses, de­
pend on those hundred acres of weird lake. At four o'clock a siren
wails, signalling the end of the working day, and almost at once
streams of cyclists pour down the hill, hurrying for a shower or a dip
in the sea before the well-earned relaxation of a rocking-chair on the
gallery.
When I got back to the main road again to wait for the bus I saw
that the Courthouse had closed. On its wide flight of steps a drunk
man sat shouting religious slogans of an evangelical nature. The
phrase which came over most coherently through the fumes of rum
was 'I only love God', which, I thought, was a good deal more than
most people would claim even when sober. I could not, however,
see how he could connect his drunken state with evangelical slogans.
But some schoolgirls, also waiting for the bus, explained that the
man, called Britain, was always drunk. This was yet another celebra-
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 LAKE DISTRICT

tion of another release from prison following his forty-sixth convic­

tion for obscene language. The Courthouse steps made an admirable
theatre for Mr. Britain's dramatic oratory, and although the Court­
house itself was closed the Police Station was open. A constable
emerged and told Mr. Britain to move on.
Behind me was a large old house overlooking the sea, and here the
Magistrate of La Brea district lived. Seeing me waiting for the bus,
the Public Prosecutor I had heard in court came from the house and
invited me in for a drink, over which we discovered mutual West
Indian friends in London's legal circles. The Magistrate, who as host
poured the rum punch, was exactly the same man as he had been in
court, though now he allowed himself to laugh. A tall, handsome
nurse, who had just come home on leave from Canada, joined us with
her beautiful young daughter. I much enjoyed this surprise end to
my day, sipping ice-cold punch, looking out at the fiery sundown
sky and talking about familiar London faces and places. We agreed
that tourists missed a splendid part of Trinidad's landscape by leav­
ing this attractive district out of their itineraries, except for a quick
look at the Pitch Lake. The oilfields and refineries are confined to
comparatively small areas and did not spoil the attractive countryside
or village life.
Before leaving I asked the Magistrate about Mr. Britain and his
forty-six convictions. He laughed. Several of them had been made in
his court. Britain, added the Magistrate, was only the man's nick­
name, culled from the wartime slogan 'Britain can take it'. I have
since forgotten whether this referred to Mr. Britain's capacity for
alcohol or imprisonment, though doubtless the once eminent
Victorian Professor of Modern History at Oxford would have had
much to say on the subject in his, if I may paraphrase, froudacious
way.

139
 ii s 1t
Botany and Bays
M y room at Gatacre Street looked over a garden of trees, an un­
intentional arboretum of tropical fruits and leaves and stems that
allowed enough view to see stars or moon at night or blue sky by
day. When I returned late at night from excursions round the island
I could go to my room and disturb nobody in doing so. In the cres­
cendo of pre-Carnival it would have needed considerable noise to
disturb the household, for through my ever-open windows blew not
only delectable night breezes but the sweet insistent sounds of steel
bands emanating from half a dozen unidentifiable places in the warm
darkness beyond the trees.
On waking in the morning there was another sound I liked to hear,
an early shower of rain. Ferocious-looking clouds would boil and
bubble over the mountain ridges and fling down rain in a fury. In no
time at all the air would be cleaned and cool. From my window I
could watch the rain waxing the breadfruit outside, or trailing like
white satin through the valleys of the Northern Range, pouring and
streaking across the exposed and hapless Savannah, obscuring its
trees, blotting out the hills. And then as if the whole downpour had
been an administrative mistake, the storm trailed away so that the
day's usual sun could get on with its job.
After such a shower the trees and plants seemed to shake them­
selves like wet dogs. But not all the moisture and drops could be got
rid of at once and the hour immediately following a short shower was
an ideal time to walk across the wringing Savannah and into the
Botanical Gardens which were laid out between the Savannah and
the mountains. Bare-eyed thrushes gave unaccompanied flute
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 BOT ANY AND BAYS

sonatas in praise of the rains which had softened the lawns and
made the birds' feeding easy. Flocks of tiny ground doves, both
rufous-winged and scaly-breasted, would be seed-gleaning among
the fallen leaves, camouflaged by plumage remarkably like the
leaves on the grass. Several times I almost trod on the doves before I
noticed them, when with remarkable acceleration they shot up into
the air like jet aircraft. The ground doves were beautiful and I felt
they belonged to miniature Japanese gardens and were somehow out
of place juxtaposed against the unrestrained extravagance of a
Trinidadian garden.
So many types of exotic trees occur naturally in the virgin 'high
woods' on the island that those in the Botanical Gardens are not the
rare specimens usually associated with this kind of artificial garden.
Yet Port-of-Spain's Botanical Gardens are some of the finest I had
ever seen, largely because of the landscaping and the sense of space
and shade. Here trees from far and near have been brought together,
from China and Australia, from the Seychelles and Mauritius, India
and Burma, Java and Malaya, Chile and Brazil, all to flourish superbly
under the certainty of humid warmth, sunshine, and passing showers.
When I got caught in the gardens by such showers I ran for shelter
to a splendid Ceylon willow. The boughs had grown to such huge
dimensions that it was more like a series of weird temple pavilions
than a tree. This quaint, architectural e:ffect derived mainly from the
tree's aerial roots which had grown down from the branches into the
ground in the manner of a banyan. These aerial roots had taken such
a hold that in time they had become great trunks themselves, so that
it was quite impossible to tell which was the original parent tree. But
only on two occasions in as many months did I resort to the Ceylon
willow to shelter against rain. Usually I sat under one of the more
normal-shaped trees for shelter from the sun.
A stroll around the Botanical Gardens is a custom not only for
English residents exercising their dogs on leashes but also Trini­
dadian lovers and children. The energetic ones or those desirous of
more private arbours for their love climb the hills. Those in search
of distractions stand and gaze at God's Acre, a tiny cemetery con­
taining only a dozen or so marble crosses and iron railings marking
the graves of British Empire V.I.P.s. I liked the cross carved like a
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decorated Swiss roll dedicated to a certain Lillie, who, not inaptly as

the wife of a Victorian Surgeon-General, was 'cut off like a flower'.
Here also stroll the Hindus in their Sunday finery to view the
wonders of nature, as Mr. Biswas's family of countless heads did
before them. Napoleon's hat is there, as the variegated lavender,
orchid-like flowers of Bauhinia variegata are called, and the beaten
gold and vermilion inflorescent display of pride-of-Burma. But in the
early part of the year the Botanical Gardens are not so spectacular
with colour as many of the suburban gardens. One tree, however, a
eucalyptus from Australia, is colourful all year round and in an
unusual way. The trunk rises like a column, tall and smooth. But
successive layers of bark peeled and in so doing revealed a variety of
colours like a marquetry of woods dyed lemon green, grey green,
red brown and muted purple. The effect resembles Tachisme's
streaked canvases.
The Botanical Gardens are on tourist itineraries and parties from
the big hotels or visiting ships soak up information like blotting-paper
as they listen to guides extolling the Egyptian sacred lotus or give
dissertations on folklore medicine derived from such ingredients as
the white sap of the tree-of-life or the blood-red juice of the raw-beef
tree. Photographic impedimenta are unloaded to picture a cable vine
growing through a tree trunk or seeds of the double coconut which
held the world heavyweight championship at fifty pounds each.
But perhaps none of the wonders collected here from the world's
four corners since Sir Ralph Woodford founded the gardens in 1818
affords visitors as much delight as a modest-sized tree, native to
Trinidad, the wild chataigne. This Pachira aquatica has flowers a
foot long, crammed with crimson-topped stamens. Although it
blossoms in abundance throughout most of the year, each scented
bud which opens in the evening has only a short-lived hour of glory,
for the next day's high noon sun destroys them.
I often had lunch at the open-air Pavilion Restaurant which had
been built under the trees by the Botanical Gardens entrance. On a
terrace raised sufficiently to give a view across the Savannah, the
tables were laid out around a fish pond and thatched-roof umbrellas
gave shade against the sun. It is one of the pleasantest rendezvous in
Port-of-Spain and has good food at modest prices. The trees per-
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haps make it so attractive, especially one enormous Andaman Islands

almond. Creepers and flowers half shelter, half enclose the restaurant,
which is almost lost in this tropical bower. The buildings do not
dominate or make a concession to foliage by a few plants in a few
pots.
A Negro workman employed in the grounds used to like my old
newspapers in exchange for the information about plants he so
readily supplied. His unvaried greeting was 'How you makin' out?'
Once he pointed out a story in the Port-of-Spain Daif;y Mirror in
disgust. It was about a child being rushed off to hospital dangerously
ill from a scorpion bite.
'If they teach the children to kill the first scorpion they see and
eat it,' he said, 'they never get bitten.'
The beauties of landscape offered the Savannah from here are
enhanced by its crests of tree-tops through which, beyond the distant
city roofs, appears the faultless geometry of the dove-grey sea horizon
bearing hardly discernible ships on their way in to Port-of-Spain.
Nearer at hand, crocodiles of convent schoolgirl boarders file de­
murely by on their Sunday walk around the Savannah, the flock
dressed all in white like their shepherding nuns. By late Sunday
afternoon the traffic at this corner of the Savannah seems to build up
bumper to bumper, for by then people are coming back to the city
from beach trips. Hunters with guns and dogs also come home at this
time from the mountain forests. In Trinidad, hunting is by no means
the exclusive sport of the rich man. Many of the cafes around Char­
lotte Street area offer 'wild meats', such as venison sandwiches,
possum stew, and roasted wild hog on their menus. The tailless hogs
are called quenck, though they are properly named collared peccary.
For anyone who wants only to see the wild pigs and not to eat or
hunt them, a trek up into the high forest is not necessary. Next door
to the Botanical Gardens a fine herd rush down their sloping pen like
the Gadarene swine to greet their visitor or snuffie at him through a
wire gate, ears erect while they rub thick hairy coats against the
enclosure's posts.
These charming, rather dreamy-eyed peccaries live in the
Emperor Valley Zoo. Like the adjacent Botanical Gardens, the zoo is
sited in a natural park and again has the character of being only an
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extension of the Savannah. The zoo's own landscape is alluring, and

the amount of space allotted to each of the specimens made the place
attractive for me, and this was unusual, because normally I do not
like to see captive animals.
Nearly all the specimens are from the tropics and so they live in
an environment not so very different from their native habitat. The
name of the place itself partly explains this natural setting, for the
emperor from which both valley and zoo derive their name was the
large moth. The zoo tends to concentrate on creatures living wild in
Trinidad. The exceptions are notable, especially the pride of lions
in their spacious, moated pen. A placid bison makes the ground
doves, daintily engaged in pecking seeds from the droppings, look
even more diminutive and Japanese. There was also a tall, black bear
called Yogi who knew his name and did tricks with a tyre and a pool
of water.
The cages and pens are widely separated in the gardens and
shaded by many trees. Dense masses of foliage close every view, and
along the paths and grassy tracks the peacocks strut, lordly, disdain­
ful and magnificent. They leave the begging of food from visitors
to their dowdy wives, who insistently importune for titbits with as
much dignity as pye-dogs. Smaller birds fly in and out of the animal
pens. Sometimes the same species are themselves captive in cages as
specimens. The ground doves and blue tanagers are unlucky in this
respect. But the Zoo's captive tanagers can nest in a splendid matti
tree or flame-of-the-forest whose orange trumpets fall all around, so
cleverly has the natural setting of trees and grassy slopes been
incorporated to house the inmates. It is frequently impossible to tell
whether the bird calls come from inside or outside the cages.
The birds are exactly like the birds in Saint-Saens's Carnival of the
Animals. Quite at the other extreme are the zoo's alligators, who
really have nothing to commend them except the thrill of all fearful
things. Alligators, they say, make good pets. Although I have had no
experience in this matter, I doubt if they would make good com­
panions. Like a collection of Giles the cartoonist's grandmas, the
dumpy, living logs just lay around or half in and out of their pool,
perfectly inanimate. Suddenly the onlooker might become aware of
two baleful, crafty eyes watching him. What, I wondered, do alli-
144
Fantasy for
Carnival-paper
mosque for Hosein
Madam Ramkhelawan
Rampersad with
Ramcharran, Chano
and Shandra

Keg
 BOTANY AND BAYS

gators think about during their hours-long comas? The dozen or so

confined within a depression in the middle of the zoological gardens
served as timely reminders that the swamps and lagoons around the
island's coasts are full of alligators. A friend who built himself a
house by a river in the foothills near Carenage had alligators in his
garden when the river flooded in the rainy season.
The sulphur-and-white-breasted toucans make a happier sight,
similarly caged in a setting not unlike their native woods in the
Northern Range rearing up behind. The toucan is one of the hand­
somest birds and his colours have a brilliance and freshness which
deserve the publicity usually reserved for the more vulgarly hued
parrots and macaws. His yellow and orange breast set off the black
plumage, and the long bill, translucent in the sunlight, was a joy.
Yet the Emperor Valley toucans enjoyed publicity of a sort, for fixed
in their cage was a notice to the effect that they had been donated by
the 'Makers of Guinness Stout'.
Remote alike from vulgarity and commerce is the iguana, that
ancient creature suggestive of life in a half-formed world, inheritor of
the earth when the earth was still almost void, a time when waters
almost covered its face. The iguana, arrayed in subtle varieties of
green, has a curious consistency to his ugliness which makes him
beautiful and, somehow, terrible. He is quite harmless, and country
people, as well as some smart city restaurants, regard his appearance
fried on the dinner-plate as a tasty way to end both his day and
theirs. Occasionally, while walking amongst beach palms or the lower
forests, I saw iguanas crouched on the branches, barely distinguish­
able from the thick foliage around them.
The Emperor Valley Zoo and the Botanical Gardens not only
appear to be visually part of the Savannah in the landscape. They are
inseparable parts of its sounds, too. The Savannah serenade is as
much the roar of lions as it is the peaceful click of cricket balls. The
screech of howler monkeys or laughing gulls from their cages be­
longs as much to the Savannah's grassy tracks as the neighing of
highly strung racehorses, the staccato Spanish of Venezuelan base­
ball players in the first long shadows of sundown, or the shouts of kite­
flyers as they bring their airborne squares of bright paper and wrig­
gling ribbon tails down from the sky for the last time. And the sunsets
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 BOTANY AND BAYS

which mingle all these sounds are never the same twice. The chang­
ing light at sundown is always different, sometimes softer, sometimes
more luminous, casting different colours and depths of shadow on
the mountains behind.
Chinese schoolboys and Creole fathers lower their kites or dis­
mantle model aircraft, but other fliers now come out to taste the
evening air, huge moths drawn into fatal dances by the street
lamps. The morbleu carries eyes on its wings that seem as efficient in
the dark as those real eyes it imitates, those of the pygmy owl, which
haunts gardens and the Savannah. But in Trinidad and Tobago,
whatever transmutations the sky and the earth go through, whatever
creatures creep to their caves and dens and whatever restless haun­
ters of the night emerge, nothing marks the last light of day on the
islands so much as the swift nervous darting of bats. Even the gentle
stop-go candlelight of the fireflies is not the sunset's hall-mark as the
bats were. Trinidad and Tobago have more than sixty varieties,
ranging from the little Antillian free-tailed to the false vampire with
a wing-span of three feet. Bats and the island nights go together and
are such a part of everyday life that groups turn up in Carnival pro­
cessions year after year, playin' mas as white, brown and black bats,
in a masquerade of Die Fledermaus which surely would have de­
lighted Johann Strauss had he seen it.
On my evening strolls along the popular promenade around the
Savannah I would meet, almost head-on, not the strange little old­
man bat which has enough chin folds to pull right over its ugly
wrinkled face, but huge, lion-coloured bats that might well have been
false vampires, but were probably the greater spear-nosed bat.
Across Queen's Park West the trees in Memorial Park are giddy
roundabouts with these large bats darting and swooping with in­
credible speed and deftness at turning sharply on the wing. Bats
turn at right-angles in mid-flight, shaming all other fliers by their
aerobatic prowess, even the swift and the humming-bird with its
remarkable hovering technique. The scientist's fascination with bats'
sonar devices is understandable. For one bat to use its ultra-sensitive
radar in locating obstacles in the path of flight and also for locating
insects they feed on is miraculous enough. But from such trees as
those in Memorial Park, which the bats colonize, dozens of them fly
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simultaneously at high speed in a continuous whirl, each emitting the

ultrasonic cries to avoid other whirling bats. International airports
have difficulty enough with planes landing and taking off one-a­
minute guided by computers and radar. But Port-of-Spain's large
bats, taking off, flying and landing back on the branches, do so at the
rate of scores every second. So fast is this movement that the trees'
branches and leaves shiver and rustle.
I could understand why bats have so long been popular as a sub­
ject for Carnival masquerade. They are endlessly fascinating
creatures in their quick, darting flashes of humour, like the Trini­
dadians themselves, whose swift turns of clever political manceuvre
must have irritated the Colonel Blimps of the Colonial Office.
For a long time Port-of-Spain had a lively if more or less bound­
hand-and-foot City Council. When the Trinidadians' mouthpiece
spoke too loudly, then, of course, the people had to be put in their
place. Not many years after the fatuous Froude's visit the City
Council was silenced by the Governor, Sir Hubert Jerningham. The
City Council had refused to accept conditions laid down by Colonial
Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. This situation, like so many other
political ones, was expressed by the famous calypsonian Richard
Cceur de Lion, who in 1897 wrote,
Jerningham the Governor,
It's a fastness into you,
It's a rudeness into you,
To break up the laws of the Borough Council.
Before this there had also been sporadic attempts to stop Carnival.
The Trinidadians, once free of their chains, were too lively for their
Victorian rulers. The island people showed marked recalcitrance
about accepting their God-given station. Froude had prated about
the 'powers and privileges of loyal citizens', but those powers and
privileges enjoyed by Britain's downtrodden industrial workers in
their slums did not, somehow, appeal to the West Indians. They
liked life and gaiety, and nothing Whitehall did was able to kill off
the Trinidadian's natural disposition towards happiness.
Part of the Carnival festivities used to include the canboulay, the
carrying of flaring torches in procession. The British authorities,
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fearful at every Carnival that a riot would be accompanied by arson,

tried to forbid the canboulay on the pretext that the wooden city of
Port-of-Spain could become a conflagration by accident. Farther
south, disturbances actually broke out when the Hindus and Muslims
were forbidden to celebrate their own Indian festival of Hosein in
San Fernando. When, in defiance of this oppressive edict, the people
attempted to bring their decorated paper mosques into town, the
police opened fire and killed twelve outright, while over a hundred
were rushed off to hospital. Just as the Spanish colonialists and the
French planters had forbidden the 'heathen' drums of Africa to
deprive the enslaved Negro of even the last shreds of human rights,
so the British Government was concerned to put down other tradi­
tions which the Negroes had somehow managed to hold on to in spite
of generations of deliberate and calculated degradation.
The 'bungo' dance, which was an essential part of wakes following
deaths, was prohibited by law. Householders who permitted 'any
persons to assemble and dance therein the dance known as 'Bungo' or
any similar dance shall, on conviction before a magistrate, be liable
to a penalty not exceeding ten pounds'. Under such enlightened
twentieth-century British rule, the Shouter religion also came in for
a share of enlightened government when their ceremonies were made
illegal. But many of its adherents chose prison rather than betrayal of
their beliefs. Ordinances and fines could not break the Negro's spirit
any more than planters' whips had stopped the drums.
With only just over thirty years to go before calendars register the
year 2000 it is difficult to imagine not only the physical and economic
oppression which Britain spread over those large areas of the globe
once coloured red in school atlases, but the deathly pale face of
spiritual oppression. Perhaps the only good the First World War did
was to crack the walls of the British kill-joy way of life, which had
previously seemed so impregnable. Certainly the First World War
brought changes to Trinidad other than the exploitation of the
island's oil for the British Navy. Even the Viceroy of India, Lord
Hardinge, was addressing the Legislative Council there on the
'revolting nature' of the system of indentured labour in the West
Indies. The pressure of opinion in India forced the British Govern­
ment to abolish the system in 1916.
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After 1914 many among the Negro population crossed the Atlantic
to war zones in Africa and Europe, places from whence their grand­
parents had been shipped as slaves. And their grandparents' chains
now became the uniform of the British West Indian Regiment. The
experience of being accepted as equals in the British Army, especially
with other regiments from the waning empire, of sharing the white
soldier's privilege of being blown to bits, was the best war medal
Trinidadian soldiers brought home.
In spite of everything the British Government had done, aided and
abetted by the ludicrous rationalization of people like Froude and
Joseph Chamberlain, the West Indians had all along suspected them­
selves to be human. Now they knew they were, and straight away
wanted their new horizons and ideals made into reality. They looked
for a leader and found him in the ex-soldier Captain Arthur Andrew
Cipriani. That he was 'white' of French descent was of no conse­
quence, for Cipriani was totally indifferent to a man's pigmentation.
He was a good man. And his outraged contemplation of British
misgovernment sent him to the political Left. It could not be put
more simply than Dr. Eric Williams did-'He gave dignity to the
barefooted man.'
After an uneasy breathing-space of only twenty years there was
World War again. By this time, the Labour Party in Trinidad, which
Captain Cipriani founded, claimed allegiance from a third of the
island's population. The voice of the common people and their
common lot was making itself heard. Joseph Chamberlain's Crown
Colony system was tottering on its last legs. As for Chamberlain's
grand conception that the World's Protestant Anglo-Saxons­
namely Britain, Germany and the U.S.A.-should unite and rule the
world, not even a whimper was heard.
Besides bats and lovers, the monument of the war dead is in
Port-of-Spain's Memorial Park. But more eloquent of death is the
crouched skeleton of a 'young adult male of Amerindian race' who
lies complete with his ancient burial paraphernalia at one side of
Memorial Park, in the Royal Victoria Institute, which houses the
National Museum and Art Gallery. The young Amerindian died long
before Europeans 'discovered' the island, and was found in the Erin
midden in a grave full of small sea-shells. A wide shallow earthenware
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bowl was buried with him, perhaps containing food. Clay pellets
rattled about inside its hollow rim. The bowl was beautifully shaped
and nothing but speculation could be made about the rattle, whether
it was used in burial ritual or to frighten away evil spirits. The bowl
may have been placed so that the young man could use it on returning
from his journey into the land of death. This skeleton affected me,
perhaps because his crouched embryonic position was pathetic, as if
he had just died, and also because his mourners may have waited all
their lives believing in the return of the dead.
Trinidadians in the two World Wars discovered that even the
white-skinned soldier had no privileges where death was concerned.
The solemnity of such thoughts, however, is difficult to sustain unless
one has a vocation and training for it. So I could view the National
Museum's other human skulls objectively, and by the time I got to
the shark's jaws, the first-aid display for snake bites, the butterflies
and moths showing mimicry and camouflage, the stuffed land birds
and water birds, tiger cats and mangrove dogs, the bell from an old
ferry and the original puncheon used by Dr. Siegert when he began the
commercial manufacture of his bitters, I was my cheerful self again.
As with the best things in life, money is required to build up
museums and art galleries, and as yet Trinidad's National Museum is
modest, though certainly well worth going to see for the light it
throws on certain aspects of life that the visitor can see on his
journeys round the island. Similarly on the upper floor the art col­
lection, though not extensive, shows a side of Trinidad which other­
wise, except for the Carnival, could not be discovered by the visitor.
Carnival is art and craft for the Trinidadian. The uninitiated tourist
who has not seen Carnival itself could catch some of its glory in the
Museum's collection of Carnival costumes. When I was there this
included portrayals of Satan, Beast, Clown, Woodpecker, Squirrel,
Princess, Autumn Leaves, Viking, Fancy Sailor. Other names of the
costumes were as colourful as the ostrich plumes, the silks and satins,
the sequins and peacock feathers, names such as Bannerman of the
Noble House of Three Fishes, Aurora Goddess of Dawn, The West
Wind, Virococha God of the Sky, The Dream of the War Eagle,
Lucifer Son of the Morning, King Kofri Kari, God of the Scorpion,
Argus-eyed Juno-Queen of Olympus, Seven-headed Dragon.
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Besides these Carnival costumes displaying an incredible ingenu­

ity and imagination, there are also other craft works. The paintings
include some by Trinidadian artists, among whom M. P. Alladin
seems to have been one of the more prolific and to have an ability to
put on to canvas the constant merry-go-round of Trinidad's colour
and movement. His art, in a painting like East Indian Wedding, is a
kind of Impressionism not so much of light and colour as of move­
ment. But many of the Trinidadian artists have this eye for move­
ment. The visitor should look for Jeannette Farrell's Sailors, a kind
of two-dimensional horn-pipe dominated by white-uniformed
sailors with brown faces. Alfred Codallo has a water-colour in the
gallery which I did not like as much as a scene of Santa Cruz which I
had seen amongst Teresa Pitts's collection in London.
A powerfully evocative landscape I admired was Dry Season, a
brittle painting, abstract and conventionalized, by Marguerite Wyke.
Its blue and orange and dusty ochres of heat evoke powerful
images of rainless tropical land. And in Venezuelan Falooch these
images of heat and stillness influenced Carlisle Chang's vision of
coloured boats. Chang's work is at least seen by many people because
he has done murals in new public buildings such as the Town Hall
and the airport at Piarco. Some of his best work is at the Hilton
Hotel, which is itself a discreet art gallery of local painters and crafts­
men. Of all the things done by Carlisle Chang which I saw I most
liked his metal relief mural of Carnival figures at the hotel. Mr.
Chang worked with Ken Morris, a metalworker whose craft can also
be seen in the National Museum. The Carnival relief is simply a
series of figures in costumes typical of Carnival, yet the peculiar,
lithe and liquid movement of 'jump-up' was fixed in this sheet
copper. Pictorial art has not yet made its full come-back, but for its
purpose as decoration in an hotel right on the site of the Carnival
procession, I thought Chang and Morris had done brilliantly.
I began to wonder if I was suffering from hallucinations about
Trinidadian names, for here also in the art gallery the artists joined
the ranks of the richly named and the cosmopolitan-named, indicating
the island's multi-racial make-up: Patrick Chu Foon, Leo Glasgow,
Edward Hernandez, Dominic Isaac, Holly Gayadeen, Amy Leong
Pang, Newel Lewis, Frank Seepersad, Henri Salvatori, Thora
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Mahabir, Alphus Charles, Nan Dalziel, Jones Gilbert. The subjects

this distinctively named group painted or sculpted were mostly from
local scenes and ceremonies, and here again the titles of the paintings
almost paint a picture themselves of everyday Trinidad, The Hosein
Festival, Mr Dan's House, Cocoa Pickers, Stick Fighters, Seventh Day
Adventist Clinic, The Governor's Residence, Shanty Town, Woodbrook
Market, Wayside Preachers, Washday.
I would have loved to have drawn and painted the scenes along
the road between Arima and Sangre Grande. After leaving the Royal
Borough of Arima the traveller going to the Atlantic side of the
island passes through tracts of landscape with the appearance of
virgin forest still in the process of being cleared. This is lyrical
country, well wooded and watered, giving signs of human husbandry
by occasional ranch-like houses which blend with the rolling green
forest of the mountain background and the large, healthy herds of
cattle in the cleared pastures. Something ethereal possesses this short
and very beautiful stretch of the road eastwards, five miles of red­
tawny earth often misty with smoke drifting before the wind, blue
and grey wood smoke from the burning of trees and scrub of the
clearances. It is a landscape I found nowhere else on the island.
When the Emancipation Bill was passed in 1833 there were only
17,439 adult working slaves and 2,246 child slaves in Trinidad,
while Barbados, a mere 166 square miles to Trinidad's 1,864 square
miles, had 66,638 working slaves. The British Government gave the
planters and sugar-mill owners in Trinidad £55 as compensation for
each slave freed. But in Barbados this was reduced to £23. This is a
good example of how neglected Trinidad had been, though right
from the very time of Columbus's discovery everybody had remarked
upon the island's fertility and the excellence of its soil and climate.
Even today, driving from Arima to Valencia, the visitor must wonder
why these new and prosperous cattle pastures had not been cleared
years earlier.
After Valencia the landscape changes again in the abrupt way
which is characteristic of the island. The road turns sharply from
east to south and runs away from the Northern Range down to
Sangre Grande, and this is the road I would have painted. It is
similar to the plantation avenues beyond Diego Martin, but on a
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much grander scale. The new fiat motor road cuts straight for miles
between tall, even walls of trees, more like a clipped and orderly
allee in a French garden than the Eastern Main Road in Trinidad.
One particularly long stretch passes through taller, straighter and
darker woods growing so densely together that they resemble an
immense wall covered in creeper. This narrow, gorge-like avenue is
at its most impressive on the journey back to Arima, for framed in
the trees at its distant end the noble Hanks of the Northern Range
reared up.
But only a single tree stops the vista down the main street of
Sangre Grande. This is a yellow poui outside the Police Station.
Edward Lear would have loved the tree, for it is delightfully full of
things . . . there was an old man in a poui . . . There were, alas,
no old men in the great tree, but instead it was festooned with the
marvellous hanging nests of the yellow-backed cornbirds. Scores of
the handsome birds Hew to and fro, their bright custard patches made
snappier by the jet-black plumage and by contrast with the blue
radiance of the sky. To find this big, extremely noisy colony in the
centre of the busy market town was unexpected. The policemen took
pride in their tree of gregarious cornbirds. One officer on duty I spoke
to thought that at the moment the poui probably held nests for at
least one hundred and fifty birds, though many of the old nests had
only just been cut down. He also called the birds yellow plantains.
Fried plaintain was served with my meal in the Royal Restaurant
only a few yards away from the Police Station-not fried birds, but
the large cooking banana.
Sangre Grande afforded me many happy hours during my stay in
Trinidad, and I know no other inland market town in the West
Indies which quite has its charm and vivacity. The wide, sunny main
street swarms with country people from the north as well as the south,
for the town is the centre of the region's trade. Men unload sacks of
cocoa and coffee beans while their wives wander along pavements
piled with beds and mattresses, shoes and oil lamps, swimming
costumes and plastic pails interspersed among roti-makers and
women roasting corncobs. Women play an important part in business
life as well as in the home. A shopkeeper proudly announced on his
nameboard 'Boodansingh & Daughters Dry Goods Store'. Several
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times in Sangre Grande I saw a man I called The Prophet, a very tall
East Indian with flowing hair and beard, a long staff and yellow
smock. From beneath this smock blue jeans peeped out, but in no
way destroyed the general effect of a Muslim holy man capable of
dispensing potent charms. Another shop called itself 'New Life
Food & Fun'. Trinidad's genius for incidental buildings has not
missed Sangre Grande, and its main street has examples of this artless
art. The New Cash Store is an elegant frame house with thin wood
pillars on the pavement and high ground-floor shops set back from
the upper floor, whose veranda was shuttered. The structure is
lightened still further with finely wrought fretwork white-painted as
crisp as freshly laundered lace. There are lace brackets at the top of
the pillars, lace bargeboards at the eaves, lace ventilators over doors
and windows, the whole thing done with a grace that could never be
built again.
Farther up the main street is another fine example at Marlay &
Co. And on the comer by the bus and taxi terminus yet another of
these enchanting buildings of plain, weatherbeaten wood. Rickety
with age and settlement, it leans this way and that, yet is beautiful,
with the first-floor balcony completely closed in by narrow delicate
louvres in frames.
The thirty miles from Port-of-Spain to Sangre Grande became
familiar to me, yet for no particular reason on my part I never spent a
night in the town. The coast always seemed to draw me on, so that
Sangre Grande became a half-way stop on the way to Mayaro on the
Atlantic shore or to Toco on the north-west comer of the island
where the Atlantic met the Caribbean. The Toco road lacks the
spectacle of high ridges and plunging valleys, and the road itself does
not perform look-no-hands feats of engineering like the road through
the heart of the Northem Range to Blanchisseuse.
To go to Toco is to experience one more of Trinidad's unique
landscapes. The first few flat miles pass through a series of avenues
bordered by wide, grassy verges and walled in by tall trees. These
avenues are not so straight and disciplined as those between Valencia
and Sangre Grande. They are not evocative of the French allee, but
of those long, winding drives up to Irish domains I remembered.
But here, instead of the montbretia of Ireland, wild ginger grows.
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The clusters of flowers of this Heliconia psittacorum flourish by the

roadside for most of the twenty-eight miles from Sangre Grande to
Toco, running along the domain-like drives and carpeting palm
groves by the sea. The bracts are most noticeable, brilliant orange
inside and peach-coloured with a waxy bloom outside, while the
orange flowers are tipped with deep bottle green.
The road to the island's north-western point twists and winds
through a continuous garden of tropical trees and shrubs, all decked
in the freshest and most ebullient of greens and all pressing closely
down to the edges of the road. Or, at least nearly all were green, for
there could still be seen the blackened scars from a forest fire in 1957
when the flames destroyed 170 acres around Matura. These were
stately mora woods soaring to 130 feet which give their name not
only to this part of the island, called Mora Forest, but also to several
lanes leading deep into the country off the main road. I saw several
of these with signposts labelled Mora Trace. But fine new plantations
were springing up between the charcoal stumps of the ruined mora
forest. Ironically, one of the local industries was charcoal-burning,
and in spite of the 1957 devastation the air was heady with the
homely incense of the forest kilns.
Leaving Matura we passed rivers, creeks, coconut palms in every
condition and form of life and death, dusty yards, dogs, vultures, and
traces ambling unpaved and pastoral into sylvan plantation land­
scape, leading to hidden lands of lost content. I was travelling in a
shared taxi and presently the road veered towards the coast and the
first glimpses of the sea appeared, snatches of bottle green, placid
under the luminous blue sky. Then the road skirted coves bordered by
chocolate rocks sugar-iced with broken foam of the sea. Gates and
nameplates betrayed the presence of new villas. Places like Balandra
Bay and its sickle of perfect beach were becoming fashionable. The
sea embraces the sandy crescent in single waves that rise and fall with
military precision, making a perfectly sheltered place to swim, unlike
the farther side through the coconut groves, where the currents are
treacherous and bathing consequently prohibited. Evenly spaced
like the waves falling and spilling at Balandra Bay were the clear,
loud notes of the thick-billed finch called chicki-chong. I heard its
fine voice in many places between Arima and Toco from woods and
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clearings. In its splendid black and rich chestnut livery, the cock is
more likely to be seen and heard captive and caged in the towns like
the picoplat and semp.
The Toco taxi passed hunters, but they were not intent on
catching finches. Their guns and multi-coloured dogs leashed on
lengths of rope were set for bolder sport than song birds. This road
passes through much of the high woods, rich in animal life that can
be shot during the October to March season. Mongoose and agouti,
alligator and armadillo are bagged, but for many the sport means
deer or the quenck pig. The tailless hog is a ferocious attacker
despite its small size and a match for the boldest dog. When cornered
the quenck has been known to attack the hunter himself. Teeth from
these peccaries turn up among the aboriginal artefacts, and since
they have been sharpened by human hands Dr. Bullbrook suggests
they may indicate manhood initiation by scarification.
Palm groves rather than mora forest were the harbingers of Toco
itself, which came into view as a straggling village of red tin roofs
and overfull gardens. The coast did not seem to be so beautiful as
Blanchisseuse's sweeping coconut-fringed sands. Yet Toco compen­
sates in its quantity of bays and the choice it gives of hidden sitting
places facing the open stretches of sea, which here are half Atlantic
and half Caribbean. Toco's skyline, too, goes up and down with
headlands, conical in form and forest-covered, their lower slopes
sprinkled with houses. On the farther headlands shiny palm trees
and shiny tin roofs glint through the heavy haze of spray from
breakers smashed on shoreline rocks.
The Anglican church of St. David presides over Toco's centre in
the glorious company, not of the Apostles, but of the Courthouse and
Police Station, housed in red-roofed, cream-walled wooden buildings.
Toco is a toy town, unchanged since old colonial times, except that
electric fans and corrugated iron have replaced coconut-frond thatch
and palm-leaf fans. On closer inspection St. David's, in a plain style
of Gothic Revival, is not as old as it looks. A home-made foundation­
stone records 'This church was destroyed by fire in 1951. It was
restored and rededicated by John, Lord Bishop of Trinidad, in
November 1952.'
St. David's is dwarfed by tall royal palms outside, which had
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obviously been there prior to the fire. The schoolhouse, immediately

next door, was quiet except for the master's voice. The whole village
while I was there was extremely quiet and men cycling into town
went to join others in a solemn circle that seemed gathered at every
shop listening to a cricket match on the radio. A large fat Negress
with white hair sat selling vegetables and fruit by the side of the road,
trying hard not to fall completely asleep while keeping the village
hens and bees away from her wares.
Opposite St. David's church stands the village garage, with a
large, modern Shell notice proclaiming the jet age to the cycling
foresters and coconut-gatherers who 'cycle' up the palm trunks by
means of a piece of rope like a figure-of-eight on their bare feet. Bare
feet are a prominent feature of Toco's newest building, Mount Pisgah
Temple. Passing through unfenced back gardens and their calabash
trees bearing fruit the size of large melons, I came to the new Spiritual
Baptist church.
The door was firmly padlocked. But two boys who lived in the
house on the near-by slope brought me an empty beer crate to stand
on so that I could look through gaps in the concrete blocks that
served as windows. The eighteen-foot-square building is almost right
on the beach. By the door a notice admonishes the faithful, 'Put off
thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is
holy ground.' At the more imposing Jinnah Memorial Mosque at St.
Joseph's a notice simply says, 'Please take off thy shoes'.
The altar of Toco's Spiritual Baptist church is also made of
cement. On the white cloth which covers it stand brass vessels and a
handbell. On the wall behind is a crucifix, another in front, one at the
side, as well as the wand with the iron ring at the top with which the
spiritual father leads converts to the 'living' waters of baptism. Crude
pieces of wood serve as candelabra and a large enamel pot with
enamel plates lies on the floor. The central and most important part
of the temple is a free-standing cross with other crosses chalked on
the mud floor marking the cardinal points. Mystical signs mark this
centre cross in concentric circles. 'Agla' is written in the innermost
one, and 'Adonay' in the outer one. There is a sign resembling a
clock face. Wooden benches are placed on each side of the central
cross and they face the altar. Here the worshippers wait for the Spirit
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-the Holy Ghost-to come and take possession of their bodies, so

that they become paralysed with the divine touch before the Spirit
fills them, causing them to quiver and dance, to speak in tongues and
to prophesy.
Mount Pisgah Temple on a sandy slope above the sea at Toco is
similar to the many other Spiritual Baptist churches throughout the
island. Worshippers were called Shouters because of their manner of
speaking as they display the phenomena they believe to be possession
by the Holy Ghost. A strict moral code of everyday behaviour, that
is more in keeping with the evangelical behaviour of ordinary Baptist
churches, lies behind all the hysterical dancing and jumping around
during the climax of worship. The Shouter religion is entirely a
Christian denomination and quite distinct from Shango worship,
which is also practised on the island.
The gods of Shango came to the Carribbean and South America
with the captured and enslaved Africans. Since the Negroes accepted
Christianity rather than be flogged for not doing so, they kept their
own African beliefs while outwardly crossing themselves and going
to church. Shango was the resultant compromise. The religion was
not as widespread or influential in Trinidad as in, for instance,
Brazil, where the New Year celebrations in honour of Yemenja are
second only to the pre-Lenten Carnival. In Brazil this mixture of
African gods and Christian saints is called Macumba. To see the
miles of coast around Rio de Janeiro lined with rich and poor, black
and white, throwing garlands of white flowers into the waves to
honour the dusky Mother of the Waters, Yemenja, and businessmen
leaving boxes of cigars as offerings to Exu, the Evil Spirit, on the
rocks of the shore, is to understand the extent and power of this
African-inspired religion.
In Trinidad, the Devil is also Exu, though slightly modified into
Eshu. Yemenja also has the same name and her particular colours,
but in Trinidad she is connected with St. Anne rather than the Virgin
Mary, as in Brazil. All the African deities have corresponding Chris­
tian saints. Ogun the War God is St. Anthony in Brazil, St. Michael
on the island. Shango, who gives his name to the Trinidadian religion,
is the God of Thunder of the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria. Shango makes
thunder and lightning and controls the sun, and is equivalent to 'the
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man without the head'-St. John the Baptist. In Brazilian Macumba

his name is spelt Xango and, although still the God of Thunder, he
corresponds to St. Peter.
The overall pattern of the religion, the pairing of African gods
with Catholic saints, their sacred colours and emblems and festival
days are much alike throughout the Caribbean and South America.
Food eaten by the gods, food given as offerings (land turtles, sheep,
rum, goats, pigeons and fowl of any colour except black) are also
similar. The black hen or cock is devil's food and can only be given
to honour Eshu. Since the violent dancing of these African religions
reaches a climax when the god takes possession of the individual
dedicated to him, the sessions of worship tend to conclude in a kind of
epileptic seizure in the worshipper-not unlike the Shouters filled with
the 'Holy Ghost' and speaking in tongues. As recently as 1957 Pro­
fessor Estyn Evans wrote in Irish Folk Ways about black fowl still being
buried alive in a few remote parts oflreland as a cure for epilepsy.
As far as I could tell Toco had no Shango temples, and certainly I
could see no white lilies on the blue sea for Yemenja, the Mae d' Agua.
But if the black goddess of Africa does not haunt this part of Trini­
dad's coast, perhaps Yara the water goddess of the early Amerindians
still lures sailors to their death and watery graves, as did the seal­
women of the Faroes. At any rate, the waters along that north-western
coast are haunted by the ghosts of a real event which occurred during
the Amerindian rebellion of 1699. The tribes had taken enough insult
and injury from the Spanish invaders, whose sole objects were to
enslave the Indians and force them to look for gold and silver or
export them to other islands to work mines. With nothing but bows
and arrows the Amerindians attacked a mission and ambushed the
Governor's travelling-party. They buried their victims, except for
the Governor, whom they simply threw into the river. When troops
arrived the Indians and their families made off for the high ground
east of Toco now called Point Calera. When faced with the choice of
being caught by the Spanish or flinging themselves to the rocky
coast below, men and women, young children and old warriors threw
themselves in a mass suicide over the cliff, no doubt comforted by
whatever hopes their god-Quiyumucon-Our Big Father-gave
them of bliss after death.
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Today, no trace remains of the horrors of those times. A powerful

lighthouse has been built on Point Calera, its long, straight beams
the only votive lamp over the sea grave of nobody knows how many
Amerindians. It may have been stories of this kind which moved
Pope to write:
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul, proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the Solar Walk, or Milky Way,
Yet simple .Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud top't tower, an humbler heav'n
To Be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no Angel's wing, no Seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

