Pax Britannica (17 page)

A
’GLAMOROUS weakness of the Empire was its dispersal. If they could have willed a miracle, the New Imperialists would doubtless have squeezed all its component parts into a shapelier and simpler whole. Not, though, into a land mass, for half the glory of the Pax Britannica was its far-flungness, spangling the seas with forts and islets as the power of some great stained-glass window issues from a thousand petty parts. There was a high romance to the ocean outposts of Empire, most of which suggested to the British, not always very clear just where their possessions lay, rollicking piratical adventures of the Spanish Main. Gibraltar they knew, of course, and Malta, and Aden vaguely, and St Helena historically: but how thrillingly unfamiliar sounded Bramble Cay, the Amirante Islands, Yuma, Montserrat and the Grenadines—British every island, sun-baked beneath the Flag in one ocean or the next!

One such dimly comprehended possession was the island of St Lucia, which not one Briton in a thousand could place on the map, and scarcely one in a million could pronounce properly (it should be St Loosha). Few islands better fulfilled the dream of a tropical paradise. St Lucia lay among the Windward Islands, looking southwards to St Vincent and the Grenadines, washed on one side by the bluff waves of the Atlantic, on the other by the gentle Caribbean. It was a volcanic island, crowned by the striking twin peaks of the Pitons, like miniature wooded Matterhorns above the water, and most of its small expanse was covered with a delicious tropical foliage, frogs croaking, parrots brilliantly on the wing, green lagoons in shadowy recesses of jungle. The centre of the island was mountainous. Around its perimeter palm-trees leant crookedly over white beaches, and creeks ran between high brush-covered bluffs as in a hotter Devon. St Lucia was some 3,500 miles from London.
There was, as we already know, a file about it in the Colonial Office.

Like many another island fortress it had endured an uncertain history, and had been passed from France to Britain, Britain to France, fourteen times in all, as the one Power or the other gained supremacy in the West Indies. The British had finally won it in 1814, but it was still Frenchified in manner. Its population, mostly Negro or mulatto, spoke a queer patois of antique French warped by a rustic kind of English. Its laws were partly French, and so was its cooking, crabs in rich sauces and spiced flying-fish. Its countryside was full of names like Trois Gras Point, Grande Palmiste Bay, Vieux Fort and Mount Grand Magazin. Its capital finally settled for the name Castries, after an eighteenth-century French Minister of Marine, having spent some time as Le Carénage and some as Feliciteville, during a spell of French revolutionary rule. The administrative units of the island were still French quartiers. Most of the schools were run by the Roman Catholic church, and the
élite
of the island was a small landed gentry of French creoles, who still lived in a style more French than British, and sometimes sent their children to school in France.

Upon this lovely alien place the British Empire had stamped its presence with bloodshed and heroics. St Lucia rang with the ships’ bells and bugles of the Napoleonic Wars. Great names of the imperial past were blazoned on the island rolls, and heroes abounded. Rodney sailed from St Lucia to win the battle of the Saints in 1782. St Vincent took the island in 1794, when Queen Victoria’s own father, the Duke of Kent, planted the British colours upon the fortified plateau of Morne Fortuné. Moore of Corunna subdued the revolutionary creoles of St Lucia in 1796. It was because of a false message from St Lucia that Nelson, in 1805, sailed south to Trinidad in pursuit of Villeneuve, allowing the French another few months’ grace before the battle of Trafalgar. Impetuous bravery, heavy slaughter, long terrible struggles, undiminished ardour, courteous foes—these were the phrases of St Lucian history, as the British read it in the shuttered dim cool of the Castries library.

