The Sugar Islands (37 page)

I remember four of the guests particularly—a Federal Court judge, a minor local politician, a youngish married woman who
had spent several years in Harlem, and the Chief of Police. They all behaved exactly as their opposite numbers would in Europe. The judge was urbane, relaxed, courtly, a little conscious of his importance. He was accorded the same kind of deference that in London at Pratt's the Lord Chief Justice receives from his fellow members. The lady from Harlem was definitely more polished and better dressed than the others, who she impressed in the way that an international socialite who is dressed by Hartnell dazzles a provincial gathering. The policeman was rather silent, as men who have had a security training invariably are. The politician talked just a little bit too much, as local politicians tend to do, arguing parochially on the need for Federal funds to stimulate relief work and discourage the spread of Communism in the islands. They all behaved in character. They were not different through being of African descent, whereas I have usually found in British and French colonies that certain types of behaviour are indicative of African descent. In a British or French island it is difficult for a man of European origin to be natural with a man of African descent. I did not find this difficulty in the Virgin Islands.

I would not, however, dismiss this difference with the explanation that Americans are more democratic than Europeans. The reason lies, I think, in the history of the islands. An American, an Englishman, a Frenchman, and an Italian can meet, at a normal time, at dinner on equal terms. But if they meet in wartime on neutral territory, when one is a non-belligerent and another a potential enemy, there would be embarrassment. In the British and the French islands there is still a certain wartime element. The planters were once slave-owners who distrusted and feared their slaves. There were revolts and massacres. All that is a long time ago, but the white landowners are the heirs of the men who once lived on terms of enmity with their labourers. The atmosphere is not yet wholly cleared.

The landed proprietors in the Virgin Islands are not, however, the heirs of slave-owners. They are Americans who have come down from the north to make their homes here, in the same spirit that New Yorkers moved north into Connecticut and Iowans moved west to California. They have no ingrained, inherited feeling of distrust; they have no sense of guilt; nor equally have they any sense, as many planters in the British islands have, that an injustice was done them at the time of emancipation and that
their case has been misrepresented by the abolitionists. The American residents in St. Thomas and St. Croix have not those particular reasons for feeling ill at ease with men and women of African descent. The Africans equally need not on those grounds feel ill at ease with them.

America has many problems to face in the Virgin Islands, but she seems to me to have been spared that headache. If friction ever arises between the natives and the Continentals, as some think it may, the cause is likelier to lie in the resentment that is invariably felt in a small community when ‘strangers from the north' buy up its property.

¹
The incident described here took place in 1948. Racial discrimination is rapidly disappearing at the Caribbean. The administrator of a small British West Indian island would not make the same remark today.

Published in
HOUSE AND GARDEN

Written in
1952

If
one cannot trust the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, where can faith begin? Because of a reference to it in that august authority, I had long been anxious to visit the Dutch West Indian island, Saba. The reference is brief; but how it whets the imagination! Saba, I was informed, produced the finest boatmakers in the Caribbean, but since it has no beach, the boats had to be lowered over the side of the cliff. I was most curious to observe this industry.

Saba was, however, hard of access. Small as it is and a Dutch colony, there is no economic reason why the British and French islands should maintain contact with it. Unless you were a yachtsman, the only way of getting there was from St. Kitts— itself a little off the map—in a thirty-five ton two-masted schooner, the
Blue Peter
, which made a weekly five-day tour of the Dutch Windward Islands to deliver mail. I had often seen Saba, shadowy on the horizon, a single cone-shaped mountain like Vesuvius, but I had failed to fit a visit there into my schedule. So when I wrote a comprehensive book about the West Indies, and came to Saba, I had to content myself with copying from the
Encyclopaedia.