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 ti 6 It
Symphony of Palms
Unlike many of his fellow Victorians, Charles Kingsley had an eye
for Caribbean beauty and a pen with which to express its mood, and
consequently his At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies became
much quoted. But since he was also a Professor of Modern History,
though at Cambridge, he was full of ideas about how the West Indies
could be most profitably organized. For him 'the bane of the West
Indies' was large-scale sugar production, which also, in his opinion,
was unnecessary and bad economics. Kingsley's schemes involved
'petite culture' as he put it. He thought bamboo should be cultivated
for paper fibre, and that plantain-meal should be exported for the use
of 'the English working classes', that drugs should be grown, and
that use should be made of the rich harvest obtainable from oil­
producing seeds devoured by bats and birds. 'Why should not
Trinidad, and other islands, export fruits?' he asks and, 'Above all,
can nothing be done to increase the yield of the cocoa-farms, and the
quality of Trinidad cocoa?'
If only Charles Kingsley could retrace his observant steps around
the Caribbean and go to Trinidad now! If only he could see aspects
of Trinidad that concerned him then! The climax of such a resurrec­
tion would be the journey from Sangre Grande to Mayaro Bay in the
south-east. For eight miles out of Sangre Grande the road runs
hardly ever straight, the steering-wheel of the car held hardly ever
still. The road curves in quadrants and ogees and quarter ellipses up
and down hills and intimate valleys, and passes through some of the
island's lushest countryside. Mile succeeds mile of citrus grove and
cocoa plantation crowding down the hillsides to the road. In February
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the verges are stacked high with boxes of grapefruit waiting for
transport to the canning factory. Charles Kingsley's proposals have
become reality, for Trinidad now exports fruits, orange juice and
grapefruit segments.
But cocoa shipments are nothing new. By the eighteenth century
cocoa and tobacco comprised the island's main commercial crops.
Although cocoa has been an agricultural mainstay ever since, the
industry has had as many elevations and depressions as there are on
the forested slopes where the cocoa trees thrive. By 1727 the plan­
tations were completely destroyed by a great 'blast'. The 'blast' had
several interpretations. Some thought it was a hurricane. The Abbe
Raynal, the French scholar on Caribbean affairs, considered it no
more than exposure to the north winds, and one resident priest on the
island declared that it was nothing less than divine judgement on the
Spanish planters who had refused to pay their Church Tithes. Nearly
two hundred years later, in 1928, when a fungus parasite laid waste
the cocoa plantations, the scientists swept it aside as a touch of
'witches' broom' and sent to the South American mainland to search
for wild plants to cross with the old stock. This resulted in Trinidad
becoming a centre of cocoa research.
Micro-climatology plays an important part in modern cocoa
growing. Whether the plantation is only a holding of an acre or an
estate with over a thousand planted acres, the trees on their slopes all
require shade. Tall covering trees tower above the cocoa boughs to
shelter them from excessive sun and to arrest passing clouds and hold
the precious rain. In this way, extensive areas ofTrinidadian foothills
are an evergreen forest reigned over by the beautiful immortelles.
Other trees and shrubs used for shading are red sandalwood, naked
Indian (Albizzia caribaea) so beloved of cornbirds, and the toporite,
angelin, balisier and banana, fig and cassava. From the air, the large
areas of cocoa plantation look like jungle, and even when driving
through them by car the traveller has to look for the pods attached in
such an odd way to the trunk and branches, as though they were
decorations hung on a Christmas tree. At the various times of ripen­
ing the eight-inch-long, ribbed ovoid pods also look like artificial
wax fruits whose deep green merges into custard yellow and crimson
runs into purple. The fruit pod contains a white pulp and, nestling
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in this, about thirty of the beans which are the object of the whole
exercise. The cocoa harvest goes on through most of the year as the
pods ripen so that their beans can be taken out to ferment and dry in
the 'sweat boxes'.
Within the sheltered gloom of the cocoa plantations many herbs
and wild flowers spring to life. Notable among these is the black stick,
the Pachystachys coccinea, which, despite its lovely scarlet flowers, is
regarded as a troublesome weed by cocoa farmers. At the time of the
year when I began my weekly jaunts to Mayaro, the cocoa lilies were
just putting out their scarlet trumpets as well, and as I went along the
tortuous, switchback road, I was able to enjoy the eight miles of
plantation with their varieties of shade trees and wild flowers which
stretch between Sangre Grande and the sea.
Cocoa and Trinidad brought to mind tales of that most profligate
and drunken of pirates Captain Edward Teach. He was otherwise
known as 'Blackbeard' or 'Thatch' because of his thick black beard,
which grew to his belt-buckle and which he plaited with coloured
ribbons and tied up with the long hair on his head. Blackbeard
wanted Spanish gold and silver, but when he attacked ships leaving
Trinidad in 1716 the pirate found nothing but sweet and bitter cocoa
beans in the ships' holds. Even this amount was more than Black­
beard could consume, although he had thirteen wives with large
families to send to sleep each night.
But for all the enchantment of all those acres of plantations and
shade trees on the road from Sangre Grande, Charles Kingsley, if he
were able to make his journey today, would feel the same compulsion
to hurry to the end, because the scene was still there that once im­
pressed him by its unsurpassed spectacle: 'The Cocal, and it was
worth coming all the way from England to see it alone' as he wrote
afterwards. The Cocal is a wide strip along the shore salty with stiff
Atlantic breezes. Kingsley said of it, 'All this while the dull thunder
of the surf was growing louder and louder; till, not as in England
over a bare down, but through thickest foliage down to the high-tide
mark, we rode upon the shore, and saw before us a right noble sight,
a fl.at, sandy surf-beaten shore, along which stretched, in one grand
curve, lost at last in the haze of spray, fourteen miles of Coco Palms.'
Cars could still drive along the firm sands today. But buses and
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taxis hurtle along the road which passes as if in a green tunnel

through this most magnificent of all the sights of Trinidad. Charles
Kingsley did not exaggerate in claiming it worth the journey from
England just for itself. No visitor to Trinidad should miss these con­
tinuous miles of palm groves, nobler than the sands and the sea.
Graceful, slender trunks swoop upwards to form a fantastic roof
swimming with aqueous light slanting in bars through the palms'
stiff leaves. The road is narrow and littered with fallen, dead leaves
and withered coconuts lying about like cannonballs, gone astray in a
battle. If ever trees could be likened to a Gothic cathedral, these are
they. The trunks are nave piers, the huge leaves overlap and enfold
one another in a million variations of interweaving ribs, such as no
mason who contrived the glories of vaults like King's College Chapel
at Cambridge or Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey could
ever have conceived. No blue in a stained-glass window ever had the
radiance of the sea glimpsed in fragments between those palm
trunks.
All along the way, and for another fourteen miles beyond that to
the end of Mayaro Bay, wild ginger grows. Its orange flowers are to
the palm groves what bluebells are to English woods in spring. But
no English glades ever saw a scene like that at Manzanilla where the
cocoa hills give on to the sea. Here, on the night of the October full
moon, the Hindus come to celebrate Kartik-Nathan. At this place,
they substitute the Atlantic rollers for the sacred waters of the
Ganges to fulfil their yearly rites of purification.
Boys also come here to catch crabs for calaloo to sell to passing
cars. Tractors, trailers and mule carts make a continual caravan along
the palm-grove road to and from the copra factory. On the side of the
Cocal road away from the sea, and for the whole of its length, lies the
Nariva Swamp. Not only do the small oysters grow on its mangrove
trees but the neighbourhood is renowned for its musk-scented
melons and cantaloupes, besides huge watermelons whose black­
seeded, pink slices are a serious rival to ice-cream later in the year.
A sharp bend of the road brings travellers on to the 320-feet-long
Nariva Bridge which crosses a wide river of the same name, lined
densely with undergrowth and trees along both banks. Even the
speediest of taxi drivers is obliged to slow down at the bridge, as at
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another bridge farther along which crosses the Ortoire River. The
bridges are narrow and built of steel and timber baulks which rattle
alarmingly when a car goes over them.Just at this part of the journey
to Mayaro it is easy to imagine that here were the marches of El
Dorado. The wide motionless rivers, with dense forest reaching out
over the brown water, seem more like the slow, wide rivers of South
America's immense interiors.
It was difficult to remember that this was Trinidad, an island so
broken up by hills and mountains. But the Nariva was not the
steaming rain forest and piranha-infested river it pretended to be.
The river was wide, but necessarily short. After the impressive ride
over the bridge, the road continued through more and equally riotous
palm trees. Along this road the sea's white crests appeared just above
the floor of the groves. The sky was not always the brilliant blue that
might be expected of the tropical palm-fringed bay. Instead, soft,
misty colours suffused it, harmonizing with the sea, as if both sky and
sea had been made from the same element.
As the first houses of Mayaro appeared along the road, passengers
in the shared taxi began to get out. Hindu women who had managed
to keep themselves to themselves behind small head-veils slid out of
the car in as dignified a way as possible. Farmers called for the driver
to stop at their home trace, and delayed us while they rummaged in
the boot for hoes or cutlasses or outraged piglets. I usually stayed on
as far as the town market. Mayaro is the name of the county which
occupies the south-eastern part of Trinidad. But although its area is
93,242 acres the population is less than seven thousand souls.
The visitor, certainly at first, might he confused by the use of the
name Mayaro. The town itself is referred to in conversation as
Mayaro. But on maps, such as those I looked at in the British Museum
as well as those in Trinidad, the town is marked as Pierreville.
Mayaro, however, is the name generally used and appears on all
public buildings. Pierreville is only part of the present town of
Mayaro.
If I could arrange affairs, I tried to arrive in Mayaro before midday
on the Fridays I went. This meant that I could go into the little
market to buy food for a picnic on the beach. I liked the clean, neat
market with its assortment of strange vegetables, such as cassavas,
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yams, dasheen, sweet potatoes, tannias, artichokes, cucumbers, kohl

rabi, christophines, shallots, pumpkins and chives, red sorrel for
sweet drinks and jellies, wax gourds for vegetable curries, a snake­
like gourd called locally 'coolie kitchender', kola nuts, limes for
punch, yellow star apples for dessert, and bulbous marrows like the
Baroque domes of southern Germany, together with all sorts and
conditions of curry powders, tree barks and herbs for tanning, dye­
ing, medicine, teas, chewing and wine-making. Cleanliness was the
order of the day, so much so that the butchers' stalls had no flies
around them. Mayaro market is an intimate friendly affair. 'Dear
Customer,' said one notice over a butcher's stall, 'Due to the High
Cost of Cattle, We are forced to sell our Beef at $ 1 per lb. Winston.'
Friday morning made its presence felt at Mayaro's open-sided
market, for at one end of the stalls old age pensioners queued up at a
government office shed with their little square pension books. They
had all the character of old age pensioners in England, the slowness,
the patience, the slight bewilderment at officialdom's ways, the
expression of pleasure at meeting friends and having money again,
however quickly the few dollars would trickle through their old
fingers. There were Negroes and Indians, many of them shrivelled
and shrunken and misshapen with age. Yet, because they were
Trinidadians as well as O.A.P.s, they somehow had not lost their
jaunty air, and though they might be bent over sticks for support, the
way they wore straw hats or felt hats and bright clean dresses was some­
how youthfully gay. There was also dignity under the trilbys or the
Hindu veils which had been specially donned for 'pension mornin' '.
After a look around the market stalls with the precious pension
money in their pockets and purses, men and women wandered into
the big store owned by Chai Ashing. This proprietor had many
things on his shop counter, but none so bright and beautiful as his
diminutive grandchildren who sat and played on the top of it like
Chinese dolls. The old people who came into the dark, richly spicy
shop might buy a pound of lima beans for their own table or a sack of
hen meal, or perhaps one of those mysterious envelopes wrapped in
banana leaves tied with thin string. Inside the dark green mystery
packets was a portion of highly seasoned mincemeat mixed with green
peppers, raisins, tomatoes, capers and covered with crushed corn
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which, after being folded into the banana leaves was ready for putting
complete into boiling water for making the popular pastelles.
One end of these Chinese village stores serves as bar where dark
or white rum can be bought in miniature bottles or gallon jars. When
English planters forced Africans into sugar cultivation on Barbados
rum became known as 'comfortable waters'. The slaves have gone,
but the rum remains, and the old men who collect their Friday
pensions at Mayaro come into the Chinese shop for a comfortable
and sociable glass before starting back for the familiar trace that
leads to home. These Chinese shops serve as general stores, not only
for Mayaro, but for the country districts for miles around. You can
get anything there from gum-boots to bicycle bells, from bottles of
perfume to kitchen stoves. There are christening-robes and rat traps.
And in the centre of the floor on the customers' side of the counter,
amid the clutter of farm implements and heaps of animal fodder.
there are barrels of salt fish and beef, pigs' tails, snouts and trotters,
I never lost my astonishment that village general stores like those
of Mayaro should stock shelves of Portuguese sardines, Danish roes,
salmon from Peru and Canada (Mr. Biswas's favourite food), cases of
imported smoked herrings and barrels of salt fish. The astonishment
was because on my first visit to Mayaro within fifteen minutes of
leaving the village I saw a miracle of fishes on the beach. This was
at Plaisance, the name given the cluster of wooden houses and yet
another Chinese store on the beach. Plaisance is less than half a mile
down the straight road from Mayaro to the sea and the great bay.
One of the fascinations of going to Mayaro Bay, besides the thrill
of the drive through the miles of seaside palm groves, is actually to
arrive. Mayaro village, built along the arms of its crossroads, is
charming, like most of the island's country places. But to walk past
Mayaro school and its playing-fields, past the tiny cinema, is to walk
from one world to another, from rural Trinidad to maritime Trinidad,
to go from the inland atmosphere of Mayaro's market-place to the
open seashore cooled all year round by salty onshore breezes.
Mayaro Bay opens suddenly in a grand vista. Where the fisher­
men's huts on the yellow sands stand at the end of the road down
from Mayaro village, where the palms lean together as if in a con­
spiracy, where the roar of the sea or its susurrant murmurs can be
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heard clearly for the first time, here also the climax of the journey
bursts in a vision of great simplicity and majesty. Towards the south
the sandy beach and the palms disappear altogether in the distance.
The white, low breakers merge miles away until they become like
driven snow. The air is misty with miles of sea spray, yet from the
southern horizon, itself obscured by salt spray haze, a ragged profile
of headlands can be seen. For the whole length of this immense,
gently curving bay, coconut palms grow only a few feet away from
the farthest out-thrusts of the incoming tide. After seeing the palm
groves of the Cocal I had thought it impossible that palms could
make any more patterns, but along this shore they did. They incline
gracefully towards the sea, the taut geometric leaves forming foun­
tains of polished green marble. The head of one tree is indistinguish­
able from the next and so the whole mass of palm leaves make their
own cliff for the otherwise flat bay.
At Plaisance light beats off the sand, illuminating the coconut
palms from beneath, so that their shade is full of unsuspected high­
lights, constantly moving like light under water. The houses and
thatched fishermen's sheds are all drowned in this lagoon of palms,
but here there is no mournful tolling of the drowned bells Debussy
heard, but only the incessant clamour of the incessant sea. The
waves break at a sand bar a hundred yards from the palms. The sand
bar breaks the back of the Atlantic rollers. Their high white crests
collapse in avalanches of green crystal and, rollers no more, rush
inshore in a swirl of warm kindly shallows. On that first visit, as on
every one afterwards, I flung off my clothes almost as soon as I saw
the sea and plunged into the breakers. This was no swim. This was
porpoise play in the foam, turning, rolling, diving, throwing myself
into the buoyant and caressing water.
Each time a wave spent itself with rushes and hisses in shallows
over the sands, scores of tiny fish broke the surface. These were a
cartoonist's fish with enormous cartoon-like eyes protruding from
the top of their heads, which has given them the name four-eyes.
They seemed to enjoy the partial exposure to sun and air which the
incoming waves afforded them. But if they saw anybody walking
through the water, they fled suddenly in a cartoon-like panic, flash­
ing on top of the water at great speed. Ancestors of the fish I scattered
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had looked at Charles Kingsley, for he wrote: 'Pleasant to bathe in

warm surf into which the four-eyes squattered in shoals as one ran
down, and the moment they saw one on the water, ran up the next
wave to lie staring at the sky.'
Just like water-babies, in fact.
Two Chinese youths from Mount St. Benedict's School were
wrestling in the surf. I asked what they called the little silver fish,
and they said 'chuff-chuff', adding that the harmless-looking crea­
tures were poisonous besides keen-sighted. When the next crowd
surfaced like submarines from the surf the boys raced after them to
demonstrate how the chuff-chuffs' bellies distended when rubbed.
The boys were on holiday and so had rented a plain little bungalow
on the beach beside Plaisance's Chinese store. They invited me in
to share a seven-pound salmon which they had been given free for
helping the local fishermen drag the big net in. That morning's had
been a good catch. Lorries and vans still went to and fro along the
firm, low-tide sands, loading up and carrying the extraordinary sea
harvest to places as far away as San Fernando and Port-of-Spain.
The lorryloads did not seem to diminish the enormous heap of
fish lying a few hundred yards farther along the beach. There were
sickle-tailed bonito, bonito indeed with their silver bellies and blue­
black backs. There were at least three hundred of them, all with
their mouths wide open, some still gasping last breaths, drowning
terribly in air. Cavalli had also been caught in great numbers, a fish
identified by its fat saffron-coloured tail and a weight anything be­
tween six and twelve pounds. In much lesser quantities were the
splendid silver king fish and salmon. Sting-rays, rhombic and
viciously tailed, had been thrown together with unwanted catfish to
the vultures. Fifty of these ugly black birds stalked among the fishy
carrion, making gashes with hooked beaks. Ten or a dozen would
settle and squabble together over one fish until, in no time at all,
its flesh was gone. With an arrogance to match their voracity the
corbeaus walked among the crowd around the net, making only a
token attempt to rise in the air when dogs came to sniff their catch.
Those already gorged sat like plump turkeys in the palms. Others
wheeled and planed slowly overhead, like diners uncertain of the
menu.
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 SYMPHONY OF PALMS

The moonshiners resembled opals. But these Hat fish, heaped in

baskets, were twelve inches from nose to tail. They swam in an
upright position, the two eyes very close to each other on each side
of the head, which was streamlined into their iridescent, oval shape.
The fishermen had brought a few young sharks in with the last
morning catch. These had not been thrown to the vultures, because
a tasty soup could be made from them. On the previous day a 350 lb.
hammerhead had been caught though it only fetched thirty dollars.
A shark from another catch had been cut open and a watch and a
ring were found inside.
That morning, I learnt, about 20,000 lb. of fish had been hauled
ashore from 'one pull' of the great net. Supervising the weighing of
the catch was the boat's captain, Kenny Glodon. He was nicknamed
Jamboree and his boat was the Spartacus. While the fishermen piled
the long net in a skilful way for reloading on to the boat, and while
the traders, mostly of East Indian stock, picked and weighed what­
ever fish they wanted for sale in the towns and villages around
Princes Town, Spartacus itself bobbed and swayed up and down on
the offshore swell, a slim, sharp-prowed vessel. Kenny did not con­
sider it worth while to take sharks fifty-two miles to Port-of-Spain's
market for only fourteen cents a pound. He was more interested in
the sort of profits resulting from the kind of catch he and his fellow
Spartacans had landed the previous August. It had been a sensational
haul and made news all over Trinidad. As they dragged the net in
that day there developed on the beach one of the biggest piles of fish
that had ever been seen at Mayaro. When all was sold and the total
figures worked out, the weight of the catch was reckoned 70,000 lb.
Kenny felt almost as much pride in the newspaper cutting as he did
in his four children. On that day he might well have thought well
justified the motto 'God is my co-pilot', a phrase appearing with an
anchor on his arms as one tattoo among many, some of which he had
done himself when younger. Kenny was still under thirty, a tall and
handsome man, his brown body tanned by years of sun and sea air.
He wore a short beard that completed his smiling yet commanding ap­
pearance. I asked him about the two large rings on his fingers. 'They
look like moons in the water,' he said, 'and frighten dangerous fish.'
The fishermen's shed headquarters stood on the sand, adorned
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 SYMPHONY OF PALMS

with a notice 'No Absene Language used on these premises', near

the bungalow rented by the students from Mount St. Benedict. As
we settled on the seven-pound salmon, now cooked and seasoned and
sharpened with the juice of fresh lemons, we could hear the fisher­
men singing a deep-chested work song; at each phrase the Spartacus
came out of the water and up the sand, inch by inch, the muscles that
plied its oars now straining to beach it.
Farther down Mayaro Bay, another of the long, sharp-prowed
fishing-boats rode on the swell and the crew were still feeding the
net back on board. Seen in silhouette, this perfectly controlled,
rhythmic movement, the men standing at regular intervals in the
surf with the net drooping between them, was like a perfect gym­
nastic display. But here the movement and the form were enhanced
by the flatness of the sea and the beach and the long, spray-misty
perspective of distance. A small boy went along the beach with a
king fish nearly as big as himself. He wanted me to buy it for two
dollars. When he went away, not at all upset by a no-sale, he stamped
his foot on a washed-up and dried-out Portuguese man-o'-war which
went pop! with surprising loudness.
The beach had many of these transparent bladder-like creatures
tinged with wonderful pinks and purples. But all sorts of fascinating
things could be picked up on the sands, most of them deposited by
the last incoming tide. I particularly liked the sea biscuits: dead
starfish with remarkable similarity both in size, colour and consis­
tency, to a tea biscuit. But close inspection showed them to be
exquisitely and delicately incised with fine patterns as if they were
the work of some modern-jewellery designer.
Observing my interest in the curios along the tide-tidied shore, a
youth asked me if I had ever seen the Devil's Woodyard. I certainly
had not, at least not up to then, and now this newest acquaintance
offered to take me at once, since he and his two companions were
driving their truckload of fish over to their home at Princes Town.
Buying fish from surrounding coasts and selling it wholesale was
their business. So when they had taken as much as they could from
the Spartacus's catch, I climbed into the driver's cabin and off we
went at a good pace for the trans-island journey to the weird mud
volcanoes called the Devil's Woodyard.
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 SYMPHONY OF PALMS

Our first fourteen miles to Rio Claro lay over a winding, hilly
road through winding, hilly countryside, wooded and gladed in a
pastoral rather than a jungly manner, reminding me of Classical
landscape paintings with Pan and attendant nymphs. But no Poussins
or Claudes ever had trees like the still-burning perch of mountain
immortelles which played parasols to the small cocoa farms lost
among the orange groves, and played host to innumerable parasite
vines and tufted air-plants, or served as choirstalls for the sprech
gesang duets of kiskadee and lesser white-shouldered tanager.
Bridget Swinton, an Irish painter whom I first met in Denmark,
where she still lives on the Roskilde Fjord, had a phrase for such
occasions. 'What-' she would ask with a sigh-'What does one do
about something so beautiful?' It was always rhetorical, implying
that nothing could be done. Irish, too, was Louis MacNeice. In lines
commemorating his father he wrote:
About this time ofyear the spendthrift plants
Will toss their trumpets heralding a life
That shows itself in time but remains timeless
As in the heart of music.
At the same time as Bishop MacNeice was fighting bigotry and
intolerance in Ireland and trying to win tolerable conditions for the
Belfast docker and parish orphan, Captain Cipriani was giving
'dignity to the barefooted man' of Trinidad. Both men fought and
won the same sort of battles. Both spent their lives endeavouring to
make two widely separated specks of the British Empire better places
for the poor man irrespective of his religion or background.
In 1925, after 128 years under the British flag, Trinidad held its
first election. It could hardly have been called a general election.
Only 21,794 people out of a total population of 364,828 were allowed
to vote, and even then two of the seven seats were uncontested.
Nevertheless, within the narrow confines of this Legislative Council,
Captain Cipriani used every opportunity to further the cause of
those people who, in spite of being the majority, had no right to
vote. Cipriani fought for abolition of child labour. He fought for old
age pensions, an eight-hour day, minimum wages for workers and
recognition of trade unions. And when his plans could not be aired
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in the stifling Legislative Council, Cipriani used the Port-of-Spain

City Council as a platform for much-needed reform. He was mayor
of the city eight times and a statue of this courageous humanitarian
stood in Independence Square.
But the voice of Cipriani was not crying in a wilderness. Gradually
but inevitably, like storm clouds piling slowly up on the mountain
peaks, the idea grew that Trinidad should be an independent nation.
Whitehall continued to ignore the island except when this little
thorn occasionally pricked its tough hide. A complaint was once made
to a British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies by a man who
had occupied a colonial government house and knew intimately
Whitehall's calculated indifference to the needs of its smaller out­
posts of empire. Why, asked the former governor, was such rubbish
sent out from England to fill numerous departmental posts? The
Under-Secretary replied, 'It is true we send out a great deal of
rubbish, but it is mostly in the form of governors.'
What was wit in Whitehall was tragedy in Trinidad. Over the
years the island had suffered under more than a fair share of guber­
natorial rubbish. Government House had bigoted diehards such as
Sir Henry Irving. There were heads of police like a certain Captain
Baker who thought nothing of drawing innocent blood with his own
ceremonial sword.
Over the years, however, the Trinidadians themselves became well
known, not only as clever sportsmen and cricketers. When the long
road to Independence reached Marlborough House, London, in May
1962, and leaders assembled to work on the Constitution of Trinidad
and Tobago, the Trinidadian Prime Minister was the object of as
much respect at the high tables of Oxford as he was among the
dockers and cane-cutters of the People's National Movement which
voted him into power. This was Dr. Eric Williams, who for years
was Professor of Political and Social Science at Howard University
in Washington, and is widely known as an authority and writer on
race relations.
Under the leadership of this quiet scholar, Trinidad and Tobago
emerged from Marlborough House as an Independent State within
the Commonwealth. On the day I rode to the Devil's Woodyard in
the fish lorry, Dr. Williams was escorting Queen Elizabeth II around
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the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine. This royal visit
was being made not so much by the head of the Commonwealth as
by the Queen of Trinidad and Tobago. Every crossroads and every
village the Queen passed through fluttered with flags and bunting,
enthusiastic with loyal welcomes. But the Union Jack was nowhere
to be seen. The flag flying everywhere was the red one with a diagonal
stripe of black on white-Trinidad's own flag won at last from the
terrible oppression of slavery, from the ignominy of indentured
labour, from the pseudo-government of a Crown Colony, a flag repre­
senting the fusion of a dozen races, a score of languages that still
enriched the official English language.
Queen Elizabeth II is popular in Trinidad. The three young
Hindu fishmongers taking me to the Devil's Woodyard thought she
was quite as good as the Beatles, and that was high praise indeed.
'She real nice,' they said, as we rattled along to the Devil's Wood­
yard, passing many East Indian country people with their water­
buffaloes and Sahiwal cattle.
In this tract of the island many of the houses are built on grassy
knolls shaded by breeze-rippling bananas. And the road to Rio Claro
is bordered for many stretches by wide grassy fringes. Where it sails
gently up to crests and rises the trees sometimes give place to open
views across the intensely green-wooded countryside. A tradition of
palm-thatching seems to have grown up here, and I saw more of the
tinder-dry biscuit-coloured thatched roofs than anywhere else on the
island. Here also the trees have more and thicker creepers and aerial
roots and long rope-like lianas trailing to the ground. Then pastoral
lands open between the woods and on these flocks of grotesque anis
feasted on grasshoppers and seeds. And here and there we passed a
boy lost in wonder at his tiny kite caught high in the wind, a speck
against the sky.
This is not a country of vertiginous mountain flanks and deep
valleys as in the Northern Range. But its elevation is sufficient to
afford panoramas of the low-lying country around, perspective turn­
ing the green woods dusty-blue with distance. The town of Rio Claro
itself is high, built on a knoll with fine views to the south where the
farthest landscape just peeps above the tree-tops. Trees are kind to
Rio Claro, helping to modify a suggestion of garishness in its cor-
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rugated iron roofs and concrete houses. The town was like Mayaro,
built along the limbs of a crossroads. The clusters of single-storey
houses, the few bars and shops opening directly on to the street,
create an atmosphere like that of a small South American town, a
character well matched to its Spanish name of Rio Claro. The Singer
Sewing Machine signs in combination with Coca-Cola advertise­
ments so oddly out of keeping with everything else brought to mind
small villages which I had seen in the interior of Brazil thousands of
miles from the great cities.
Our way out of Rio Claro was barred by two ancient farmers each
bearing two large sticks of green bananas on yokes across their
shoulders. They hailed the lorry and for the cavalli they chose care­
fully from the fish gave the young traders one of the sticks containing
several dozen 'figs'. Any similarity to South America now dis­
appeared, for the predominant theme became East Indian, with
place-names like Indian Walk and Hindustan where transistor radios
were turned on at full volume for the sinuous singing of the Girls of
the Muslim League. This was the world of The Mystic Masseur who,
as the hero in another of V. S. Naipaul's novels, was forerunner to
the more sophisticated Mr. Biswas. On such a mango tree as those
we passed, Naipaul's hero nailed up the notice to announce his pro­
fessional practice as mystic and masseur.
The Devil's Woodyard turned out to be a curio rather than a
seven-day wonder. But in a sense it was suitable for this part of
Trinidad, because it was like the East, as though the deep mud of
the monsoons was drying and cracking under a relentless sun. The
barren field of mud volcanoes was sinister. I did not want to stay
long. It was easy to imagine how tales of evil omen developed from
the place, especially when the volcanoes rumbled and spat out
columns of mud. In Iceland the tourist is taken to see geysers which
have to be coaxed into eruption by the shovelling in of soap. I could
not tell what would anger the evil spirits of the Devil's Woodyard,
but certainly when I was there with the three fishmongers neither
subterranean rumble nor eruption showed the slightest sign. The
main slough gently bubbled as though some of the mud-encased
buffaloes we had just passed were submerged and breathing under
the surface. I wondered if the mud had medicinal properties. What
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a splendid spa could be made there if it had! The Devil's Woodyard

did not contain the only mud volcanoes in Trinidad, but the others
were smaller and comparatively unknown, although to come across
the conical miniature mountains of dried mud unexpectedly in the
middle of thick green undergrowth, and discover that they were not
giant anthills but outlets to tremendous heat and pressure deep be­
neath one's feet, was as uncanny as noticing that neither grass nor
shrub would encroach on hard mudflats of the Devil's Woodyard.
The trio of fishmongers were going on another eleven miles to
San Fernando with their fish and so I took my leave with thanks for
the conducted tour of the volcanoes and with promises to see them
again down at Mayaro beach. And I did see them again often, for by
now I had found the perfect place to stay on my visits to Mayaro
Bay. This was at St. Anne's. One of Mayaro's crossroads runs down
to the extreme south-east of the island, the Guayaguayare Road. Less
than a mile along it from the centre of Mayaro village, a signpost on
the left-hand side points to a narrower road disappearing among the
palms leading to St. Anne's. The lane is beautiful, a perfect tropical
paradise of a lane going down to the sea and the village of St. Anne's,
which is no more than a handful of houses.
I loved that walk down to the sea. Clumps of the lovely Zephy­
ranthes rosea, locally called crocus or wind flowers, were to be seen
along the sun- and shade-dappled lane. On the South American
mainland this plant is called thunder lily, since it appears after the
first heavy rains. These small, pink lilies each have a flower like a
crocus, borne singly on eight-inch stalks. Though growing wild, they
have a refined, cultivated appearance strangely at variance with the
vigour and fleshy wildness of the undergrowth around them. To
keep company with the wind flowers were wild gingers which
flourished here as everywhere along the fifty-two crooked miles
north to Toco.
Fragrant wood smoke often scents the air of St. Anne's lane, for
the plantation workers burn dead branches and coconut-shell waste.
When smoke hangs about under the trees, or is blown by the sea
breeze, the sun slanting in shafts through the palms picks it out in
light blue, adding a kind of mystery to the green deeps of the groves.
The village buildings are dotted about among the palm trees almost
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Far from the
Ganges-Hindus'
annual purification

Far from the Jordan­

Gospel belle's
baptism
Some of the old ways contmue-both
· ashore and at sea
 SYMPHONY OF PALMS

at the end of the narrow road, with sandy tracks leading to their
front doors. All the way down St. Anne's road domestic fowl and
goats run freely among the woods. At night the animals come to lie
on the tarmac surface, presumably because it retains the day-time
heat.
Past the commodious schoolhouse and the sandy playground and
the children's seed-boxes and gardens, a sandy track leads between
two houses to a long, low building facing the sea-Cinta's Holiday
Camp. Fred Blanc, a man of French stock, is the large and congenial
proprietor. It is not, of course, an establishment in any way resemb­
ling what the words 'holiday camp' conjure up. This single-storey
house, raised off the ground on short concrete pillars, is entirely an
informal and friendly place with room for no more than twenty
people or so. It has to be informal, since one steps literally from the
sand into the open sitting space.
Fred Blanc is a master of intuition. He liked to live away from the
bustle and noise of Port-of-Spain. His ship-chandler business fre­
quently called him back to the city for a day or two. But he could
never hurry back to Mayaro fast enough, and rightly guessed that
others would be pleased to do so, too. His 'holiday camp' is the
result. He put no carpets on the wooden floorboards, demanded no
changing of clothes at meals, and provided no irritating entertain­
ments. And his intuition was right. Although he has not been there
very long, Fred Blanc has already collected a clientele of people who
want just what Cinta's has to offer-the convenience of an hotel with
none of its formality, the advantages of a private house on the beach
without the responsibility of running it.
The real living-room where everybody spends most of the day is
the beach a few yards in front of the house. Here the sea and the sky
and its few tufts of cloud are all viridian-turquoise in innumerable
shades, particularly on those days when the sky is mirrored on the
wide wet sands of low tide. Mayaro and the Cocal can in certain
lights create such huge expanses of sea and sky that the true size of
Trinidad is quite belied-the island seems to be more like enormous
stretches of the South American Atlantic coast, though not even on
the Brazilian coast had I seen any place so beautiful as Mayaro Bay.
At the side of Cinta's Camp lies a small, tree-fringed lagoon
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crossed by a wooden bridge which gives on to other houses scattered

under the palms. Fred Blanc told me that a four-foot alligator had
been killed the previous night outside the window where we sat.
That part of the lagoon was a favourite place for even bigger alligators
coming to sun-bathe in the shallows on hot days.
Except at week-ends, I was sometimes the only guest. When Fred
Blanc himself went off to Port-of-Spain as chandler to the ships
escorting the royal yacht Britannia I was left alone with Pearl, who
did the cooking, and Hubert Hector, who did everything else
around the place except cook. Pearl's nickname and the one every­
body used was Cucus, a name denoting affection for the youngest in
the family. I asked her how she acquired her nickname and she said
that when her father had seen how his family was growing up 'he
decided he wanted another baby around the house'-in fact a
Cucus.
I was glad her father had wanted a Cucus, because not only was
Pearl a most wonderful cook, especially with West Indian specialities,
but she was also an oracle about the names of local plants and local
customs. I often brought wild flowers home with me to try to
identify them from the local terms Cucus gave them. Around the
clearing where Cinta's Camp stands, and for that matter along most
waysides, there grew the long spikes full of little blue flowers of a
native weed.
'That's vervain,' Cucus declared without hesitation; 'leaves very
good for makin' a bush tea.'
By comparison the plant's botanical label, Stachytarpheta jamai­
censis, sounded very pompous and dull.
Once when a couple and their baby were guests, Cucus recom­
mended to the young mother the popular local way of curing hic­
coughs. This was simply to place a short length of thread on the
baby's forehead. But Hubert Hector held the opinion that a much
more effective method was to put a matchstick behind the baby's
ear.
I had not been long at Cinta's Camp before learning that although
Hubert Hector was duly proud of his name everybody called him
Keg.
'See,' he explained, 'I play keg drum when I a boy.'
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Keg was twenty-one, a dark, splendidly-built Negro who, shy at

first, soon let himself be as natural with me as he was with Cucus.
Keg was known all around, and no wonder, for he was a great char­
acter, quicksilver of mood, but mostly laughing and possessed of a
great kindness. He saw the funny side of things. His favourite ex­
pression was a long-drawn-out almost falsetto 'Oh Lord!' This
sounded through the house followed by his equally unmistakable
laugh. Keg padded round the place in navy-blue shorts and two large
silver rings like Kenny Glodon's. Keg wore his also for frightening
dangerous fish. But unlike Kenny, Keg was not a captain at sea nor
was he an enthusiastic swimmer. He had a manana policy about
swimming. When I asked him to come into the breaking waves with
me he always answered in the same way.
'I go takin' the bath tomorrow, please God.'
Once upon a time Keg had been a fisherman, and then he had
tried bouts of city life in and around San Fernando and Port-of­
Spain, but he always came back to Mayaro. Sometimes now he went
out with the local boats early in the morning and afterwards as I was
going for a swim before breakfast he would be wandering about the
house covered in fish scales until he took a shower. When no other
guests were there Cucus served Keg his hearty breakfast with me in
the dining-room.
'Too much a-fire,' Keg would comment if the rolls were brittle
from being heated too long in the oven.
At Cinta's Camp nearly all the meals are West Indian dishes.
After a swim in the warm sea, I always had an appetite for a tasty
breakfast of dried herring and raw onions soaked in olive oil. Despite
a conscience about starch and calories, I could never resist the many
kinds of bread Cucus made, baked before each meal and served hot
and eaten with deep-yellow butter and guava jelly.
St. Anne's is a fishing and copra village and the people with whom
I spent most of my time outside Cinta's were the family of a coconut
worker, Ramkhelawan Rampersad. Partly, perhaps, influenced by
V. S. Naipaul and his Mr. Biswas, but mostly deterred by the formid­
able pronunciation difficulties of such a name, in the end I came to
call him, for short, Mr. Ram, a title which even his wife came to use.
Young Mr. Ram worked as a cutter on the coconut plantation of
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which St. Anne's was only a small part. The whole estate was owned
by a family which spent a large part of the year in France. Mr. Ram
shinned up the lofty palms with strong, nimble movements of arms
and legs, his grip on the ringed trunks secured by a single loop of
rope on his feet. For every thousand coconuts he cut he was paid
$4.60. He kept a record of his work for the estate office. Pages of the
book were covered with orderly entries, 'Church Field 19,776 nuts,
Eye Flat Field 6,755 nuts, Providence Field 700 nuts, Shanty Field
6,200 nuts.'
Climbing trees to lop off coconuts with a cutlass might seem to be
a carefree, healthy open-air life for a youngster. And so indeed it
might be. But it has its own peculiar hazards. Jack Spaniards are one
of them. These are large hornets which build their nests at the tops
of the trees. They have to be destroyed before the coconuts can
be cut down. Most of the local boys I spoke to said they did this
by taking a handkerchief wet from their armpits and stupefying
the Jack Spaniards. But despite this precaution poor Mr. Ram was
often severely stung. When I sat late one evening reading in
Cinta's sitting-room, with doors and windows wide open to the wind
and the sounds of the sea, I saw Mr. Ram standing in the light falling
through the door. He came and sat down and looked at me with
heavy eyes. That day had been a bad one from the Jack Spaniards.
The hornets had stung him many times all over his body. So Mr.
Ram had gone up to the corner by St. Anne's crossroads and got
drunk on rum to deaden the soreness and itching and to help him to
sleep. He never complained about the stings, nor about the attacks
of ants which also lurked at the tree-tops. On another evening when
Mr. Ram looked in at Cinta's on his way home his arms and legs were
covered with nodules raised by ant bites. He really needed rum that
night. But he took such things as a matter of course, and that parti­
cular night he was very pleased, because during the week he had cut
21,000 coconuts-a good thing, since he was saving to build his own
house.
Ramkhelawan Rampersad looked like a teenager, but he was
twenty-one years old and the father of three children. Two were boys,
Chano aged three, Ramcharran aged nine months, and then there
was his two-year-old daughter Shandra. Their mother was Madam
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Rampersad, though the family called her Ninkee. Around Mayaro,

married women are addressed as Madam, and not Mistress as in Port­
of-Spain. The local schoolmaster's wife, for instance, is known to
the children and their families as Madam Teacher.
Two or three times a day, going to and from a swim, or on my way
along the beach to the Chinese store at Plaisance, I crossed the
wooden bridge over the lagoon next to Cinta's and stopped in the
clearing to talk with the Rampersad family. They lived out of doors
nearly all the time, and when friends called they sat on a plank nailed
to coconut stumps round a table in the sand. Mr. Ram's house was
too small to accommodate anybody other than himself and his
family. It had been built as a servant's room behind a holiday villa.
On one of the two single beds the dainty and diminutive Madam Ram
slept with her three children. Their home was lit by a hurricane lamp
hanging on a wire hook from the roof.
Whenever I called after dark the three children would be curled
up on the bed, perhaps with a tiny hand flung out or a stray foot
hanging over the edge, a foot that had spent the day long running to
and fro in the sand of the clearing or venturing even as far as the
edge of the palms where the open sea begins. How grand the new
house would be which Mr. Ram was working hard for! But a house is
not a home. The Rams already had a home which was a happiness
and easy-going contentment with each other, a constant delight in
their children and a dignity of manner which would well have suited
a palace. Rather like one of those honoured military colours which
hang glorious but decaying in chapels and churches, Madam Ram's
white silk wedding-gown hung in the tiny room. It was customary
that this should be done. She explained quite brightly, though
seriously, 'I buried in it, too, ifl die.'
Madam Ram was very beautiful and very small, in fact no more than
four feet five inches tall. Her hair was long and thick, a lustrous blue­
black raven colour. Her black eyes sparkled vivaciously. Her fea­
tures were most delicately formed, her tiny hands looked too frail to
deal with cooking and caring for children. She laughed nearly as
much as Keg. I teased Madam Ram unmercifully and the more I
teased the more she laughed. If Mr. Ram had been badly stung and
had come home drunk I would see them next day.
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'Did you beat him?' I asked.