It was a colony exceptional in its beauty, but in status much like many another. There were forty-seven thousand people on the island. At least forty thousand of them were Negroes or mulattoes. Between three and four thousand were creoles. Perhaps two thousand were Indians, brought across the world as indentured labourers for the sugar plantations. Rather fewer than two hundred were the British, the rulers of St Lucia. They were mostly merchants and Civil Servants. Not many British people had bought property on the island, and the plantations were mostly owned by creoles. St Lucia had none of the transplanted Anglicism that made Barbados, across the water, one of the most ineradicably British places on earth, and after eighty years of permanent possession it still felt more a garrison than a settlement. The paladins of the island were the senior British officials, but in many ways power was really in the hands of the rich creoles, whose roots went far deeper into the island’s past, and who were there to stay. It was they who had been the slave-owners of St Lucia until, sixty years before, slavery had been ‘utterly and for ever abolished and declared unlawful throughout the British Colonies, plantations, and possessions abroad’: and their spare and haughty persons, sipping very dry aperitifs on the terraces of plantation houses, commanded a respect different in kind from the remote loyalty St Lucians offered the British.

The official community revolved around Government House, which may stand for a score of such lesser mansions, in a long roster of such infinitesimal colonies. It was a building very different from the sloping floors and iron roofs of Government House in Salisbury, for though new it was instinct with old traditions of authority—British power had been implanted in the Caribbean for more than three hundred and fifty years, and Britons had long been familiar with the pace, the climate and the Elysian ease of these parts. The house had been built two years before to the design of Mr C. Messervy, Colonial Engineer to the island, and was a pleasant white building with a tower and a wide veranda, ornamented with white-painted iron griffins and surrealist external plumbing. An office was
attached to the side of it, and there was stabling around a modest courtyard. On the lawn stood a couple of old brass guns, polished weekly by prisoners from the gaol, and the Union Jack flew upon a terrace, grandly surveying the harbour far below, where it could be seen by all the mariners coming and going, and saluted by the more punctilious of captains. The house looked spanking and wind-scoured, but its predecessors had not always been healthy. Four Governors had died in previous Government Houses, besides one who was buried in the rubble when the house fell down in 1817, and a favourite St Lucian anecdote told the tale of a parsimonious Governor greeting an episcopal guest with the words: ‘I suppose your Lordship has heard of the insalubrity of this place? Every room in the house has witnessed the death of a Governor, but none of them has had the honour of killing a Bishop.’ The big glass doors inside the
porte
cochère
were engraved with the royal arms, suggesting the entrance to a railway hotel, and the hall was decorated with a collection of bayonets, arranged in florid patterns on the wall.

The last occupant of this agreeable house
1
had been Brigade-Surgeon Valerius Skipton Gouldsbury, M.D., C.M.G., whose wife had been At Home on Thursdays, but who had gone home in 1896 leaving his office vacant. He was the thirty-eighth British governor of the island, but was technically only an Administrator—a senior officer was Governor of the whole Windward group, and was liable always to sail into Castries in his yacht to see how things were going. Moreover the Administrator was advised by a Legislature, officially nominated and subject to his veto, but nevertheless, in a colony whose local gentry was neither English by origin nor docile by temperament, sometimes irritatingly persistent. The Administrator’s job was no sinecure. St Lucia had passed through some cruel vagaries of fortune, even in Gouldsbury’s six years of office. Hurricanes were not infrequent, the wooden houses of Castries repeatedly burnt, the fall in sugar prices had caused much hardship and the demand for logwood had lately fallen off. Local criticism of the administration was often fierce. Relations between the Negroes and the whites had never been altogether happy since the emancipation
of the slaves—which had half-ruined many of the planters, and embittered some of them still. (In the British Caribbean colonies, at the end of the eighteenth century, a slave could be hanged for the theft of 1s 6d, or lashed and castrated for striking a white servant.)

