BARBADOS AND TRINIDAD

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1607, 14 February 1925, Page 7

BARBADOS AND TRINIDAD

GREAT MOUNTAINS AND GLOOMY FORESTS.

The citizens of Leeds 'boast, of their railways, that there are more ways of escaping from Leeds than from any other city of equal size. The Bahamas might boast, conversely, that all roads lead to Nassau. If you are pressed for time and do not mind big ships of the North Atlantic in winter, you can go by New York and cross from Miami to Nassau by sea or air. You can take a larger, more southerly course and tranship at Havana. Or you can frankly enjoy yourself by drifting on the most southerly and longest course possible; this will take you a month, as against ten days by New York; but you will visit Barbados and Trinidad, you will saunter along the Spanish Main, and you will touch the enigmatic coast of Central America before you tranship at Kingston and bid good-bye to the tropics. By this route you shed your winter clothes before you pass the Azores (describes a writer in the London Times). The sun-helmets icome out as you enter your first drift of Sargasso weed, and' after you are warmed and rested, you make land, for the first time in ten days, when you reach Barbados. The calendar may make December ot January; but as you watch for the low green line of the island, you probably find yourself barefoot in pyjamas on a deck that is already hot before sunrise. But for the trade winds the heat would be insupportable; but cool air is always to be had if you will drive in search of it. As you drop anchor the negro harbour police row out —in the round hats and white blouses of Nelson’s day, lacking only a pig-tail—to rest on their oars until the quarantine flag has been hauled down. Without their protection ever yship would be stormed and boarded by the boat boys who race out to ply for hire and by the divers who flash in and out of their coracles, returning with a grin of invitation and your sixpence secure in their mouths. Thanks to the police, the row-boats are kept at a distance; and their owners stand in a clamant circle, clutching the name boards.to their chests and asservating at full blast that there is not a boat in all Barbados that can compare with the Mayflower, or the Anna, or the Rose. Nature has done more than art for the capital. The blistered, ramshackle houses and pitted roads are monotonous ; but, after months of flowerless winter and weeks of landless seas, the red and purple bourgainvillea make you hold your breath in ecstasy of gratitude. THE COLOUR BAR.

In history, in site, and in sentiment Barbados —of all the Lesser Antilles — lies nearest to England. It is the least cosmopolitan; the most insistent on a rigid colour bar. In Trinidad it is imprudent to discuss questions of race, for your neighbour may be French, Spanish, American, or mixed, a quadroon or octoroon. Barbados like a southern state, permits no union between black and white; he who tries to break the rule is rejected by the one community and repelled by the other. The instinct and tradition of both approve this division, though a traveller may moralise over the retributions of history. Our great-grand-fathers filled their plantations with slaves whom our grandfathers emancipated and our fathers had to recognise as British subjects. We cannot live with them or without them, 'blending or purging; in the United States and the West Indies, the African negro lingers on into the twentieth century as the revenge which Nemesis has taken on the greed of our forefathers. Flat and arid from the sea, Barbados in the interior is exhaustively cultivated and richly productive. Like the other islands, it has passed through trying times since the war; but, allowed a sufficient rainfall, it will respond to its late careful nursing. It is optimistic; and this is the first of many contrasts to be noted at this season between Barbados and Trinidad.

The voyage from the one to the other takes less than a day; but it is from one world to another, from flats to heights, from an island to a promontory which has broken away from South America. The bocas through which you approach Port of Spain once must have stretched to the mainland; the harbour is everlastingly silted up with Orinoco mud; the climate and vegetatation belong to the continent; the great pitch-lake at La Brea has its sole counterpart in Venezuela. If you know Corfu and the glassy, landlocked sea by which you approach it from the north Dalmatian coast, you will be reminded of it as you enter the roadstead of Port of Spain; but Corfu is cold and barren by comparison; with none of the grandeur that comes to towering mountains trailing their tropic vegetation to the water’s edge. Approaching Trinidad from the noTth-west, you cannot see the sun rise but you will notice a flush in the sky behind the mountains; the air, which before dawn was soft and warm as on an English summer afternoon, takes on the fierce, dry heat of fire; the silence of the night snaps like

a taut string; full day rushes out and the world is awake. In beauty of position and design Port of Spain eclipses old Havana; and Kingston is not to be mentioned in the same breath. Lying between the sea and the mountains and radiating from the Savannah, it is a city of palms and crotons of poinsettia and ■hibiscus of dazzling streets and green spaces of scorching sunshine and shaded verandahs.

COSMOPOLIS OF THE CARIBBEAN. Stand for an hour at the Galata Bridge in Constantinople, and you will see more nationalities than anywhere in Europe. Walk from Lighthouse Jetty to Union Square up Frederick Street and across the Savannah to Government House, and you will see in Port of Spain many nationalities that you havealready met in Constantinople and man ythat you have not. There are English and Americans; French, Dutch and Spanish; Greek and Chinese; African and East Indian; mulattos, half-mulattos, and quartermulattos. And everywhere you will hear the clipped, sing-song intonation of the creole unmistakable, unavoidable, whatever the breed of the speaker.

After Barbados Trinidad at this season may seem pessimistic. The price of cocoa and sugar is unstable; and, though the world can absorb all the asphalt that the pitch-lake produces, the island has not yet established itself as a great source of oil. There have been financial collapses; and the prudent are suffering with the foolhardy. The capital however, is commonly more sensitive than the country; and Trinidad is too fertile, too rich, too varied in her riches fertility to long depressed. Her people, too, are not likely to trouble a visitor with their misgivings; he has come to an enchanted island, where even the oysters grow on trees and the turtle dies uncomplainingly for his pleasure. Great mountains, gloomy forests, green palms, and cocoa-trees sheltered by flaming immortelles; days of quivering heat; velvet nights spangled with stars; and between them, the abrupt sunset of the tropics, with a green and opal afterglow; these things grow more beautiful with every visit; the memoy of them sends you back again and again to see if you were dreaming.

No dream, you find, did justice to the reality.