To my surprise I received a letter from a correspondent assuring me that there was no truth whatsoever in that paragraph and calling my attention to an article contributed by Charles W. Herbert to
The National Geographic
magazine in November 1940. ‘Saba', Mr. Herbert wrote, ‘has no natural timber and if the material was imported, it is hard to believe that men would struggle to carry the massive timber fifteen hundred feet up to the top and then be faced with the colossal task of getting the completed schooner down to the salt water.' It was very clear that whatever else I might miss on my next trip to the West Indies, I must not skip Saba.

Now, having kept that promise to myself, I am convinced that
Mr. Herbert was right and that the
Encyclopaedia
was wrong. I asked a number of the oldest men and women in the island if they could remember a time or had heard their grandparents talk of a time when boats had been lowered over the cliff by ropes. Nobody could, though one man did recall that in recent years a film company had arranged an exhibition recreating for the screen the scene as it had been described in the
Encyclopaedia.
Having been all over the island and examined its remarkable geological conformation. I doubt whether boats have ever been built on Saba. It seems far likelier that they were built on the neighbouring Dutch island of St. Eustatius and sailed across.

That may sound a very negative result for a visit that involved considerable planning, but in fact I have rarely spent five days more profitably. Saba is unique, and the life that has been built up by its thousand or so inhabitants on this barren rock with its area of less than five square miles has no counterpart in my experience.

From a distance it looks like several other islands, Nevis in particular, but as you approach you see where the difference lies and why Père Labat two and a half centuries ago described it as a natural and impregnable fortress. It has no foreshore, no flat cultivated land at the mountain's base. It seems uninhabited; and it is not until you are quite close that you see high in the hills a red smattering of roofs. Saba is an extinct volcano, and the Sabans have perched themselves round the hp of the crater. There are many uninhabited islands in the Caribbean, and it must be assumed that the only reason why a settlement was made here was because as a natural fortress it presented complete immunity at a time when the Caribbean was the cockpit of constant conflict. At that time the settlements round the crater could be reached only by a single narrow passage cut in the stone, too narrow to admit more than one person at a time, and the Sabans heaped stones over the passes in such a way that by the pulling of a string, they could be catapulted onto an invader. Saba was able to survive, and built up its own personal way of living while all its neighbours were the victims of attack and siege and plunder.

When the danger of invasion passed, that narrow passage was replaced by a flight of steps, traces of which you can see today beside the steep, winding road that, built since World War II, runs from the crater to the one point in the island where landings
can be effected all through the year. On the northern side, a flight of five hundred and thirty steps connects the crater with a second beach, Ladder's Bay, but the seas there are generally so rough that it is rarely used.

Landings at Saba are notorious for their discomfort if not their danger. The beach is narrow, and between it and the open roadstead where you anchor there is a line of rocks. Myself, I arrived shortly after sunset; the sea was moderately rough, there was no moon, and I did not find it easy to tranship from the schooner into the rowing boat that bobbed beneath it. When I was finally settled in my seat, the boatman wrapped a tarpaulin round my shoulders. I could not think why, as it was not raining, but I was soon to discover the reason. In the dark I could not see how the boat was manoeuvred between the rocks, but suddenly the keel struck on pebbles; as it did, a wave went right over the boat. I scrambled over the side into the water and reached the shore soaked to the waist. It was in very much that way that Père Labat landed there two and a half centuries ago.

Much has been changed since then, but the main changes have all taken place since the second war and it is easy for the visitor to reconstruct for himself the curious existence that was led on this barren rock during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Labat's day Saba was inhabited by forty to fifty settlers and some hundred and fifty negro slaves. The plantations, he tells us, were small and well-cultivated, and the whitewashed houses very pretty and well-furnished, the settlers living as it were in a large club and frequently entertaining one another. He was, he said, received there very kindly.

In essentials Saba is not so very different now. Today the visitor to the island will be met at the beach by the Dutch Administrator in person. He will be treated as a guest. He will be driven in the Administrator's jeep to the Government Rest House. Though he will pay five dollars a day for excellent meals, service, and accommodation, he will have the sense of visiting in a private house. No record is kept of his raids upon the icebox. When he leaves, a rough calculation is made of his consumption of beer, Cola, Dutch gin, and dessert wine. The Administrator will ensure that he is ‘shown the island'.