'Yes,' she replied while Mr. Ram grinned, 'I beat him good.'
Sometimes I put it the other way round. 'Did he beat you last
night?'
Looking up at her tall, slender husband, Madam Ram said, 'If he
beat me, I beat him back bad.'
Then I said that when I left Trinidad I would like to take all her
children with me.
'All right, you take them. I make some more.'
Sometimes when I called the little house was all shut up. Then I
knew that perhaps Madam Ram had gone to visit her mother, who
had now moved down to Mayaro from Rio Claro, where the family
lived before. Madam Ram first met her husband in Rio Claro, where
he was her brother's friend. It was love at first sight. Their parents
had not been allowed to see each other before marriage. But although
my two friends were not restricted quite so much, her grandfather
refused to allow them to walk out together until after the wedding,
which eventually took place up at Rio Claro with the full Hindu
ritual. And it was to bring luck that her wedding-dress hung in the
room. Outside the house other banners fl.uttered, two triangular
pennant prayer flags. They had only recently moved to their present
house from one room in a plantation barrack. Some time soon the
Rams planned to invite all their family and friends when they asked
the pundit to come and bless their new home. They hoped I would
return to Mayaro for this.
A lean-to had been added at the side of the Rams' room and this
was their kitchen. Outside the shuttered, unglazed opening which
served as window a large wooden tray was hung and used as a sink
with waste water running down a wooden chute into the ground.
Beside it, Madam Ram prepared delicious-smelling curries on the
mud oven which stood on a wooden bench. This oven was horseshoe­
shaped with three raised pinnacles for supporting pots. All the
housewives round about used the coconut meat in a variety of un­
usual ways. For Cinta's guests Cucus prepared a delicious ice-cream
from coconut water. Madam Ram grated coconuts to obtain their oil,
which she used both for cooking and for rubbing on the children's
skin to keep them supple.
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For my last swim of the day I was often joined by Mr. Ram and his
nineteen-year-old brother-in-law, who was also employed on the
estate as a 'buster', which meant he split the external shell and got
the nut out. We went out into the breakers as though into a foam
bath. Mr. Ram did not venture beyond his depth, because he could
not swim. This last bathe was always at twilight, when over our heads
the subtle silver greys and mauves of the evening sky were a sea for
ships of cloud to sail through, majestic and lonely, coming in from
the Atlantic and passing across the island to the South American
mainland or on to the open Caribbean. Swimming was delightful
always at Mayaro, but in the evening it had a special poignancy, as
though I and my two friends were castaways on a desert island. Gone
were the fishermen and their nets and the traders with their trucks
and the children and dogs and holidaymakers. Everything was gone
and even the sun soon went, leaving the world to darkness.
The multi-coloured hens and sturdy cocks had already found a
roost for the night in the trees like exotic Christmas cards. And the
evening tide, coming up close under the trees, had removed the last
traces of the vultures and their carrion. At this hour the only move­
ment in the sky apart from the beautiful clouds was a frigate-bird
passing low over the sea. His silhouette was as sharp as a cut�out
made in cardboard by a razor. It was angular and pointed, the body
placed neatly in the deep V between his wings. This was a bird
notable in the sky, for he was a creature of lordly isolation-a lone
hunter. But the seven-foot wing span of this man-o'-war hawk did
not win my heart like a dainty Eastern solitary sandpiper running
along the beach as we came from the sea. He was invariably seen in
last light around the lagoon by Cinta's Camp, escaping the snows of
Canada and always alone. How well this winter visitor was described
by his Latin name Tringa solitaria solitaria.
If I went to the Rams after supper they had often shut themselves
up in their little house. When I knocked the half-door would open
and Mr. Ram's smiling face appeared. Inside, in the dim hurricane­
lamp light he and his wife would be sitting listening to their transistor
radio, while the children slept undisturbed beneath the canopy of
their mother's wedding-dress. I did not stay long, as Mr. Ram had
to be up and about by five o'clock next morning and so by nine in the
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evenings the tiny house was finally locked up for the night. No light
shone on it except starlight through the trees. After leaving them I
might wander along the beach, looking at the stars. In Thomas
More's Utopia the inhabitants wondered why men bothered to
possess diamonds when incomparable ones were to be had in the
sky, 'For they marvel that any man be so foolish, as to have delight
and pleasure in the glistering of a little trifling stone, which may
behold any of the stars.'
The stars at Mayaro were brilliant and more numerous than in
any sky I could remember, and the constellations were almost lost
in the shining dust of the sky. Orion, swinging across the sky, was
sometimes practically indistinguishable because so many other
thousands of bright stars seemed to crowd round it. Mayaro's night
sky was as white as an Irish summer pasture with daisies.
Many people, especially women, in country or coastal districts
like Mayaro do not care to be out after dark. This is not from fear of
their fellow men, but because of nameless fears of the dark, as
irrational and as real as children's terror of the dark. Perhaps age­
old superstitions still exert a powerful influence and no doubt cases
of maljo or other evils are responsible for this fear. Even in sophis­
ticated Port-of-Spain superstitions sometimes make their appearance.
I was at a party there one evening and heard a woman exclaim un­
thinkingly when she spilt a cocktail on her beautiful dress, 'Oh God,
I'm suffering from maljo !'
Certainly Mayaro's palm groves are alive at night with noises and
furtive movements of creatures going through the undergrowth.
Darkness had always fallen by the time Cucus had cleared away and
washed up the supper things at Cinta's Camp. If her fisherman boy­
friend did not come to escort her home Keg took her. Afterwards he
went to the schoolmaster's house just across the plantation to watch
television. I sometimes joined him to talk to Clarence Mader and his
wife, Madam Teacher. Their six young daughters and one son were
all pupils at the school across the road in the middle of the planta­
tion. Fishermen and estate workers dropped in at the Maders' house all
the time, opening the door and making themselves at home just as I re­
membered the Irish country people doing at the ceilis of my boyhood.
A walk in the warm dusk, the way lighted by fireflies and stars,
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often followed the last game with the Mader children. St. Anne's
road was loud with night sounds. Frogs made the loudest music.
Most people who walked abroad in the darkness carried electric
torches. I never remembered to bring one with me to Mayaro and so
I followed the pathway of stars above the tree-tops. Occasionally I
stumbled over goats and kids sleeping on the road. There was
momentary confusion and scampering of soft hoofs and the smallest
of nervous spasms in my stomach lest the stumbling-block should
prove to be an alligator. At the top of St. Anne's road stood the
village grocery-cum-bar. The proprietor was of East Indian family
and closed early, so those who wanted drinks afterwards had to buy
bottles through a barred window at the side of the shop. They sat
outside, around the lamp-post on the main Guayaguayare Road, and
I joined them there, listening with pleasure to their rich voices and
the meandering, vivacious talk about the day's fishing, the Jack
Spaniards' attacks, or battle scars from the previous week-end's
stick-fighting. In the light of the road lamp the boys would proudly
display head wounds and stitches from the fight, or leap up and
demonstrate their own prowess with the stick. One and all were
looking forward to the next Saturday afternoon when the local lads
gathered at the top of St. Anne's lane for bouts of stick-fighting
accompanied by drumming.
A number of people I met in Port-of-Spain were intrigued but
genuinely puzzled to know why I was always down at Mayaro, and
what on earth I wanted to wander about the island for when the
clubs and hotel bars in the city were sociable places and had the
advantage of air-conditioning. I loved Mayaro for the allure of beach
and sea, sun and shade, and the friendly ways of the friendly villages.
And there was a matchless conditioning of the air, for the trade winds
blew steadily night and day, carrying to that tropical island an
Atlantic freshness which the Caribbean lacked. To the continual
roar of falling breakers the wind added salt spray and the rhythm of
gently moving and sometimes agitated palms. The wind was often
too violent for mosquitoes to take-off from their lagoons and swamps,
though whatever the wind the bats were always out, bats as big as
thrushes, darting miraculously through the ventilation grilles at the
top of the walls in Cinta's Camp.
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When I left the boys under the crossroad lamp I walked slowly
down to the sea again, saying 'Good night' to some passer-by, turning
at last into the sandy clearing by the schoolmaster's house and Cinta's
Camp. And there I was always pleased to get into bed and read before
slipping unawares into the soundest sleep, drugged by the sea air
rushing through my open windows. I became used to the bass of the
sea's roar and the tenor of the palm trees rustling, the bullfrog chorus
and the mechanical drilling of the cicadas. I even got used to the
solo voice of this oddly assorted opera-Keg reading aloud to him­
self, solemnly and slowly. It never occurred to me that the night was
far from silent, that the creatures in the woods and undergrowth were
wide awake, watchful, amorous, predatory. Only when I had left
Trinidad altogether did the inner ear bring back the sounds like the
sea heard in a shell. The wind trumpeting at Orion through the
palms, the whoosh of breakers shattering into silver fragments under
the moon half lulled me to sleep. But sometimes a coconut would fall
with a heavy thud near the house. And sharp shots of alligator­
hunters sometimes roused me to my dropped book, and Keg, pausing
in his own reading would say, also to himself, 'Oh Lord!'

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 ii 7 It
Jumpin' Up
Aurora, Goddess of Dawn, as a costume for Carnival was one thing,
getting up in time to see the real sunrise over the sea at Mayaro Bay
was another. Quite such another, in fact, that in spite of intending to
I never did. It was always broad daylight when I woke. Cucus
clattered cups in the kitchen. Keg cleared sand from the wood floors.
And the young boys were already leaning over the lagoon's wooden
bridge, alligators out of sight and mind, looking for fish and crabs
in the shallows of the brown water. Their victim selected, they
pushed it to the bank with dead palm branches. A floppy, friendly
dog hunted alongside the boys, running in and out of the lagoon,
jumping up and wagging its tail and barking, happy as the boys.
The boys were always around the lagoon when not at school, hoping
to catch the transparent guppy, but not despising the little red-and­
green-marbled crabs.
One day was a public holiday during the Queen's visit and there
was no school. Quick as minnows, the boys darted in and out of the
water, clambered over the bridge, hovered on overleaning branches
like the purple-scarlet dragonflies. They chattered and they laughed,
showing their perfect and perfectly white teeth. Then tumbling over
each other in the sand, legs, arms and dogs all mixed in one ball of
dust, they chased each other through the undergrowth to the next
lagoon along the beach, their happy cries echoing through the palms.
But other hunters had been out long before them. By breakfast­
time gunmen were already returning from beyond the coconut
plantations where the high woods stretched between St. Anne's and
the southern region of Rio Claro. Keg told me they went after
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'ramier gingas' that flew around the forests plundering wild fruit.
These scaly-necked pigeons have, like cattle, a partiality for hog­
plums, the Spondias monbin, which may account for the birds' great
size and choice eating. I had to be careful whenever I expressed
interest in flora or fauna, as one of the local lads was likely to arrive
at Cinta's Camp around midnight with some specimens they had
specially captured for me, as Mr. Ram and his friends had brought
me Jack Spaniards, ants and nests in plastic bags. In this way I had
nearly collected a couple of squirrels, an agouti, an armadillo and
many kinds of birds. On saying how surprised I was at the war
against them I had prompt offers of pets, which many local people
made of the little creatures.
Not everybody, however, had as many pets as Shahdeed Ali
Bocas, a twelve-year-old boy from a Muslim family, who lived half­
way down St. Anne's lane from the main road. In coops and hutches
and cages he had a private zoo in the sandy yard of his house. Passing
by I would find Shahdeed feeding the agoutis or mixing the milk of
breadfruit with rubber tree sap before going off to catch birds. He
placed this sticky mixture on top of a decoy cage which usually con­
tained a young male semp of the tanager family.
Shahdeed was blessed, or at any rate surrounded, by eight sisters
and five brothers. But none of those I met seemed to be keeping the
daylight hours of rigorous fasting prescribed for Ramadan and none
of Shahdeed's kids disappeared in the sacrifices of the Eid Festival,
heralded by the new moon which appeared during one of my stays
at Mayaro. Other Muslims, however, throughout the island, were
keeping to the letter of the Koran, and the newspapers informed
those who failed to see the next new moon, which ended the thirty
days of Ramadan, to ring certain telephone numbers.
The moon's phases not only decided the movable feast of the
Christian Easter, the Muslim Eid Festival and the Hindu celebrations
of Kartik-Nathan, but also the nocturnal movements of animals. The
best known of these coincide with the travelling of the Hindus to the
beaches at Manzanilla to purify their bodies and souls in the Atlantic.
That same October full moon is the signal for thousands of crabs to
come out and lay their eggs on the beach. In fact, for the duration of
all three full autumn moons Mayaro beach becomes famous for its
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'crab run', when mothering crabs crowd the sand like an August
week-end at Coney Island, New York.
But all year round the same beach always has a plentiful display
of light-coloured crabs, distinguished from the sand only by their
big black eyes, protruding on stalks, that switch to and fro alarm­
ingly. The crabs' curious eyes are not unlike those of the little chuff­
chuff fish that comes up with the tide. These eyes, like the fishes',
were quick to notice approaching movement. With a frantic scurry­
ing of little yellow legs, the crabs would shoot down into the sand
holes from which they had just cautiously emerged.
It took me a quarter of an hour to walk along the beach from St.
Anne's to Plaisance. At high tide this meant paddling across one of
the lagoons on the way. But the short journey usually consisted of a
leisurely stroll along the crab-pocked sand, soft as a double-underlay
carpet, where the debris of the coconut palms lay strewn, and where
the dead Portuguese men-o'-war waited purple and pink to be
popped, and where the sea at whatever state between high and low
tide sent out its last out-thrust nets of foam. On the way I often
stopped to talk with the lifeguards stationed along the beach, who
wore white T-shirts and shorts. Towards evening many of them
cycled to Plaisance, coming along the sands from far away down
Mayaro Bay. Quite often there were more lifeguards ready to rescue
than there were bathers. And I had seen the long beaches completely
deserted except for a stable-boy out exercising racehorses, which
always ended with a wash down in the sea when the boy led the
horses into the warm foam, a bath which seemed to please them as
much as the groom. As on the Savannah in Port-of-Spain these fine,
highly strung horses and their riders made a splendid sight.
Visitors to the beach often spent hours looking for their favourite
seaside titbit, the chip-chip, a tiny bivalve, Donax striatus, distin­
guished by various-coloured radiating bands. A delicious flavour
could be given to soup by the chip-chip, and at Cinta's Camp the
mollusca were also used in cocktails and curries. The water in which
the chip-chip is cooked has a reputation of keeping the 'body in
order' and has in addition aphrodisiac properties: as the calyp so
says, 'lick me down with your chip-chip water'. Although the inch­
long bivalves enjoyed popularity throughout the island, Mayaro Bay
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basked in a peculiar fame in connection with chip-chip as well as its

'crab-run'.
On de beach in Los Iros
Don't talk about de beach in Mayaro
That's where they get their chip-chip free
Don't talk about the romance in the sea.

Between waves in the mid-water line, men, women and children

rushed over the wet sands scrambling for the chip-chip before the
little shells were buried in the sand again. Trinidadian food had long
included the mollusca, for Dr. Bullbrook's research into the Amer­
indian middens revealed immense numbers of their small shells.
Some of these Indian kitchen middens had been found along this
Mayaro coast. In radio-carbon studies on charcoal from two of these
middens Yale University dated the occupation of the sites between
805 and 785 B.C.
The holiday because of the Queen's visit was a day of intense
luminosity and irradiation of light. Yet the sky and its clouds had
beautiful variations of this intensity. Clouds on the horizon were
barely discernible, molten in the same hue as the sky's. The sea's
most brilliant passages of colour rivalled the shining colours of a
peacock's tail, but elsewhere, where the sea caught the sun, it was a
peacock's tail made of glittering precious stones.
The fishermen also celebrated the special holiday. The thatched­
hut headquarters of the men employed on The Zenith lay nearer to
Cinta's Camp than Kenny Glodon's Spartacus. The twelve fishermen
made an impromptu beach orchestra by the side of The Zenith with
its prominent text 'The Lord is my Shepherd'. To the strumming of
a guitar one man blew a conch shell and all the rest was percussion,
an assortment of rum bottles each with a different clink, a powdered
milk tin struck with a piece of slate, others beat upon various lengths
of hollow bamboo and empty petrol cans made drums. This ragged
happy crew of very old and very young men had a superb ear for the
quality of percussion sounds, the Trinidadian's uncanny instinct for
complex cross-rhythms. Those who had no instruments got up and
let this rich, volatile music flood their bodies and they danced sinu­
ously in the sand, while the never-empty rum bottles passed from
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hand to hand, including mine, because I had helped them earlier in

the day drag in their net from the sea. And when the communal pot of
boiled fish was ready a portion of cavalli was put on a goat's-foot
ipomoea leaf and given to me.
Trinidad produces some very exotic members of convolvulaceae.
The city wastelands support the imperial robe of morning glory and,
in unsuspected places, sprout arbours of the brilliant magenta
ipomoea horsfalliae and the even bigger trumpets of the moon flower
that greets the young night with six-inch wide flowers of purest
white. Along the edges of the beach, spreading under the palms on
the sandy floor was another native vine of the same family, the
ipomoea pes-caprae, commonly known as goat's-foot because the
thick leaves have the shape of a split hoof. Early in the day the goat's­
foot rose-purple flowers bearing a darker, five-pointed star in the
trumpet, can be found all along the beaches. The leaves which The
Zenith's crew used as plates for their open-air meal have been used in
India for centuries as a cure for rheumatism and other complaints.
But after the flower has wilted it is difficult to identify the plant, for
other running vines with almost identical leaves are also closely
woven into the sandy soil. Members of the canavalia family are pre­
valent, and some, like the horse bean and sword bean, are often
sown deliberately to provide cover-crop in the plantations. One of
the surviving superstitions brought by the slaves from Africa is
that if the horse bean is planted around a field it will 'cut the eye' of
maljo. The purple seaside bean is, however, the most common around
Mayaro, writhing along the sand as though determined to outdo the
goat's-foot ipomoea.
Although one or two of The Zenith's crew began to show signs of
wear and tear due to the rum, when the last pieces of fish had been
taken from the goat's-foot plates every man and youth was in his
place ready for the next run out to sea. Despite the day-long holiday
for schoolchildren and oil employees, the fishermen were obliged to
put out again, because the whole morning's efforts had only pro­
duced fish to the value of fifteen dollars. This amount was too small
to divide among the crew after the captain's and running expenses
had been met. So, instead, they had spent the surplus on the rum
we had swigged over lunch. The first catch I saw at Mayaro beach,
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of 20,000 lb., taken by Kenny Glodon and his crew, was an exception
rather than a rule, as I soon came to realize. His record 70,000 lb. the
previous August had been phenomenal. I was later to see Kenny's
men drag their net ashore with only half a dozen fish for sale after
the crew's families had been supplied. Fishing is good when the boats
go out to sea and spot a big school of cavalli around which they can
drop the net to make a crescent, its two ends fastened by ropes to
palms along the beach about half a mile apart. When the school of
cavalli are 'not running' the crews have to make a 'guess throw' which
frequently results in a pitifully small catch. When the fish seem to
be scarce the boats will go out hopefully four or five times a day.
After the careful hanging of the net from its fl.oats in the water
there is always the task of bringing it in, which is done from the
shore by two teams of men hauling on the two ends of the crescent­
shape made by the great net. This job takes most of two hours. It is,
however, a beautiful display of human action, a kind of dance-like
ritual with the sea that might be some ancient pagan pacification of
sea gods. At the beginning, when they begin to pull the net from the
waves, the two teams of a dozen or so men in each are half a mile
apart along the beach. The men's movements are slow and powerful.
They move in perfect rhythm, making a harmony of bodily move­
ment. Imperceptibly, as the amount of the net in the sea grows less,
the two teams come closer together. Along the sands beside each
group lengths of rope, attached to the net's ends, are already pulled
out of the water and laid in neat straight lines, ready for picking up
and reloading later.
Then at last, when hundreds of feet of rope have been pulled,
the net itself finally begins to appear. At first, only the cork fl.oats at
the top edge of the curtain net show above the water. Crowds of local
people now begin to appear and fish traders arrive with vans and
trucks. All eyes are on the spherical fl.oat which marks the centre of
the net. The boat's captain shouts orders to his teams so that the net
is pulled in equally on both ends. And now the ends of the net itself
appear out of the waves and then, with increasing speed, since the
whole net is in the shallows, the mesh curtain comes from the green
translucent water. The same question is on everybody's mind-how
full will the net be?
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The men go deeper into the water, some up to their waists, others
chest high, heaving and leaning and straining until the leading men
are washed right over by the breakers. Then, almost suddenly, the
belly of the net comes out bearing a heavy,shimmery,writhing,jump­
ing mass of fish, cavalli and moonshiners, king fish and bonito,
sharks and catfish, Spanish mackerel and yellowfin tuna, salmon,
skipjack, grouper and wahoo all flailing the few inches' depth of
water with desperate spasms. Boys and fishermen, traders and
women descend on the net and throw the protesting fish from the
shallows on to the beach itself, where the fish's muscular contortions
make a loud clapping noise like an audience applauding. The fish's
violent exertions are their last throes. For an hour now the vultures
have been circling overhead, like specks at first, then gradually
descending to plane about with no perceptible movements of their
great wings. But when the moment comes they swoop down on the
net, with as much clumsiness as previously there was power and ease
in their gliding. Gulls and terns have long started on the thousands
of sardines and small fish that the fishermen allow to escape. Some­
times the local dogs eat these small fish, which are also popular with
children on holiday from the towns, for they try to get them alive
from the net into plastic bags full of water. The children, although
they come from Port-of-Spain or San Fernando, knew better than to
set foot on the net itself, for this is often a seething,transparent mass
of large jellyfish. All too often there are many more jellyfish than
cavalli. And when the catch is a really poor one the traders rush into
the water with baskets to try to get as much of the few fish as possible.
Within an hour the wide net has been shaken free of the unwanted
jellyfish and sardines and the crew have stowed it aboard ready for
the next 'pull'.
The bay is not only very long, it looked very long, an incredible
length of beach, dotted with the tiniest specks in the middle distance
which were bathers. But the rolling and sliding white breakers con­
tinued infinitely far beyond them. When the black vultures were
sated they left the beach vicinity. The birds cleared away every last
shred of fish so that nobody would ever know a catch had been
landed and a market held. The pelicans returned, diving into a sea
which, blue in the morning, became bottle-green by mid-afternoon.
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I felt sorry for the pelicans. They were even more clumsy than the
vultures. They dived vertically into the water with great speed, but
the effect was ruined by the enormous splash which accompanied it.
And the poor pelican, having put itself to so much trouble to get fish,
was more often likely to have it taken away again by marauding
frigate-birds, or laughing gulls, or, worst of all for the pelican's
dignity, even by the smallest tern.
Mayaro's Roman Catholic church is dedicated to St. Peter and St.
Paul and it stands in Radix, the next village along the beach from
St. Anne's. The parish was one of eleven handed over in 1947 by the
departing Spanish Augustinian priests to the Irish Dominicans. The
bequeathed church is a charming and quite unexpected piece of folk
architecture that goes very well with the houses round about. A little
bit of what Mr. John Betjeman fancies does you good, especially if
the Gothic Revival is in a local vernacular with more than a smack of
Primitivism about it. The church, against an incomparably decora­
tive background of the coconut plantation, is cruciform, just, with
white walls. Westwards, too, small octagonal towers keep guard over
the entrance. And inside all is airy. There is a lot of varnished wood­
work, an indispensable ingredient of Gothic Revival not only for
appearance but also for smell. The roof timbers look as if they were
hewn by adze, and they probably were. Just inside the north transept
door St. Peter stands in the prow of a real local fishing-boat, or
rather the front quarter of one attached to the wall. A pair of four­
teen-foot oars flank the boat. On board, besides the saint's statue, are
two candles, and draped fishing-nets. Although the fishermen call
their boats after Hollywood epics, with names such as Spartacus and
Son of Spartacus, they always claim Christ as the 'co-pilot', and St.
Peter's feast day is a holiday for fishermen whether followers of
Zoroaster or Mary Baker Eddy.
Outside the church, while I gorged myself on the spectacle of
scarlet poinsettia flaring in brilliance against the white and grey walls,
I reflected how Brazilian the scene was. Here at Radix, although St.
Peter's and St. Paul's was humble compared with the gilded wonders
of Brazil, a similar attention had been paid to local life. It seemed the
church had appreciated that at Mayaro the people's preoccupation
with the sea was not just an occupation but an instinct, too. St. Peter
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among the fishing-nets had stepped straight from the Sea of Galilee
to Mayaro Bay without straining anybody's credence in the slightest.
Beyond the little apse lies a graveyard overgrown with under­
growth, where crosses peep here and there above the enveloping
greenery like the spars of wrecked ships. In a clearing of the sun­
shafted plantation on the other side of the church lies the presby­
tery. To visit it was to go from John Betjeman to Somerset Maugham.
The air and way of life at Radix's presbytery was a scene set in
Maugham's Far East, the poignant setting of expatriate Europeans
living in green jungle. The quiet-spoken Dominican father received
me with the easy gracious manner of religious houses. We talked
about the magnificence of Mayaro, about his church and cure and
about mutual Irish friends, one of whom had told him that I was
staying in the neighbourhood.
Before leaving Radix I watched a carpenter trying to put right a
door which had just been hung, but which was already so warped
that it had to be taken down again. The old Negro carpenter blamed
the wood's twisting on the forester for having felled the tree when
'the moon not right for the sap'. Old customs and beliefs still linger
in the Caribbean islands as they do in South America. A few days
later, while I was waiting for The Zenith's net to be drawn, I picked
up a cent piece on the beach. A boy about ten years old watched me
and said, 'Oh no. You mustn't pick up cents. They are left on the
ground by people who want to sell sickness.' Many people claimed
to have contracted illnesses in this way.
Cucus may well have got a distinct impression that by now I was
suffering from worms, for with the continual swimming and the
invigorating exercise of helping with the fishing-nets, and being out
all day in the fresh Atlantic winds, I was not unexpectedly assailed
by a ferocious appetite. Fred Blanc's theory that the hotelier's duty
is to make hedonism a way of life rather than a philosophy meant a
plethora of food which Cucus's cooking transformed into a glutton's
paradise. Having wolfed down one of her delicious cavalli curries, I
would at once question her about her plans for the next meal.
Saturday and Sunday lunch would scarcely be over before some­
body or other would be at the door asking if I was going up to the
stick-fight at St. Anne's crossroads. For six weeks before Carnival
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country villages hold sessions of the traditional stick-fight. At St.

Anne's, the Hindu's shop-cum-bar was crowded with men and
youths drinking rum and tins of Guinness. The shop was full and
all around buzzed with excited talk and animated gestures that would
have their climax later in the fight-ring. With such numbers come
to the crossroads, the shopkeeper was not without temporary rivals.
Elderly Negresses set up refreshment stalls complete with corncobs
roasting, ice-cream churns and home-made cordials, on the grass
verge across the road from the shop. They also served bowls of souse
made from pieces of pig's feet in cold brine with cucumber and
onions, limes and spices. The travelling draper drew up in his van
while the fishermen and plantation workers examined brightest pink
and green and lemon and sky-blue shirt-coats and their womenfolk
turned over the equally dazzling bolts of cloth for home dress­
making.
Stick-fighting can be bloody. It can also result in quite serious
wounds about the head. But it is an indispensable part of Carnival
in the country. It has escaped commercial exploitation and is a sport
conducted as such and requiring considerable skill and experience.
At St. Anne's, as elsewhere, people began to gather in the roadside
clearing hours before the fighting began. They gradually drifted
from the bar to the clearing to join their more abstemious neigh­
bours. Two drummers had already taken up positions under a guava
tree. The drums were home-made from small barrels, kegs in fact, of
the kind which had given Hubert Hector his nickname Keg.
The drummers sat astride the kegs and beat them skilfully with
their fingers and palms, providing an African-sounding music. Be­
hind them a dozen or so men chanted a chorus, also African in its
effect, yet strangely reminiscent of sea shanties. It was stirring music,
and only the shrill kiskadees swooping from tree to tree seemed to be
unaffected by it. The long trunks of fallen palms made excellent
pews for the youngest children, from two years old and upwards,
who sat wide-eyed and good as gold, missing nothing of the pro­
ceedings. By the time the fighters arrived the drumming and part­
singing had increased in tempo and passion and a man entered the
ring formed by spectators. He picked up his stick, a four-foot length
of poui wood. Then he began the first movements of a dance, step-
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ping and jumping with astonishing agility, the stick held by its ends,
now above his head, now twisting down his back or torso.
Shahdeed Ali Bocas, who had deserted his pets for the afternoon,
sat between me and his twenty-three-year-old brother-in-law, Frank
Joseph, who was very knowledgeable about the finer points of stick­
fighting and its dance movements.
'That man comes from a serious stick-fighting place up Sangre
Grande,' Frank said, indicating the man in the ring. 'Plenty stick­
fighting later. Plenty head-busting,' he assured me.
Another man at last took up the challenge of the strutting fighter
in the ring, and picking up a second stick began his own version of
the dance. They sized each other up, seeking a chance for the open­
ing blow which, when it came suddenly and swiftly, made a swish in
the air, aimed directly at the other's head. But with lightning speed
the blow was caught by the other's stick held firmly across the face.
Tricks and deceptions and feint attacks were all part of the game.
Frank Joseph said that the best local players had gone up to Sangre
Grande that afternoon, an event which newspapers on Monday re­
ferred to as 'good stick', and quite a few stitches were sewn into
heads around the countryside.
'Come and take the coco water,' suggested Frank, who was a shop
assistant, though without a job at the moment. With more men going
into the ring Frank and I crossed the road to a modest, unpainted
wooden house. With a long pole Frank brought down half a dozen
coconuts from what he called a Chinese palm.
'It sweeter water,' he explained.
When we had quenched thirsts with the clear, delicately flavoured
coconuts, Frank split the green nuts completely open with his cutlass
and threw the halves on the ground so that the hens could peck at
the soft virgin-white insides.
We sat on the wooden steps leading up to the raised living-rooms
and watched the hens going gaga with delight. 'But not too many,'
Frank explained. 'It make them fat and not lay eggs.'
On Sunday afternoon I left Mayaro for Carnival in Port-of­
Spain, although I had promised Cucus to come back and see her
playin' mas at their own costume parade on Tuesday. But although I
was only going away for two days Keg stood waving across the wooden
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bridge of the lagoon as though I were going all the way to Canada
never to return. Madam Ram ran from her little house to wave good­
bye also, a tiny, delicate and black-haired figure fluttering her hand
through the coconut palms.
On this occasion I did not go back to Port-of-Spain the usual way.
I took a different route to Sangre Grande, away from the coast road
through the miles of seaside coconut plantations. Since the moun­
tains and forests figured so importantly in the island's landscape, I
often went to Mayaro along the coastal road and returned by an
inland route which, though longer, I found most satisfying to the
naturalist in me. I went via Rio Claro on leaving Mayaro and then
over the Cunapo Southern Road to Biche at the extreme inland side
of the Nariva Swamp, and so through the Central Range to Sangre
Grande.
The road going north out of Rio Claro nicely bisects the County
of Nariva and forms the boundary line of its two wards, Cocal to
seaward and Charuma towards the interior. Charuma ward is, in fact,
the centre of Trinidad, a green heart under the care of the Central
Range Forest Reserve. Immediately on leaving Rio Claro timber
yards begin, and stately boles of guatecare, Eschweilera subglandu­
losa, lay waiting along the side of the road, destined no doubt
eventually for marine buildings and piling in the sea. Trunks of mora,
also good for marine work, likewise awaited transport to the machin­
ery of the yards as did the salt fish wood often called red mahoe,
Sterculia caribaea. Several trees we passed had not yet succumbed to
the woodman's axe and supported the pendent nests built by their
colonies of yellow-backed cornbirds.
A conspicuous foreigner among these native trees was the Malay
apple, Eugenia malaccensis. This was one of the fruit trees Captain
Bligh of the Providence brought to the West Indies in 1793 after the
failure of a similar mission undertaken by the mutinous crew of the
famous Bounty. The Malayan tree with its dense evergreen leaves
was a holy bough according to Polynesian legend, and only the
temple gods could be carved from its timbers. In Trinidad the Malay
apple makes an excellent windbreak, and the pure white fruit inside
a red skin can be used as a substitute for ordinary pears. But from
December to February and again in very late spring the Malay apple
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tree bursts into a mass of small cerise bottle-brush flowers. In places

the taxi rushing through to Sangre Grande seemed to be passing
over a magenta carpet.
The thirty miles from Rio Claro to Sangre Grande gave new
dimensions to Trinidad and new insights into the island's territorial
character, just as the extensive beaches of the Cocal and Mayaro Bay
belied the island's true size by their suggestion of a continental
hinterland. Timber was only one of the local products, as could be
seen from the 'sweat boxes' of drying cocoa and coffee beans outside
the houses, and by the frequent interruption of the woods by citrus
groves, and by such notices as 'Cocoa pickers wanted' or 'Young pigs
for sale'. Many of the houses were of unpainted wood and all were
different, each standing on a cleared patch of land with a buffalo.
Because it was Sunday men as well as women sat on their front
wooden steps or rocked themselves in rocking chairs on their open
verandas, waving to friends and neighbours who went back and
forth to the roadside stand-pipes for buckets of water. When full,
the buckets were balanced with an enviable skill on the water­
drawers' heads. Several times our taxi passed road signs 'Beware of
Landslip' which the driver nonchalantly explained as the result of
blasting in near-by quarries.
This road through central Trinidad is unlike the coastal one from
Sangre Grande which shoots unbending for miles at a stretch beside
the sea. The inland road follows the contours as best it can. But
though pasture lands had been won intermittently from the forest
the journey was like an exploration. The road surface was good, but
the encroachment of the untouched forest, often with its topmost
branches meeting overhead, gave the route the character of a rain­
forest through which a path had been hacked, a temporary path
which would soon be swallowed whole by the predatory forest and
undergrowth. This was no pastoral land, like the journey from
Sangre Grande to Toco or the garden-like avenues leading from
Diego Martin to the Blue Basin. This was primeval forest, savage
and wild.
Deep gorges choked with impenetrable undergrowth gashed the
forest, running for miles into every mountain pass and valley in this
stretch of the Central Range all around Biche. And it was not the
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height and majesty of particular trunks, the spread of a saman, or the

fantasies of blossoms that made these virgin forests unusual to an
eye accustomed to Northern woods. It was the parasite plants and
vines, the trailing curtains of creepers and old men's beard, the
knotted tangle of lianas and Spanish moss, the tree ferns and ex­
quisite orchids which gave the miles of forest the sinister effect of
growth so powerful that nothing could withstand it.
The forest seemed to have a mind, and to be waiting for the
moment when its roots and tendrils and clogging dense under­
growth, its networks and riggings of creepers could sweep out and
engulf the whole island. Dore's illustrations for Chateaubriand's
Atala are of this order, yet these forests are extravagant beyond the
power of the engraver's tool. Many of the parasites are truly 'air
plants', as could be seen from the bromelias, which had spread from
the strict confines of the forests and flourished on telegraph wires,
feeding on no substance but the air. Wild pineapple plants claimed
roosts on limbs and branches and many of them had beautiful flowers
(or more probably bracts) that thrived on the forest air. But most
eerie of all the weird growths is the Clusia rosea, commonly called
the Scotch attorney. It is well represented in both Trinidad and
Tobago, and starts its life as a seed blown by the wind or dropped
by a bird in the crotch of another tree. The tiny seed comes to life
and, feeding on the host tree, quickly puts out aerial roots that
gradually reach down to the ground. In the course of years the parent
tree is crushed to death as the Scotch attorney becomes a large,
independent tree. Whether this tree derives its name from law as
practised by members of the Scottish Bar I could not, and perhaps
ought not to, venture to say, but certainly there is food for meta­
physical thought upon the meaning of life and death. The foresters
no doubt have rather more practical approaches to parasites, and it
is part of their job to keep an eye open for the Scotch attorney
seedlings, as their long, tenacious roots can kill the stoutest of
forest giants.
Jungle law prevails in this region. Only the fittest survive. Even
the gentle agouti, feasting in the depths of permanent twilight on
guatecare seeds, is not exempt, for the forests are frequented by
sportsmen. 'There's a deer run in Biche where you will always get a
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shoot', a director of the Guardian newspaper once told me. The car
journey from Biche to Sangre Grande never failed to give me another
sort of shot, a mental snapshot of Trinidad as quite a different land
from the romantic tropical palm beach ofMayaro Bay, yet as typical
of the island and as romantic in its savagery as the coast was in its
balmy gentleness.
When I got to Port-of-Spain I had to find new accommodation,
because my room in Gatacre Street had been reserved for some
Venezuelans coming over for Carnival, a booking they had made at
the last Carnival. Port-of-Spain was bursting its seams. The largest
suites in the most expensive hotels were not available for those who
could afford them. I considered myself lucky to get a bed in the
Y.M.C.A., sharing the room with three fellow Canadians. The 'Y'
occupied an airy, pleasant old house on the north side of Victoria
Square. Its main room stood open to the veranda overlooking the
square's beautiful trees. I had often called in for a game of draughts
with friends or to collect two enthusiastic Australian globe-trotters
for a drink.
Carnival was officially designated for Monday and Tuesday. But
on that Sunday night a week of serious party-going and dancing in
clubs and hotels had already been put in, and up on the Savannah
there could be no doubt that Carnival had really arrived at last. The
transformation of the grass verges around the Queen's Park was
astonishing. Mountains of green coconuts had appeared and long
lines of booths had been built supplying every kind of Trinidadian
sweetmeat and snack-roti and dal puri, fish fl.oats and accra, hot
dogs and hamburgers, hot and cold coo-coo made from sliced
ochroes, tree-oysters and crab-backs, mashed tum-tum plantains and
corncobs, all to be washed down with unlimited quantities of Cokes
and Solos, lagers and rums.
I was pleased to see something from the Trinidad I remembered
in the form of flame. Many of the stalls and booths were lit by fl.ares,
the good old-fashioned kerosene-soaked rags stuffed in the necks of
empty bottles to give a wavering, uncertain but friendly yellow light.
Another old custom had also survived. Despite television advertising
campaigns and the invasion of ice-cold American soft drinks and the
pavement ice-cream churns, the 'press' took its rightful place and was
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doing a roaring trade. The press was not only a favourite with
children. Their elder brothers and sisters and parents waited around
the stalls while the huge blocks of ice were planed with carpenters'
planes and the chilly shavings put into cardboard cups and topped
with green or red sweet syrups whose flavour could only be guessed at.
The Carnival spirit broke out behind the fa�ades of the large
hotels, which were usually models of quiet retirement. The Queen's
Park Hotel overlooking the Savannah forgot that it now had rivals,
and because of its proximity to the centre of Carnival became the
liveliest bar in Trinidad for two days. A yellow fog drifted across the
Savannah. It had not come down from the mountains or in from the
sea, but rose in clouds from the earth itself, for the dirt tracks leading
to the grandstand and its huge Carnival stage were ground into
clouds of fine powdered dust by the hundreds of cars coasting slowly
through the park on their way to the evening's contests.
But if there were hundreds of cars there were thousands of youths
and girls milling about in a variety of fancy-dress costumes and all
wearing this year's Carnival hat, a tall conical and pointed affair of
linen, some plain, some coloured, and most bright and jazzy. Occa­
sionally fantastic constructions passed by, being wheeled in sections
on handbarrows or trolleys or carried by hand, pieces of gilded and
glittering and bejewelled material, dismantled costumes of extra­
ordinary richness and inventiveness being carried for assembly
around the body of the wearer who was to appear on the open-air
stage later that night in the Dimanche Gras Show. Here the weeks
of calypso contests would reach their climax in the crowning of the
Calypso King and, the highlight of the pre-Carnival excitements, the
announcement and crowning of the Queen of Carnival.
Many hundreds of people would not sleep on the Sunday night.
Monday morning would only be distinguished for them by the
emergence of daylight. One flowed into the other with continual
jumpin'-up which stopped not at all for stars or dawn, a ceaseless
river of music and dancing, of people in bands, of people alone,
wandering like a slow tide through the streets, apparently aimless
but having the greatest aim of all-to live it up with every tingling
fibre of their being and, if necessary, to the last cent in their pockets.
The Carnival walk, a kind of slow samba-like shuffiing, whether
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music was actually audible or not, affected everybody like an epi­

