A Family of Islands
A FAMILY OF ISLANDS
Alec Waugh’s Island in the Sun - a novel about the West Indies in the 1950’s was one of the outstanding successes of the decade. It was a major film production. Here is a companion volume, a history of the area, with islands instead of human characters as the protagonists. What Columbus started in 1492 was finished in 1898, when the red and gold flag was lowered at Havana to mark the end of four centuries of Spanish dominance in the Caribbean.
For two and a half centuries after the Pope divided the world between Spain and Portugal, the navies of Britain, France, Spain and occasionally the Netherlands fought in the Caribbean. Most of the islands changed hands at least once. Europe discovered the delights of coffee, tea and cocoa; sugar boomed; fortunes were made and lost; the slave trade flourished. But after the Napoleonic Wars prosperity receded, the conscience of the world awoke and slavery was abolished, ending the halcyon days of European colonialism in the Indies.
A Family of Islands is full of fabulous people: Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, Philip II of Spain, Elizabeth I; Henry Morgan, the pirate who was later knighted and made governor of Jamaica; Haiti's tragic trio: Toussaint L'Ouverture, Dessalines and Henri Christophe. It is full of stories about witch doctors and obeah spells and the unspeakable abominations of the slave trade.
A FAMILY OF ISLANDS
A HISTORY OF THE WEST INDIES
FROM 1492 TO 1898,
WITH AN EPILOGUE SKETCHING
EVENTS FROM THE SPANISH-
AMERICAN WAR TO THE 1960’S
Alec Waugh
Contents
Foreword
1 Spain Lights the Torch
2 The Spanish Main
3 Beyond the Lines
4 The Brethren of the Coast
5 Black Ivory
6 Rich as a Creole
7 The War of Jenkins’ Ear
8 The Lull Before the Storm
9 After the Bastille
10 Trafalgar
11 Twilight in the Antilles
12 Two Scandals
13 Froudacity
14 Where Black Rules White
15 The Century’s Close
16 Cuba – The Ever-Faithful Isle
Epilogue
Footnotes
Foreword
I Went to the West Indies first in 1927; I have been there often since. They have never lost their fascination for me. They have a common background and a common lot. There they stretch, the peaks of a submerged mountain range between the tip of Florida and the Venezuelan coast. They are green and fertile; most of them are mountainous; their climate, considering that they lie within the tropic belt, is temperate. They are cooled by a north-east wind. They are subject to hurricanes and earthquakes. Five hundred years ago they were unknown to Europe. They were inhabited by two brown-skinned races; the gentle and indolent Arawaks in the north and the fierce cannibal Caribs who were advancing from the south, liquidating opposition as they went. The Caribs would presumably have eliminated and absorbed the Arawaks before very long, but Columbus’ ‘doom-burdened caravels’ got there first. Within sixty years the Arawaks had disappeared, the few surviving Caribs were entrenched in scattered strongholds, and a new labour force was being recruited on the Guinea coast.
The Vatican by Papal Bull divided the new world between Spain and Portugal, but that ownership was not long unchallenged. For two and a half centuries the Caribbean was the cockpit of Europe’s navies: Britain, France and Spain contended there for mastery, with intermittent interventions from the Dutch. Most of the islands changed hands once at least. Europe had just discovered the delights of coffee, tea and cocoa. Sugar boomed. Fortunes were made and lost, the ports on the Guinea Coast were busy. The phrase ‘rich as a Creole’ was in daily use. Then, after the Napoleonic Wars, the tide of prosperity receded. The conscience of the world was roused and the slaves were freed. It was discovered that sugar could be made from beet; one by one the white landowners went home, leaving their lands to the descendants of the slaves.
That, in synopsis, is the story of the West Indian Islands. The caprice of history and geography has decreed for each of them a somewhat different fate, so that I, reading their history and visiting them regularly, have come to recognize their separate identities. I have come to see them, in fact, as a family of islands, so that when I began to write their history, I felt that I was engaged upon a family saga that covered a succession of generations; that I was tracing the fortunes of the various branches of that family with first one branch in the ascendant, then another. I was working, in fact, upon a kind of novel with islands instead of individual characters as the protagonists.