There is a great deal to be shown that will interest and amuse and at times surprise him. It is surprising, for instance, for a
village that you have reached by a climb of eight hundred feet to be called ‘The Bottom', but as far as Saba is concerned the administrative centre of the island is situated on the floor of the crater whereas the other villages are perched round the lip. Though Saba is a Dutch colony, the purest English in the Caribbean is spoken there; though there is a genuine feeling of loyalty for the Dutch royal family, scarcely a Saban has any links with Holland. The young men go to the oil islands, Aruba and Curaçao, to earn their livings. In New York there is a Saban colony at Richmond Hill, and the island is supported by the savings sent back to it by emigrants.

Though few new settlers come to Saba, though practically all the old inhabitants are interrelated, there has been no intermarriage between the descendants of the original settlers and of the original slaves. Sabans are pure African or pure European. The two races live on terms of the greatest amity, dividing the co-operative duties of administration; but they live in different sections of the island. The Africans live for the most part in The Bottom since they prefer the warmer air inside the crater, while the Whites chose the outer, exposed edge of the crater, where the air is cooler. There are curious customs in the island: a family in one of the villages, for instance, is allowed the highly prized privilege of burying their relatives in their own backyard.

The island's life has developed calmly and peacefully in terms of the islanders' own needs and wishes. In general appearance the island probably does not look very different from what it did in Labat's day. There are no plantations, but the streets are clean, and the houses now, as then, are white and trim; the Sabans with their sailor training are experts in the use of paint, and the red shingle roofs look as though they were tiled.

The houses on Windward Side are built so close together, and on so steep a slope, that it has been said that you step from the front door of one house onto the roof of the house below. That is an exaggeration, but it gives an idea of what the village looks like.

The West Indian climate is on the whole the most equable in the world. It is never cold, and it is rarely too hot; but in all the mountainous parts it rains a great deal, and when you look across at Saba from Nevis, its peak is often hidden by cloud. In the autumn heavy rains sweep the Caribbean; the gales of wind are
so frequent and so strong that an ingenious method has been adopted of preventing the windows from rattling. There are no fastenings, but long nails, fixed obliquely, hold the frames rigidly in position. It must often be very bleak in the houses of Hell's Gate and Windward Side. A romantic novelist might well regard it as the setting for sombre dramas of hate and jealousy, born out of isolation and propinquity. But in actual fact the history of Saba contains no such drama. The official religion of the island is Protestant. Until very recently divorce could be obtained easily, but there were very few divorces.

The only story I heard of trust betrayed had a comic atmosphere. One of the chief figures of the island had been engaged for several years to a pretty girl several years younger than himself. On the eve of her marriage she went up to New York to buy her trousseau. She never returned. A few weeks later her marriage was announced to a young American who for several years had visited the island in a yacht. The girl had worked in the post office and for five years she had conducted a correspondence with him unknown to anyone. She had put the official stamp on her own letter and locked it into the mail box, and when the mail from New York came she had extricated his letters to her before they could be delivered at her parents' house. She had not broken off her engagement, because she was not sure if she would ever see the American again, but she had been resolved to take the first opportunity of deciding how they still ‘felt about each other'. Her Saban fiancé has never married and in his cups bewails the perfidy of woman.

There are few quarrels in Saba; as in Labat's day there is the feeling of living in a club. There is frequent entertaining. But there is no club and there are no cocktail parties as there are in the other West Indian islands. A store on Windward Side has a frigidaire and a call to buy a packet of Chesterfields may easily lead to an hour's gossip over a glass of beer. There is a lot of calling in on friends after dinner. Scotch whisky and London gin are rarely seen in Saba, but Dutch gin, which is free of duty, is available in two-litre bottles, and from the neighbouring French island of St. Barthélemy sweet dessert wine is imported. The visitor is offered his choice of these, and his choice is accompanied by a sweet biscuit or a cake.