demic of muscular spasms. They shuffled up and down the streets
leading to the Savannah in a far-away dream. Few could wait for the
bell on J'Ouvert morning, the speech by the Mayor of Port-of-Spain
at 5 a.m. and the skyrocket signals for Carnival to start officially.
Carnival had really started the moment the previous year's Carnival
ended at midnight on Ash Wednesday. Months before J'Ouvert it
was already going strong in the backyards and city waste sites of the
steel bands, in the calypso tents, in the children's Carnival, the Old
Mas balls, and the various king and queen contests.
Nevertheless, Monday had its own special meaning, for it was,
after all, Jour Ouvert-a strong reminder that Carnival had origins
as old as Trinidad, or at least from the days of the Spanish and French
settlers who made Carnival the fantasy-filled highlight of their social
year. The names remained French, but the spirit of Carnival be­
longed much more to the African drum and dance. After the Emanci­
pation Act the African former slaves celebrated their own Carnival
in their own way. It was not based on the old masters' big plantation
houses with their series of polite and socially exclusive balls and
masquerades which had been the earliest expression of Carnival in
Trinidad.
In the eighteenth century, whatever freedom the slaves had to
celebrate was principally concerned with Christmas festivities. The
many weeks between New Year and the beginning of Lent-or
rather, the beginning of the cane harvest-was the 'season' in which
the French and Spanish masters showed their social status by the
originality of their masked balls and practical jokes, and the value of
their ill-gotten wealth by the ostentation of their dinner parties.
Centuries of degradation had killed many things but not the
Negroes' sense of music and their need to dance. Nor had slavery
deadened in them a love of flamboyance and celebration. So when
they were slaves no longer the Africans found Carnival the ideal
occasion. Although dressing up in crinolines and powdered wigs and
playing clowns, the Negro brought the once-forbidden drum and the
music of Africa to give a thrill to the blood that the French planters'
Carnival never knew, a thrill that has never diminished.
J'Ouvert morning began with a parade of costumed bands past the
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judges in the temporary grandstand built for the occasion in Inde­

pendence Square. By 6 a.m. Frederick Street's pavements were
jammed with spectators for the hours-long procession of bands
samba-ing to Lord Kitchener's My brother, your sister or to the
Mighty Sparrow's haunting, compulsive Obeah Wedding:
Melda you've been making wedding plans
Carrying on so you can take my hand
All you do
Can't get through
I still aint get married to you.
J'Ouvert was Ole Mas, the costumes made up from remnants of the
previous Carnival, revived as a reminder of the old and as a foil to the
splendours of the new. The car park in the Y.M.C.A. yard was used
for storing the steel drums of one of the bands. At 3 a.m. I was
awakened as these pans were mounted on tubular steel trolleys and
trundled outside, where, after preliminary warming-up snatches of
My brother and Melda, the boys played their way into Jour Ouvert.
Sugar sacks and flour bags made into U.S. Navy uniforms were king
of J'Ouvert. Decorated and painted trousers were also popular with
lookers-on as well as jazzy 'hot' shirts and jeans and, of course, the
gay, tall-pointed conical hats. But the parading bands had large
groups of masqueraders representing commercial goods and the past.
Scores of youngsters dressed all in spotless white waved plumes of
sugar cane to advertise a brand of rum, while children on the pave­
ment looked on uncertainly at the 'Evils of Mankind', where part of
the evils displayed included whips being used on slaves spread­
eagled at flogging-posts. But besides bands showing such evils and
'Bad Days of Slavery' there were things like 'Cricket In All Its
Splendour', 'A Pyjama Party' and 'The Industrial Stabilization Act'
much cheered by the crowds.
The winner of the Ole Mas Band of the Year was Hugh Hill with
his presentation of 'From England with Love', a title parodied from
the James Bond film and portraying such people as Queen Victoria,
Sir Winston Churchill, Richard the Lion Heart and Prince Philip,
and also such landmarks as the Tower of London, Big Ben and even
the B.B.C. A whitewashed Creole youth with a waist-long blond wig
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sat on an ass as Lady Godiva, escorted by Rawle Potter, the popular

basketballer, dressed as an immaculate London policeman except
that under his raincoat trouserless legs emerged. For another band
playing My Fair Lady there were some superb dresses and exag­
gerated Cecil Beaton hats, though the title of Queen of J'Ouvert was
claimed by Joyce James, playing Queen Elizabeth II opening the
Trinidadian Parliament, an event much in the public eye during the
recent royal visit. Errol Grimes was crowned King of J'Ouvert, his
person draped with all kinds of bands: cumberband, kneeband,
slave band, bellyband, contraband-and the many bans imposed on
Rhodesia. The breakaway Prime Minister of Rhodesia was simply
called 'Ian Smith', a label pinned to the white shirt of his effigy
hanging from a gallows.
Jour Ouvert, though full of clever and comic ideas and visual plays
on words, was at heart nothing more than one great romp. The
Mighty Terror, proclaimed King of Calypso at Sunday night's
Dimanche Gras, urged tourists to make the most of J'Ouvert and to
'snatch a man or woman' for the jump-up in the streets, the im­
promptu open-air dancing that went on non-stop until midnight on
Tuesday brought the 'las' lap' and Carnival to an end for another
year. And people were not just passive onlookers, but really did
jump-up and follow the bands. Rich, poor, young, old, lean, plump,
gave themselves up not so much to the music as to the Carnival spirit
invoked by the sweet insistence of the steel pans.
When or how I returned to Victoria Square on the Monday night
after a long day of celebration I could not then and cannot now
remember. All I could recall afterwards was getting up in the Y.M.C.A.
to open the door and windows wide to get rid of an overpowering
sweet smell like make-up from Carnival masqueraders. But I was
wrong. This scent was made by no Carnival queen but by the lady­
of-the-night, Cestrum nocturnum. The profusely bearing shrub of
small green-white flowers grew in the garden next door and in the
still, balmy night air yielded up its heavy cloying scent, which was
like a concentrate of oleander and powerful enough to sweeten the
air intoxicatingly over a long distance.
On the Carnival Tuesday morning I went round to Buller Street
to help friends of mine get into their costumes designed and built by
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George Bailey for his monumental parade of Kings Go Forth.

Although I had been into the small Buller Street house on numerous
evenings to see George Bailey in busy conference with his followers
and to watch the development of the ideas and sketches for the cos­
tumes, I was completely unprepared for the magnificence of the
whole Bailey presentation and the stream of kings and queens who
emerged from the house on the Tuesday morning to form up in the
streets around in a burst of unbelievable brilliance.
Yet opposite the thousand-strong Bailey band was Leonard
Carty's show, involving only himself and four others. I found him
in the back garden which my Gatacre Street window had overlooked,
and where I had seen him hard at work on various components of
his costume. But only now did I see inside the shed where the in­
credible plumed head-dress of his Inca Fantasy was hoisted by a
pulley to the shed roof. Three of us lowered the precious head-gear
carefully, fearing lest we should shatter the radiant sun of mirror
spikes surrounding the Inca magic bird among the blue and white
ostrich plumes. This beautiful costume was eight feet high, and when
Leonard Carty had donned the head-piece the topmost feathers in
its six-foot circle of plumes were ten feet off the ground. When this
splendid, awe-inspiring object emerged from the backyard amongst
the cockerels and turkey cocks which had kept me awake on so many
nights, I felt it really could have come from the Andes of ancient
Peru.
Before reaching the main parade I ran into yet another band
leaving Woodbrook. This was Stephen Lee Heung's Crete, a large
group of brilliant design as dazzling in a different way as Kings Go
Forth or the Inca Fantasy. The hundreds of people in the Crete
group were dressed in costumes whose origins were the frescoes and
sculpture of Minoan Crete. They looked like the extras in a no­
expense-spared epic film with their sandals, cuffs, red and gold loin­
cloths, and collars and helmets and carrying decorated staffs with
minotaurs' heads, and others bearing black, pink and silver fans
before them in front of men dressed as horned minotaurs. It was
only possible to place these brown-skinned handsome Cretans in the
twentieth century by the rum bottles conveniently tucked into waist­
bands.
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For three hours I stood watching the constantly changing

sequence of Carnival portrayals go by: Effigies of the Gods, Beauty
of Light, Flame and Darkness, and the breath-taking Snow Kingdom
whose War God of Snow was chosen as King of Carnival 1966. The
clowns and head-hunters paraded by, all swaying and shuffling
lithely to the samba steps, the thieves and beggars with their own
traditional form of dancing and jargon addressed to the crowd, Red
Indians with head-dresses up to a height of fifteen feet, which is
about the same as the wing-span of some bats. Almost as popular as
the ever-popular sailors were the shaved heads completely covered in
artificial gold dust, a positive army of El Dorados whose kingdom
for a day was the memory of a lifetime. And there were thousands
of young men dressed as American sailors, not in the flour sacking
of Ole Mas, but in immaculate, genuine white or navy-blue uniforms.
Unfortunately these sailors soon became grubby as they would insist
in giving their brown faces generous sprinklings of talcum powder
which soon covered everything. One band, Shindig, numbered 5,000
teenage boys and girls in 'with it' tight modern clothes, the girls in
'rib-ticklers' and black plastic trousers exposing midriffs and boys in
light blue jeans and white sweaters, all spanking neat and curiously
effective in contrast with the elaborate costumes.
I looked for friends playin' mas. There was my friend Dolman, no
longer a love-lorn drug-store assistant but a resplendent King of
Persia with half a dozen attendants. And who would now recognize
a seamstress called Judith Jordan as the Goddess of Fertility? If age
was no criterion for Carnival, neither was size, and some vast
women in tight pants soon showed that weight was no obstacle to
graceful movement in the dance. A dozen times I was on the point
of leaving the roadsides to go and snatch a siesta, only to be arrested
by yet another spectacle of colour and movement casting another
spell over me to make escape impossible. There came an African
Potentate with his army in black tunics and brilliant scarlet cloaks
and high golden helmets, followed by a forest of red ostrich plumes
billowing in the cool north-easterly breeze. However refreshing these
mountain airs, they certainly gave a rough passage to those wearing
huge head-dresses. I tried to imagine if Soleyman the Magnificent's
armadas ever sailed out of the Golden Horn with half such a panoply
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as I saw at Carnival-and whether his fierce and fearless advance

guard of Janissaries in their flowing plumes spent half as much
energy in battle for Allah as the mock soldiers and sailors and Cretans
spent on the Carnival preceding Christian Lent.
Back at Victoria Square I had to force my way through to the
Y.M.C.A. Not only was the band which had borrowed the car park
for its drums assembling in full Carnival array as a tribe of Red
Indians, but two houses away an even bigger contingent was organiz­
ing itself and spilling out over the pavement and around the square.
This was an important band, destined not only to claim the jealously­
won, envy-provoking Band of the Year title, but also to have as its
chief woman character, Kay Christopher, who achieved the supreme
triumph for lady contestants, the Queen of Carnival award. What
hours of study and planning and designing Edmund Hart must have
spent on making his presentation of Playing Cards, which most
deservedly was to come up with the two big trump prizes. A few
years earlier theatre activities brought me in contact with the Fol de
Rols in England and I got used to handling the vast wardrobes and
sets of these bright and ingenious revue companies, but I never en­
countered so many exuberant displays and original ideas as there
were that Carnival Tuesday just in Victoria Square alone. I examined
Playing Card costumes of the band's minor characters and the
quality and the inventiveness and flaring finery would have quite
suited the Broadway production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk
Circle instead of being confined to the all-too-short two-day run of
Port-of-Spain's Carnival. The Playing Cards' robes bore the insignia
of their suit, hearts and diamonds, spades and clubs, and also the
enrichment of beautifully executed hand embroidery in gold thread
of Chinese characters, swords and dragons and all the kind of
emblems associated with Chinese court dress. I was astonished by the
Playing Cards more than anything else I had seen and could not
believe that those superbly made and fitted, richly embellished
clothes were doomed for as short a glory as the night-flowering
cactus.
Battling my way through the crowds, I found a shared taxi going
to Sangre Grande. I had promised Cucus to return from Port-of­
Spain in time to see her play mas, for the Trinidadian Carnival was
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by no means the capital's monopoly, although the city boasted the

biggest bands and the most expensive and elaborate costumes. All
the country villages and towns had their own celebrations. They
lacked the sophistication and luxury of Port-of-Spain's extraordinary
presentations such as Crete and Kings Go Forth, but they certainly
did not lack the spirit of Carnival. If anything, the country Carnival,
though homely, was more spontaneous and less contrived and a good
deal more lively. None of their bands had to linger hours in the
streets waiting until the huge stage would be free for them to go on
before the judges, as in the city. Here in the country Carnival was
the crowd of local people rather than a brilliant stage-managed dis­
play. All joined in country Carnival, whether they were playing mas
or not, and everybody was jumpin'-up to the insistent Pied Piper
pans of the clanging steel bands leading the processions.
At Arima and Sangre Grande and at other places along the way
to Mayaro traffic was diverted or held up by bands and long pro­
cessions of people slowly, rhythmically jumpin'-up with the samba
shuffie. In country districts a predominant costume for those playin'
mas was a U.S. Army uniform. The countryside swarmed with these
soldiers just as the pavements had reeled with the rolling gait of the
city sailors. In fact, when I reached Mayaro and found Cucus in the
ranks of a Yankee army contingent, I thought the road down to the
beach must have looked like many roads in Vietnam, a sobering
thought in the middle of Carnival's carefree gaiety.
Leaning out of the taxi window, I admired a superb home-built
tank camouflaged with greenery and manned by a perfectly uni­
formed tiny boy. But in order to show the crowd that the long
mounted gun of bamboo was no mere ornament the boy touched it
with a flambeau and from the cannon's mouth came a flash of gun­
powder and a column of smoke in a most convincing explosion. At
St. Anne's, after a refreshing walk along by the sea, I found Keg
beaming with delight because a famous calypso singer had come to
stay at Cinta's Camp, wearing shorts so that one and all could see
the tattoos and autographs on her comely thighs.
The morning tide brought familiar faces to the beach again, and
the fishermen's run of bad luck seemed to be over, for they were
having good 'pulls'. Only when I looked into their handsome faces
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did I realize that the pagan Goddesses of Fertility and Beauty and
Dawn had revelled, but now their day was done, and that St. Peter
held the kingdom's keys again, for the fishermen had been to his
shrine at Radix and their foreheads were daubed with the Lenten
ashes of repentance.

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 tis It
Beyond the Dragon's Mouths
Port-of-Spain is a port. But because there is no fashionable marine
promenade it is easy to forget this, except when ship funnels and
masts and radio aerials and radar grids and scanners show above the
low roofs at the end of streets near Victoria Square. But the sea and
ships and sheds and rickety wooden piers and up-to-date modern
berths and harbour works stretch behind Independence Square. Here
lie the seamen's cafes, the ship chandlers, the warehouses reeking of
copra and nutmeg, cocoa and spices, barrels of arrowroot, drums of
bay-rum oil. The Customs House stands on Queen's Wharf and in
front of it a jumble of sheds and corrugated-iron boathouses, built
around a jetty. This is a fishing-pier full of men standing to mend
green-dyed nets and others taking engines to pieces in the open­
sided workshops.
The adjacent part of the harbour is devoted to the little boats
trading between the islands. These are schooners which carry crews
of real sailormen who know how to handle sail. When I had been in
Trinidad eleven years before I sometimes came down to this quay
looking for a skipper on one of the trading vessels to carry me to
Grenada, and, oddly enough, the first of the eleven sailing-ships
along the pier I saw now was the Crispin Wayne from St. George's. I
talked about mutual friends to Joseph Steward, the captain, while
the nine members of the crew sat eating in shady parts of the boat.
The Crispin Wayne's cargo of sugar and cement, bottles of rum and
Calor gas, wine and biscuits, was already stowed aboard for the
afternoon sailing. With luck and a fair wind they would get to
Grenada next morning. The Crispin Wayne was a wonderfully stout
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and trim little vessel, with an engine for emergencies and contrary
winds and generally to reinforce its cloud of sail. The temptation to
stay on board the Crispin Wayne and take again the marvellous
journey across the Caribbean to Grenada was almost too much for
me. But I consoled myself with a lingering look at the stout timbers
of its hull and tarry ropes of its rigging as the schooner rocked and
creaked at its mooring.
Tied up next to it was the Native Knowledge from St. Lucia;
which had exchanged its cargo of nutmeg and spices for rubber
tyres and sacks of potatoes, cement and general cargo. Alongside this
vessel lay the Alvin R II from Georgetown in Guyana; it had taken
thirty-two hours to sail to Port-of-Spain, though a member of her
crew said returning would take fifty or more, because of winds and
currents.
Opposite the line of wooden prows and bowsprits a solid reef of
pink conch shells lay, composed of enough of the large shells to
supply a whole army of tourists with souvenirs. Few tourists came
this way, however, because their ships berthed farther along on
King's Wharf. Port-of-Spain spread out behind, and beyond that
were the hills, and a headland sprinkled with tiny houses. This scene
from the schooners' pier was the old vision of Hispaniola, the land of
pirates and careening and all the romance of swashbuckling. The
seamen, naked except for oily old shorts, could have belonged to any
century as their dark, hard and rounded muscles varnished with
sweat piled cargo under the timeless forest of rigging. There was the
same beauty of rhythm I saw in the Carnival dance as the crews
formed a chain and passed boxes of Brooke Bond Tea from a lorry to
the deck and hold of the Pioneer. This vessel looked larger and
hailed from Barbados. A seventeen-year-old youth, a passenger on
the Pioneer, became intrigued because I was writing notes instead of
taking photographs. He had been leaning over the rail watching all
the quayside bustle, but he came down the gangplank, grinning, and
introduced himself.
'My name's Kevin,' he said. 'You heard it?'
I said, yes, I knew the name Kevin.
'It's a name from Ireland,' he went on; 'my people part Irish.'
Besides his dark skin and Negroid hair Kevin had a fine Roman
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nose and bright green-Chartreuse eyes. Kevin made me think of

Cromwell butchering his way through Ireland. Many people who did
not die at the Protector's hand were shipped off as prisoners to
islands like Barbados. If young Kevin had Irish blood mingled with
the emotional and passionate warmth of Africa it was because Oliver
Cromwell behaved in the way that he described to William Lenthall
the 'Speaker of the Parliament of England' in September 1649. Crom­
well wrote, 'When they (the Irish) submitted, their officers were
knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and
the rest shipped for the Barbadoes. The soldiers in the other town
were all spared as to their lives only, and shipped likewise for the
Barbadoes.' The Irish had much in common with the West Indians
apart from Froude's scorn and the centuries of Whitehall's misrule
imposed on both.
But there was no long memory of hate in those green eyes of
Kevin's brown face. He was consumed with memories of the Carni­
val, the first he had ever seen in Port-of-Spain. 'Man, that real, real,'
he repeated, a far-away look in the Chartreuse eyes, yet a glistening,
too, as his inner eye saw again the astonishing Snow Kingdom and
Kings Go Forth and the elegance and nobility of Kay Christopher
playing Queen of the Playing Cards as well as Queen of Carnival.
Kevin talked as though he would never get over such an experience.
We stopped and talked to an old woman sitting on the quay eating
a bowl of curry and surrounded by colourful cloth bundles, new
buckets, pots and pans. She was waiting for the boat bound for St.
Kitts to finish its loading, so that she could get aboard and sail home
on it to the little island. I also had an hour to wait for a boat, because
I was on my way to Tobago. Meanwhile I enjoyed listening to Kevin
and watching the sailing-vessels, because he was a knowledgeable
companion and even the Sanexpedito filling up with scrap-iron for
Venezuela attracted his lively attention.
Port-of-Spain's harbour straggles along the shore of the placid
Gulf of Paria, extending from the fishing-fleet at one end, past the
inter-island sailing-boats from the world of Conrad, to the steel hulls
and white superstructure of international pleasure cruisers, the rare
royal yacht, the blue and white coastguard vessels, and at the far end
the ponderous and long tankers. And it was at this end I found the
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Bird of Paradise, one of the regular steamers plying to Tobago,

licensed to carry 140 tourist and 200 deck passengers for the six-hour
journey. Although Tobago lies only twenty miles to the north-east of
Trinidad, the sea journey involves hugging Trinidad's northern and
mountainous coast for most of the way once the steamer has left
Port-of-Spain and emerged into the open Caribbean from the closed
and protected Gulf of Paria. For those in a hurry, or people who are
not good sailors, the journey to Tobago can be made by the frequent
air service in only fifteen minutes from Trinidad's Piarco Airport.
But to travel in this admittedly efficient way was to miss some new
vistas of Trinidad which the cruise could afford, although for most
of the 340 passengers and even members of the crew that particular
crossing made by the Bird of Paradise was the roughest any of them
had ever experienced.
No signs of bad weather betrayed themselves as I sat on the Bird of
Paradise's upper deck just after midday, looking across to the island
schooners tied up at their jetty, masts dark against the sky and a
motley collection of coloured hulls, a red one with yellow piping,
others black or grey. Some of the schooners were unfurling sail and
heading out into the gulf on the first stages of their voyages to An­
tigua and St. Vincent, Dominica and Grenada. My study of the
harbour abruptly ended when shouts and then laughter came from
the passengers on deck and their friends on the quayside. A young
man had thrown a ten-dollar bill to a girl on the quay, but a sudden
eddy in the air carried the bank-note across the green water. Passen­
gers forgot their closely guarded seats as they rushed to the rails and
watched the ten-dollar note settle on the water like a butterfly. All in
one movement two of the boys kicked off their shoes and dived to the
rescue for which they received more laughter, some cheers and some
applause.
Excitement over, the people settled again, the saloon passengers
to Dixie plates of 'Chic 'n chips' from the ship's galley which they
washed down with bottles of iced lager. Passengers on the deck had
brought their own refreshment. Now they drank rum diluted with
coconut water poured straight from a green nut. More powerful
even than the diesel-oily, paint-and-sea smell of the ship itself
was the pungent odour of fresh oranges being sold from large baskets
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by various women. Two youths sitting near me tried on the new

thick-soled boots they had bought in Port-of-Spain. Others watched
anxiously over boxes of recently hatched chicks or bundles of young
trees wrapped in protective sacking. There were plump, well­
rounded Negresses with elaborate flower-bedecked hats. They kept
their hats on, but as a concession to comfort took off their shoes, and
feet as fat as pigeons tapped silent rhythms on the deck while their
owners chatted in excited, musical voices. Some of the women spread
rugs on the deck when all the seats were taken and made themselves
at home, placing around them a little collection of belongings, hand­
bags and shoes, baskets and bundles and umbrellas against the
sun.
At last the Bird ofParadise moved away from the quay and slipped
unperturbed through the glassy gulf waters which were so calm that
hardly a ripple passed across the surface. From even a short distance
out to sea the Northern Range was seen from a completely new
vantage-point. The mountains' geography assumed a new geometry,
new dimensions of distance and height. The mountain flanks rose
majestically above the draught-board city to noble ridges and peaks
that seemed to shut Port-of-Spain away from the island's interior.
Although I had been through the passes of the Northern Range and
seen the steep descending valleys clad in blazing immortelles, not
until now, from the Bird of Paradise deck, looking at cones of dark
green verdure separated by valleys of dark green verdure, did I
realize the full grandeur and immensity of this range.
Swiftly now the Bird ofParadise went northwards. And then there
was land to either side as she began to pass the string of islands which
almost join Trinidad to the mainland of Venezuela. First came Las
Cotorras, the Five Islands comprising Caledonia, Lenagan, Nelson,
Pelican and Rock, and then the larger group, Gasparee and Little
Gasparee, Cronstadt and Carrera, Monos, Huevos and Chacachacare
forming a maze-like archipelago. Some of the smaller islands were like
miniature Japanese gardens composed of rocks and delicate artificial­
looking little trees where tiny dolls' houses perched unrealistically.
From the shore these islands had looked misty and mysterious, of
uncertain outline and uncertain form. But now from the Bird ofPara­
dise's deck as the ship passed through them they seemed as if specially
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constructed as desert islands for Hollywood films with just the right
amount of vegetation clinging to steep slopes. Even the prison island
of Carrera with its yellow buildings had an air of prettiness. Yet
because most of these islands were rock the prisoners worked in
Carrera's stone quarries, which no doubt was not so pretty. At the
jetty on the smaller Cronstadt a freighter unloaded its cargo of
barytes from Brazil, which was processed on the island before being
used as a form of cement fed into oil wells during drilling.
A fine, warm rain had fallen after we left Port-of-Spain, but now
the sky cleared again and the trees on Gasparee shimmered in the
wet. Discreet villas had been lodged on some of these islands amongst
the rocks and hanging gardens to command their own sandy coves.
They could be rented by the week or longer and were by no means
expensive. The bird-watcher who could not make the long trip to
the Aripo Caves to see the nocturnal feeding guacharos might ex­
plore the caves on Gasparee in search of the oilbirds.
Then, the chain of islands navigated, some almost near enough
to touch, the Bird of Paradise began to negotiate the channels
through the narrow Boca de Monos with Monos Island coming
down steeply into the water on one side and the Trinidadian
coast on the other studded with close trees, with foliage dense
and rounded so that it looked like brussels sprouts. Monos is large
compared with some of the other islands littered about the straits,
and part of it was surprisingly treeless and smoothly green like
English downland. These clearances remained from the days when
the islands were famous for cotton as well as whaling stations.
The highest point on Monos rises astonishingly to a thousand feet
above the turbulent channel waters. Besides fishermen, holiday­
makers and prisoners, these islands have other residents. Nearest the
Venezuelan coast lies Chacachacare, its towering lighthouse and the
buildings of a leprosy hospital.
But the Boca de Monos was different from anything in the journey
through the Gulf of Paria, for heavy swells swept through the narrow
passage and high waves appeared, smashing themselves on the rocks.
Several people on board said the Boca always had heavy swells, but
that once out into the open sea beyond the channel the swells died
down again. But on that afternoon instead of subsiding the swells
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grew bigger and the waves became higher and more powerful when
we 'jumped out of the Boca', as my companion put it. Big seas came
thundering diagonally at the ship so that the Bird of Paradise rolled
in all the worst possible ways a ship can. 'It's the meetin' of the two
waters,' my seat-companion continued. He was a lean Hindu with an
abundance of hair sprouting from his ears and a pile of paperback
books of serious content in his lap. He brought to mind Naipaul's
Mystic Masseur, who bought learning by the yard. 'How much book I
buy last week?' the masseur asked his wife. 'Only three, man, but
they was big books, big big books. Six to seven inches altogether.'
With a tremendous shudder the ship shook and heeled over and
in the bar glass followed glass, bottle followed bottle to the floor and
those which did not break rolled violently from side to side as the
ship twisted and slid down into the trough of giant waves. After that
it was clear the bar could not operate, so everything was stowed
away and the bar closed. Thick paper bags were handed round by the
stewards and the passengers succumbed one by one to the peculiar
agonies of seasickness. Above the groans of human beings lost to
everything but the death-wish, the banging of tons of water against
steel hull plates and the creaking of the superstructure, a group of
large and still-shoeless women sprawled on rugs set up a lusty and
under the circumstances a surprisingly tuneful, 'Oh hear us when
we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea'.
The great seas rushed like mobile mountains towards the ship,
towering high above the deck rails and then quite suddenly falling
away into deep, watery valleys into which the ship slid and rolled. It
was thrilling, especially as I was not seasick, as I kept telling myself.
I am not seasick, I recited, as we were flung up and let down, rolled
over to starboard and tossed to port, taking an hour to get through
the islands and into that stretch of water called by Columbus Bocas
del Dragon, the Dragon's Mouths. The four channels created by the
islands led the discoverer to use 'mouths' in the plural to describe the
treacherous currents swirling this way and that in these moody
waters, the largest of which was the Boca Grande between Chacacha­
care and Venezuela,just under six miles wide.
The Bird of Paradise was well found and her engines were power­
ful enough to deal with the rough seas. But as we navigated the
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roaring channels I wondered how Columbus's caravels, mere cockle­

shells by comparison, with hulls of wood and driven only by the
wind, managed to manceuvre these dangerous races, more especially
as to the discoverer and his crews the dangers were unknown and un­
charted. A Dutch document of 1637 reported that the Spaniards
always promised to say Mass to St. Anthony if he would bring them
safely through the Dragon's Mouths.
But though the voyage was not altogether conducive to sight­
seeing of the usual placid kind, the north coast of Trinidad and its
mountain wall of the Northern Range running continuously like a
great barrier, was made more impressive by the wildness of the sea.
The plunging, heaving, pitching decks came to wave-crests and
commanded the sea and the mountains wreathed in low, steamy cloud
lightly touching their tree-lined peaks or trailing before the north­
east wind along the valleys. Where the mountains came down to the
sea a distant line of angry white foam could be seen trying to scale its
way up the cliffs. This part of Trinidad is almost completely un­
inhabited, inviting exploration by those who love the dangers and
thrills of virgin forest.
Although Columbus aptly christened the channels giving entrance
from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Paria the Dragon's Mouths and
wrote in detail in his journal about his discoveries, no mention was
made of Tobago. Since Tobago is so near to Trinidad that on a clear
day each island can perfectly well see the other, it seems reasonable
to support local theories that he must have sighted Tobago during his
third voyage of 1498, but did not consider Tobago large enough or
important enough to mention in the journal. Alternatively he may
have missed Tobago altogether if the weather was squally and rain
obscured the island, or again Columbus may mistakenly have be­
lieved it part of Trinidad or part of the mainland. For whatever
reason, Tobago did not figure in Columbus's reports. And on his
third voyage he was in great haste to reach Hispaniola in order to
plant a flag and claim it for the Spanish crown.
Columbus's indifference to Tobago, if such it was, set a prece­
dent which seems to have been followed consistently until compara­
tively modern times. Indifference to Tobago was a policy of many
nations, many kings and queens, principalities and dukedoms,
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merchant adventurers and plantation knights who otherwise gener­

ally plagued the Caribbean islands. They laid claims to Tobago and
then ignored it. But in their case, although they never properly
settled the island, all of them made elaborate statements about its
existence. Such pronouncements usually appeared in pompous prose
giving grants of land or selling Tobago's sovereignty in exchange for
favours. During all the centuries-long game of chess played by the
great political powers in the Caribbean no other island changed
hands or made so many moves as little Tobago.
Early English and Dutch visitors to the island reported that it was
uninhabited. This was untrue, apparently, as evinced by the number
of Amerindian middens that have been unearthed and also as shown
by historical events, such as attacks on later colonists by the Amerin­
dians. The reports of the English adventurers who came around
these parts inJames I's reign made the King lay claim to it in 1608.
Nothing, however, was done about colonizing the island until twenty
years later whenJames's son, Charles I, signed a royal charter grant­
ing it to the Earl of Pembroke. But in the same year the Dutch
reached Tobago and established a settlement called New Walcheren.
Lord Pembroke did nothing to safeguard his claim to the island.
Disease and Carib bows and arrows made away with his counter­
claimants.
The Dutch were built of stern stuff and they persisted in occupy­
ing this outpost of nobody's empire even after the inhabitants of New
Walcheren had all perished. From the ranks of Dutch adventurers
rose up one Jan de Moor who did a neat public-relations job by
selling the idea of a paradise in New Walcheren to his contempo­
raries. Under his influence six attempts were made to colonize
Tobago.
No heaven-on-earth resulted from these attempts, for the Spanish
nose in Trinidad now sniffed the air and smelt suspicious intentions
on the part of the new occupants of the sister island. The Spaniards,
of course, trusted nobody, let alone those who were not in commu­
nion with Spain. So the Spaniards joined with the Amerindians in
raiding Tobago, setting fire to the new settlements and carrying the
surviving Dutchmen off to Trinidad as prisoners. Nobody, however,
could accuse these Hollanders of relying on Dutch courage, for others
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soon arrived to face more than Spanish muskets and Amerindian

arrows. The French West Indian Company now entered the lists,
claiming Tobago as theirs by right of a settlement agreed with Cardi­
nal Richelieu.
Since the Earl of Pembroke did not avail himself of the island,
Charles I drew up a new charter in favour of James, Duke of Cour­
land, on condition that only English subjects and Courlanders should
be allowed to settle there, and that all imports and exports should be
made through the kingdom and dukedom and the city of Danzig. So
the first Courlanders sailed for Tobago from their small dukedom on
the Baltic Sea. Their reaction to the tropical island has to be im­
agined, though possibly seasickness and other privations of seven­
teenth-century ocean voyages made them react in no other way than
sheer thankfulness that they had actually reached terra firma.
They at least did not suffer the fate of James, Duke of Courland.
When he had seen his compatriots on their way to unfurl his standard
on the island, the King of Sweden took him prisoner in the Swedish­
Polish war of 1655-60. There had been a steady flow of Dutchmen,
especially from Flushing, where Jan de Moor was Burgomaster, to
the island settlement of New Walcheren and they did not recognize
the King of England's grant to Duke James of Courland. So when
that unfortunate Duke lay languishing in his Swedish prison the
Hollanders deemed it an opportune and lawful occasion to attack
their Courland neighbours. With their rights successfully won, the
Dutch agreed that their fellow Europeans should remain and present
a united front under the Dutch flag to their common enemies, the
Spaniards and Amerindians.
Peaceful co-existence between the Dutch and the Courlanders
lasted a number of years until France revived its old claim to Tobago.
Louis XIV decided to create a French barony out of the island. But
being Louis XIV he turned this into a double entendre, for the man
he made Baron of Tobago was Adrien Lampsins and he was a Dutch­
man from Flushing who with his brother Cornelis had established a
settlement on the south coast in 1654. This was a subtle manreuvre.
However, the subtlety was more than a little offset by the crudity of
the English in the person of Captain John Poyntz, a seadog whose
bite was worse than his bark, and who had a company of London
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merchants as his backers. Captain Poyntz had earlier agreed with the
Duke of Courland that he should transport 2,400 settlers within
eight years to an enormous tract of the island which Poyntz saw as
his own private domain. It is difficult to know how Tobago, only
twenty-six miles from one end to the other, could possibly be the
subject of so many claims and counter-claims, or how so small a pawn
in the international chessboard could figure so often in top diploma­
tic moves. Captain Poyntz was not a man of diplomacy but of action,
and though tardy in settling his claim, when the time came he made
no bones about it. With four formidable English vessels he appeared
one day off the coast of Tobago and without ado captured the Dutch
stronghold.
John Poyntz, sea captain and Clerk of the Revels, was an elder
brother of Sydenham Poyntz, and the two of them together had star
parts in the Caribbean tragi-comedy. Both typified the 'rubbish' sent
out by England to important positions. Sydenham held an army
commission before being dispatched as Governor to the Leeward
Islands. On more than one occasion he was in danger from his own
soldiers, who were mutinous because nobody paid them. In fact, so
much was said about his abuse of power even in his lifetime that he
felt compelled to write The Vindication of Colonel-general Poyntz
against the slanders cast against him by the Army. Brother John, too,
had learnt to use his sword in the Civil War in Ireland on the Parlia­
mentary side. He was therefore admirably qualified to silence any­
body he regarded as an intruder to the West Indies generally and
Tobago in particular. It would be interesting to know whether
Captain Poyntz ever encountered any of the Irish he and Cromwell
had 'spared' to ship them prisoners to the Barbados. He also wrote a
book, The Present Prospect of the Famous and Fertile Island of
Tobago, and by present prospects he meant his own grand plans for
the island.
Unfortunately a hitch had occurred in the Captain's plans. Only a
few of the promised 2,400 settlers actually materialized on the island.
Captain Poyntz could leave no more than a handful of soldiers on
Tobago, in Fort James at Plymouth. In the following year another
ship appeared off the coast. This time it was French and came from
Grenada and the Captain's soldiers were overpowered. An old
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tradition held that the French soldiers only numbered twenty-five, but
they attacked in the dark and made a noise such as a far superior force
might make, completely hoodwinking the English commander of Fort
James, who decided to cut his losses, keep his powder dry and
surrender.
In its turn, this French victory did not last long. The Dutch were
tenacious colonizers and they determined to fortify Tobago to the
extent that the island could repel the advances of any empire-building
nation. A Peter Constant was put in charge of the resultant Dutch
forts and settlements. But these, though strong and well organized,
were not effective against English men-of-war which sailed to Tobago
from Barbados under the doughty command of Sir Tobias Bridges,
who soon had the Dutch commander as his prisoner. His name was
not Constant for nothing, and after his release, the Dutchman set
out again to make Tobago an impregnable Dutch fortress. His head­
quarters lay near the present island capital of Scarborough at the site
still known as Dutch Fort. Then the French returned, this time in
strength. And so, in 1667, the armies, the fleets and the islanders
witnessed the first major battle between the European powers over
Tobago.
The French forces under the Comte d'Estrees suffered heavy
damage to the fleet and enormous loss of life among the soldiers, and
the survivors were glad to escape alive. At the end of the same year
the French returned again, and unfortunately for the Dutch a shell
exploded amongst the ammunition of the fort, blowing it, the garrison
and the naval hero from the previous battle, Admiral Binkes, to
smithereens. Although his strong defences lay in blackened ruin and
most of his compatriots were dead, Peter Constant himself survived
to become a prisoner once more. But nothing, it seemed, not even
this tremendous setback, could deflect the Dutch determination to
regain and keep supremacy in Tobago. Not for nothing was the
motto of the royal house of Orange 'Holds fast', words which can still
be seen on public buildings in Curac;ao and Aruba.
The times and tides of history, however, waited for no man, and a
completely new set of would-be conquerors turned envious eyes on
Tobago. This Caribbean prize had already been fought for by
Spanish and Amerindians, Hollanders and Courlanders, English and
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French, Puritans from Barbados, buccaneers from Jamaica. When