It was quite an elaborate little Government that the Administrator supervised—at a salary of
£
800 per annum, plus
£
100 entertainment allowance. Although St Lucia was part of the Windward group, it fell itself into the category of possession known as a Crown Colony. Constitutionally it had no real autonomy whatever: everything had to be approved by London, or by London’s representative on the spot. In practice the imperial authorities at home did not often interfere. They had greater things to think about, and provided imperial grants-in-aid were not required, generally left the St Lucias of the Empire to look after themselves. Local laws could be passed by the St Lucia Legislature; the island drew up its own budget; if there was ever a revenue surplus, it remained on the island—since 1778 it had been a principle of Empire that a colony could not be taxed for imperial purposes.

Even within the Windward group each island had its own institutions and laws, subject only to a common appeal court at Grenada. St Lucia was thus a tiny nation of its own, disbarred from relations with foreign Powers, totally within the power of London, but in everyday affairs much its own master. A glance at the St Lucia
Gazette
,
the official journal, gives one some idea of the bureaucratic method in such an unnoticeable possession of the Crown. The Protector of Immigrants, Mr Cropper, having completed his quarterly inspection of the sugar estates, reports how much money was sent home to India by the indentured labourers, the number of letters they sent and received, and their daily earnings (the average was is a day, and nobody earned more than
£
18 in the year). The Acting Inspector of Schools reports that discipline at Canaries Roman Catholic Mixed School is ‘mild, but not on the gentle system’: he complains that children too often pronounce ‘ship’ as ‘sheep’, and regrets to say that ‘too many attempts are made at copying a neighbour’s
knowledge’. The St Lucia Library, with eighty subscribers, has given up
The
Field‚
we learn, and opened subscriptions to
Notes
and
Queries
and
Black
and
White
: the Administrator has presented the
Bulletin
of
Kew
Gardens‚
Mr T. D. Gordon has given
The
Wesleyan
Watchman
‚ and Mr L. F. Howard (‘an excursionist on board one of the American steamers’) has given a life of Napoleon in five volumes.

The Town Board of Castries seems to have been extravagant. In the past year it has spent
£
6 17s 6d on Barometers, has given a
£
75 subsidy to the Philharmonic Society and spent
£
2 8s 3d on Entertaining the Band of the Leicester Regiment. The Choiseul Town Council accounts more soberly, in brackets, for its expenditure of
£
2 5s od on sanitary expenses: (‘
Dead
Whale
’). The Castries Steam Fire Engine has been giving trouble again; five rural policemen have been dismissed from the force; Mr Garroway the Treasurer offers for auction thirty-four gallons of rum and nine pounds of snuff seized by Her Majesty’s Customs. The slaughterer’s monthly report shows that he killed 122 cattle, fifty-two sheep, two goats, twenty-one pigs and two turtles. The First District Court reports fifteen charges under the Masters’ and Servants’ Act, including Acts Relating to Indentured Coolies. One or two announcements originating in London remind us that even St Lucia is part of a greater diplomatic whole, and that, for instance, the copyright agreement with Austria-Hungary, to which St Lucia was willy-nilly a subscriber, will not apply to Natal.

British expatriate officials were a small minority, as they were in most of these island colonies. The Colonial Surgeon was British (and a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons), but the nine other Government doctors came from several parts of the Empire, and included one with a Maltese degree. The nine Inspectors of Nuisances were all St Lucians, creole or mulatto. We notice that Mr Cropper is momentarily doubling as Inspector of Schools, and that among thirty-two Justices of the Peace are the Colonial Surgeon and his three senior assistants, the Attorney-General and Mr Cropper. Anything to do with money, though, was closely watched by the British cadre, for the St Lucians, like most of the West Indians, had a bad name for petty graft. The licensing system, especially, was open to cheerful abuse—in an island where slavery was still remembered,
and most people lived in shacks of planking and palm-thatch, one had to have a licence to conduct an auction, sell cocoa or tobacco, keep a market stall, sail a boat, have a dog or a stallion, operate a still, sell petroleum or make a living with a house of refreshment. A marriage licence was only needed if one had neglected to have the banns called, or could not wait: even so, of 1,824 births in St Lucia in 1897, 1,099 were illegitimate.