One of the chief problems in the writing of that kind of novel lies in the decision of how and where it is to end. In a sense it cannot finish, it cannot do more than stop; the current of effect and cause continues after the word ‘finis’. Any conclusion must be arbitrary. Yet there are landmarks. A family saga ends usually with a funeral or a marriage, with the closing of an individual chapter or the opening of a new one. And in this case the Spanish-American war of 1898 does provide a convenient curtain. It marks the end of four centuries of Spanish occupation. What Columbus started, ended when the red and gold flag was run down at Havana. Nor is it inappropriate that the Spanish general who handed over the reins of power should have sailed eastward in the first day of the twentieth century.
As I wrote this saga, I thought of myself, in the role familiar to me, as a novelist. And there are few novelists who do not, when they correct their proofs, suspect that however hard they have striven to avoid them, mistakes and misprints will have found their way into the text. A character with brown eyes in the first chapter will find their colour mysteriously changed to grey in the seventeenth. On page 17 a bedroom is described as facing east and on page 176 a heroine’s siesta is disturbed by the afternoon sun shining in her face. The Le Havre boat train from Paris will start from the Gare du Nord instead of from the Gare St Lazare. The reader is horrified at the author’s carelessness, but it seems inevitable that such slips should occur. It takes, after all, a number of months to write a book, and most human beings in the course of a year manage to misdirect an envelope, to arrive on the wrong night for dinner, or to deposit a house guest at an airport station sixty minutes after the plane has taken off. Our concentration slackens. And one of the troubles about authorship is this – that if one has made that kind of slip in manuscript, one rarely spots it in revision. Nor do proofreaders; while editors, ready though they may be to amend one’s grammar, rarely spot one’s howlers.
If the author of a piece of fiction makes mistakes, how infinitely more vulnerable is the novelist who attempts a narrative of recorded fact.
I know that there will be many mistakes in the ensuing pages. I can only crave the indulgence of my readers, assuring them that I have tried my hardest to be accurate, and I would like to express my gratitude to those who have helped me with advice and guidance – I did most of my research in the Brigham Young University in Provo, the Library of Congress in Washington, the London Library, the New York Public Library, the Public Library in Peterboro, New Hampshire, and the Library of the London West Indian Committee; their staffs were very helpful. A number of officials and residents in the various islands have in the course of my visits assisted me, by their introductions and interpretations, to a better understanding of the problems of West Indian life. They are too many to recall by name, but I would like to express my especial gratitude to Charles-worth Ross, one-time Administrator of Montserrat and now a magistrate in Antigua, whom I have been meeting under the most friendly and congenial conditions for over thirty-five years, and who knows more about the Leeward Islands and Dominica than anyone has ever known. Finally, I would like to record
my debt to the directors of the MacDowell Colony in Peterboro, who, while I was working on this book, extended to me once again the peace and hospitality of their quiet woods.
1 Spain Lights the Torch
At ten o’clock on the night of October 11, 1492, Christopher Columbus saw from the deck of his caravel, the Santa Maria, a light on the horizon. Four hours later a seaman discerned the outline of what is now known as Watling Island, and the ships were ordered to lie to.
Columbus has not put on record the thoughts that lit his mind as the swift dawn broke. But he would not have been human if his sense of triumph had not been quickened by the chuckle of the man who had been proved right. For many years he had himself been certain that, because the world was round, Asia could be reached by a western route; he had inferred, because the distance between the edge of the West and the edge of the East was very long, that the distance by sea between Spain and India must be very small. To his own mind this truth was evident. But he had argued to unheeding ears. Henry of England had been impressed but dilatory; John of Portugal had tried to cheat him; the council of Salamanca, while he had loitered in the courts of Spain, had dubiously weighed his testimony, deciding finally that his project was ‘vain, impracticable and resting on grounds too weak to merit the support of the government’. Even when Queen Isabella of Castile had at last approved his plan, staking her jewellery upon her faith in him, the doubters had been more numerous than the believers; he had had the greatest difficulty in raising a crew in Palos.