the King of Sweden made the Duke of Courland a prisoner the
Swedes also appropriated the Duke's claim to Tobago. Thus Swedish
settlers also left their homeland for the island in the sun. Probably at
any one time during the seventeenth century nobody could have said
to whom Tobago belonged, if indeed it properly and legally belonged
to anybody at all except the aboriginal Amerindians. During the
whole seventeenth century Tobago passed from power to power, its
title deeds being bestowed on various merchants and court favourites.
One of the oddest claimants was an English doctor called Moses
Stringer. Poor Queen Anne had come to the throne by this time,
having been literally carried there in a litter, so far had her gout
developed, in spite of Dr. Stringer's loyal and devoted attention.
Moses Stringer, however, saw himself as more than a court physician.
He wanted to be an ambassador and a peace-maker, and the field of
this ambition in diplomacy was Tobago, where, he realized, no
settlement could ever be firmly established unless the island occu­
piers co-operated with the wild Caribs. Dr. Stringer, in fact, had
been largely influenced in this matter by Captain John Poyntz's
book, and, moreover, the doctor was not without funds to cover his
schemes. He asked for a royal charter to make his schemes legal and
also for letters patent authorizing his official position as Her Majesty's
Ambassador to the King of the Caribs.
But Tobago attracted people of this kind like bees to honey and
the island's position, never sublime except in its beauty, went from
the ridiculous to the ridiculous. Eventually the major powers decided
that Tobago was best without either fortification or flag. In 1749, when
France and Britain drew up the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, they de­
clared Tobago a neutral country open to settlers from all nations. If the
great powers could not agree on the rightful ownership of the island,
the treaty they made concerning it was nothing more than a pirates'
charter. Certainly people of many nationalities descended on Tobago,
but mostly under the black flag with its skull and crossbones. In those
days on the high seas around the Caribbean islands it was difficult to
distinguish pirates from non-pirates, for both kinds of adventurers
behaved in exactly the same way and were in those waters for exactly
the same reasons. The pirates who came to Tobago in the eighteenth
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century were probably no worse than Columbus's men who had been
there in the fifteenth, bobbing up and down in their caravels, for
the latter were criminals specially released from Spanish prisons by
Queen Isabella for the first voyage of discovery.
The same kind of heavy swells that Columbus and his crews ex­
perienced in the Dragon's Mouths, the same kind of playful porpoises
that provided the pirates with oil, greeted the Bird of Paradise as she
plunged her way round the north coast of Trinidad. We passed
several other ships ploughing in the forty-foot-deep furrows of angry
water. Most of them were tankers and freighters toiling down to
Port-of-Spain, rolling alarmingly from side to side, hanging in mid­
air on the crest of a giant swell; ungainly compared with the por­
poises which took each wave as though it were a bed of green bracken
to roll in. The Bird of Paradise had left Port-of-Spain at one o'clock
and it took eight hours to reach Scarborough Harbour in Tobago.
The afternoon's bad weather had left dark, lowering clouds, seamy
with the promise of evening squalls at sea. Then, as the first hint of
sundown changed the light and the colours, a schooner under full sail
passed along the horizon, a stately and moving sight after the clumsy
wallowing of the steel-hulled merchantmen. On the gyrating deck,
which at one moment had a wall of waves in front of it and the next
an aerial view of the whole sea, I met a smiling officer who was
apparently unaware of any untoward behaviour of the sea.
'Bit of a swell, I suppose,' he said and smiled even more broadly.
He added, 'Of course, the hammering is worse.'
I wondered that he should think anything could be worse. Ham­
mering, he explained, were short seas that knocked the ship, whereas
those we were currently experiencing were long enough between
crests for the ship to do no more than roll. In the saloon I sat beside
an old Negro like Uncle Remus, except that the business he ran in
Port-of-Spain was obviously a prosperous one. He was Tobago­
bound, 'For a coupla days off. A man needs to get away and think,
otherwise what's it all for?' He had bought land in Tobago and
shortly would retire there and build a house on it. 'You've got to
make sense out of life.' Then he went to sleep for the rest of the
Journey.
Suddenly it was calm. The lighthouse beams sweeping the stormy
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seas we had been watching for some time were now overhead as we
glided almost motionless into the still, fiat waters of Scarborough
Harbour.
'The worst crossing I've ever known,' observed the officer smiling
more broadly than ever as he passed me on his way ashore.
'Well,' I commented aloud to nobody in particular, 'that's the limit.'
It was the limit. The heaps of bedraggled seasick passengers
picked themselves up and collected their belongings. The first wan
smiles, the first laughter began to spread, and we walked a little un­
steadily down the gangplank on to the water-level quay. The Queen
had been here and the coloured lights of her welcome were still there
to welcome us. Some friends had recommended the Bacolet Inn to
me, and I thought I would walk the mile along the Windward Road
to regain some terrestial sense of balance. Now I could see the light­
house on its high hill above the road, cutting the tropical night with
sharp and powerful beams.
Before I reached the hotel I saw a group of young men playing
cards in a room full of Creole children, so I stopped to ask if I was
going in the right direction. The modest villa, with the main room
open to the front garden and the road, turned out to be a guest house.
The card players were mostly Government clerks who lodged at the
Edendale Beach Guest House. There and then I abandoned all idea
of the inn farther down the road and decided to stay with the Spencer
family. Mr. Spencer seemed far too young to be already a retired
policeman and father of a family ranging from a seventeen-year-old
son to seventeen-month-old twins. It was nearly ten o'clock, but not
too late for Mrs. Spencer to produce a supper of chicken stewed with
a curiously fragrant herb and a glass jug of iced Ovaltine flavoured
with cachou.
By the time I had finished supper a room had been got ready for
me. A little brown gecko on the ceiling had organ-stop eyes that
worked like radar antennae picking up the whereabouts of mosqui­
toes. The gecko had a partiality for moths which made it indulge in
hour-long manceuvres. Although he must have caught them, I never
saw him pounce on any of the magnificent moths that masqueraded
around my room in coloured patterns worthy of the huge and gaudy
forest butterflies.
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I slept soundly and woke to a morning bright and calm with no

clouds or other signs of the previous day's rough weather. I soon
found that a lush, unkempt garden lay behind the house, and that it
tumbled steeply down to a private cove. Somebody had spread
washing to dry on the wildly proliferating marrow beds through
which I picked my way and then through pumpkins and pigeon-pea
bushes, palms and banana trees, down to a delightful and secluded
miniature bay barely a hundred yards across. Firm yellow sand
stretched between outcrops of rock which nature had disposed with
all the art of the Japanese landscape gardener. Sea-scoured tree
branches had been washed ashore and they also lay disposed about
the beach as if designed by a flower arranger. The sand shelved
gently and gradually under the transparent blue sea. I needed no
encouragement to swim, nor afterwards to let the sun, already strong
for that time of the morning, dry me more efficiently than any towel.
I lay on the sand watching the leaves of overhanging trees whose
fruit plopped into the hardly murmuring water as though this were
indeed a playboy's private swimming-beach.
The cove's enchantment was completed by the bird song. The
sounds were different from those of Trinidad and I did not know
why until I realized that there were no kiskadees. They were, indeed,
conspicuous by their absence. Equally conspicuous by its presence,
however, was the Tobago housewren-Troglodytes aedon tobagensis
to ornithologists. The housewren's loud and melodic song filled
gardens and plantations. Besides being so musical, this little bird
commended itself also by being tame enough to build its nests
around houses and even right inside them. Bare-eyed thrush and
mocking-bird began each day with memorable lauds. On Tobago the
mocking-bird is called day-clean or long-tail, and certainly justifies
its other title of Jamaican nightingale on that island of the northern
Caribbean.
As I walked into Scarborough the gardens resounded with restless
songsters. The road ran high above the sea, an immense expanse of
sea with a promontory in the distance, low, wooded and strangely
non-tropical. The enclosing arm of land could have been the banks of
a Danish fjord. Along the road no more than a scatter of houses had
been built, but there was nothing Scandinavian about these, for each
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was bowered in bougainvillea whose intense dyes vied with Mexican

creeper, giant deep-stained hibiscus, brilliant yellow allamanda and
cup-of-gold. The gardens displayed their fruit trees and seemed to
specialize in sapodillas bearing at this time their russet-brown fruit,
which was delicious raw, stewed, or made into a syrup served on
ice-cream. This handsome evergreen was also tapped in some places
for chicle, an ingredient of chewing gum. All along the Windward
Road gardens made a show of avocado pears, cashew trees, various
types of passion fruit, the pleasant-smelling golden apple (Spondias
cytherea), Spanish limes and Barbados cherries, and here and there a
hedge of governor plums.
On the cliff side of the road coarse grasses covered the ground
around banana trees and custard apples and various members of the
Anona family. And there was the papaw, undoubtedly the most
elegant of all tropical fruit trees, small and dignified with its tiers of
umbrella-like leaves arranged in a precise geometry, its tight cluster
of round, green fruits tucked up close to the central stem, the leaves
themselves deeply cut and folded. The papaw alone has all the motifs
a stone- or wood-carver could desire.
Even the wayside weeds and herbs had an intensity of colour and
intricacy of shape that bewildered by their unsparing luxuriance. In
many areas along the Windward Road I passed Clitoria ternatea,
locally called blue vine or blue and white pea. It had a scallop-shell
petal with a yellow-white centre and gradated from a pale blue to a
saturated cobalt at the edge. Crabs' eyes made a trellis out of every
wire stay of the telegraph poles. The pods of this slender vine, Abrus
precatorius, split open to expose small, brilliant pillar-box red seeds
each tipped by a tiny, black eye like a crab's or a piece of Byzantine
enamelled jewellery.
Beyond a row of candle trees, fencing a new but unobtrusive
cemetery, I came to the Nuns' House. This was perched by the
roadside on a green sloping cliff, a wooden house neatly painted
light grey and white with cool, delicate fretwork brackets on the
veranda posts whose lattice screened the Sisters from the road but
allowed them to see out. There were only three nuns in the diminu­
tive convent and only two priests on the island. From the number of
Gospel tracts and wayside pulpits around Scarborough I had already
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gathered that, unlike Trinidad, Tobago was predominantly Protes­

tant. As early as 1637 the Reverend Nicholas Leverton had settled on
the island with his flock of Puritans.
The Reverend Mother Vincent, who hailed from Westmeath, had
spent over thirty years in Trinidad and Tobago without losing the
slightest intonation of her Irish voice. She was bright, and combined
a sense of energy with composure. In the sitting-room she pulled up
a chair for me. Her round face was built for smiles and her eyes
twinkled as if there was a joke that must come out. Another of the
Sisters was also from Ireland; her features were less rounded but
handsomely formed. The face of the third Sister was the most striking
of the three; she was a Trinidadian Creole quite unmysteriously
radiant with happiness. The immaculate white habits of the Order of
St. Joseph Cluny rustled as they moved, to fetch books connected
with our talk or to replenish the glass of Coca-Cola and ice and the
plate of dainty sweet biscuits.
Theirs was a teaching Order and their schoolhouse just across the
road on a green knoll had the Anglican Girls' School as its neighbour.
On the slope in front of the school lay an old anchor.
'It can't be Columbus's,' said the West Indian Sister mischiev­
ously; 'he has too many in Trinidad already.'
I asked what they thought about the Vatican Council Two. What
difference would the new ecumenical spirit make in their lives? Not
much, it appeared, because they had been practising for years in
Tobago what was now being preached in Rome. They had to, for
that was the way of things in Tobago, where there had always been a
spirit of help and friendliness among denominations.
The nuns had many stories to tell of the sugar bird, Coereba
flaveola luteola, which is one of the most widely distributed and
familiar species to be seen in both Trinidad and Tobago. Like the
housewren, the sugar bird is unafraid of human habitations and
builds its domed, grassy nest around the house. Its rapid song has a
natural sugary quality, no doubt because of all the honey and nectar
it eats. Mother Vincent said that when she turned the electric fan off
the sugar birds would be in the house, and in a single morning might
have stuffed the fan with new nests. The birds also did this to the
lamps in the church. And as though the miles of hibiscus hedges and
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gardens overflowing with sweet nectar, especially the Antigua heath,

were not enough, the sugar birds impudently raided the altar flowers
and took their baths in the holy water stoups. At breakfast-time the
birds thought it their right to dash in and sample the honey or syrup
on the table.
Religious houses in the West Indies have been oases ofcomfort as
well as oflearning throughout the long troubled history. The monks
were outspoken in their criticism of Spain's extermination of the
Amerindian natives and the destruction of fertile valleys by the
desperate gold-diggers. 'Thousands of square leagues have been
rendered desolate,' complained the Dominican Don Ortuno de
Ibarra to Philip II and to the Pope. But it was an earlier priest who
had long been dubbed the 'Apostle of the Indies'. This was the
Spanish theologian Bartolome de las Casas, born in Seville in 1474.
He was the son of one of those who accompanied Columbus on his
second voyage of discovery. At the age of twenty-four he joined his
father on his estate in Hispaniola, and then studied for Holy Orders.
Las Casas was already ordained by the time Cuba was conquered.
The young priest joined the Conquistadors and was duly rewarded
for his efforts by a tract ofland with sufficient slaves to run it.
Las Casas quickly became disillusioned. The pious and righteous
terms of the royal decrees, especially those of the religious Queen
Isabella, which concerned the taking of Christianity to the Indies,
were totally ignored by those Spaniards actually operating in the
Caribbean possessions. Las Casas wrote in his Historia de las Indias,
'Thus, the Queen's first and most important wish .•. was that the
Indians should be taught the doctrines ofthe Church and converted.
As I said before and now reaffirm, during the time Ovando governed
this Island, which was about nine years, no more interest was taken
in the instruction and conversion of the Indians, and no more action
was taken, and no further mention ofit made than ifthe Indians were
sticks or stones, cats or dogs.'
Father de las Casas not only preached against the abuses, but put
his sermons into action by making free men of his own Indian slaves
and travelling back and forth to Spain pleading with the King to pro­
hibit the enslavement of the West Indian Amerindians. He wrote
books and mounted pulpits, he interviewed slaves and forced slavers
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to free their Indians. For sixty years he never tired of using his
sermons to preach against the cruelty of slavery and for decades he
refused absolution to slave-owners; he never tired of writing treatises
and letters to planters or kings, with never a thought for his own
safety as he openly and roundly condemned the policies of both.
In 1519 Las Casas wrote to the Emperor Charles V, 'Most power­
ful and most high lord and king, I am one of the oldest immigrants to
the Indies, where I have spent many years and where, I have not
read in histories, that sometimes lie, but saw with my own eyes, and,
so to speak, came in contact with the cruelties, which have been
inflicted on these peaceful and gentle people, cruelties more atrocious
and unnatural than any recorded of untutored and savage barbarians.
No other reason can be assigned for them than the greed and thirst
for gold of our countrymen.'
The slave trade had become so vicious by this time that the priest
could also write that so many Indians being shipped to the gold­
mines had died on the way and had been thrown overboard that it
was possible to steer a boat from the Bahamas all the way to Hispani­
ola simply by following the trail of floating corpses. He wrote about
atrocities in Trinidad, about Spaniards setting fire to hundreds of
Indians trapped in a large wooden hut and how the poor wretches
who escaped were taken off for sale in the slave market of Puerto
Rico. The results of Las Casas's faithful labours soon brought a
long-lasting restraint between the Spanish plantation-owners and
the Catholic Church.
Father de las Casas's letters and pleadings eventually bore some
fruit, for Charles V's son issued an edict that only the more war-like
tribes, such as the Caribs, should be made slaves. Peaceful people
like the Arawaks were to be left alone. But once again, what was said
in Spain and what was done in the West Indies were two different
things. The cunning planters introduced agents provocateurs to
incite the peace-loving tribes to rebellion so that the white settlers
could justify their capture and evade the law by calling them Caribs.
The demand for Amerindian slave labour in the gold- and silver­
mines was insatiable. The unscrupulous planters and miners cared
not at all for edicts from Spain or papal bulls from Rome. As a result
of their deception the gentle Arawaks of Trinidad have been errone-
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ously referred to as Caribs through the centuries, so that even today

Mistress Martinez was known as the Carib Queen. The patience and
learning of people like Dr. Bullbrook eventually established the real
facts of the matter from the evidence of tribal habits and customs.
It was obvious that if Las Casas's plans had completely succeeded
the Spaniards would have been ruined-that is, unless substitutes
for the Amerindian slave labourers were found. The plain fact was
that without slaves Spain would simply have had to abandon its great
New World empire and its dreams of reaching El Dorado. African
captives had been used as slaves in both Spain and Portugal for
many years. Even Las Casas, for all his enlightened views on many
things, was forced into giving consent for Africans to be shipped out
to replace the Indians for whose freedom and betterment he had
worked so long. But even so, the Spanish priest's mission came too
late for the survival of many Amerindian tribes. In a hundred years
of conquest two million Indians died from overwork or by the sword
of Imperial Spain. It was not surprising that they were reluctant to
receive baptism, because they feared that if they died and went to the
Christian heaven-a city at last whose streets were paved with gold­
they would have to spend eternity with their cruel Spanish masters
and the agents provocateurs.
Unlike most people, Father de las Casas bitterly repented the
necessity for enslavement of the Africans and the scheme for sub­
mission. In the Historia de las lndias it states, 'The advice that a
licence should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands was first
given by Las Casas, ignorant of the injustice with which the Portu­
guese capture and enslave them: when he realized it, he would not
have recommended it for anything in the world, because he con­
sidered them to be unjustly and tyrannically enslaved, and the
reasons valid for the Indians were also valid for the Negroes.'
Bartolome de las Casas died in Madrid aged ninety-two, a man
unhappy at the fate of the Negro which was now the cost of his own
life's work to save the Amerindians. But his books lived long after
him. They were the works of a rare humanitarian, a lone voice among
the gold-mad butchers who ravaged the Caribbean in the sixteenth
century.
It was time for me to leave the Sisters of St. Joseph Cluny and con-
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tinue my walk, stopping next to inspect St. Andrew's Anglican church,

consecrated in 1819 and knocked flat by Hurricane Flora on 30th
September 1963, a day well remembered by all the people of Tobago.
The new building had been placed on the foundation of the old, and
was in a plain, modern and inoffensive style. Some of the former
buttresses had survived, and these, painted now with bitumen, were
cleverly incorporated in the new structure. Crosses of coloured glass
in open grille windows illuminated the interior, revealing a T-shaped
church whose virtue was simplicity.
Four large wall tablets from the former church had been rescued
after the hurricane and now, built into the walls of the new church,
added a touch of romantic Englishness. Two were for the Apostles'
Creed and Lord's Prayer and the remaining two for the Ten Com­
mandments. They were beautiful objects of white marble incised
with black and red lettering done with the peculiar gracefulness that
letter-carvers possessed in the early nineteenth century when Gothic
was Gothick. Some changes had occurred, I felt sure, in the level of
churchmanship since the original church's first days when evangeli­
calism was in its heyday and Low Church was the thing. Now, in the
modern post-Flora church, the splendid tablets of marble kept
company with Italianate Stations of the Cross, a sure sign that the
Low had been exalted. There was, besides, a six-foot-high slab of
wood fixed to the wall, carved by a modern sculptor into a bas-relief
depicting the patron saint St. Andrew drawing his net of fish in red
and green and gold. I thought this a good work of religious art,
making its symbolic point without concession to sentimental realism.
Memorial tablets had also survived the hurricane and, salvaged
from the wreckage, were reinstated on the new church's walls. They
told a silent tale about an extraordinary number of young deaths
which, in their turn, were eloquent of the toll Tobago took of
nineteenth-century empire-builders. Protected by no inoculations or
vaccinations or drugs, and living in times when tropical medicine
was the prerogative only of witch doctors, they succumbed to the
rigours of an alien climate. James Gunn, merchant, died 1843 aged
32. Captain John Uniacke Jeffery of the 81st Reg. of Foot died 1841
aged 34. Otto Mackie, Fort Adjutant, died 1846 aged 27. William
Engledow died 1878 aged 24 years.
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In the churchyard outside I found a similar record of untimely

deaths. Was it the fevers that carried them off? Behind solid iron
rails lay the tomb of Anne Wilhelmina 'Daughter-in-law of Major
General Henry Charles Darling, the Lieutenant Governor of this
island. Born 13th July 1813 and died 16th October 1837.' Poor Anne
Wilhelmina was only twenty-four, too. And Major-General Darling
himself was killed when he fell out of his state carriage into the ravine
at Rockly Vale on his way home from a ball.
With birds singing in the trees around, St. Andrew's seemed for a
moment like an English country churchyard. But what a picture it
conjured up of the English in Tobago, the formidable formality, of
rank and precedence jealously guarded, of English snobbery and
class distinction amongst themselves and of this little patch of Eng­
land existing side by side with the degradation of the slaves. Had
any sermons, I wondered, ever been preached against slavery in St.
Andrew's pulpit like those Bartolome de las Casas had preached three
centuries earlier?
Yet the Church of England did not lack notable abolitionists and
emancipationists. There was John Newton, who once sailed the
Caribbean as the captain of a slaver until he became converted and
eventually ordained. It was only when William Wilberforce came
under Newton's influence that he, too, decided to strike out against
the evils of slavery. But the chief enemies of the planters were the
Methodist and Baptist missionaries. Their evangelical teaching of
liberty and equality, based on the premise that all men were the sons
of God, soon made the estate owners declare that 'chapels and meet­
ing houses were centres of subversive activity and that religious
instruction was a pretence for stirring up the slaves to rebellion'. Sir
Ralph Woodford in Trinidad was particularly against the Methodists
or 'Methodizzies' as he called them, because they taught the slaves
and allowed them the freedom of the pulpit to preach. In conse­
quence, Methodist and Baptist missionaries were often sent to prison,
and their chapels burnt, for as it was nicely put at the time, 'to get rid
of the rooks you must destroy their nests'. I hoped that those Low
Church tablets in St. Andrew's parish church had been as eloquent
of evangelical principles in their day as now they were of the era's art.
Opposite the church was Scarborough's new fire station. A young
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fireman off duty, who might have been a boxer with well-developed
muscles that gleamed like old, much-polished brown leather boots
against the dazzling white singlet, turned off his transistor radio to
talk to me. Thirty men worked at the fire station, which served the
whole of Tobago. During the previous year they had been called out
on an average of once or twice a week. Bush fires caused the majority
of these calls. When country people clear land they begin by burning
the thick undergrowth. Such fires spread quickly and often get
beyond control. In the whole year only eight of the calls had involved
houses. The fire station was spick and span, the fire engines bright
red and shining, the fireman cheerful and a little bashful. I would
have understood any young Scarborough boy who caught the glam­
our and wanted to be a fireman when he grew up.
The fire station stood near Gun Bridge, a step farther into the
town. Cannons at each end of the short bridge guarded the road over
the ravine. And as if this military equipment were not enough, the
bridge's balustrades were topped with rifle barrels embedded in the
concrete. Though not vastly deep, the ravine below was steep and
choked with wild vines and banana trees. On the telegraph wires
above sat a flock of six ani birds, their black wings partly open like
witches in shawls. But it was the little sugar birds and housewrens
that provided music from sumptuous hibiscus hedges between the
Anglican Girls' School and Hilton Clarke House, one of the 'Chil­
dren's Breakfast Sheds run by Coterie of Social Workers'. Breakfast
sheds, run by similar ladies, were a familiar feature in Port-of-Spain
also. Breakfast in the sheds, however, was not breakfast, but the
midday meal, for in Trinidad and Tobago breakfast was luncheon.
Before exploring Scarborough's environs any further I retraced
my steps to the Edendale Beach Guest House for my own 'breakfast'.
It consisted of a succulent casserole made from small pieces of pork,
beef and chicken, served with an immense dish of rice, yams, sweet
potatoes, plantains, macaroni cheese and a separate dish of pigeon­
peas, and a side-plate of lettuce, tomatoes, beetroot and cucumber,
all to be washed down with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice mixed
with a scented herb I could not identify.
The only other lodger home for the midday meal on that occasion
was a man of East Indian stock from Trinidad, now come to Tobago
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in connection with his work as an insurance agent. Seeing me going

off to town immediately after the meal, he said, 'Sorry I can't give
you a ride, but my car's on the bomb', an expression I had not heard
before for'out of order'.
Scarborough town proper has the haphazard untidiness charac­
teristic of English villages, though the town is small enough to be
picturesque rather than chaotic. There lies the waterfront and there,
up the hill, the market square. Here at least some semblance of order
obtains, for the market square is bounded by short, straight, narrow
and intriguing little streets. These two, quayside and market, are the
two poles of Scarborough to which all navigation through the town
is related. Although every inch a port around the waterside area, up
on the hill Scarborough is very much a country town. The people's
speech is rich and slow, their errands and their business without
urgency. Its tempo, the visitor might think, is the tempo that life was
intended to have. And indeed, many might think that the houses and
open-fronted shops around the market and the charming streets
near by are of the size and scale that shops and houses ought to be.
Although I should not have thought it possible, Scarborough's
vernacular architecture is even more petite than Port-of-Spain's. The
corrugated-iron roof is ubiquitous here. And here, too, there are
louvred windows and doors, and lacy fretwork, and affixed to this
wooden architecture a permanent exhibition of works by local sign­
writers, nameboard-makers and notice-fixers whose announcements
range between such subjects as lotteries and the saving of souls, with
sidelong thrusts and parries at customers in notices like Mr. Trust is
dead. Killed by Bad Pay, and direct appeals made to the sense of the
dramatic by the posters for the island's one cinema. Right there, in
the town centre, hens peck among the oil stoves and wooden chairs,
the suitcases and lawn-mowers displayed on the narrow strips of
pavement outside the hardware stores.
The market itself is an island in the main square, a matriarchy
ruled by expansive Negresses whose stalls are their seats of govern­
ment. A tin roof covers the entire market except in corners where
trees grow dark green against the red roof. Around the square is a
medley of shops, each more grand than any stall in the market. I saw
Joseph Abraham's 'The Working Man's Store', and Abdullah
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Raphael 'Dealer in Ladies and Gents Goods, Haberdashery, Cut

Glass for Doors, Windows and Picture Frames and Mirrors of All
Sizes'. The shopper went to Aziz Esher Joseph for 'Beds, springs and
matresses' and to Young Kow the 'Licensed Spirit Grocer'.
But almost as if it were a reminder that treasure laid up on earth is
treasure laid where moths corrupt and thieves break through and
steal, in the midst of these prosperous Scarborough businesses was a
black ruin where only recently Wilson's Bargain Stores had stood.
Neither moths nor thieves had been corrupting or stealing, but fire
had been destroying, leaving nothing of the stores' former stock. The
wooden building was now a brittle half-fallen structure of charred
beams with the gallows outline of charred upper windows stark
against the sky. Here and there, forgotten by the mindless vagary of
fire, odd articles had escaped total destruction. A ledger had its
edges singed. Pages of it had come loose and strayed on to the pave­
ment. I picked up one dated 1939. It recorded the account of Mrs. C.
Peters of The Whim and showed that on 21st May of that year she
had purchased '1 shirt, 1 pr drawers, 1 pant, 1 cap for $1.74', and
again on 31st July, '3 yds satin, 1 yd cotton for $1.37'.
The solid Georgian walls of the Courthouse were not so prone to
conflagration, though destruction by other vandals occurred when
the pillars of its portico were removed. The market square seemed
indeed to have more Government departments than commercial
establishments. Here the Ministry for Tobago Affairs has its being,
and the Telegraph Office, the Inland Revenue Department, the
Government Electrical Inspectorate, the Public Library and the
Tourist Bureau. Most of these are situated at the top of the steeply
sloping market square, where, with the Georgian builders' infallible
eye for siting, stands the Courthouse, occupying the whole width of
the square. By reputation this was once the finest Georgian building
in the whole of the West Indies. But without its portico columns,
grand though its double staircase is, noble its proportions, cool its
open porch on the piano nobile, the building lacks the centrepiece
essential to architectural compositions of this kind. The Courthouse's
central clock turret has not been removed, and contains a clock that
is a going concern and tells the time to those that can tell it, marking
the easy hours of Scarborough's day and the stillness of its night.
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Down at the waterfront it is not time but tide that regulates life.
The quays stretch along the bay rather than crouch in a harbour.
Immediately the shipping and the small quays stop, the coconut
palms begin, bending over the chain of sandy bays and coves. Along
this part of the coast the hills rising behind the bays are low, giving
no hint of the dramatic coastlines that lie to the north. White-painted
piers project into the water. At one pier the sailing-boats and
schooners tie up, flying signals of domestic order where strings of
washing hang from the rigging above crosslegged old sailors mending
sheets of sail. There was a boat-building shed of endless fascination.
The green water teemed with thousands upon thousands of tiny fish.
I put my hand in, thinking to scoop up a fistful. But they parted art­
fully, leaving a curious, empty space in the warm, motionless water.
The Scarlet Ibis and the Bird of Paradise were berthed near by,
the two small vessels that shuttled to and fro across the channel and
through the Dragon's Mouths to Port-of-Spain. I was not long in dis­
covering my favourite part of Scarborough: Fort King George. When
I went out of Scarborough to other parts of the island I always tried
to return to the town in time to climb up the steep Fort Street before
sundown. So many old colonial houses of undeniable charm were
scattered across the island that if one had been offered me I would
not have known which to choose. Many of those I admired could not
have been described as small; they were diminutive. The difficulty of
my imaginary choice lay in the houses' individuality.
One that became a favourite stood just off the road going up to the
Fort, on the right-hand side of the Methodist church. Brick red,
white and pale mauve bougainvillaea smothered its tiny doll's-house
veranda. Its door was permanently propped open by a pink conch
shell. The garden's steep contours followed those of the road, but the
little slopes and little lawns were well grassed and closely mown and
this trim green carpet was fitted right to the walls and the door. Of
course, the garden was shady with flowering trees and shrubs, and
because the whole hillside had similar trees and planting it was quite
impossible to tell where the garden of this most perfect among the
two islands' dolls' houses began or ended. The international disease
of pretentious villa-building has infected certain parts of Scarbo­
rough, but my little house (in imagination it was already mine) could
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only have been just where it was, almost lost among the bougain­
villaea.
Walking up Fort Street in the cool of late afternoon I used to see
a pair of blue tanagers. These were a Tobago variety, differing from
their Trinidadian brethren in being a bolder blue, a colour which no
doubt led to their local name of blue jean. Farther up the hill I passed
a large wall topped with broken glass that had once helped to confine
prisoners within the old jail. Now the cells were occupied by those
whom poverty and old age had sent to seek shelter in the House of
Refuge which the former prison had been converted into. From that
dark house of dark memories came the story of a slave revolt in 1801.
The leader and his thirty-eight companions who dared to raise the
voice of freedom were caught and sentenced to death by the British
authorities, as a warning to other slaves that proper respect had to be
shown to their masters and betters and their property. The prison
governor had the slaves' leader hung from a gibbet on the wall for
the whole town to see. Thirty-nine times the pound-of-flesh-de­
manding planters-or rather their estate agents and overseers,
because most British landlords were absentee as they often were in
Ireland also-saw a body rise and fall, while each time fresh grief
and tears and cries came from the watching Negro families. In fact,
only the leader was hung, and it was his body which was hoisted
again and again on the gallows in a deceit to strike terror into the
watching slaves outside.
Quite another thing, in its brightness, airiness and cheerfulness,
is the next building higher up the road, the two-storey Tobago
General Hospital, whose windows overlook one of the best views on
the island and catch every breeze from the sea and the mountains.
The yelling of new-born babies from the maternity wing mingles with
the baaing of lambs in the fields across the road.
And immediately bordering the hospital are the grassy slopes and
lawns of Fort King George, the splendid climax of the steep hill, a
climax worth every step of the way. By six o'clock in the evening the
Fort is a ghostly place cooled by zephyrs that come out of nowhere,
a high place commanding vast expanses of the Caribbean. Masses
of cloud sail by majestically, casting shadows which move slowly
across the limitless sea. On different knolls and terraces, with dif-
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ferent walls and embankments, the remains of the old Fort release
ghosts that have lingered there since the days when each successive
conqueror of the island thought himself, ensconced behind its bat­
teries, apparently impregnable, immune from either land or sea
attack.
The pirates' charter which resulted from the Treaty of Aix-la­
Chapelle in 1749 allowed every cut-throat seadog who scoured the
Caribbean to shelter safely in the perfect, natural harbours of Toba­
go, for by the terms of the treaty the island had no military defences
at all. Pirates and privateers and naval officers and buccaneers in the
West Indies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all behaved
in an identical fashion whether acting on behalf of a king's greed or
merely their own.
All the King of Spain's efforts to try to obey the Pope's commands
to keep slaves out of his colonies were pointless when English
gentlemen like Hawkins transported slaves from Guinea and sold
them openly in the markets of the Spanish Caribbean islands. Queen
Elizabeth I once wore a glittering tiara of Muzo emeralds in her red
hair to a New Year ball on the same day Drake headed the New Year
Honours List, although he had waited anxiously for months not
knowing whether he was to be hailed as a hero or to lose his head for
piracy. The Queen's Muzo emeralds were part of the booty taken in a
raid on a Spanish caravan crossing the Camino Real of Panama,
where two hundred mules were loaded with gold nuggets and pearls
on their way for shipment to Spain. Not for nothing did the Catholic
planters on the islands think Drake the Devil incarnate, especially
when this bold pirate made his night raids on the islands on holy
days of obligation.
Drake is honoured as the clever and courageous leader against the
Spanish Armada which sailed to conquer England in 1588, but he
was a pirate none the less, and little different from the knight of later
times, Henry Morgan, whose method of capturing cities of colonial
Spain was to force prisoner nuns and priests up the scaling ladder as
protective fronts for his own bloodthirsty crew who scrambled to the
attack behind them. Henry Morgan, a first-class rogue, was thought
suitable to be promoted as His Majesty's Lieutenant-Governor of
Jamaica. He spent his Spanish loot on riotous living and on building
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Protestant churches. Little wonder Jamaica was known as the

'Babylon of the West'.
These notable men, and scores of lesser-known figures like them,
were the great British heroes of the Caribbean, reaping honours and
titles simply because their lootings, shootings, burnings and plunder
were done while on business for their sovereign. Those men who did
such business strictly on their own account and preferred to fly the
black flag rather than a royal ensign were simply not gentlemen and
were therefore pirates. Not, indeed, that Britain ruled the waves
without competition with other marauders. There were French
noblemen like the Marquis de Maintenon, who took to piracy and
ravished Trinidad in 1677. There was the Irish-born Anne Bonney,
one of the famous women pirates whose daring and exploits have
been the subject of films and novels.
The ranks of piracy included many Dutchmen and as many North
Americans and Newfoundlanders, such as Henry Mainwaring and
William White, the fish splitter. There were Francis Spriggs, who had
his own flag of a skeleton and a bleeding heart, and William May,
who was acknowledged as 'the true cock of the Game'. And from
Tobago itself Captain Redlegs Greaves planned many of his attacks.
He was the son of English prisoners shipped out as slaves by Crom­
well. Redlegs fled as a youth from his master and got on board a
pirate vessel sailing for Tobago. Later in life he was reformed, but
not before capturing Margarita Island and its sea harvest of pearls
besides much Spanish gold and silver.
All these men were brutal, and some more than others, but none
so brutal as Blackbeard, Edward Teach, or the Boston pirate
Edward Low. Few excelled Captain Low in his energies, especially
where the hacking to pieces of Spaniards by poleaxe and cutlass was
concerned, or the hanging of friars from the rigging. Low liked to cut
out captains' hearts, roast them and force the prisoner crews to turn
cannibal and eat their captains' hearts before having their own lips,
ears, hands and feet cut off before dying. Low's hunger for sadism
led him to murder some of his own crew, but this was too much, and
he was abandoned in an open boat by his fellow torturers. A French
ship picked him up and he was eventually hanged in Martinique.
The Caribbean sea rogues breakfasted on rum and dined off
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smoked pork-a la bucana, that lent itself to the term buccaneer.

This motley murderous, cruel company were those who swept the
Caribbean from end to end. When there were no Spanish galleons to
rob they set fire to towns and churches and plundered everything they
could lay their hands on, raping the inhabitants, not caring whether
they were old women or nuns. And it was this kind of merciless
adventurer who soon saw the advantage to be gained from Tobago's
unarmed neutrality as established by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
The sea rovers took it as their right to make of Tobago what they
would and turn it into a pirates' lair. The island became a sort of
pirates' republic, and the open protection they gained in the island's
harbours eventually got under the skins of the European signatories
of the Aix-la-Chapelle Treaty, for these powers were those which
reaped such riches from the Caribbean sugar islands. It became
intolerable to have their valuable trade routes constantly at the mercy
of pirates who lay up in Tobago between raids, careening, caulking,
taking on fresh water and supplies, so that their enterprises were
always undertaken from a position of strength, the crews sailing
under articles of agreement that were on the basis of 'no prey, no
pay'.
The situation was not to be borne, and in 1762 Britain again took
Tobago. Nor was this the first time the British men-o'-war entered
Tobago's harbours after pirates rather than European rivals. In 1723
H.M.S. Winchelsea came to end the reign of Captain Finn and his
ruthless crew. Until the end of the century Tobago passed many
times between England and France. But the plantation of the island
had taken place and by 1770 the first shipment of sugar had left for
England. The production of coffee and cocoa, indigo and ginger,
cotton and rum was also established. And to safeguard their interests
the British started to build Fort King George in 1777. Four years
later the French had captured it and renamed it Fort Castries. But
the French soldiers could not tolerate the arrogance and abuses of
their superiors and the planters. They rebelled by setting Scarbo­
rough on fire and shutting their officers in the Fort's prison. Three
years passed and the island was British again, and French the year
after that.
The discontent with colonial rule had not only led small slave
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communities to abortive rebellion. The brightest gem in the British

Empire had also become tarnished with the notion of freedom and
the determination to have it, for the Americans were now preparing
to fight their War of lndependence. When the war and their freedom
were won, the Americans set their cap at little Tobago, but the
American invasion was stopped by the British Navy before Fort
King George could be attacked yet once more.
Though they had blown up the American ship Randolph in this
battle for Tobago, the sailors in the British Navy were filled with the
discontent which marked the reign of George III. Their sufferings
were terrible, their position and treatment hardly different from that
of the slaves. But the Negro slave on Tobago with a Government
recommendation for a weekly ration of 's lbs of salted pork or 4 lbs
of salted beef or 14 good herrings' and seven quarts of wheat fl.our,
fared better than Jack Tar, who by tradition, as noted by Samuel
Pepys, a former Secretary to the Admiralty, 'Seamen love their
bellies above anything else.' The plantation owners were not philan­
thropists, but they were often intelligent enough to realize that a
badly fed slave was a bad investment. The officers of His Majesty's
ships, who bought their commissions as a financial proposition, saw
to it that their capital gains were made by giving the ordinary seaman
short rations of rancid salt pork and blue-mouldy biscuits and there
was always the cat-o'-nine-tails for those sailors who disliked rancid
pork and mouldy biscuit.
The slaves on Tobago were probably more able-bodied than the
so-called A.B.s on the men-o'-war who, like the slaves, were sub­
ject to prolonged floggings if they so much as struck an officer. It
is not to be wondered at that British sailors were old at forty-if they
survived that long-and that even after ten years in the ships they
could not stand up properly to attention because of permanently
rounded backs caused by crouching under low bulkheads in the
crowded lower decks. Under the circumstances there was little the
sailors could be except 'loyal', but even so this loyalty was taken for
granted. George Ill's intolerant stupidity and the corruption of his
ministers and officials led to conditions which became impossible
even for his navy and resulted in the biggest mutiny ever in all the
world's navies. E. C. Bentley wrote,
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 BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTHS

George the Third

Ought never to have occurred
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

But George III did occur, sane or insane, at Windsor, and Fort
King George occurred in Tobago. Britain was at war with France,
and if the latest outbreak of rioting of the Navy at the Nore had
lasted another month Whitehall would have had to worry, not only
about keeping the flag flying over far-away Tobago, but also about the
real possibility of a French invasion of England with no fleet to
prevent it. But if the 1797 naval mutinies at Portsmouth, Plymouth
and the Nore had been put down in time to stop the French fleet
from invading England, nothing, it seemed, could put an end to the
continual flag-changing in Tobago. During one period of French
occupation of the island a nobleman of Irish stock, Count Arthur
Dillon, was appointed Governor and Scarborough's name changed
to Port Louis. When the French Revolution broke out little respect
was shown for King Louis by the French garrison on Tobago. They
burnt Port Louis and killed their officers. They also ruined their own
defences, so that the British were able to take the island easily in
1793.
By the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 Tobago became French again.
On the 25th November of that year the Legislative Council of Tobago
wrote an extraordinary address to Napoleon Bonaparte which began,
'First Consul, The members of the Council and Assembly of the
island of Tobago beg leave to express these sentiments of loyalty and
fidelity to the French Republic and of gratitude to you for the many
marks of paternal solicitude you have condescended to show for the
welfare of this Colony, and that at a time when your thoughts must
have been employed in deciding the fate of Europe and arranging
the weighty concerns of nations.'
In the year that followed the British made a landing on the far
side of the island and were guided through the hills to Scarborough
by a slave who, after the British victory, was granted his freedom and
given a reward which enabled him to set up a business under the
auspicious English name of George Winchester. And so ended two
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 BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTHS

hundred years of non-stop plunder and burning, attack and counter­

attack for supremacy over Tobago's 114 square miles.
Fort King George did not fall to cannons of the French fleet or
Spanish guns. But in the end fall it did, for on the night of 11th
October 1847 a hurricane crossed the island, destroying sugar
factories, the cane-cutters' fragile wooden houses, uprooting trees
and laying waste the plantations. It also tore off the roofs and
demolished part of the walls of the sturdy stone barracks on Fort
King George. But the ruins and the grassy slopes I saw up there had
recently been given a wash and brush-up for George Ill's great­
great-great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II.
On my first stroll up to the Fort there were only two great-great­
great-great-grandsons of slaves to be seen. They were a pair of young
boys dressed only in ragged shorts. They had been cutting grass for
indoor animals from the lower slopes and now climbed up into the
Fort with bundles of fodder, and chasing and catching each other
around the lighthouse, rolled over laughing on the newly trimmed
lawns. The lighthouse whose beams I had seen from the Bird of
Paradise's heaving deck was an essential part of the Fort scene. I
could not imagine this half-hill, half-headland without the squat,
sturdy white tower and its beautiful large lenses revolving slowly,
flashing with prismatic colours. Scattered palms and houses by the
sea spread below the slopes, a scene probably little changed since the
days when Tobago was a much-besieged island, days when sailing­
ships crowded Scarborough harbour, which was often used by
menacing marauders and pirates and men-o'-war from the fleets of
the European powers.
The Fort itself has changed more than the magnificent scene from
its ramparts. The white modern lighthouse contrasts sharply with the
dark brick and arched buildings of the old garrison. But the Fort has
two other intriguing buildings, also mementoes of some of the gory
battles, which now only dream of cannon smoke and flame. Built
purely for prosaic purposes, the powder magazine has acquired an
architectural character in its quiet retirement. It was built on one of
the Fort's lower terraces, a small stone building like a medieval Irish
chapel. And there is also the Bell Tank, a domed structure of stone
with double doors going into an enormous well that served the Fort
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and that still contains fresh water. All the Fort's buildings are on
different levels, which makes it a fascinating place to climb and
wander over, or to sit on and survey the world below and the sky
above.
The Fort provides a fine vantage-point for looking across the sea
to Trinidad, although at evening the light has faded too much to see
anything of the Trinidadian coast except the distant pin-point
signals from a lighthouse. Yet the evening light lingers long enough
for the harbour and Scarborough to be seen, illuminated now by its
strings of navigation lights. Fort King George's fascination for me at
this haunted hour between the tropical day and the tropical night
was not spoilt by the powerful, fl.ashing lamp and lenses of the light­
house, but rather increased by them. The lighthouse restored the
Fort to something of its original significance.
But the lighthouse, too, gains an element of romance from its
setting among the terraces and earthworks and walls of the old Fort.
Enough remains of thick quoined and embrasured stone defence
structures for artillery pieces to be placed there, bristling through
the wall openings. It was not difficult in imagination to fill the stone
platforms with wide-screen smoke and stereophonic thunder and
cries and cursing now in English, now in French, as garrison suc­
ceeded garrison. The soldiers no doubt had little cause to observe,
as I did, how in the evening's half-darkness two of the cannons looked
remarkably like the lions of Delos.
Apollo was born on Delos, but the Greek gods presumably never
wandered far from the Aegean islands, or else they might have
chosen hill-tops like those of Tobago for their abode. On Fort King
George thoughts of pantheism came easily: a god each for the earth,
the sea, the air and the revolving sun. Gods for the rocks and gods for
the trees, and gods for the first appearing stars. With the wind whist­
ling in the Fort's wireless aerial mast I even had an Aeolian harp. But
Tobago was not the Classical world of stark, shining stone, and silver
groves of olives, a world of wine and honey. Tobago was too lush,
too green, too violent in its foliage and colours. No Greek skies ever
contained clouds like those I watched going heavily across the Carib­
bean offshore from Tobago. Dove-grey cumulus would suddenly
become flamingo plumage when the sun flared out from the westerly
�45
 BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTHS

horizons. And the sea picked up this red glow under the clouds as
though fires burnt infernally below its glistening surface.
The sun's precise moment of sinking out of sight might or might
not be visible from my eyrie on Fort King George. But the lighthouse
never failed and as though by prior arrangement with the sun its great
lamp came on as the sun went, its lenses turning, glittering like an
elaborate chandelier, its brightness absurdly out of context with the
Fort's darkness where, earlier, candles and flambeaux and lanterns
and perhaps at most a beacon had been its only lights. But even when
the sun had gone the sky was a different miracle every evening. It
might consist of small clouds coloured like immortelles, laid like
blossoms on layers of higher clouds which were pale blue and dark
blue like the hues of the slender pea-vines along the hedges of the
Windward Road beneath.
Fort King George's ghostliness was not entirely imaginary. Be­
cause of the different buildings and walls on different levels and
terraces and slopes and the inability to see all of the Fort at once, it
was impossible to tell whether one was alone or not. The wind in the
aerial mast or the rustle of air through grass or among the leaves of
the dark trees hanging over the mysterious armoury could be mis­
taken for human footsteps or human voices. One day two ghosts
actually appeared, Canadian sailors in white tropical uniforms. Their
mission, however, was not to see the Fort or photograph the sunset,
for they were not alone. Each had an arm around the waist of a dusky
girl, for though ships have changed sailors have not. They had the
same eye for dark beauty as one-eyed Tee Wetherley or John Martin
ofBlackbeard's crew.
Later the two sailors came behind me down Fort Street and made
eyes at any woman on the younger side of forty. The young ladies of
Scarborough, however, although undoubtedly interested, were as in­
dependent as their island home now is from the attentions of Spanish
caravels, French men-o'-war, the galleons of James Duke of Cour­
land, pirate sloops with the black flag and the Queen's Royal Navy.
Shakespeare's The Tempest was not all spells. No doubt the Bard
heard sailors talking-perhaps even some from the fleet under Cap­
tain Keymis of the Darling, who landed in Tobago in 1596, fifteen
years before The Tempest was written.
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The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,

The gunner and his mate
Loved Mall, Meg and Marian and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate;
For she had a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a sailor, Go hang!

247
 ti 9 It
The Windward Road
Aner church on Sunday I felt like lazing around the guest house,
but the courtesy and friendliness of the Tobagans decided otherwise.
Taking my church-going tie off as I wandered back to Edendale, a
driver slowed down and offered me a lift. The man was Tobago's
Public Health Inspector, and he had so much to talk about that in­
stead of disembarking at the Edendale's garden I sat on, listening to
his interesting talk until we reached Mount St. George. Since he was
going inland my companion left me by the village post office high
above the sea. I reckoned on a leisurely stroll which would get me
back just in time for Mrs. Spencer's Sunday 'breakfast', and stood for
a moment looking down the steep hill planted with pigeon-pea
bushes under the palms. Here and there were little houses propped
on the sloping cliff.
Blobs of white hung on the rank green hedges. They were like
cotton-wool snow on Christmas trees. The bolls were, in fact, real
cotton, though in a wild state, the seed pods bursting under the
pressure of white beards. But cotton has gone from Tobago, and
gone are the cotton fields and the 114 cotton factories of 1727 which
provided the Government with the lion's share of the tax for that
year and still left the planters a comfortable profit on the exports.
Long before the dark, satanic mills of Lancashire began to turn and
French planters went down to Port Louis's slave market to choose
new pickers, cotton was cultivated and spun in Tobago as in Trini­
dad. Amongst the other intriguing finds Dr. Bullbrook gathered to­
gether at the National Museum in Port-of-Spain were buttons made
of shell and a needle made of bone. Historical evidence that the
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Amerindians grew a fibre, most probably cotton, supports the idea

that these shell buttons were sewn on to clothing.
The day was overcast, but looked as if the clouds would clear later.
I thought there would be time to walk on to the next headland to get
a closer view of Smith Island. But the hour went so quickly and the
scenes along this cliff road were so engaging that I telephoned the
guest house and cancelled my meal so that I could continue farther
along the coast. And as though I had just ordered a taxi and not just
cancelled a meal another car drew up. It was going all the way to
Roxborough. My host this time was Inspector Herman Gittens on his
way to a harvest festival celebration. Mr. Gittens was a large, jovial
yet thoughtful man of Negro blood with a habit of exactness of
expression which I imagined must have made him a cross-examiner
to be reckoned with in court, for he was the police officer responsible
for public prosecution. It greatly amused him that I knew about one
of his recent cases, though it had been much publicized in the news­
papers. Whenever I showed a special interest in anything we drove
by, Inspector Gittens slowed down and told me as much as he knew.
My first stop in this way was beside an immortelle tree made
conspicuous not only by its blossoms but by the stocking-like nests
of the large cornbirds. Though similar, their nests were considerably
longer than those of the yellow-backed cornbirds in their famous tree
outside Sangre Grande Police Station. Bird's-nest hats are all the
rage in Tobago and marvellous hats they make. The large cornbird's
nest hangs from a branch like a coconut in a stocking five feet long,
and the hen enters through a hole at the side to lay one or two blue­
pink eggs. The nests are extraordinary structures, cleverly and
closely woven by the large cornbirds of thousands of fibres carefully
stripped from parasite tree plants. So much do the young men of
Tobago admire this bird-made fabric that they cut the nests down
and convert them into hats.
The country lanes and forest tracks were not called 'traces' as in
Trinidad, but 'crown traces', as I saw when we passed such places as
Long Bed Crown Trace and Cambridge Crown Trace on the road to
Roxborough. Black pigs and goats were tethered by the road and
milk ewes also browsed along the grass verges. The sheep had lost all
vestige of their fleeces, because the heat gave them that natural rise
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 THE WINDWARD ROAD

which governs clipping-time in Europe, and it was often difficult to

distinguish sheep from goats.
Young men in crisp newly laundered Sunday pants and shirts and
their smart bird's-nest hats were out enjoying the landscape with
equally smartly turned-out girl-friends. On the following day, when
I made the same journey by bus, old Negroes were going back and
forth to their work in the plantations and maze fields. They wore
straw hats and patriarchal white beards and carried cutlasses like
swords and rode their donkeys along the roads as though generals in
some guerrilla army of old times.
At Pembroke the Post Office was comparatively grand and
occupied part of a two-storey house standing back from the road,
guarded by a large and fine mango tree. Children played outside the
wooden church with its tin roof and lantern turret painted grey and
red. The next village along the road was Belle Garden. I saw here a
brown squirrel looking out from its cage on the veranda of a little
wooden house. Women washed clothes in the stream and spread
them to dry over bushes so that the gaudy garments looked like
exotic blooms. Fishermen travel by this road besides coconut-planta­
tion workers and farmers. The waters around these coasts abound
with fish-bonito, yellowfin tuna, skipjack, king fish, mackerel,
cavalli, snapper, amber jack, and the Jew fish with a record of 200 lb.
Lobsters are found on the reefs and porpoises and rays are still har­
pooned along this coast all year round.
I was amused by decoys the fishermen made for luring green
turtles into nets. The decoys are called mounting-boards, and some
were cleverly made of wood to resemble the 300 lb. green turtle. But
great art is not necessary in constructing decoys. The male turtle can
be drawn into nets by the crudest little raft of nailed planks roughly
the size of a turtle and fitted with a short stem of wood to resemble a
neck. The male turtles are easily deceived into thinking these rafts
are turtle beauties of the opposite sex. In moments of passion they
have been known to smash them to pieces.
The trunkbacks, with a weight upwards of 2,000 lb., cannot so
easily be cheated by the fishermen. These are the immense creatures
that the turtle-hunters I talked with called the 'Orinuks', believing
the huge amphibians to come from the many-mouthed Orinoco across
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 THE WINDWARD ROAD

Venezuela. An extraordinary amount of debris from South American

forests which falls into the Orinoco is caught in currents when it
meets the sea and washed up on the shores of Trinidad and Tobago.
This happens particularly when the Orinoco floods its banks after
the May and June rainy season and rafts of trash and wild hyacinths
sweep through the channel between Trinidad and Tobago. It seemed
extraordinary to me that powerful swimmers in ocean currents like
the trunkbacks should be swept around like dead tree trunks in
fresh-water floods.
Along this Windward Road, high above the sea, a French army
had once come, and in greater haste than the dignified Negro farmer
and turtle-hunters of today. After leaving Belle Garden the road con­
tinued through what was called the old French Military Road that cut
its way through living rock. I could not help being sceptical and
wondering what currents in the sea were capable of carrying the
trunkback turtles along with them. But I was even more critical of the
tradition that the French cut this road through the rock in a single
night. Even with modern earth-moving machines such feats were not
accomplished so quickly. A landslide had recently occurred at this
ledge above the sea. The terrain here-precipitous rocky cliff­
reminded me of the coast road on Flores in the Azores. Tobago's high
shelf road, with the sea abruptly below, dropped down again soon
after to the level of the coconut-fringed bays.
While Inspector Gittens carefully took his large car around the
fallen mountain rocks of the landslide I felt the qualms always in­
duced in me by high hairpin bends. But the Inspector smiled and
with infinite care negotiated the boulders and in a short while after­
wards brought us safely to Roxborough, he to the harvest festival
and the consequent and subsequent celebrations, and I to explore the
surrounding countryside. The Inspector offered to take me back to
Scarborough again in the evening. And so, for the afternoon, which
was still early, we parted company.
Roxborough on a Sunday afternoon, and a feast day, too, had a
Wild West atmosphere. Strollers filled the main road as they do in
Western films, and the houses were also like cowboy films, little and
wooden and mostly single storey, some ramshackle and leaning to­
wards all points of the compass. Beneath tin roofs some of them were
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 THE WINDWARD ROAD

painted white or ochre or pink or all three colours. Some stood on the
ground, others on stilts. Roxborough, in contrast to most places in
Trinidad and Tobago, displayed almost no fretwork, but in compen­
sation it had some cowboy-saloon half-doors along the main street.
These were marvellously intriguing little houses with the tiniest and
most delicate louvred windows I had ever seen. The roofs went at
all angles. Some windows were protected from the sun by sophisti­
cated ogee shades. All Roxborough's houses were, in fact, sophisti­
cated to a degree, for each, though essentially plain, had been
individually hand-made to suit the whims of the individual con­
cerned.
Some of the houses have that straightforward charm of wooden
signal boxes on English railways, and to match them, Roxborough
Post Office looks like a reproduction of an English country railway
station. Only a few cars pass through and the road serves a better
purpose as a playground for children and chickens, sheep and goats.
The lots between the well-spaced houses teem with springing bushes
of pigeon-peas and punkah-leaved bananas. Business premises are
signposted plainly and with no nonsense-'Cynthia Hercules
Licensed to sell Spirituous liquors' or 'Hairdressing done here by
Mrs. E. Clarke'. I thought it odd for the children to use the road for
their games even though the Sunday traffic was negligible, because
behind the houses were the sands of Roxborough Bay, a Saracen's
scimitar of a bay with Richmond and Queen's Islands lying off the
two horns. In the centre a knob of rock rose from the sea and this was
called the Sugar Loaf.
Tobago, a fish-shaped island nowhere wider than eight miles, has
the appearance of being much larger, an effect of scale created by the
mountains and hills. These form the Main Ridge running almost the
entire twenty-six-mile length of the island. In some places, although
confined at the base by so small an island, the peaks tower up to
1,soo feet. Such a sheer ascent to the sea matches its violence of land­
scape with the violence of Tobago's history and the violence of the
pirates and scoundrels who once careened their ships in the bays below
the mountains. Marvellous views of this Main Range come into sight
on leaving Roxborough. When I walked out of the town the lazy
sea was on my right hand and on my left the Louis d'Or Valley run-
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ning into the mountains. The face of the mountains was not gaunt
and scarred, but completely clothed in dense woods where low cloud
drifted over the high hanging forests.
This walk along the road through the Louis d'Or Estate was a
strong reminder of the way that planters managed to keep their lands
intact in spite of all the flag-changing under different European
governments. The British had an interest in preventing the develop­
ment of Tobago's plantations, for they saw them as rivals to their
own sugar estates in Barbados. And when land did eventually reach
the stage of being parcelled out the planters were forbidden to grow
sugar cane and had to content themselves with indigo and cocoa.
Such restrictions were intended to safeguard the Barbados sugar
market. Only when the French came were the island's fertile valleys
opened up properly and Tobago gained a fair share of Caribbean
trade.
To encourage immigrants and give them a feeling of security in
their possessions, in 1788 the Government in Paris decreed that an
elected assembly should be allowed in Tobago, unwittingly fitting
the first rung in the ladder which eventually led to complete indepen­
dence. The existence of this elected assembly remained an advantage
Tobago had over the Crown Colony System which for so long in­
hibited the development of Trinidad. Tobago's prosperity and the
volume of its most important exports depended, as, of course, they
did on every other Caribbean island, on the use and abuse of African
slaves. Long before the British found themselves faced with slaves
actively taking freedom into their own hands only to be hanged or
mock-hanged from the prison walls, the French had been faced with
similar revolts. The French prohibited Negro meetings and banned
the use of the drum, that old voice of Africa which was still symbolic
of freedom.
It was with great indignation that the Tobago Legislature when
under the Union Jack condemned the British Government's prohibi­
tion in 1823 of the flogging of women. It was, the planters claimed in
high dudgeon, 'tantamount to unqualified emancipation from this
hour'. And when the idea of complete freedom for the slaves was
being talked about not only in the degrading slums on the plantations
where the slaves were kept, but also in London drawing-rooms, the
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Tobago Legislature was quick to ask the Mother of Parliaments for

its pound of flesh, 'If it is now found that the establishment of
slavery in the West Indies has been a National sin, the loss should be
National also, and they are entitled to a full remuneration for their
property.'
'They', of course, being the planters, and, of course, 'they' were
compensated from the national purse. Although the planters' family
investments were not forgotten by the Treasury at Emancipation, the
slaves themselves got nothing except a share in the crops of the
estates for which they had to sweat and strain as much as before. In
order to keep the plantations going the owners offered the ex-slaves
agricultural jobs under an arrangement by which, though still un­
paid, the Negroes would receive a percentage when the cane was cut
and crushed. This was an old European practice known as the
Metairie System. On Tobago it operated reasonably well within the
system's own limitations and as long as there was a harvest to share.
But a series of disasters struck the island including the terrible
hurricane which, not being a respecter of persons, not only lifted
the roofs of Fort King George's barracks but devastated sugar fac­
tories, plantation houses and the labourers' flimsy dwellings and
completely ruined the cane fields and cocoa and coffee harvests.
In 1876 disorder broke out in Roxborough after fires in the sugar
fields, which were blamed on disillusioned immigrant workers from
Barbados. In the rough-house that followed a police corporal called
Belmanna was killed. By now the planters realized that their
privileged seats in the Tobago Legislature were threatened by Negro
voters, and they decided any form of government was better than a
black one and, in their own interests, voted that Tobago should
become a Crown Colony. Also behind this move was the knowledge
that imperial troops could be summoned to deal with disturbances
in a Crown Colony. But though a Government warship arrived to
settle the riots in Roxborough it could not produce harvests from
the ruined plantations.
The island had scarcely recovered from the effects of the hurricane
and the rebellion when the bankruptcy of a London firm caused
many of the island's plantations to go bankrupt also. The firm was
Gillespie Brothers and over the years it monopolized Tobago's sugar
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crops. Many of the estates had been mortgaged to Gillespie's and

when the firm went out of business in 1884 the bottom dropped out
of the economy. Sugar ceased to be king, the economy was in such a
low state that the island went shopping among benefactors as the
poor relative of the British West Indies. Whitehall made bright sug­
gestions and attempts at attaching Tobago to Barbados or St.
Vincent and Grenada and even little St. Lucia. It looked as if
Whitehall's white collars were sticking pins in the list of islands,
stopping when they got to the very last island in the whole chain­
Trinidad. There were no more islands after Trinidad bacause of the
South American mainland. So Tobago was tacked on to Trinidad in
1889.
As I walked through the Louis d'Or Estate on that Sunday after­
noon I had to protect myself not from hostile workers but from
courteous drivers who, as the Public Health Inspector and Police
Prosecutor had done, slowed down to offer me lifts. One which
stopped to offer me a seat was run by a young employee of the Dela­
ford Co-operative Cocoa Fermentary Limited. He had two hours to
kill before meeting his girl-friend and so he offered to drive me
wherever I wanted to go. His car, his time, his quick brain full of
village traditions and ways of the estates were all mine to employ
free of charge for two hours.
My new friend was so busy pointing out things to me, the birds,
the bees, the flowers and a score of other facts and facets of Tobago
that I completely forgot to ask, and he to offer, his name. He knew
well that villages like his native Delaford had vantage-points for
surveying the beauty of the island that could not be glimpsed in a
flash from a car. So we both got out repeatedly to stand on the high
road. As we looked at the marvellous valleys or hillsides sweep­
ing down to the sea we stood in silence. My friend had doubtless
known these particular sights of Tobago's landscape continuously
through all of his twenty years or so, yet he looked intently as though
seeing them for the first time. He knew that talk would spoil the
spell, especially at one place where a perfect pirate bay lay below us,
the water twinkling with depths of green-blue intensities of trans­
parent colour.
This was King's Bay, a superb inlet in an amphitheatre of hills
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which fell abruptly away from the road down to the sands, and
which were thick and dense with palms and breadfruit, mango and
banana trees. Breaking through these green clouds the cockscombs
of the immortelles thrust up as red as a rooster's. The trees parted
occasionally to let the roof of a little house peep through. As though
from far away, like the shush in a seashell, the sea breathed in and
out, its movements audible but invisible.
In the eighteenth century Delaford was a fiddler's green for men
of the black flag when the island was evacuated of French and
English by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The pirates frequented
King's Bay to anchor in safety when rough seas caused the sloop
to 'chew her oakum' or when fresh water and supplies were wanted.
Here they could rely on professional smugglers to unload and dis­
pose of the cargo taken from the holds of captured prizes, perhaps a
stray brig that had foolhardily run the pirate gauntlet. Here it was
always drinking time-the sun over the foreyards, as they would say.
Camp-followers and hangers-on abounded in places like these­
runaway slaves, men with a price on their heads like the pirates
themselves, smugglers and trader outlaws and outcasts of both sexes
and many creeds, and there was pretty sure to be a wench to share
the bull of rum in the palm-leaf shack.
King's Bay saw scenes like R. L. Stevenson's immortal ones in
Treasure Island. And there actually was an Israel Hands on Tobago.
The real person of this name was Blackbeard's gunner, one of the
few to escape the gallows. R. L. Stevenson must have read about
Hands's trial and subsequent life as a well-known begging cripple
in the streets of London. He was crippled by Blackbeard, who en­
livened a dull party by discharging a pistol under the table to shatter
Israel Hands's knee.
Long before France and England evacuated Tobago the island
had been a pirate stronghold. The British naval expedition of 1723
was sent from Barbados, not against the French, but the 'Brethren
of the Coast'. Here into King's Bay sailed the stately H.M.S. Win­
chelsea to hang Captain Finn and destroy the pirate villages round
the island. And here, too, forty years later, Alexander Brown came
ashore as the island's first Lieutenant-Governor and inspected a
guard of honour on the beach.
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Besides the shelter and secrecy afforded, this coast had other
attractions, especially for pirates. The green turtle headed the list.
'There can be no adventure without belly-meat' was a pirate saying
and the green turtle was nearly as important as rum. The turtles
were abundant and easy to catch, and above all were particularly
tenacious of life. In those days, beyond the salting down of meat and
fish, there was no known way of preserving food in the tropics and
even salting was not always reliable. But the great turtles could be
kept alive for weeks simply by being turned on their backs in the
ships' holds. And when fresh meat was wanted all the quartermaster
had to do was order the butchering of one.
When I first saw King's Bay I silently complained about the lack
of a pirate ship to complete the picture. Before getting back into the
car, my head full of unashamed romancing about the days of oak and
canvas, I saw out to sea a topsail schooner heading for the other
islands in the best of sailors' weather. The presence of so many
sailing vessels around the Caribbean keeps alive the memory of Sir
Henry Morgan's and Captain Finn's sloops and brigantines.
A waterfall of Mexican creeper draped the rock wall beside the
Delaford road, and ruby humming-birds hovering there took not the
slightest notice of the car as they darted from roses to hibiscus, from
pigeon-pea blossom to their favourite russella shrubs. Two boys of
about ten years sat cutting each other's hair in the space under a
stilt house while others played backyard cricket with oranges as
balls. But standing by Delaford Post Office high above King's Bay
and its scintillating water, I thought that not even Port-of-Spain's
Botanical Gardens could delight a gardener so much as the enclosing
headland below, burning here and there with the fire of immortelles.
We went on in the car as far as Charlotteville that afternoon
before returning to Roxborough to find Inspector Gittens with some
others of the constabulary celebrating the harvest festival in the
parlour above Cecil Adonis Ramsey's store. Although in an upper
room, this was hardly the last supper, harvest or otherwise. Mr.
Ramsey was justly proud of his middle name, though whether its
classical and literary connections were known to him I could not
say; indeed, there was no time to ask, for I was introduced to the
local sergeant and his men. I asked another man of East Indian
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features if he wa& also a policeman. 'No, m>, no,' he assured me

hurriedly and with as much pride as Mr. Adonis Ramsey, 'I'm a
proprietor.' As we drove back to Scarborough, Inspector Gittens
pointed out the proprietor's wooden hut at the roadside, which
served as a shop-cum-bar. Shades of Mr. Biswas, I thought, who at
one stage in his extraordinary life had also owned such a wooden
structure and had proudly called himself a proprietor.
Adonis Ramsey seemed to produce another bottle of whisky every
time a newcomer climbed the stairs to the parlour and he laughed
when I said that I preferred rum. Roxborough, I was told, did not
make such a fuss over Christmas as it did over harvest. Most of the
people were involved one way or another with the island's main
industries of coconuts, cocoa, citrus fruits, bananas and market
gardening, and they waited for harvest with the anticipation reserved
elsewhere for Christmas, and their biggest celebrations took place
at that time. Special cakes and pastry were baked and dances ar­
ranged. The sergeant said that a great deal had been given to St.
Boniface parish church that day and would all be sold and the pro­
ceeds given to the poor, things like bundles of sugar cane, settings
of eggs, baskets of cocoa beans or pigeon-peas, sticks of green
bananas, bundles of dasheen, a tray of avocado pears or golden
corncobs, a sack of sweet potatoes or a simple bunch of backgarden
shallots.
Not everybody, of course, brought the first fruits of harvest to the
Anglican parish church. There were those who 'threw away' the
yams and sweet potatoes as tributes to the jumbies and ancestral
spirits. I came across a number of unusual emblems painted on walls
and floors during my stay in Tobago, and not only in out-of-the-way
villages. Two of the most intricate of these signs were on the wall of
the main restaurant in Scarborough. Both had been painted over the
door and the design was composed of Masonic-like emblems and
letters of an unknown language. The two waitresses I spoke to about
the signs just dismissed them as 'old-time things', although the signs
had obviously been painted within the last few years.
Inspector Gittens came from Trinidad, but he enjoyed the country
traditions of Tobago. But he remained a police officer even when off
duty, and although at the harvest celebrations his glass always
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seemed to be full of amber liquid, I knew that it contained ginger

ale. He drove his large car at twenty miles an hour, a speed thor­
oughly to be recommended for people like myself who have a phobia
about fast cars. With the kindness I had received all day, the In­
spector went out of his way to drive me to the Edendale Beach
Guest House. The journey back from Roxborough was a new drama
on the stage of sky and sea. Distant, frantic shots of lightning rivalled
the paler, but more regular windmill sails of the beams from Fort
King George's lighthouse.
The late afternoon had turned to what old sailing-masters called
an Irish hurricane-drizzling rain in a calm. But the rain cleared as
we drove towards Scarborough and enormous frogs came out on to
the wet road to out-stare the car's headlamps. What serenades the
frogs of Tobago composed and orchestrated. They croaked and
whistled, made twangs like guitar strings snapping, produced sonor­
ous bass roars and a high alto chorus like bleeps from a sputnik.
Musique concrete and electronic music displaced the mysteries of the
twelve-tone row, but none of these could rival the noise of the frogs.
But for melodic sweetness nothing can rival the song of the black­
thrush that haunts the higher mountains of Tobago, even though
the cock thrush's paean serves only to proclaim his territorial rights
to his fellows. Not so the bullfrog. Both his motif and his motive
are different and, though falling strangely on the human ear, must
have been full of sweet airs that delighted because it was simply a
love song guiding the female to a roadside ditch or a pond of sacred
lotuses. Mocking-bird and bared-eyed thrush sang Tobago's lauds
and the bullfrog intoned its night office.
Neither mocking-bird nor lauds roused me next morning in time
to get the first bus to Speyside at 4.30 a.m. And when I boarded the
next one at nine o'clock most of the seats were occupied by country
women already going home from market with their shallow wooden
trays in which they had taken farm and garden produce into Scar­
borough. These ladies were in high good spirits, but even though
they chaffed each other they remained within the bounds of courtesy
and addressed each other as 'Madam'. They laughed uproariously,
tilting back the men's trilby hats they wore. They had plenty to talk
about and new passengers to involve in talk, for the bus was delayed
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at every village and crossroads to let people on and off and to deliver
newspapers to the shops, messages to private houses and most im
portantly mailbags to the post offices. We also stopped to pick up
cloth bundles and baskets of food, stopping yet again to disembark
them at places where road-menders or foresters waited for this their
'breakfast' where perhaps a crown trace ran off the road into the
green mountains.
'Smoking! On Four rear seats only. No spitting. No Inflamable
liquids. Freight is carried at owner's risk only.' You couldn't ask for
more than that, and even if you couldn't read the content of these
notices in the bus, they were probably known to you. The delight­
fully ambiguous instructions in some English buses to 'Mind your
head when leaving your seat' have their complement in Tobago with
'Keep your hands Within this Bus when it is in Motion', a pro­
nouncement imbued with all the grandeur of Newton's laws. The
motion which propelled the bodies at rest was, to do it justice, a nice
balance between expedition and the expedience of navigating a wind­
ing road with hidden corners and bends above the sea. To keep their
hands within the bus was hardly more than the country women
could do, for the way was sprinkled with their friends, each of whom
had to be waved to, and special ones favoured with the gift of a
'sweetie', a wrapped toffee thrown through the window.
The short journey to Roxborough took over an hour. Then we
went on to Delaford and the incomparable prospect of King's Bay.
Down we sailed through a coconut plantation and across King's Bay
River before climbing steeply again. And now the country began to
be on a magnificent scale. The hills rose abruptly and with grandeur.
They were well formed and adorned with green bamboo and balisier
in profusion.
We came to the cocoa trees of the Merchiston Estate. In days gone
by the Duke of Mantua owned this land. His dukedom was as
colourful as that of Courland. Mantua, a city of Lombardy, was one
of the most formidable fortresses in Europe. During Napoleon's
flood of victories in 1796 the immense stronghold of Mantua with­
stood the terrible bombardments for eight months. The ducal house
was intermarried with French royalty and so the duke was welcomed
by the British authorities in Tobago when Napoleon finally over-
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came Mantua. The fortified city boasted also one of the world's
largest palaces. When he bought the Merchiston Estate on Tobago
the duke naturally set about building a house worthy of the family
tradition. Alas, despite the outlay of money on building Merchiston
and the laying out of the estate, it was not destined to become the
Versailles of Tobago. Only a heap of rubble remained from the
former saloons, the servants' hall, the stable courtyard. Yet around
Delaford there were old people living whose families had been ducal
retainers, and stories still circulate about haughty duchesses.
No speculation was necessary as to why the Duke of Mantua
chose to build his exiled island palace in that part of Tobago. It was
situated high up, high enough to escape the worst humidity of the
coast. The fine airs of that elevation must have struck the duke as
healthier than the marshy climate of Lombardy. A man with an eye
for a site must also have had one for a view. Perhaps his coachman
reined in the horses so that the duke could look out of the windows
at a place along the road which many people believe to offer the
finest prospect of any in the island. Six hundred feet below lies the
miraculous view of Speyside at the head of a bay sprinkled with
islands that emerge from the water like Loch Ness monsters, and
beyond them the larger and beautiful profile of Little Tobago.
From the elevation afforded by the road, the observer can quite
clearly see the currents swirling through this patchwork quilt of sea
where nearly every hue of a seven-coloured parrakeet's plumage
shines, from cerulean bands to apple-green channels, amethyst pools
gradating into emerald caverns, waves of jade shattering like crystal
on the dusky islets, shadows of wheeling gulls framed in the blue
mirror that broke up to scatter itself in the form of waves which
became green rollers unfolding on the shore. The Duke of Mantua
could hardly have failed to respond to this view. Certainly I wanted
to stop the bus as we rode over the proud profile of mountain which
surges majestically above in its own green waves of forest.
Speyside took on a character on a bright and sunny Monday
morning totally different from its greyness on an overcast and drizzly
Sunday afternoon. The sun had brought out the colour again. There
were large wooden trays of cocoa beans drying in the hot sun on the
waterfront. In doorways youths sat absorbed with making bird's-nest
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hats which now had a market value. I spoke to a Scots couple who had
rented a cottage for the Christmas holiday and who became so enam­
oured of the island that they lengthened their stay until Easter
because the weather was so good and their cost of living in the
cottage so low. At Speyside I also talked with an amazing couple
from Eastbourne. The man wore shorts and a gaudy beach shirt
and a brown beret. He smoked a pipe gripped between his own long
teeth, and later on, when I encountered them again at Charlotteville,
I learned to my astonishment that this energetic and enthusiastic
walker was eighty-three years old and that they, like the two Scots,
were happily spending all their long vacation at Speyside, though
they were housed at the Bird of Paradise Inn, whither I shortly went
in search of lunch.
Near the hotel I saw some buildings in ruin, enough remaining of
tumbled stone walls to show the sturdy character of an old industrial
building. Rusted with decades of exposure to the sea winds was the
skeleton of an iron water-wheel, like a giant bicycle wheel about
twenty-five feet across. Before neglect brought it down and lush
weeds made almost a rockery out of it, this had been the Speyside
sugar factory.
The Tourist Board had made suggestions for the following sign:

Production 1856 1956

Sugar 85,000 cwt. 0
Rum 140,000 gal. 0
Molasses 5,800 hogsheads 0

These figures told their own story of how Humpty Dumpty sugar
sitting on his high wall of prosperity fell, and how all the king's
horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty together again.
But as I wandered up the road from the silent water-wheel other
thoughts came to me. I stood looking out over yet another inlet,
Bateau Bay. A cannon's muzzle poked aggressively towards the
dotted line of islets grouped with Little Tobago as their climax. It is
a star-shaped island rising abruptly from the water and all its hills
and valleys are thickly wooded. An alternative name for the tiny
island is Bird of Paradise, because of the twenty-four pairs of the
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greater bird of Paradise brought there by Sir William Ingram. This

bird's golden plumes were in such demand by Edwardian society
women that extinction of the species seemed inevitable. However, it
was the society women who became extinct and not the bird. Sir
William's connection was with the survival of the bird, for he organ­
ized an expedition to the Aru Islands off Dutch New Guinea and
brought forty-eight immature birds to breed on the 450 hilly acres of
Little Tobago. When Ingram died in 1929 his sons presented the
island to the Government on condition that it should remain a bird
sanctuary in perpetuity. There was also to be a warden in attendance
on the New Guinea immigrants. Unhappily, Hurricane Flora did
away with a number of the birds, although by that time, 1963, the
danger of birds of paradise becoming extinct in their own native
habitat had passed. Sir William Ingram's deed was no doubt regis­
tered by bird-lovers as a noble and kindly one. Yet there was
another aspect of his artificial migration, and another and equally
appropriate sign could have been erected by the Tourist Board at
this end of Tobago:
Species 1786 1909
Amerindians 24 0
Birds of paradise 0 24 pairs
The last Tobago census listing Amerindians stated that five
Caribs lived on Little Tobago prior to the arrival of the birds of
paradise. No public hue and cry arose when the island's earliest
people were threatened with extinction, no wealthy patron to organize
a reserve for those last remaining Amerindians. Looking out across
the blue-green waters of Bateau Bay, I thought of the tribes that
were driven from their ancestral hunting-grounds, which comprised
74,392 acres in 1498 at the time of Columbus's doubtful sighting of
the island, but only the five survivors' 450 acres of Little Tobago in
1790. And even then no nation, no good works committee or Chris­
tian gentleman was willing to come forward and ensure their sur­
vival, as Sir William Ingram was so anxious to do for a handful of
birds. Dr. Moses Stringer wanted Queen Anne to send him to
Tobago as her ambassador to the 'Emperor of the Carib Nation' in
1704. But before that cruel century was out the Carib race was in
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need of another sort of Moses to lead it from the wilderness of decima­

tion into which it had fallen. This was not a 'National sin' of the
British, as the local Legislative Council had ironically called the slave
trade in its angry demand to London for compensation at Emancipa­
tion. The sin of wiping the Amerindians off the face of the earth was
shared by every nation that sailed the Caribbean.
Although they seemed to be so bursting with interest, the East­
bourne couple had not yet been across to Little Tobago, but others
staying at the hotel had made the short voyage and had received their
reward of a quick flash of a hen bird of paradise's undistinguished
tail. I made no attempt to go searching for birds of paradise, though
the excursion itself to the wooded hills of the island would have
justified the little effort involved. Instead I tried, without success, to
get two youths to take me out to another cluster of islets farther
along on the north-east, called St. Giles Islands. The two boys said
their boat was incapable of making the trip because of the currents,
and even if it could, treacherous tides made landing difficult. I also
tried on other occasions to get to St. Giles Islands, but in the end left
Tobago without having seen that natural sanctuary of sea birds, with
its colonies of gulls, terns and both the red-billed and yellow-billed
tropic-birds which bred on the rocks.
I never even caught a glimpse of, though I several times heard, the
cocrico, Ortalis ruficauda, which was Tobago's national bird and
appeared with the scarlet ibis of Trinidad on the two islands' joint
coat of arms. The cocrico is a big game bird which I enjoyed eating in
Venezuela at one time. But its popularity on Tobago's tables, where
it was referred to as pheasant, had so seriously reduced the numbers
that the birds had to be protected by law. But what I did see without
any searching was the delightful Swainson's motmot. The mixed
coloured plumage of purple and black, iridescent green and bronze,
turquoise green, the chestnut breast and the bright red iris were not
the main points of identification. Its long tail never ceased to amuse
me, for the bird nibbled at its own tail feathers, leaving a bare quill
at the end of each side of the two central feathers except for two
tufts like those of an arrow. The bird almost seemed to have a sense
of style as though, not content with nature's generous endowment,
it felt compelled to add coiffure. The motmot is a friendly bird and
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I could remember few experiences in bird-watching more delightful

than to see a pair perched on a tree with their extraordinary tails
going from side to side in regular movement like pendulums. There
was no need to set off on expedition to watch the motmot, for I often
saw as many as a dozen in the course of a day's travelling about the
island.
On that particular Monday morning at Speyside conchology con­
cerned me more than ornithology. Something pertaining to our
primeval state, perhaps, when in the mysterious dawn of the world
men dwelt at the sea's edge and held communion with seals, perhaps
even when we were mermen, then seashells, too, perhaps were part
of our life. Certainly their auricular magic has a sound of far-away,
only dimly remembered things, which in childhood hold such fascina­
tion. The sound of the tide picked up by the spiral voids of the
queen conch is a sound like no other. Not all shells on Tobago's
shores are dead. The sandy strands are very much alive with chip­
chip, which have the local name of 'butterfly shells'. They can be
seen scurrying into the sand after being marooned by a wave, though
not in the same numbers as at Mayaro. This perhaps has been the
most popular bivalve ever since the days when the Amerindian tribes
used them. The earliest Europeans in the West Indies did not take
to the tiny chip-chip as they did to the great sea turtles, one of which
could keep a caravel supplied with meat for days.
The reptilian bones in the Amerindian middens were almost
exclusively turtle or tortoise. But in historical times the early Euro­
peans were intrigued by the way the Indians captured the turtles,
for they used a method which was even more novel than the crude
decoys used today in turtle-snaring on Tobago. The Amerindians
knew the curious habits of the remora, the suckerfish, just as they
knew about the durability in sea water of mora, a wood from which
they made their canoes.
The remora has a suction pad on its head and attaches itself to the
underside of a larger fish, including sharks, and, without having to
lift a fin, feeds royally on the crumbs that fall from the host's mouth.
The Indians not only studied this but used to catch the remoras
alive and attach a long cord to the tail and set them free to get stuck
on a much larger fish, which could then be hauled in on the line.
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Crews of Columbus's ships were as fascinated by such an easy way

of fishing as Raleigh's men were by tree-oysters in the following cen­
tury. Sir Walter may have been distressed that fresh tree-oysters
could not be taken home to England, though if it is true that he
brought tobacco to England he may have been aware that the island
got its name from tobacco, by way of variations like Tavago,
Tabacco, Tabc, or, in its present form, Tobago.
I contented myself with gathering shells for my collection, which
by the end of the week included measled cowries, the beautiful baby
bonnet, green star fish, flamingo tongues, violet snails, partridge
shells, coffee beans, large helmets and conches and the wide-mouthed
dye shell which was to ruin half my slender wardrobe with episcopal
ink because I picked it up alive. Besides the key-hole limpets and the
little spotted dove shells the most plentiful up at Speyside were the
strange univalves of the Neretina family, known on Tobago as baby
tooth and bleeding tooth. When the tide goes out thousands of them
cling to the rocks to await the next sea-rise.
Chip-chip shells predominated in the upper layers of the Amer­
indian kitchen middens examined by Dr. Bullbrook. But in the lower
layer, under the chip-chip, the shells thrown out by earlier settle­
ments showed that the Neretina species of baby tooth and bleeding
tooth had predominated. Dr. Bullbrook points out in his book that
both Neretina species are now so scarce around Trinidad that they
have not even earned themselves a local name. On Tobago the situa­
tion is different, for I saw many more baby teeth than chip-chip,
especially around Speyside.
Like Mayaro on Trinidad's Atlantic coast, Speyside is an ideal
place for families with children, and for anyone who wants either
to relax or to explore. Even if I had been rather pessimistic about
the birds of paradise, Speyside was an excellent centre for studying
land and sea birds. But the climax to this dramatic northern end of
Tobago is not really reached until the inland road goes off from
Speyside. This rises almost at once in a very steep incline at such an
angle that even the Eastbourne octogenarian had to call a halt to his
walking and hail the bus on which I was going to the opposite coast,
where Charlotteville lay.
Tobago narrows at this end, and the mountains necessarily rear
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sheer on the isthmus shelf, so affording some of the most spectacular

sights the island has to offer. Trinidad has nothing like it. Cocoa
farms are wedged among the thickly wooded Hanks and immortelles
cast shade over them from their canopies of flame. At that time of
the year, early in Lent, the water immortelles had reached the stage
of their salmon-hued blossoming, growing more liberally at these
altitudes than the more usual bois or mountain immortelle. Since the
water immortelle grows normally as a shade tree on lower and wetter
lands in the West Indies, its presence up there betrays the amount
of the island's rainfall. The early months of the year enjoy a so­
called dry season and then, in October, another short one known as
the Petit Careme. But nobody would care to guarantee absolutely
rainproof periods. Plantations and forests benefit from short showers
during the dry season, and I found also that the rain clears the
atmosphere when humidity tends to become oppressive. These
showers enable the water immortelle to flourish in the mountains.
After the arduous climb to the top of the ridge, a panorama of
Speyside and its sea garland of islets unfolds. Within minutes, how­
ever, all previous sights are forgotten in yet another view. But this is
not so much a view as a vision. There was no doubt in my mind as I
stood there that this superseded all other mountain prospects in
either Trinidad or Tobago. The other coast came into sight, far, far
below. The perfect village of Charlotteville lay scattered around the
finest of all the island's natural harbours. This was Man-o'-War Bay,
surely one of the most majestic in the world. Although that deep
anchorage had seen fleets of men-o'-war and sail-crowded wind­
jammers during the island's restless centuries of Hag-changing, its
name seems, oddly enough, to have derived from a corruption of
Jan van Vear, who owned the surrounding estate.
The Irish also have reason to remember the house of Orange and
Dutch planters, and they even have a similar West Indian manner
of pronouncing Dutch names. Man-o'-War Bay brings to mind
an old Irish song which appropriately fits the situation, because
Jan van Vear of the Charlotteville Estate must also have been
constantly on the look-out for the French, coming by sea to land an
army on the beach as the French General Blancheland landed his in
May 1781.
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The French are on the say,

Says the Shan van Vocht,
The French are on the say,
They'll be here without delay,
And the Orange will decay,
Says the Shan van Vocht.