Now it was all over. In a few hours he would set foot on the promised land. He would soon deliver into the hands of the great Khan a letter of introduction from his sovereigns. ‘We have heard,’ so the letter ran, ‘that Your Highness and your subjects entertain great love for us and for Spain. We are informed, moreover, that you and your subjects very much wish to hear news from Spain. We therefore send our admiral, Christopher Columbus, who will tell you that we are in good health and perfect prosperity.’ I told you so, Columbus must have thought. I told you so.
He was never to learn that the doubters were right and he was wrong; that his calculations had been at fault; that the group of islands that were to be known later as the West Indies were twelve thousand miles distant from Cathay and the mighty Khan; and that had not the continent of the Americas been interposed between Spain and China, his caravels would have assuredly perished in mid-ocean.
We do not possess the letter in which Columbus announced his achievement to his sovereigns, but the letter which he sent to the treasurer of Aragon can indicate its nature. ‘The Caribbean Islands,’ he wrote, ‘are as beautiful as any in the world, and no area is luckier in its climate; the land is fertile and mountainous and a trade wind cools its heat.’ Columbus spoke of the fruit, the birds, the flowers; of the towering mountains, the different kinds of palm; of trees so tall that they seemed to reach the skies and never lost their foliage. The rivers were full of gold, and the natives wore gold ornaments, which surely proved that he was within range of the riches which Marco Polo had described.
He was delighted with the appearance and behaviour of the natives. They were very different from the coarse-featured Africans and the swarthy Moors with whom Europe was familiar. They were pale brown in colour, their features were fine, their hair was coarse but not curly, and was worn short. They were Asians rather than Moors or Africans.
No trace remains of the Indians who welcomed him. They have since been named Arawaks, and there is abundant evidence that they were weak, charming, indolent, pleasure-loving. They bore, as far as we can gather, a spiritual resemblance to the Polynesians. They had broad faces and flat noses. They altered the shape of their heads, depressing their scalps in childhood with a wooden frame, a procedure that so strengthened the skull that the Spaniards were later to complain that a blow from a broadsword often broke the blade off at the hilt. They had fine dark eyes and friendly smiles. They were tall and they moved gracefully. They lived mainly upon maize. They had made no attempt to develop the resources of the soil, though they possessed some skill in the fashioning of domestic furniture, and presented Columbus with some handsome ebony chairs. They danced in groups for hours on end. They amused themselves with a fibre football, which they kicked over their shoulders with the backs of their heels, maintaining it in the air for long periods. They seemed to have no laws or priests, believing that power and goodness were in the sky. Their weapons were wooden spears. The women wore nothing but a small leaf-covering, while the men inserted birds’ feathers in their hair.
Columbus wrote in his eventual report, ‘So lovable, so tractable, so peaceable are these people that I swear to Your Majesties that there is not in the world a better nation nor a better land. They love their neighbours as themselves and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle and accompanied with a smile.’
Las Casas, Bishop of Chiapas, who visited the islands on a later expedition and is our most important witness to the period, though his testimony has to be accepted with reserve, since he was the Indians’ most strenuous apologist, wrote of them as ‘naturally simple. They know not what belongs to policy and address, to trick and artifice, but are very obedient and faithful to the rightful governors. They are humble, patient and submissive. They are a weak, effeminate people, not capable of enduring great fatigues; they care not to be exposed to toil and labour, and their life is of no long continuance; their constitution is so nice that a small fit of sickness carries them off. . . . They are so poor that they live in the want of almost everything ; they are very cool and indifferent in the pursuit of temporal advantages and seem not to be inclined to pride and ambition; their way of living is so frugal that the ancient hermits in the wilderness were scarce more sober and abstemious. They go naked, yet they have the modesty to wear a kind of apron about their waists.’