But over a century earlier this part of Tobago with its natural
harbours was the scene of some gory battles. In 1666, the year
Captain Poyntz captured the Dutch settlement, Admiral Sir John
Harman led the English towards Man-o'-War harbour. This was at
a time when the Dutch and French were united in their effort to
keep Britain out of Tobago, Louis XIV having created Adrien
Lampsins Baron of Tobago four years previously. Admiral Harman's
ships reached a bay farther along the north-west coast from Char­
lotteville, only to find a combined force of the Dutch and French
warships waiting for him. In the ensuing sea battle the loss of life on
both sides was so enormous that the blue waters were turned to a
bath of blood. Still today that recess in the coastal mountain range
is called Bloody Bay.
All these sanguinary battles were waged by the would-be powers,
not only because of the fertile lands of which Captain Poyntz made
so much in his book but also because the deep and sheltered natural
harbour of Man-o'-War Bay offered the finest naval station in all the
islands for large-scale, ocean-going fleets. The visitor can best appre­
ciate the dimensions of this setting by going through the mountains
from Speyside and seeing Man-o'-War Bay lying between the wide
arms of its headlands. De Heer Jan van Vear may have owned the
surrounding estate, but the bay was so obviously a splendid harbour
for a war fleet that I wondered if the Dutch planter was nicknamed
Man-o'-War rather than the other way round.
At the road's highest point before the descent to the Bay a mighty
immortelle stood sentinel, its incandescence glowing against the
transparent green-blue of the sea below. So steep were the mountain­
side sweeps down to the bay that the bus descent was like coming
down in an aeroplane. From that height Charlotteville looked neat,
and as we got lower and drew nearer the diminutive figures moving
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about on flat roofs turned out to be cocoa workers turning the drying
beans like Biblical oxen treading the threshing-floor. The sea's grada­
tion of green, olive, ultramarine, indigo, in stripes or a fusion of one
colour into another, had to be seen to be believed. The little waves
as they turned on the shore were like lumps of green glass, yet the
horizon was a dark blue, and the sky picked up the sea's lighter blues.
Man-o'-War Bay is remarkable for its grandeur of scale, but even
more so for its colour. People transfixed by the saturation of colour
in Raoul Dufy's paintings should go to this bay. They will be un­
likely ever to see such colour again.
Charlotteville occupied the centre of the scimitar cove, sheltered
by the projecting headlands. Behind the village, the great mountain­
sides swept up to their escarpments and occasional houses stood
among the trees and sea-leaning palms. Fishing-boats were drawn up
on the beach where the glass waves broke, and nets were spread or
hung to dry, and on the gently heaving surface of the sea other boats
bobbed about their buoys. Boats are native to this place and so are
boatbuilders. I talked with two of them, Henry and Augustus Camp­
bell. They were happy young Negroes, working with a boy appren­
tice in an open shed on the shore.
The brothers told me how they went into the forest to select and
cut cyp and cedar trees, and had them sawn and planed into planks
at the saw-mill before they began to work them on the shore. They
made a new fishing-boat every two weeks if both Henry and Augustus
were working on it. They used cedar only in the stern. All else was
fashioned from the native cyp wood. Fishermen from the coasts all
around Tobago kept them continually busy with orders, because
their boats were stout and good.
'Have to put up another two this week,' Henry said, standing
ankle deep in the redolent shavings. Already a keel was laid with
ribs curving up from it; the stern was in place and some of the side
planks had been fixed. I admired their skill, but they worked as
easily as a boy whittling a ship from a stick and thought nothing of it.
Theirs was a life of enviable contentment, a daily round in the shade
of the open workshop with a view of the headlands and, a stone's
throw away, the sea they made their boats for. I wondered how the
brothers had come by their surname, whether from the plantation
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owner who had bought their not so distant ancestors as slaves, or

whether from Highland soldiers stationed at the western end of the
bay, which is still called Campbell Town, whose gun emplacement
still looks out over the bland acres of Man-o'-War Bay.
Charlotteville is so spread out that it did not look like Tobago's
largest village, which it is. Commercial development has not yet
arrived, possibly because the village lies at the extreme end of the
island from the capital. I muttered a secular prayer that it might
remain so, its charm free from despoiling, its fishing community free
of destructive forces. Charlotteville possesses a seaside village green
and donkeys were tethered to the telegraph poles around it and
washing was spread out to dry on its banks. A one-legged woman
went by, crutch in one hand and an enormous yam in the other,
while on her head she balanced an overfull basket. Beyond the little
fish market and Campbell Brothers' Boat-building Yard and the low
sea wall, the road was no more than seven feet wide. The East­
bourne walkers were already returning from an exploration of
Charlotteville's main huddle of houses by the time I strolled there.
The old gentleman was in great spirits, his eyes missing nothing.
He returned with me to point out a notice on a blackboard, 'The
long overdued Village Council Election will be held tonight. Come
out in your large numbers. Bring money and make yourself finan­
cial.'
I went into a shop-cum-bar called Gurly Nicholson's for a glass of
Whiteway's Devon Cyder, for Tobago nowadays has to import its
drinks, even, incredibly, its rum. Gurly's wife Greta presided over
the shelves stacked high with bales of cloth and dress material, sacks
of hen mash and flour, tins of Quaker Oats and bottles of Madeira.
Sitting by the wide-open door was old James Job, a retired farm
labourer. With the aid of a dictionary he was reading Pilgrim's
Progress and he wore a silver bangle whose ends were shaped like
snakes' heads. The bangle was a charm similar to ones I had seen
at other places on the islands. Mr. Job wore it because he had a deep
cut in the crook of one arm which had seriously hindered the move­
ments of his fingers until the local charmer-medicine-man gave him
the bangle, which had proved to be an effective therapy. Fishermen
called in at Gurly Nicholson's wearing trousers made from flour
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 THE WINDWARD ROAD

sacks which still bore the bright deiigns and lettering like exotic and
expensive beachwear from Florida. At Carnival time in Trinidad
trousers like those are worn as a joke at Ole Mas Carnival, but at
Charlotteville they are workday trousers. They looked right and had
a touch of the pirate about them.
Walking again by the seashore, I talked to a youth who said
'Good evening', though it was not yet one o'clock. I asked him why
he was not enjoying himself with a swim.
'The water's a bit shaky,' he said, because the surface of the sea
was heaving gently and its glass waves occasionally churned up the
fine sand.
He switched on his transistor radio and there burst on the air,
like film music, a climax suited absolutely to the opulence of the
scene around us, music of that master of opulent sound, Elgar. In
surging gushes strangely expressive of Man-o'-War Bay's grandilo­
quence, out came the incomparable Pomp and Circumstance March
Number One, with its incomparable melody spoilt for ever, with
Elgar's express disapproval, by the attachment of the banal words
'Land of Hope and Glory'. Wider still and wider, however, was not
a description that could be applied to the steep enclosing amphi­
theatre of mountains and headlands. They set the bounds ofMan-o'­
War Bay for ever.
The village houses by the road were built upon stilts, and many
families seemed engaged in the sun-drying of cocoa beans. There
was much activity along the waterfront because the Scarlet Ibis was
due in on the visit it made once in three weeks delivering cargo and
to take on pigeon-peas and ground vegetables, bananas, cocoa beans
and copra.
Although Tobago is only twenty-six miles long, so many bays and
coves indent it and the 260 miles of road often run through so many
mountains and bends and steep inclines that from Scarborough to
Charlotteville was a two-hour bus journey. The women were already
waiting for the next one back to the capital, overburdened with live­
stock, bundles of vegetables, one woman carrying two sacks of empty
bottles and jars. Tobago's northern tip, like Mayaro on the east
coast of Trinidad, is not a place where one visit would suffice, but
although I took again the interesting and superbly beautiful ride
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from Scarborough along the coast, up and over the mountains at

Speyside and down to Charlotteville, I never actually stayed there as
I did at Mayaro. I was, in fact, just beginning to discover Tobago's
one fault-the whole island was so lovely that I wanted to stay
everywhere at once, and that, of course, was impossible.

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 �110 It
Pigeon-pea Mountains
Scarborough's Botanical Gardens, though unpretentious, are sur­
prisingly big for such a small town. Whenever I came back from the
mountains or forests the Gardens seemed impeccable in their neat­
ness and orderliness, yet they had lost none of the island's exuber­
ance of growth. Just inside the main entrance two fourteen-feet-high
stumps of old trees had become totem poles of morning glory, their
trumpets a radiant, deep blue. A gentle, bowl-shaped little valley
accommodating most of the gardens is generously grassed and set
with flower-beds and borders and shrubs, which included multi­
coloured crotons, and lined with formal paths, palms and trees. It
also boasts a lily-pond seething with tadpoles. Unlike Port-of­
Spain's Botanical Gardens, Scarborough's are more of a garden and
less of an arboretum.
The avenues of cabbage palms and royal palms are all well
groomed and wear their trunks whitewashed, so that they look as
trim as racehorses' putteed hocks. Rotten tree trunks have been
allowed to remain in many parts of the gardens as hosts to elaborate
displays of orchids, and these ornate flowers with their inevitable
overtone of luxury also grow thickly on the trunks of living trees. In
addition, there is a so-called orchid house which is, in fact, an aviary
of wire netting with fragments of tree branch wired to the open roof
from which the more exotic blooms sprout. The orchid house also
sports ferns and decorative conch shells, and these help to give the
enclosure a strong, though amusing, Victorian flavour.
One of the palm avenues leads to a plaisance on a knoll, grassy
and green and surmounted by a bandstand, and giving a view of
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 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

Scarborough Harbour and jagged rocks laced with foam a mile or so

out breaking the tranquillity of the green sea. The Botanical Gardens
here differ from Port-of-Spain's most noticeably in their lack of the
kiskadee's cry, although another tyrant flycatcher of similar size and
colouring is well represented-the king-bird, which whistles on a
long and wavering note. Not only is the king-bird's voice superior to
the kiskadee's rather grating talk, but he is a better aeronaut, too. At
the coming-on of evening in Scarborough's gardens the king-bird
gives a daring display of diving to catch insects, an activity followed
by nonchalant retirement to a tree perch for a concert of tremulant
whistling.
The road outside the gardens leads to Golden Lane, and one
morning I started to walk there. But it was steep and hot and by the
time I reached Mount Grace Post Office I joined some farm workers
carrying cutlasses and waited for the bus. Post Office was the name
and function gracing a little wooden hut which, besides the mail, also
dealt in a few tins of sardines and a few others of condensed milk
and a great deal of laughter and horseplay amongst the youngsters,
a happy, spontaneous liveliness which inevitably occurs when
Tobagans get together. The bus came at last and immediately began
a switchback journey up into the mountains. Here, in this interior
part, deep valleys score the land, thickly lined with vegetation and
trees, trees, trees all the way.
Yet in the landscape remain many signs that Tobago was once a
sugar island. In contrast to the mountains of Trinidad's Northern
Range, these mountains and their peaks had been cleared of their
virginal woods and each cone of the hills was so fertile that cane had
been successfully planted and reaped during the years of slavery.
When I saw those green hills they were only partly in use for growing
maize and pigeon-peas and sweet potatoes, a little cocoa and less
sugar. The cane of bamboo rather than the cane of sugar was in
evidence and from the valleys and roadsides and hills immense
clumps of this beautiful plant, which Chinese artists have never tired
of admiring, sprouted up like huge green fountains. Patches of
clearance were still being made and men with donkeys and primitive
hoes were out working, some on the precipitous terracing of the
hill-tops. The rough road never ran straight. At places it passed
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 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

without visible means of support over sheer, tree-lined drops where

streams coursed in the valley bottoms, supplying the village women
with nature's washing-machines.
All along the way houses and huts were sprinkled near the road,
and many of them had large baking-ovens made of dried mud and
built in the yards and gardens. I saw, too, that outside some houses
were four-feet-wide hemispherical iron pans like halves of sea-mines.
These were reminders of King Sugar's reign, or rather of his decline
in power when the slaves were freed and tried to make a living out
of their own miniature cane-fields won from the jungle.
We stopped at Les Coteaux, a small village whose children
chanted in a tall wooden schoolhouse. Nobody could visit this place
and escape its farming connection. Everywhere there were 'Agri­
cultural Dept Bulletin Boards' announcing the days and times when
pigeon-peas or bananas would be bought. And so we came to
Golden Lane, a lost-Inca kind of village that might have been
ensconced in the remotest spur of the Andes for all connection it had
with tiny Tobago around. The village's wooden houses clustered
about the sunny roadway in much the same way as Les Coteaux's.
Bare-footed, broad-chested country boys sat in the shade on wooden
boxes, their cutlasses beside them as faithful and as true as any
pirate's. The arrival of the bus was an occasion. For nine days out of
ten the bus up from the capital and the coast might bring only
familiar faces, though to be sure with new gossip. But the tenth day
might bring a complete stranger.
The stranger that morning noted in his book that Golden Lane
was no Inca or Andean village, because an out-of-date notice in Mrs.
Charlotte Douglas's store announced 'Hi Folks, A Grand Disguise
dance will be held at the Community Centre Golden Lane on
Carnival Saturday. Music by the Blue Diamond Steel Band. Admis­
sion Ladies $LOO. Gents $1.25. Dance time 8.30 p.m. Surprises.' I
would have loved that hill-top Carnival dance, but had to be content
with the blissful air of the place where nothing was flat or level, no
vista dull and the skyline serrated by the mountain peaks.
And on another day I took a journey in the same direction, but
went to Des Vignes. Instead of traversing the mountains to Les
Coteaux, the road cut through the rugged heart of Tobago and came
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 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

to Mason Hall, where a rocking-chair and a counter with glass jars

of sweets were set out on the front porch of the Post Office. Thinking
of my travels in Tobago afterwards it seemed, in the remembered
sunlight, that this was the most beautiful journey of all, excluding
always, of course, the first dazzling revelation of Man-o'-War Bay
from the ridge. But the ride to Mason Hall was memorable because
the road was a frieze of animation. The Agricultural Department's
trucks were out buying pigeon-peas at every crossroads. Women
with sacks of peas congregated where the solemn-faced village elders
and the smartly dressed youths witnessed the weighing in and saw
that justice was done.
The landscape of violent hills and serried ranks of peaks had their
counterpoint in little, gentle valleys high above the coasts, and
bananas waved in the breezes which blew across them. There were
pockets of grassland here and there, wild and unkempt because the
rate of growth was too great for the cutlass. Over these high meadows
blazoned the blossoming immortelles. Mason Hall Post Office was the
bus stop. But to all intents and purposes the bus was a chauffeur­
driven limousine entirely at the beck and call of the passengers.
When somebody wanted to get out anywhere along the route they
called out 'Bus stop, please!' Stop being in the imperative.
On leaving the bustle of pea-sellers we passed some waterfalls
half hidden from the road. They tumbled into a pool reminiscent of
Trinidad's Blue Basin. These, the Craig Hall Falls, were very pretty
indeed, splashing within the shade of overhanging trees, pretty in
that petite minuscule way which made Tobago completely enchant­
ing. We descended a beautiful, narrow valley with the Courland
River at the bottom, which meandered through high banks of balisier,
feathery and cool. There was a spectacular view down the green
basin, with rocks and the river, a landscape quite different from that
which the coastal road passed through on its way to Charlotteville.
When we got to Moriah an even bigger pea market was in pro­
gress, the country Negresses carefully signing the register against the
weight of their crop. Men in cork sun helmets (shades of pomp and
circumstance!) checked the scales, youths with unbounded energy
loaded the trucks and onlookers shelled pigeon-peas for their own
'breakfast' while watching the excitement of market morning. People
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 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

in the bus poked their heads out of the windows to inquire anxiously
of friends the weight of their harvest and thought ten cents a pound
a fair price. In Trinidad it was said that those who ate the fresh-water
fish called cascadura would return to the island to die. Anyone with
an eye for nature who has seen a pigeon-pea market up in these
delectable mountains of Tobago's green interior would never after­
wards be able to see that vegetable without returning in happy
memory to the high crossroads and diminutive sea-villages.
But not everyone overflowed with happiness on the morning of
my first visit to Moriah. A young boy screamed blue murder at a
roadside water tap not because his claims to manhood were being
exposed to public view but because the soap got into his eyes as his
mother lathered and washed him with as much determination as she
would scrub clothes. The village served as headquarters for the
Moravians, who were still a force to be reckoned with on the island.
This sect also had a stronghold at Montgomery, a village named after
John Montgomery, who came to Tobago as a missionary in 1787 and
did much noble work among the slaves. One of the passengers in the
bus said Moriah was also called 'The Broad Place', though 'broad'
perhaps was not the mot juste to describe the place where the bus
stopped, almost touching the wooden walls and wide-open doors of a
wooden shop propped on pillars, with the sheer drop of the moun­
tainside beneath its wooden floor, a drop I could see perfectly well
through cracks and chinks.
I got into the bus again for the last stretch of this journey to Des
Vignes. It was a fitting climax. All around, the pyramid hills were
terraced. Huts and houses balanced precariously on little individual
high ridges and peaks. This was a strange world now, for the land­
scape changed once more as I came into a tropical Switzerland,
except that here all was clothed in shades of green and the valleys
were not lost under snow, but under rioting bush. I watched a young
lad taking the family goats home for milking and wondered if they
were prize ones used in the goat races in which Tobago has a long
tradition associated with Eastertide. There was a V-shaped sea
glimpsed between the mountains' clefts as the road ran now along a
knife-edged ridge through this extraordinary range in miniature.
Then suddenly the sea swung into view between the switchback
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 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

green camel-humps of hills. Below, deep down in an incision in the

coastal mountains, was the bluest bay I had ever seen.
The bus terminus was at Des Vignes Post Office, a post office on
top of the world, it seemed, and one from which the mail must surely
come and go by carrier pigeon. But, of course, as everywhere on the
island, the buses carried the mail and I went down again with a few
letters and a couple of packets in a sack, down from Tobago's tiny
Matterhorns, Zermatts and Jungfraus, down from the place for which
any landscape painter would forsake alljust to paint the violent forms
of those peaks seen against the quintessential blue of King Peter's
Bay far below.
Visitors to Tobago should on no account miss those mountain
villages. In a sense, I had to discover them, for they were not regarded
as worthy of notice by any of the guide-books I consulted. Nobody
told me about such lovely places as Moriah or Des Vignes. They
appeared on no tourist itineraries brought to my notice, and the
guide-books devoted much of their limited space on Tobago to the
few birds of paradise on Little Tobago which sounded well as tourist
propaganda but quite missed Tobago's real character. The island's
main attractions were happily quite unspoilt, like the walk between
Moriah and Des Vignes, or the descent to Man-o'-War Bay. The
mountains of the interior and the bays and coves and valleys of the
coast were full of surprises and unsuspected delights, yet compara­
tively few of them were known.
The Nylon Pool is, of course, a famous haunt for those whose
journeys in the West Indies consist of no more than hops from one
island to the next. In spite of its name, which suggested something
in the wishing-well-Giant's-Causeway-Devil's-Dyke category of
tourist attractions, and therefore at best doubtful and at worst to be
avoided like the plague, the Nylon Pool really is a 'must' and well
rewarded the journey to get there.
Like all journeys in Tobago, the one to Milford was never dull. On
that particular occasion the country women in the bus got on to the
subject of food prices, which led to the subject of politics, and this
led to such explosiveness that the driver was obliged to quieten one
of the excited ladies by telling her to 'Shut up, man.'
'Stupid jackass,' the woman replied.
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 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

'Look, you on bus, man,' the driver reminded her with a note of
threat in his voice.
'I nothing,' the woman retorted as the bus set off, only to stop a
few seconds later so that a young man overburdened with baskets of
shopping could get in.
Against the altercation between the women I learnt from the new
arrival that he was a twenty-year-old Swedish seaman and he pre­
sumed I was a seaman also, because the tattoos on our forearms were
similar. He had recently sailed on the two-masted English schooner
Amphitrite, but was now on his own except for his girl-friend and
their fortnight-old baby. They were living on a small vessel they had
crossed the Atlantic in, then anchored in a cove near Robinson
Crusoe's Cave. When the child was a few months older they would
explore the other islands.
As we passed the Robinson Crusoe Hotel overlooking the wide
and sandy bay outside Scarborough I thought the Swede's young love
adventure would probably be as interesting, and probably more so,
than those which befell Defoe's hero. Although the hotels and sou­
venir shops advertised Tobago as Robinson Crusoe's Island, they
also knew that certain guide-books deflated the theory by saying that
the claim was 'groundless'.
Alexander Selkirk, the original of Robinson Crusoe, was born in
Scotland 1676. When he was nineteen the Kirk Session charged him
with indecent conduct in church, and in 1701 he was reprimanded
again, this time before the fully assembled congregation, for fighting
with his brother. There seemed to be nothing for it but to leave
Scotland. In the following year he joined up with Captain William
Dampier, naturalist, explorer, and pirate, and was appointed sailing­
master on one ofDampier's boats, the Cinque Ports. They had sailed
as far as the Pacific when Selkirk quarrelled with the captain over the
Cinque Ports's seaworthiness. Selkirk was told to keep his silence on
pain of being marooned on the Juan Fernandez islands. The boat
must have been in bad shape, for Selkirk chose to be marooned. He
was set ashore there with his personal belongings, books, navigation
instruments and a gun with shot and powder.
And there poor Selkirk remained, quite alone, since the island was
uninhabited, for four years and four months, until that remarkable
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 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

pirate Dr. Thomas Dover saw a light on the island. Going ashore,
Dr. Dover found Selkirk 'Cloth'd in Goat Skins who look'd wilder
than the first Owners of them'. So impressed was Dr. Dover with
Selkirk's story that he promised to make him sailing-master of the first
Spanish ship they captured, an event that soon took place.
They sailed then for Guayaquil, a fortified city on the coast of
South America which they successfully sacked. But the booty was
not enough to satisfy them and so they set off again after the richly
loaded Spanish plate ship on its annual visit to Mexico. It carried
200,000 sticks of gold, then worth $5,100,000. This seizure was the
biggest ever made of pirate gold and their ship was given a public
welcome on its return to Bristol. Selkirk received his share of the gold
and returned to Scotland. Instead of building a house, he dug himself
a cave in his father's garden, and lived his old island life in it as far
as the difference between Scotland and Pacific would allow. Then a
Miss Sally Bounce arrived and convinced Selkirk that she knew an
even better way of living close to nature, and they eloped south to
Bristol. Alexander Selkirk was then made the mate of the Weymouth,
in which he died in 1721 at the age of forty-five. Poets and other
writers celebrated Selkirk's amazing experiences, the best known
being Cowper's lines and Daniel Defoe's masterpiece, though it
remains a matter of speculation as to whether the novelist and Selkirk
ever met.
Closer examination of the circumstances under which Robinson
Crusoe was written might well show that the claims for Tobago were
not entirely 'groundless'. Defoe never went to either Tobago or Juan
Fernandez, but Captain John Poyntz did. Daniel Defoe was twenty­
four years old when Poyntz's The Present Prospect of the Famous and
Fertile Island of Tobago was published. For years Poyntz's book was
a constant promoter of interest in Tobago and it inspired London
merchants who wanted a stake in the Fertile Island. The book was
still sufficiently read for Dr. Moses Stringer to be impressed by the
Present Prospect in 1704, when he asked Queen Anne for a charter.
Poyntz's prospectus for would-be investors or settlers was full of
detail about Tobago, and it would be the type of book a stranger to
the Caribbean like Defoe would consult.
In the Journal of the West Indian Expedition, 1654-1655, Henry
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Whistler described Barbados, 'This Island is the dunghill where­

on England doth cast forth its rubbish: rogues and whores and
such like people.' All too often the so-called rogues were no more
than English prisoners like Henry Pitman, who, after the Battle of
Sedgmoor, was shipped to Barbados. Pitman was a man of great
courage and he managed to escape from Barbados and land on an
island he called Tortugas off the north Venezuelan coast. He lived a
Robinson Crusoe life, killing turtles for food and watching for a ship
to come and rescue him. And eventually a ship did pick him up and
in 1689 he published his memoirs, almost certainly read by Defoe,
whose novel did not come out until thirty years later. The English
public was well aware of the 'Famous and Fertile' Tobago as the
tropical paradise, whereas little was known about the Spanish Juan
Fernandez until Alexander Selkirk's adventure was published in
1713. But when Defoe's Robinson Crusoe came out six years later it
was the Caribbean and not the Pacific that was featured as the scene
of the shipwreck.
The wealthy Crusoe was sailing from Brazil to get slaves in Africa
for his Brazilian estate when a twelve-day storm sent his ship com­
pletely off course, so that the slaver found itself 'beyond the river
Amazona, towards that of the river Orinoque'. Later a second storm
hit Crusoe's ship as they 'stood away for Barbadoes' and carried them
westward until wrecked upon the sand with only Crusoe escaping
alive. Then he lived in a cave for twenty-five years and explored the
island, seeing land extending from the west to the west-south-west.
It was not until Man Friday turned up that Robinson Crusoe learnt
'this land which I perceived to the west and north-west was the great
island of Trinidad'. This is the direction of Trinidad from certain
parts of Tobago's coast. The locations so described were all very far
away from the Juan Fernandez group of islands in the Pacific. There
seems to be no doubt about it, from the descriptions, the names of
surrounding islands, the geography, and the degrees of latitude given
that Defoe placed his hero on the island of Tobago. But whether this
shipwrecked hero was based entirely on Selkirk, who asked to be put
down on Juan Fernandez, nobody can say. I feel Defoe might have
been more deeply impressed by Henry Pitman's much more dramatic
story of escape from Barbados and life on 'Tortugas'.
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Although I had no intention of going to see Robinson Crusoe's

Cave, an American couple on the bus were going there and they asked
the young Swedish sailor where to alight. 'Not that we believe in all
that stuff,' the husband said, though he believed in the Swiss Family
Robinson, and like Walt Disney had been to record their tree-house
on film.
I turned away to continue my silent dialogue with the landscape
through the bus window. There was Petit Trou Beach, on whose
miles of golden sands horse-racing used to take place until the new
track and grandstand, which the bus soon passed also, were built.
The country here, however, became remarkable not because of the
mountains, as was the case in most other parts of the island, but for
the lack of them. The peaks of the Main Ridge had given way to the
flat lowlands. The bus ran between hedgerows resembling an English
country lane and then on through large coconut plantations. Here,
the forest floor was not choked by undergrowth and wild ginger. All
was order, because the estates belonged to the Government Stock
Farm. It seemed odd, but a delight nevertheless for anyone with a
love of the soil, to see wide grasslands studded with palm trees and
great herds of cattle moving slowly under them. The herds were not
inconsiderable either in numbers or breeds or cross-breeds. The
Holstein-Friesians were easily recognized, their udders on the point
of bursting. For beef, and herds included Jamaican red polls which
had a touch of Brahmin blood in them, no doubt to give them resist­
ance to tropical conditions. There were Sahiwals and Charolais, also
used for crossing purposes, and, of course, the inevitable water­
buffaloes, as always caked in mud.
Some of the fields were open and had no palm shading, and here
the flocks of sheep showed considerable international influence,
although not a great deal of cross-breeding-or at least as far as I
could see from a number of drives through the Stock Farm which I
made by bus or car. West African ewes bearing twins or triplets, like
the Barbados black-belly dams, were all part of the same hirsel as
black-faced Persian grimmers and hoggets.
This district was called Canaan, and to ensure a constant flow of
milk and honey a careful rotational system had been worked out in
the rolling meadows, endowing the landscape hereabouts with forms
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and characteristics unusual in Tobago. The grasses which the herds

ate, both in the fields and as dry-season hay and silage, were im­
proved species brought from widely scattered countries to replace
old savannah pasture and sour grass and even the long-established
Para and Guinea grasses used for cut fodder. Now the emphasis was
on the reed-like Napier grass that grows to ten feet in height, and
there was also the similar Uba cane, both kinds coming from Africa.
There was the quick-growing Guatemala grass which I invariably
mistook for maize crops, as it grew to much the same height and
deceptively resembled sweet corn.
Trinidad and Tobago might have been specially created as holiday
islands with the endlessly enchanting green mountains and blue bays
and perennial sunshine. Yet, though the tourist industry was impor­
tant and by no means a negligible source of income, I felt sure that
there was even more room for the development of good farmland like
the beautiful reaches of open, recently cleared land in Trinidad
between Arima and Valencia or the Stock Farm on the road to Mil­
ford in Tobago. The title which Captain Poyntz gave to his publica­
tion, The Present Prospect of the Famous and Fertile Island of Tobago
could justifiably be used today on a prospectus for anybody wishing
to settle on the island. The present prospect of the mid-twentieth
century seems infinitely more reliable for the investor than it was for
the mid-seventeenth London merchants who backed Captain
Poyntz's plans.
This is largely due to the political situation in Trinidad and
Tobago. The new, two-island nation has escaped many of the
troubles which beset other newly independent countries, and
although the islands' population consists of different races and dif­
ferent cultures, these disparate elements already compose a homogen­
eous nation. The British and French plantation-owners were not
ruthlessly uprooted when Trinidad and Tobago won their indepen­
dence. They were encouraged to stay and become part of the new
nation like the East Indian merchants in San Fernando and the
Chinese laundrymen of Port-of-Spain. People of any class, race or
creed had been given the same rights of ownership and to vote for a
Government headed by a Governor-General, who, during my stay,
was a Chinese. The Prohibition Ordinance of 1917 against the
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Shouter religion was no longer in force, so that the Fire Baptists

could march in freedom to the Blue Basin for their candlelight
baptism. And the drum of Africa at last had a place of honour instead
of dishonour.
At midnight on 31st August 1962 the Union Jack was solemnly
lowered and the flag of Trinidad and Tobago raised in its place, a
smart, bright flag of black and white diagonal bands on a red ground.
This ceremony was not so much the severing of old and irksome ties
as the making of a new relationship within the Commonwealth. In
February 1966 Elizabeth II sailed into Scarborough Harbour with the
royal yacht Britannia flying her personal standard as the Queen of
Trinidad and Tobago. The two-islands' Queen was greeted there by
the man who led his country to Independence, Dr. Eric Williams.
The words he used to inaugurate the new nation neatly summed up
the islands' story, 'On 31st August 1962, the people of Trinidad and
Tobago will close one book of their history and begin another. Many
tributaries, small and large, have contributed to the Independence
current. Our people have come from Africa and India, England and
China, Syria and Lebanon, the U.S.A. and Venezuela, many countries
of Europe and many islands of the Caribbean. Our Independence
will be celebrated and prayers will be said for our new nation in the
churches of many faiths: Roman Catholic and Muslim, Anglican and
Hindu, Baptist and Methodist and Presbyterian. All races, all
colours, all creeds, all have combined, consciously or unconsciously,
knowingly or unknowingly, to make Trinidad and Tobago what the
country is today. Many individuals from different walks of life and
from varying backgrounds have played their part and added their
quota. And so the colony has become the Nation and we have moved
up from colonial slavery to Independent Nationhood.'
I was certainly enjoying the freedom of the islands without let or
hindrance. I considered myself lucky to be riding in that friendly
Milford bus with the windows open wide to balloon my beach shirt
round my hot body, rather than to be waiting at Strand-on-the­
Green for a bus where the stony indifference of one person to an­
other, the dismal scene through the steamy windows and the almost
obligatory silence make prisoners of the passengers. I had eaten and
slept in some odd places that would never get listed by the Tourist
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Board, but I had encountered no bed hugs and contracted no

stomach disorders as a result. I had walked through some Port-of­
Spain quarters of disrepute and never been insulted or assaulted. But
at the end of my bus ride to Milford I emerged from a swim to find my
clothes gone.
I was furious, not because of the nominal value which could be
attached to my much-travelled shirt and pants, but because of my
notebooks and collection of pressed flowers. Both notes and flowers
were almost irreplaceable. There was not a soul in sight, though I
imagined a big pair of eyes behind every palm watching my predica­
ment. I wondered if currents had carried me unawares along from the
place where I had undressed. A few yards away, however, I saw my
clothes. Not a leaf in my notebooks had been disturbed, but they
were definitely in a different place from where I had left them. After
I had dressed, pondering on the mystery, I wandered farther along
the beach and met the young man responsible. He had been cycling
to his work on the estate and saw that the incoming tide was about to
wet my few glad-rags and ruin my books and so he thoughtfully
moved the whole lot above the high-water mark.
The Milford road terminated at the beach which swept around
Store Bay. It was a vastly different beach from that at Mayaro. It was
different, too, from those on the north of Tobago, because coral was
the main theme of the whole area at Store Bay. Broken antlers of
coral lay scattered all along the beach, although more fantastic than
the coral were the sea fans made of delicate, white lace seaweed with
pinkish veins as though they were fl.at sponges made of plastic. Other
sea fans were as purple as pickled cabbage, and some were sulphur
yellow with black veins, all caught up in the shore wrack with
bunches of tiny sea grapes, corals and shells. Along this shore I
found, without the slightest sense of any search, large helmet shells,
surprisingly heavy and nearly a foot long.
The helmet shell possesses a most extraordinary form, its top
curling and spiralling like the dome of an Italian church designed by
Guarini. I wondered, in a passing fancy, if sailors had once taken
such shells home to Italy and that Guarini had seen them. Seashells
were transportable, hut, alas, the china-blue-green sea was not.
Nobody could have taken it to London for Turner to paint. But he
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would have found these light-washed, sky-paled colours suited to his

palette, as could be seen from his works such as the Tate Gallery's
Sunrise with a boat between headlands. His melting quality of paint,
the unerring observation of light as radiation, the poetic and emo­
tional response to the overwhelming flood of light through sky and
sea would have been well served by the coast of Tobago. The soft,
lambent, yet clear light captured by Turner in 1840 shone at Store
Bay in 1966. These colours, like the beach itself, were of an entirely
different order from those ofMayaro in Trinidad.
The coral reef lay close to the shore and was no doubt responsible
for the colours and millpond stillness of the sea. Nevertheless, the
broken coral on the beach made uncomfortable walking and un­
comfortable swimming, and led me to suppose that this particular
part of Tobago had perhaps been praised at the expense of other
equally remarkable beaches which were not in the tourist limelight,
although the colours of Store Bay were unique. Pelicans sat like
brown swans on the turquoise waters, ignoring the agitated terns
wheeling above, hoping to get the pelicans on the move with the
fishing so that the terns could then oblige them to disgorge. I recalled
how grateful we had all been during the acute food shortage that
followed Hurricane Janet in Grenada when the pelicans returned to
the reef by my house on Grand Anse Bay, pelicans which made an
excellent stew to go with the Government ration of rice.
On the left of Store Bay, however, lay a white and perfect beach.
This was Crown Point, blessed with an hotel of the same name built
on very low cliffs, perhaps no more than twelve feet high, which went
down directly to the beach. Crown Point Hotel deserved credit for
being unobtrusive, and it was partly hidden among the trees on the
low spit of land which again reminded me strongly of certain land­
scapes in Denmark. The two-storey, simple block of buildings had a
Scandinavian quality, too, and its lowness did not interrupt the pre­
dominant horizontality of the scene.
That afternoon there were clouds as mottled as little dove shells
as I went to examine some gun emplacements dating from the eight­
eenth century. A taxi stopped near by and the Americans from the
bus called to me. They had given up their walk to Crusoe's Cave and
had altogether abandoned the novelty of travelling 'native' in the bus.
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Their morning's exertion of doing nothing frantically now demanded

reward with a long drink, and we all retired to the splendid hotel
terrace for drinks. I refrained from mentioning the fact that Fort
Milford had been built by the British in 1777 and that those British
cannons had pointed out to sea not only against the French but
against Americans who were also involved with the question of
independence. My American companions might, on the other hand,
have been amused to learn that the Yankee privateer which came to
plunder the British settlement was called Oliver Cromwell.
We sat in the spacious gardens drinking rum and Coke, which
they did not refer to as Cuba libre, and looked out at the fine, sandy
beach sweeping round to Pigeon Point with the classical Caribbean
cluster of leaning palms and a few blue launches on the transparent
sea. And on top of all this the husband and wife were classical
American vacationists, clad in sun-glasses, peaked caps, the woman
in a hip-length, little-girl frilly dress and floppy hat, the man a replica
of film star George Raft. Like poles in this case attracting they quickly
joined another, almost identical American couple, who let everybody
know that they were 'going to drown some bait'.
Besides its marvellous views and pleasant gardens, the Crown
Point Hotel offered traditional Caribbean fare such as barbecues,
steel band music and limbo dancing. Tobago may have had a rival in
Juan Fernandez over the perennial arguments about Robinson
Crusoe's location, but the steel band was strictly a product which
originated in Trinidad, though every island and cay in the Caribbean
nowadays resounded to the music of the 'sweet pans'. Limbo dancing
formed a trio with pans and calypso, though performed principally
nowadays as a spectacle for tourists to beguile tropical evenings in
their hotels. The limbo dance might be described as the exact oppo­
site of the high jump in athletics, for, keeping in time with the accom­
panying music, the man or woman dancer bends slowly backwards,
ever lower and lower, and in this contortionist's position passes under
a low bar, often aflame, suspended between two uprights. In order to
display prowess and to prolong the performance and draw it to a
climax the bar is placed about three feet from the ground at the
beginning. Without difficulty, leaning backwards and having no
support but his legs the dancer works his way under it. When the bar
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is progressively lowered until less than twelve inches from the floor
even the honeymooners in the audience stop gazing into each other's
eyes and the vacationist businessmen forget to chew on their cigars
as everybody watches the quite unbelievable sight of the thin, but
extraordinarily muscular human body, bent backwards, shoulders
almost brushing the floor though still with no support from hands,
wriggle under the bar without touching it.
I did not stay to see limbo at Crown Point, because I wanted to
walk right round Store Bay to the other headlands, my objective
being the Nylon Pool rather than the fresh-water pool of the hotel
terrace. Along this beach, as at Mayaro, the purple seaside bean
dominated the sandy floor under the palm trees. Many of the palms
here had been victims of Hurricane Flora and now were only odd,
standing stumps without their feathery green tops which had been
snapped off in the tearing winds. The palm plantation of the Bon
Accord Estate led to the Aquatic Club on Pigeon Point. The youth
who rescued my clothes saw me walking and came over to ask for a
'friction' to light his cigarette. His two friends agreed to take me out
to Buccoo Reef during the afternoon low tide for a modest sum. They
had a beautiful pea-green boat powered by the last word in outboard
motors. They also provided me with a snorkel mask and slippers
when we reached the reef, which I had expected to be full of visitors.
But we had not seen a soul as we went out, unless, as superstitious
sailors used to believe, the terns we saw plummeting into the sea
contained the souls of drowned sailors.
The slippers were necessary to make standing possible at all on
the coral's sharp crenellations. The tide was now out and only three
feet of water covered the reef. With the snorkel mask I put my head
under and saw another miracle of fishes. This was a miracle of a
different order from that of the impressive sea harvest hauled ashore
by the fishermen at Mayaro. Colour and not size was the reward to be
gained by this placid sea trip, though some of the parrot fish weighed
twenty pounds or so. I saw crowded schools of common tangs follow­
ing our boat in a sort of submarine carnival procession. The splendid
angel fish of many kinds contributed their own exotic note of ivory
or cobalt, and black edged with gold, and yellow fins on specimens
two feet in length of grey lustre. Common, too, were the four-eyed
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butterflies of pale lemon and spotted bands, unperturbed by my

intrusion into their world of mauve coral.
The boatmen held out some old bait and in a flash streaks of blue
and orange queen-trigger fish were making a very unqueenly attack
on it. The peacock-coloured parrot fish disdained such titbits and
preferred to nibble the brittle coral antlers which curiously constitu­
ted part of its normal diet. There were red parrots, blue parrots,
green parrots and rainbow chub, gorgeous pink squirrel fish, the
yellow-tailed demoiselle, schools of sergeant majors with bold black
stripes on luteous backgrounds. There were moments when the
glass-clear water seethed with French grunt which then disappeared
as herds of goat fish frolicked over the coral. Among the curios were
the X-ray fish which had transparent bodies. And there was the
surgeon of a particularly sumptuous royal blue, armed with a pair of
scalpel spines in readiness for enemies-excluding human beings, to
whom I presumed they were rather attracted judging from the
number which came to diagnose me.
I had never seen an aquarium as lovely as that natural one out at
Buccoo Reef. Since I had hired the pea-green boat by the hour the
youths were delighted that I did not notice both hands of my water­
proof watch moving round. The colours and formations of the sea
gardens themselves, besides their fish, were completely enchanting
seen through the perfectly clear water where the sun pierced the
shallows to the reef itself, picking out every detail of the coral's
architectural fantasia, enhancing every yellow fin, each half-moon
tail, the sea eggs and purple fans of the luminous underwater world.
The fishes' jazzy hues, the combination of startling colours, the
striped and the spotted, those of silky lustre, those of perfectly
circular shape and the friendliness of numerous species made the
Buccoo Reef excel beyond its fame. No emphasis or repetition of
tourist propaganda could ever hope to convey the wonder of the
reef. Visitors apt to shy away from places lauded as excellent tourist
sights should on no account miss Buccoo Reef.
After the reef the Nylon Pool was necessarily an anticlimax,
though it was an interesting phenomenon none the less. Tides and
currents of centuries had hollowed out this deep circular pool from
the coral reef. Its soft sandy bottom had the sensuous quality of silk.
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The Nylon Pool delayed me and I was quite prepared to find the last
bus back to Scarborough had gone when the pea-green boat eventu­
ally put me ashore.
At the bus stop I asked a man, 'Has the bus come?'
'Oh yes, sir. It now coming.'
His musical phrase could be interpreted into many shades of
meaning, although the certainty of the bus's coming and its immi­
nence were implied. However, before it did come a woman passed
us with a rolling swing of her ample bottom, which, by reason of its
amplitude, seemed to be on the point of bursting from the confines of
light jeans. Anatomy such as Rubens loved, I thought, and it was
plain what the man thought.
The woman rebuked us saucily, 'What you lookin' all at?'
'I like she walk,' said the man enthusiastically without taking his
eyes from the tantalizing creature as she put even more rotation into
her hips on her royal progress down the road.
Next day Inspector Gittens was my companion again and for a
long time we discussed another tantalizing lady of Tobago, a Mrs.
Betty Stiven. Exactly how tantalizing she had been in the flesh was
impossible to know, but her gravestone had been puzzling islanders
and visitors alike ever since it was put there by her husband, 'Aley
Stiven to the end of his days will deplore her Death which happened
upon the 25th day of November 1783 in the 23rd Year of her Age'.
So far straightforward in a tragic sort of way. But then the inscrip­
tion continued with this conundrum,
She was a Mother without knowing it
And a Wife without letting her Husband know it,
Except by her kind indulgences to him.
For years this inscription had roused curiosity, and endless solu­
tions to the puzzle had been put forward, though none which could
fully satisfy all three lines. As though it was one of his court cases,
Inspector Gittens patiently listed and explained those he had heard.
He was driving in his usual slow and careful way over to Plymouth,
where the mysterious gravestone stood by the roadside amongst
wooden houses shaded by breadfruit trees. No other graves lay near
by and the railing had only just had a fresh coat of paint for a visit to
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Betty Stiven's resting-place by Queen Elizabeth II. The six-foot slab

bore the incised script of the late eighteenth century, which was a
time for good lettering.
Children going home from school sucking pieces of sugar cane
looked at the Inspector and me with curiosity. Obviously the Un­
knowing Mother occupied a place of importance in Plymouth to
bring royal visitors and a steady flow of tourists to the little seaside
town. Not indeed that Plymouth was without other attractions and
its place in the island's turbulent history. Fort James had been built
at Plymouth before Fort King George at Scarborough. The Fort was
still called James after the Duke of Courland, though the town itself
changed from Courland to Plymouth in spite of the fact that it over­
looked Great Courland Bay into which the Courland River flowed.
It seemed as though nothing could be more English in appearance
anywhere in the West Indies than the low, mounded headland
occupied by Fort James, where sheep were cropping the short down­
land grass within the sound of the sea and the wind threshing, birds
twittering and lambs crying. It was Cornwall on a hot summer day.
I speculated as to whether Aley Stiven had been one of Governor
Ferguson's 427 oddly assorted sailors and planters, Militia and regu­
lars who watched 3,000 French soldiers arrive in Great Courland
Bay in 1781. Betty would have been only twenty-one years old then,
but wise enough to get out of the way of the plundering French army,
which on landing advanced across the plantations, burning all the
sugar cane. But the British flag was flying again over Fort James two
years later when Betty died as a wife without letting her husband
know it.
Inspector Gittens and I stood on the Fort by the little stone cabin
which was once its magazine and which still dominated the knoll by
the sea. Here the Dutch and the Courlanders, the French and Eng­
lish, the Swedes and the Spaniards had won their battles and
suffered their defeats. And here, too, the defeated slaves had been
unloaded on to the beach below, where their descendants were the
masters now on Tobago since the act oflndependence in 1962. Many
people must have looked across the bay, longing for the lost home­
land of Africa. But that was a long time ago. Now Tobago meant
home to the Negro working in his pigeon-pea garden up on the
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heights of Des Vignes, as it was equally home to the French pro­

prietor and the Chinese shopkeeper.
The cannons still mounted guard at Fort James, but the twitter of
the sugar birds and the cor anglais cry of sheep were the only noises
likely to interrupt the soughing winds moving onshore or offshore
through the plams inclined over the beach. One day a group of
Creole schoolboys playing football manned the thick embrasured
walls half-buried in the soil, but the boats out to sea carried harpoons
and nets and not swivel guns or Spanish loot, and nowadays the only
ambushes set were wooden decoys for turtles. The blue water here
was no longer the cockpit of Europe's colonial powers with pirates
looking on and laying their bets in favour of the various contenders.
The waters beyond Great Courland Bay were famed now for
mackerel and black jack, cavalli and barracuda.
Inspector Gittens had kindly offered to take me around the Ply­
mouth area, and I enjoyed our short tour. But the landscape viewed
from Fort James whetted my appetite and so I took an early bus over
to Plymouth again the next day. I had asked the conductor for a
return ticket to the terminus of the route, and I became confused
when we reached the centre of Plymouth and after only a short stop
started going back to Scarborough along the same road as we had just
come. But still the conductor assured me we had not reached the
terminus. Thinking that there must be a lower part of Plymouth
reached by an inland road to the sea I asked no more questions. The
ride was most enjoyable in any case, especially after we left the main
Plymouth road and began to follow the coast. I eventually discovered
the Plymouth bus terminus was at Black Rock, which was not the
collection of dark brown rocks like chocolate cake which protected
the foot of Fort James.
After several miles the bus finally halted in a long country lane. I
heard the sea and found it quite near by, as the conductor had
promised all along I would. Here also, at Black Rock, I discovered the
finest bathing beach of them all. It was neither too big nor too small,
too steep nor too fiat, too hot nor too shady. The sand was fine, firm,
sloping and free of wrack and coral. The narrow margin of palms
between the coast road and the beach had a carpet of the ubiqui­
tous goat's-foot ipomoea and purple seaside bean. And here on the
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beach, as along so many roadsides and gardens and pastures in

Tobago, bushes of black sage grew, the Lantana camara. People at
the Edendale Guest House called this plant rough bush and said it
was used for making tea. The shrub certainly had rough leaves and
the flowers were verbena-like, coloured orange to red, which soon
turned to mauve and white. Black sage or rough bush has an aroma
like mint mixed in lemonade. King-birds put on acrobatic displays as
they swooped down in a yellow-green flash for beach insects and with
superb flight were gone as swiftly as they had come.
Once during my early childhood I was taken to the sea beyond
Bangor in County Down. The waves then had seemed large, though
not at all angry or vengeful. They built themselves up and poised in
perfect arcs before completing the circle and breaking. I thought
often of those waves, but when I next went to the sea I had grown so
big and the waves so small. I never saw such waves again until I
visited an exhibition at the Cavendish Gallery in London and saw
two oil paintings by Liam Hanley, both subjects with a single wave
rising up like a mountain and curling over in exactly the way I
remembered from the sands of County Down. I never thought to
have the same experience again, but I did the moment I stepped
through the trees on to Black Rock beach. Here the waves rose out of
Hanley's subtle canvases and childhood's memories. They rode into
the bay in solemn procession like summer clouds and then, mounting
upwards to eight feet of geometrical perfection before an invisible
handbrake was released, each wave tried to outrun its predecessor in
foaming fury, racing to the purple bean garden among the palms.
Perhaps through those associations with my early life, I became
particularly fond of Black Rock beach and loved throwing myself
into the green, arching breakers. It was here at Black Rock that a
Major Hamilton of the Militia manned the single gun capable of
making any impression against the large-scale French invasion of
1781. I thought I had discovered a place that would never be invaded
by anybody else again until George Baird appeared and told me that
the Beatles had favoured Black Rock, and during their recent stay in
Tobago had come, according to young George, 'Plenty, plenty to
swim and catch plenty pounds of fish.'
But then the people of Trinidad themselves think of Tobago as an
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island for holidays. The island's economy is based on farming and,

in a conservative way, tourism in its best sense. Fortunately Tobago
does not lie on the direct line of international air routes, so that its
visitors have to go via Trinidad. Most of Tobago's tourists go with
the express intention ofrelaxing, which can hardly be done in Port-of
Spain at Carnival time. Compared with Trinidad, the island is small,
but so far not a victim of those who delight to despoil. Yet, although
small, Tobago's coast is crowded with numerous coves and small
bays where the famous or the infamous can escape the public eye
and, like the Beatles or Princess Margaret on honeymoon, escape the
fans or the crowds.
George Baird had seen the Beatles at Black Rock, where he lived.
He was more proud of that than the cross which his brother had
tattooed on him 'long time ago'. But it could not have been such a
long time ago, because George was only thirteen years old, in spite of
his height and his ability to play the tenor tumba drum in Black
Rock's Texaco Band. George's father had died from cancer five
years earlier and his mother now supported the family by buying fish
from the boats and peddling it around the villages. At the moment,
George explained, 'The men can't fish until the sea cool down.' I
thought this a nice expression, for the foam I enjoyed so much
certainly looked as ifit was boiling.
George was a Boy Scout, 'And guard the Queen when she come
after the Beatles.' His highest praise was for the Duke of Edinburgh,
'He real friendly. Talk plenty, plenty. Very jokey.'
George Baird of the Black Rock Texaco Band was like so many
helpful and friendly people I encountered by chance along the
beaches or up in the mountain villages. I met nobody who was too
shy to talk and all talked with pleasure at meeting a stranger, and in
this George was like the people ofthe People's Cafe that served Black
Rock as a village store and bar from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., as its owner
Turner Rochford told me.
Turner was forty years old and had worked on farms until not
long before. Then he lost a leg in an accident when he was cycling
home and a car ran into him. He could do no more manual work and
so, with the aid ofa crutch, ran the little wooden hut as a village shop.
Although the People's Cafe was more like a local club and he there-
294
 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

fore never lacked company, Turner missed the active, open-air farm
life in the sugar fields and citrus groves. The speciality in his shop
was 'mauby', a drink he brewed daily from the bark of a tree. The
shelves around the tiny counter were lined with old rum bottles
filled with freshly made mauby. None of them was corked, because
froth, a substance that looked like ice-cream, still bubbled out of the
liquid. Children came in with enamel mugs, helped themselves to
chunks of ice from a wooden box and then poured mauby over it.
The bus for Scarborough I wanted did not turn up on time.
News arrived that it had broken down. Several people with cars
offered to take me back, but I preferred to spend another hour at the
People's Cafe. Work finished for the day, fishermen and road­
menders and coconut-cutters and cocoa-pickers gathered about the
little hut. Some of the men sat outside the gap in the wooden wall
that served as window and played gin rummy, listening at the same
time to cricket on the radio. They sat close in the hut's shade and the
faithful dogs that followed them everywhere slept flat out under a
near-by calabash tree hung with huge green fruit.
A cleft in the hills opened opposite the cafe doorway. A steep and
greenly beautiful little valley bisected the hills. An old man with a
sickle moved slowly through high grass cutting indoor fodder and an
old woman picked pigeon-peas into her apron. By now the late
afternoon gave out the first hints of evening. The sun pierced the
shade of bananas and palms, and the yellow king-birds intensified
their last hunting forays of the day.
The sea's moods, the seasons of planting and reaping alone did
not govern the little world of Black Rock. Although Carnival itself
was over, the youngsters in the Texaco Steel Band still wandered
into the People's Cafe with their short, rubber-tipped drumsticks,
unconsciously humming or whistling Obeah Wedding, wearing
nothing except shorts, because the day's heat had still not yet given
way to the approaching coolness of evening. But before long they
would be stylishly dressed in T-shirts or coloured shirts and tight,
knife-edge-creased trousers, each one a dandy.
A major event in Black Rock's daily life was the coming of the
bread van to the People's Cafe. Within minutes of its trays being un­
loaded women and girls called in for the deliciously sweet-smelling
295
 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

bread. Much of it had been shaped into miniature loaves which sold
at a penny each. The customers wrapped their bread in the clean tea­
towels they brought, although a good number of the loaves were
shared out and eaten before home was ever reached in the depths of
the coconut plantations. The smallest girls' hair was plaited to reveal
partings, making patterns on their heads like hot-cross buns. Others,
more elaborately plaited, resembled harvest loaves.
That night I was leaving Tobago to spend a last few days at
Mayaro, so I half wished that no bus at all would arrive at Black Rock.
But it did come and I got on after finishing the last glass of Turner
Rochford's splendid mauby. There was a pulling of heartstrings
which I knew would be similarly strained when I left Mayaro for
Port-of-Spain and then left Trinidad for northern latitudes.
The Spencer family insisted I ate a special ice-cream dessert they
had made for me when I called to pick up my bag from the Edendale
Beach Guest House. I still had time to walk along the mile or so of the
Windward Road to Scarborough Harbour, the quiet road where the
sea shushed to and fro on the shore below and where the bullfrogs
sang in the ditches when the sun went down and the lighthouse up
on Fort King George came on, sweeping the upper air with arms of
focused light. Not even a chink of light showed from the nuns'
wooden house when I went by, for it was past nine o'clock, but Harry
the watchman across the road at the new County Hall was still
sitting on the forecourt wall eating custard apples and giving cheerful
good nights to all passers-by.
Inspector Gittens came on board to see me off and as usual we
laughed a lot and then he went ashore and I went to bed and even
before the Bird of Paradise left Scarborough fell asleep. Next morn­
ing I was told the crossing had been one of model calmness. After
collecting letters and arranging affairs at a shipping office, I went up
Charlotte Street for a shrimp chow mein at the Rosary Guest House
before going across to Mayaro for the last time. Rosary House was
unchanged, except, of course, that the Queen had been since my
night under Mr. Lo Ten Foe's roof two months earlier, so there was
naturally a new addition to his royal portrait gallery on the dining­
room walls.
Mr. Lo Ten Foe was sitting behind the familiar desk.
296
 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

'How nice to see you again!' he said, adding what a pity I had
come too late for Carnival.
'But I have been in Trinidad and Tobago ever since I last saw
you,' I protested.
'Oh! So long?'
It had been for the island's beaches that I used to leave Venezuela
and fly to Port-of-Spain and stay at the Rosary Guest House when
both Mr. Lo Ten Foe and I were younger. In those days I never got
as far as Tobago, because I made a beeline for the beautiful bathing
beaches in which Trinidad abounded. But then as now 'beach'
usually meant 'Mayaro'.
So later in the afternoon of my return from Tobago, long before
night slipped its mask over Port-of-Spain's Savannah, I was plunging
into Mayaro's Atlantic breakers along with Mr. Ram and other
coconut-workers from the estate who wanted the water to cool the
fire in their skin caused by the latest attacks of the Jack Spaniards.
They told me that both Spartacus and The Zenith had taken good
'pulls' that day. Keg had brought a ten-pound cavalli to Cinta's
Camp and Cucus was cooking it for our supper.
Holiday-makers from Port-of-Spain and San Fernando were still
on the beach, stalking carefully over the wet sands, piling chip-chips
into plastic bags. The plastic bags would probably not outlive the
centuries, but perhaps future archaeologists will be as amazed at the
number of chip-chip shells in the city's refuse dumps as Yale
University's team was at the hoards of the mussel shells and turtle
bones in Mayaro's Amerindian middens of 805 to 785 B.C.
I had found many changes in Trinidad since my last stay eleven
years before, but the beaches remained inviolate,just as twenty-seven
centuries had not changed the islanders' love of chip-chip and turtle
soup. On the Boeing 707 from London I had noticed the B.O.A.C.
booklet mentioned Mayaro's chip-chip as being good for making 'a
nourishing soup'. I could not help wondering if the tribes who
depended so much on mollusca for their meals had been preoccupied
with its food or its romantic value.
A famous Amerindian singer in the last century called Surisma
claimed that calypso started with the carieto which the aborigines
sang to give men strength in love or battle. So if they could return to
297
 PIGEON-PEA MOUNTAINS

their chip-chip crammed middens the Newer Stone Age islanders

· might not be surprised to see others gathering the shells and the
radios going with a modem calypsonian singing,
Now chip-chip is a thing inside a shell
That is ifyou want to knows it well
In talkaree it's wonderful
But the water that it spring
Is powerful.

298
 Index
Abercromby,Sir Ralph,71,77 Bailey, George,81,86, 87, 101,206
Abou el Hassan,king of Morocco,98 Bain, Donald,13
Abraham,Joseph, 235 Baird, George,293,294
Africa,40,69,70,76,94,97,98,99, Baker, Captain,173
100, I I I, I 18, 126, 127, 149, Balandra, 155
158, 159, 167, 191, 196, 203, Barbados, 152, 167, 212, 213, 221,
231, 284,291 222,253,254,255,256,281
Africanus, Leo,98 Barrackpore,126
Ahmed the Golden,king of Morocco, Bateau Bay, 262, 263
98 Beatles, the,89, 112,174,293,294
Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 223, Beausejour, 105-9
239,241,256 Belle Garden, 250,251
Alladin, M. P.,151 Belmanna, Corporal,254
Amerindians, 51, 52, 54,55,56, 58, Benoit,Joseph,64,67-75
59, 60, 62, 77, 95, 129, 149, Bentley, E. C.,242
159, 160, 190, 219, 220, 223, Berrio,Antonio de, 56-60
229, 231, 248, 263, 264, 265, Biche, 198-200
266,297 Binkes, Admiral, 222
Arawaks,52, 54, 60, 62, 63, 230 Bird-of-Paradise, M/V., 214-25, 237,
Caribs, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58,60, 244,296
63,223,230,23 I, 263 Birds, 32, 38, 39,43,44, 50,64,65,
Chaymas,133 67, 75, 79, 80, 81, 106, 114,
Morukas, 63 I 15, 135, 140, 141, 144, 145,
Warraus,63 153, 155, 156, 172, 183, 193,
Amiens,Treaty of,243 I 94, 2 I 6, 226, 234, 249, 259,
Anne, queen of England, 223, 263, 263,264,274,286,293
280 Biswas, Mister, 124, 142, 167, 175,
Antigua,214 179,258
Aquatic Club,288 Black Rock,292-6
Arima,44-63,67,76,152,153,155, People's Cafe,294-6
209,283 Texaco Band,294,295
Railway Station, 50,61, 119 Blanc,Fred,177, 178,195
St. Rose of Lima Church,51,61 Blancheland, General, 267
Woodford St.,52,60,62,63 Blanchisseuse,63-76,154,156
Aripo, 64,65,216 Bligh,Captain,198
Arouca, 50 Blue Basin,104-11, 199,276,284
Aruba,80,222 Boca de Monos,216
Ashing, Chai,166 Boca Grande, 217
Azores, 120,251 Bocas, S. A.,188,197

299
 INDEX

Bocas del Dragon, 2 1 7 150, 151, 187, 196-210, 213,

Bolivar, Simon, rn3 294,295,297
Bon Accord Estate, 288 Caroni Plain, 49,115
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 243,260 Caroni Swamp, I14
Bonney, Anne, 240 Carrera, 215,216
Bounce, Sally, 280 Carty, Leonard, 86,206
Brazil, 46,54,61,69,IOI, 158,175, Casas, Bartolome de las, 229-3 I, 233
194,216,281 Cazabon, Jean M., 41
Bridges, Major Albert, 125 Central Range, 198,199
Bridges, Sir Tobias, 222 Chacachacare, 215,216,217
Brighton Pier, 138 Chacon, DonJose, 71,77,128
Britain, 48,70,72,77,III, II7,120, Chamberlain,Joseph, 147,149
125, 126, 148, 149, 172, 223, Chang, Carlisle, 151
240,241,243,264,287 Charles, Alphus, 152
Britain, Mister, 138,139 Charles I, king of England, 219,220
Brithwaite, J. A. C., 26 Charles II,king of England, 99,IOO
Brown, Alexander, 256 Charles V,king of Spain, 230
Buccoo Reef, 288,289 Charlotte, Queen, 22
Buen lntento, 75 Charlotteville, 257,262,266-73,276
Buenos Aires, 102 Charuma, 198
Bullbrook, Dr.J. A., 14,52-56,133, Chin Chin, 75
I 56, I go, 23 I, 248,266 Chinese, 39,40,113,120,137,167
Busy Corner, 74 Christopher, Kay, 208,213
Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, 113
Calcutta, 123 Cipero Ste. Croix, 75
Caledonia Island, 2 1 5 Cipriani, Captain A. A., 149, 172,
Calypso music, 74,81, 94-96,297 173
Cambridge, 161, 164 Ciudad Bolivar, 102
Campbell, Augustus, 269, 270 Claude, youth at Carenage, 3 7
Campbell, Henry, 269,270 Coa, Mrs., 75,76
Campbell Town, 270 Cocal, the, 163, 164, 168, 177,198,
Canaan (Tobago), 282 199
Canaan (Trinidad), 131 Codallo, Alfred, 15 1
Canada, 42, 43,126, 130,139, 183, Coeur de Lion, Richard, 147
198 Columbus, Christopher, 54, 55, 56,
Canadian Confederation, 42 60,63,122, 132,152,217,218,
Caracas, 65, 121 224,228,229,263,266
Carapichaima, 75 Conquistadors, 55,57,229
Cardinez, Lennox, 63,64,69 Constant, Peter, 222
Carenage, 35-40,104, ms, 145 Cooper, Mrs. E., 72,73,75
Arrow Beach Hotel, 38,39 Courland, 220,221,222, 260
Carlyle, Thomas, 117, 1 18 Courland River, 276,291
Caribs, Queen of, see under Martinez, Craig Hall Falls, 276
Mrs. Cromwell, Oliver, 213,221,240
Carnival, 13,21, 37,48, 66, 74,79, Cronstadt Island, 215,216
81, 82, 86, 87, 88, go, 93, 94, Crown Point, 286,288
95,96,101, !04,146,147,148, Crown Point Hotel, 286, 287

300
 INDEX

Crusoe's Cave, 279, 286 Farrell,Jeannette, 151

Cucus, cook at Cinta's Camp, 178, Fawcett, Colonel, 46
I 79, 182, 184, 187, 195, 197, Ferdinand V, king of Spain, 55, 56
208, 209, 297 Ferdinand VII, king of Spain, 128
Cunapo Southern Road, 198 Ferguson, Governor, 291
Fez, 98, 99
Finn, Captain, 241, 256, 257
Dalziel, Nan, 152
Five Rivers, 50
Dampier, Captain William, 279
Flanagan, 75
Darling, Anne, 233
Florida, 63
Darling, General H. C., 233
Foon, Patrick Chu, 151
Defoe,Daniel, 27g-82
Forestry Department, 13, 64
Delaford, 255, 256, 257, 260, 261
Fort Milford, 287
Derby, 123
France, 69, 70, 74, 75, 96, 97, 99,
d'Estrees, Comte, 222
100, 106, 130, 180, 220, 221,
Des Vignes, 275, 277, 278, 292
Devil's Woodyard, 75, 171-6 222, 223, 241, 243, 251, 253,
256, 267
Diego Martin, 105-7, 152, 199
Francis I, king of France, 70
Dillon, Count Arthur, 243
Froude, Professor J. A., 118, 119,
Dolman, youth in Port-of-Spain, 81,
147, 149
82, 86, 96, 104, I IO, 207
Fyzabad, 75
Dominica, 56, 214
Dominicans, Irish, 194, 195
Gasparee Island, 215, 2 16
Dover,Dr. Thomas, 280
Gayadeen, Holly, 151
Dragon's Mouths, 39, 217, 218,
George III, king of England, 242-4
224, 237
Germany, 102, 106, 125, 126, 149,
Drake, Sir Francis, 239
166
Dundonald, Lord, 134
Gilbert,Jones, 152
Dutch, 219, 220, 222, 267, 268
Gillespie Brothers, 254, 255
Dwali, festival of, 103
Gittens, Inspector Herman, 249,
251, 257, 258, 290-2, 296
Eastern Main Road, 44-46, 50, 153 Glasgow, Leo, 151
Edinburgh,Duke of, 294 Glodon, Kenny, 170, 179, 190, 192
El Aripo, 64, 74 Goddard, M. C. C., 32
ElDorado,55-58,120,121,165,231 Godineau River, 38
Elizabeth I, queen of England, 59, Golden Lane, 274, 275
98, 239 Government Stock Farm, 282, 283
Elizabeth II, queen of England, 25, Great Courland Bay, 291
44,173,174,205,244,284,290 Greaves, Captain R., 240
El Tucuche, 64 Grenada, 56, 211, 212, 214, 221,
England, 24, 25, 46, 49, 59, 70, 75, 255, 286
78, 79, 98, 99, IOO, I 16, 121, Grimes, Errol, 205
124, 163, 164, 166, 208, 221, Guadaloupe, 128
233,239,241,243,256,266,281 Guarini, 285
Engledow, William, 232 Guatavita, 58
Erin, 149 Guayaguayare, 74, 176, 185
Evans, Professor Estyn, 159 Guinea, 100, 239

301
 INDEX

Gunn,James, 232 Isabella, queen of Spain, 55, 224,

Guyana, 36,62,63,212 229

Haiti, II8,121 Jamaica, 223,239,240

Hamilton, Major, 293 James, Duke of Courland, 220,221,
Hands, Israel, 256 223,241,291
Hanley, Liam, 293 James I, king of England, 219
Hard Bargain, 75 Jeffery, Captain, 232
Hardinge, Lord, l 48 Jerningham, Sir Hubert, 147
Harman, Admiral, 268 Job,James, 270
Harmony, 75 John III, king of Portugal, 97
Hart, David, 24 Jones, George, 104
Hart, Edmund, 208 Jordan,Judith, 207
Hawkins, Sir John, 239 Joseph, Aziz, 236
Hector, Hubert 'Keg', 178, 179, Joseph, Frank, 197
184, 186, 187, 196, 197, 209, Juan Fernandez Islands, 27�1,
297 287
Hernandez, Edward, 151
Herskovits, Mr. and Mrs. M., 68,69 Kartik-Nathan, festival of, 164,188
Heung, Stephen Lee, 206 Kati, Mahmoud, 98
Hindus, 34, 46, 48, 103, 110, II4, Kevin, youth from Barbados, 212,
I 16, I 19, 120, 123, 138, 142, 213
148,164,175,182 Keymis, Captain, 246
Hindustan, 175 Kid, youth in Port-of-Spain, 28,29
Hochoy, Sir Solomon, 113 King Peter's Bay, 278
Holland, 70 King's Bay, 255-7,260
Hollis, Sir Claude, 51 Kingsley, Charles, 57,72,131,134,
Hosein, festival of, 48,49,101,148 161,162-4,169
Huevos Island, 215 Kitchener, Lord, 96,204
Hume, David, 98 Kow, Young, 236

Ibarra, Don Ortuno de, 229 Labour Party, 149

Iceland, 133,175 La Brea, 135-9
lere, 54 Lampsins, Baron Adrien, 220,268
Illustrious Cabildo, 58,70,77 Lampsins, Cornelis, 220
Indentured labour, 37, 120, 124, Lapeyrouse, Picot de, 96,99,100
l 25,148 Las Cotorras, 215
Independence, 1 73,284,291 Lear, Edward, 153
Ingram, Sir William, 263 Leeward Islands, 221
India, 40,46,48,49,116,119,124, Lenagan Island, 215
191 Lenthall, William, 2 13
Indian Walk, 75,175 Les Coteaux, 275
Ireland, 28,76,108,134,154, 159, Leverton, Rev. Nicholas, 228
172,212,213,221 Lewis, Newel, 151
Irving, Sir Henry, 50, 51, 61, 119, Limbo dance, 287,288
173 Little Casparee, 215
Isaac, Dominic, 15 1 Little Tobago, 261-4,278

302
 INDEX

London, 15, 77, 78, 91, 121, 139, Merchiston,260,261

I 5 I' I 73, 253, 254, 256, 264, Metalino Island,56
285,293,297 Metronomes,House of,14,88,96
Whitehall, 119, 125, 147, 173, Mexico,57,280
213,255 Mighty Sparrow,a calypsonian,204
Westminster Abbey, 164 Mighty Terror,a calypsonian,205
Lopinot Valley,67 Milford,278,283,284,285
Lo Ten Foe, Mr., 16, 17, 19, 296, Mohammed,Z.,50
297 Monos Island,215,216
Louis d'Or Valley,252,253,255 Montgomery,John,277
Louis XIV,king of France,220,268 Montserrat Hills,130
Low,Captain Edward,240,256 Moor,Jan de,219,220
Luquay,Selwyn,63,64,66,67,71 Mora Forest,155
Morgan,Henry,239,257
Mackie,Otto,232 Moriah,276-8
MacNeice,Bishop,172 Morne Blue Pass,68
MacNeice,Louis, 172 Morocco,49,98
Madeira,97, 120,270 Morris,Ken,151
Mader,Clarence,184 Mount Grace,274
Mader,family of,185 Mount St. Benedict,49,50,169,I 71
Mahabir,Thora,152 Mount St. George,248
Main Ridge,252,282 Muslims, 34, 48, 49, 97, 101, 102,
Maintenon,Marquis de,240 II6,II9,120,122,148,188
Mainwaring,Henry,240
Malta, 24,27,97
Naipaul,V. S.,124,175,179,217
Manoa,57,58,59
Nanan, Oudit, 114
Man-o'-War Bay, 267-71, 276, 278
Naparima Plain, I 15,128
Mantua,Duke of,260, 261
Nariva Bridge,164
Manzanilla,164,188
Nariva River,165
Maqueripe Bay,75
Nariva Swamp,164,198
Maracas,35,104
Nathaniel,38
Marcia,104, I IO, I 11
Nelson Island,215
Margaret,Princess,294
Newton,Rev. John,233
Margarita Island,56,99, I26,240
New Walcheren,219,220
Marrakesh,98
Nicholson,Gurly,270
Martin,John,246
Northern Range,33,36,40,51,63,
Martinez,Juan,57-59
64, 65, 67, 74, 78, 105, 108,
Martinez, Mrs., the Carib Queen,
115, 121, 122, 140, 145, 152,
52,6o-63,231
153,154,174,215,218,274
Martinez,Ruffino,60-63
Norton,Noel,13
Martinez, 128,240
Nylon Pool,278-90
Mason Hall,276
Matura,155
May,William, 240 0 Aleijadinho,6I
Mayaro, 14,154, 161-98,201, 209, Ordez,Diego de,57
265, 266, 271, 272, 285, 286, Orinoco,57,59,63,250,25 I
288, 296-8 Oropuche Lagoon,75

303
 INDEX

Ortoire River, 165 Anglican Cathedral, 23-25, 34,

Ottermann,J. J. H., 26 41, 42
Oxford, 51, 99, I18, 139, 173 Art Gallery, 149-52
Botanical Gardens, 68, 140-3,
Pakistan, 79, 128 145, 257, 273
Palmiste Estate, 125 Buller Street, 86, 205, 206
Palo Seco, 75 Catholic Cathedral, 34,41,42,43
Pang,AmyLeong, 151 Chacon Street, 25
Paradise, 1 1 2 Charlotte Street, 16-22, 30, 31,
Paria, Gulf of, 38,39,43,49,58,70, 43, 44, 78, 84, 143, 296
71,138,213,214,216,218 City Council, 147, 172, 173
Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, 101 Clarence Street, 104
Pelican Island, 215 Emperor Zoo, 143-5
Pembroke, 250 Gatacre Street, 84, 85, 88, 96,
Pembroke, Earl of, 219, 220 IOI, 104, 140, 201, 206
Pepys, Samuel, 242 Greyfriars Church, 23
People's National Movement, 68, Hilton Hotel, 16, 29, 34, 35, 78,
173 151
Peschier, family of, 27 Hollow, the, 18
Peters, Mrs. C., 236 Holy Rosary Church, 18
Petit Trou Beach, 282 Independence Square,42-45,173,
Philip II, king of Spain, 229 211
Piarco Airport, 16, 151, 214 Jackson Square, 79
Pierreville, 165 King George V Park, 78, 80
Pigeon Point, 287, 288 Lapeyrouse Cemetery, 101-4
Pirates, 59, 223, 239, 240, 241, 256, Maraval Road, 30, 79, 83
257 Memorial Park, 146, 149
Pitch Lake, 52, 103, 131--g National Museum, 14,41,49,52,
Pitman, Henry, 281 53, 66, 133, 149, 150, 151, 248
Pitts, family of, 19 Parliament Building, 22, 23
Pitts, Teresa, 151 Queen's Hall, 35
Plaisance, 167-9, 181, 189 Queen's Park Hotel, 202
Pluck, 75 Queen's Park Savannah, 26-35,
Plymouth, 221, 290-2 65, 78, 83, 88, 84, l02, I2I,
FortJames, 221, 222, 291, 292 129, 140, 142, 143, 144-6, 189,
Point-a-Pierre, 75, 126 201,202, 297
Point Calera, 159, 160 Queen's Royal College, 30
Port-of-Spain, 13, 14, 16-36, 40--46, Red House, 25-26, 34
48, 49, 52, 64, 65, 71, 77-105, Rosary Guest House, 16-19, 296,
112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 127, 297
128,140-54,169,170,177,178, St. Clair, 34, 79
179, 181, 184, 185, 193, 197- Siegert Square, 78
209, 211-16, 224, 234, 237, Supreme Court, 22
274, 283, 285, 293, 294, 296 Town Hall, 151
Abercromby Street, 34 Victoria Square, 7g--81, 82, 96,
Adam Smith Square, 78 IOI, 104, 201, 205, 208, 21 I
All Saints Church, 29 Whitehall, 30, 31, 32, 79

304
 INDEX

Woodbrook,82-85,88, 99,103 Mahammed Cafetta, 128

Woodford Square, 22-26, 78, 79 Main Road, 130
Y.M.C.A., 201, 204, 205, 208 Naparima Hill, 128
Portugal, 97, 98, 99, 120, 231 St. Vincent Street, 131
Potter, Rawle, 206 Skinner's Park, 129
Poyntz, Captain John, 220, 221, Y.M.C.A., 127-9
223, 268, 280, 283 St. George's, 211
Poyntz, Sydenham, 221 St. Giles Islands, 264
Princes Town, 170, 171 St. Joseph's, 48-50, 57-59, 72, 77
Puerto Rico, 56, 230 Jinnah Memorial Mosque,48,49,
157
Queen's Island, 252 Parish Church, 59
St.Joseph Cluny,Order of,228,231
Radix, 194, 195, 2 IO St. Kitts, 213
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 57-59, 70, 126, St. Lucia, 212, 255
132, 266 St. Mary's Oropuche, 132
Rampersad, 'Mr. Ram', 17g-83, St. Vincent, 214, 255
188, 297 Salvatori, Henri, 151
Rampersad, Mrs., 181, 182 Sangre Grande, 152-5, 161, 163,
Ramsey, C. Adonis, 257, 258 197-9, 201,208,209
Raphael, Abdullah, 236 New Cash Store, 154
Ravel, Maurice,93 Police Station, 153, 249
Rayna!, Abbe, 162 Sanjuan, 47
Realize, 75 Scarborough,222,224-46,251,258,
Reinagle, Philip, 41 259, 271, 272, 279, 290, 292,
Richelieu, Cardinal, 220 295,296
Richmond Island, 252 Bacolet Inn, 225
Rio Claro, 172, 174, 175, 182, 187, Botanical Gardens, 273, 274
198, 199 County Hall, 296
Robinson Crusoe, 279-87 Courthouse, 236
Robinson Crusoe Hotel, 279 Edendale Beach Guest House,
Rock Island, 215 225, 234, 248, 259, 293, 296
Rochford, 294-6 Fort King George, 237-46, 254,
Roxborough, 249-60 291, 296
St. Boniface Church, 258 Fort Street, 237, 238, 246, 259
Gun Bridge, 234
St. Anne's,176-97,209 House of Refuge, 238
Cinta's Camp, I77-80, 185, 186, Nuns' House, 227
188, 189, 190, 209, 297 St. Andrew's Church, 232, 233
St. Anne's Estate, 14 Scarlet Ibis, M/V., 237, 271
St. Augustine, 174 Seepersad, Frank, 151
San Fernando, 113-31, 136, 148, Selkirk, Alexander, 279-81
I 69, I 76, I 79, I 93, 283,297 Selvon, Samuel, 95, 96
Carnegie Library, 128 Serpent's Mouth, 39
Coffee, the, 127-9 Seville, 98
Good Shepherd Hall, 130 Shango, 158, 159
Harris Promenade,128 Shell Invaders,37

305
 INDEX

Shouter Religion, w4, 11o, 1 II, Surisma, Amerindian singer,297

148, 158, 159, 284 Sweden, 223
Sibelius,Jean, 106 Swinton, Bridget, 1 72
Siegert, Dr. J. G. B., !02, 103, 121,
150 Tacarigua, 50, 75
Silver Stars, 14, 88, 89, 96 Teach, Captain Edward, 163, 240
Simon,Winston 'Spree', go,92 Tertis, Lionel, 91
Singh,A.G., 62 Thomas,J. J., 119
Siparia, 132 Toco, 68, 154-60, 176, 199
La Divina Pastora Church, 132 Mount Pisgah Temple, 157,158
Sisters, 75 St. David's Church, 156, 157
Sixth Company, 75 Toumert, Ibn, 98
Slavery, 37, 94, 97-101, 116, 117, Tourist Board, 13,262,263,284
I 19, 125, 149, 152, 230, 231, Trinity Hills, 54, 122
238, 253, 254 Trollope,Anthony,118
Smith Island, 249 Tunapuna, 50
Snakes, 107, 108 Turner,]. M. W., 285,286
Solomon,113,114,123,124, 127
Southern Main Road, 129, 132 U.S.A., 36, l 13, 124, 149, 242
Southern Range, 54 University of the West Indies, 174
Spain, 54,55, 56, 58,69,7°,71,75,
96, 97, 99, 159, 219, 220, 230, Valencia, 152, 154, 283
231, 239 Vear,Jah van, 267, 268
Spencer, Mr. and Mrs., 225, 248, Venezuela,16,23,38,43,55,57,65,
296 82, 102, 109, 121, 126, 134,
Speyside,259, 262, 265-7 213,215,217,251,297
Bird-of-Paradise Inn, 262 Victoria, queen of England, 44, 60,
Spriggs,Francis,240 61, 62, I17
Star Land,88 Vincent, Rev. Mother,228
Steel bands, 14, 37,88-95,100
Stevenson, R. L., 256 Wetherley,Tee,246
Steward,Joseph, 211 Whistler,Henry,281
Stick-fighting, 196, 197 White,William,240
Stiven, Aley, 290, 291 Wilberforce, William, 233
Stiven, Betty, 290, 291 Williams,Dr. Eric,68,149,173,284
Store Bay, 285, 286, 288 Winchester, George, 243
Strand-on-the-Green, 15, 284 Windward Road,225,227,246,251,
Strauss,Johann, 146 296
Stringer, Dr. Moses, 223,263, 280 Woodford,Sir Ralph,24,27,41,59,
Sugar Loaf Island, 252 142,233
Sugar Manufacturers' Association, Wyke, Marguerite, 151
34
Sum Sum, 75 Yale University, 190,297

306
Robert Harbinson Bryans was born in Ireland
thirty-nine years ago.In 1949 he emigrated to
Canada and still has his headquarters in the
Maritimes overlooking the Atlantic. While
teaching on the west coast at Shawnigan Lake
on Vancouver Island he started writing his
Robert Harbinson autobiographies:

NO SURRENDER
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by ROBIN BRYANS

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• .•• original and quite free from the stuffiness of a guide-book approach ...
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MALTA AND GOZO

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MOROCCO
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THE AZORES
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ULSTER A Journey through Six Counties

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SUMMER SAGA A Journey in Iceland

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DANISH EPISODE
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