Columbus’ report went on, ‘These people are very simple in weapons, as Your Majesties can see from the seven of them whom I have brought over so that they may learn our language; we can send them back, though Your Majesties may, whenever you so wish, have them all sent to Castile; or you may keep them captives in the island, for with fifty armed men you will keep them all under your sway and will make them do all you may desire.’ He did not realize that though a people may be weak, it can be capable of preferring death to slavery.
Columbus returned home almost at once, landing in Palos in the following March. The court was in Barcelona, and his month’s journey thither through Andalusia, through a countryside fresh with young grain, with the trees in full leaf and the fruit in blossom, was as rich a triumph as any man had known. Very few had expected him to be successful; the winter’s storms had been exceptionally severe; after an eight months’ silence his death had been presumed. In Seville and Cordova, in Valencia and along the coastal road through Tarragona, he was received with acclamation. At Barcelona, cavaliers and merchants and a thronging populace were at the gates to honour him.
Ferdinand and Isabella, with their throne set in public before the Cathedral, awaited him under a canopy of gold brocade. At the head of the procession marched six Indians; they were painted and befeathered, they were hung with ornaments, and they were very cold. The crew followed them, carrying live parrots, stuffed animals and examples of Indian furniture. Columbus rode upon a horse with a velvet bonnet on his head and a regal cloak about his shoulders. Ferdinand and Isabella rose from their seats to greet him, commanding him to sit beside them. He presented them with the log of his voyage; he expatiated on the wonders he had seen and even more upon those which he expected to see on his second voyage. When he had finished his story, his sovereigns and Prince Juan knelt with their hands raised in gratitude to heaven. The court knelt too; the choir of the royal chapel sang the Te Deum and a procession started through the city.
The welcome was appropriate to his achievement. But he had, in fact, brought back very little. His journey had not by any means paid its expenses. He had travelled with three ships, the Santa Maria of one hundred tons, wit
h a crew of fifty-two men, the Pinta of fifty tons with eighteen men, and the Nina of fifty tons with eighteen men, and he returned with two, the Santa Maria having gone aground in Hispaniola, and a fort having been built out of its wreckage; the settlement had been called La Navidad and forty-four Europeans had been left in charge of it. Moreover, though he had brought back a certain amount of gold, he had discovered no sources of gold. Nor had he delivered his credentials to the Khan. He had not, however, been expected to show a profit on this one trip, but to indicate how profit could be made on a later one, and he could justifiably present a roseate account of his prospects. He never himself doubted that he was within a few miles of the fabulous fortunes of the East, and he convinced his audiences.
Tall, grey-haired, with clean-cut rugged features, he was an impressive figure. It is not surprising that for six months he was the most feted man in Spain. Nor is it surprising that Isabella should see her admiral’s achievement as the symbol of the greatness that, under God, was soon to be conferred upon her country. Her life’s work was coming to fruition. With Granada freed from the Moors, with the unconverted Jews expelled, she was free to concentrate upon her people’s welfare, to restore the war-ravaged countryside, revive local industries, found universities and hospitals, assuming her role of patron of the arts and sciences. In Columbus’ achievement, with its promise of new wealth and its prospect of spreading the Gospel among unenlightened peoples, she foresaw the fulfilment of her heart’s dearest prayers. She promised to finance a second voyage, and this time there would be no difficulty in finding men for it.
The second voyage was to be a very different project from the first. Columbus had started on his first voyage as a missionary and an explorer, to make discoveries and to spread the Gospel. He was now setting out to found an empire. But before this could be done, the legality of the operation had to be determined. The Portuguese had been the initiators in discovery. Diaz had been the first man to round the Cape of Good Hope, and Portugal had established itself on the west coast of Africa. When King John learned of Columbus’ discoveries, he claimed that Spain had trespassed upon his domains. Ferdinand and Isabella appealed to the Pope, who prudently adjudicated between the two nations by drawing an imaginary line from pole to pole a hundred leagues west of the Azores; everything east of this line belonging to Portugal, and everything west of it to Spain. This Papal Bull left Portugal in control of the African coast, which is one of the several reasons why Spain was never involved directly in the slave trade. It also explains why Brazil became a Portuguese colony.