Part 1 (2/2)
BARBADOS
Gloom was cast over the _Renown_, the day before reaching Barbados, by the falling overboard, in rough weather, of a fine young gunner of marines, who was sitting on the taffrail gaily talking to his mates when a roll came that sent him into the sea. The poor fellow had hardly stopped falling when patent life-buoys, which sent out white clouds of smoke, easily visible in the bright afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, were dropped.
The big s.h.i.+p swung round. The man was swimming, when lost to view amongst white-topped waves. A boat was smartly lowered, and within fifteen minutes of the cry ”Man overboard,” the rowers had reached the buoys and were carefully searching the precise spot where the speck which had been one of our company had disappeared. The Prince was much concerned at the accident, and came upon deck the moment he heard of it.
But our hearts grew heavy as the minutes went by and the search proved vain. It had eventually to be recognized that the unfortunate man had sunk before reaching the life-buoys, close as they had been dropped to him in the water. A funeral service was afterwards held on the forecastle, the entire s.h.i.+p's company and all the officers attending to pay respect to the memory of their s.h.i.+pmate. The Prince also sent a personal message by wireless to the relations of the deceased. It was one of those accidents that no amount of care can entirely prevent, upon the necessarily low, and but slightly fenced decks of a modern battle-cruiser in a heavy sea.
The following evening the _Renown_ arrived off Barbados. The light-cruiser _Calcutta_, flags.h.i.+p of the West Indian squadron, met her at sea and escorted her in to the anchorage half a mile from sh.o.r.e. A dozen sailing barques, mostly American, also three or four steamers of various nationalities, were lying at anchor, all of them decked with bunting in honour of the Royal visit. The usual salutes were fired and formal exchange of calls between the Prince and Sir Charles...o...b..ien, Governor of the island, and Admiral Everett, commanding the West Indian station, took place.
It was the first pause for the purpose of the tour, the first official touch. The feeling of function, of standing at attention, which was soon to clothe the enterprise as with a garment, fell upon all concerned. The silk hat for the first time bobbed in the visiting steam-launch, and the address came out of the breast pocket of the munic.i.p.al morning coat.
Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, as seen from the _Renown_ through the soft warm muggy atmosphere of the end of March, was a tumbled ma.s.s of white and red buildings embowered in emerald foliage, and fringed by the masts of anch.o.r.ed sailing vessels, themselves reflected in the broken amethyst of the open roadstead. The narrow streets had been decorated by the wives and daughters of the residents, headed by Lady Carter, wife of a late governor of the island, who had expended an immense amount of labour upon the work. Gigantic sago-palm leaves had grown into royal emblems wherein the fronds took the place of feathers.
The Broad Street of the city might have been a Cantonese bazaar, so thick was it with coloured banners. Nelson's statue, in the local Trafalgar Square, looked out of a ma.s.s of brilliant floral designs. An imposing triumphal arch of flowers had also been erected. Even the tiny wooden huts of the negroes, on the outskirts, carried paper decorations that must have cost much labour to make. A well-set-up company of volunteers furnished a guard-of-honour at the landing. The members of the Barbados House of a.s.sembly, headed by the Governor in white political uniform, received the Prince. Bands and salutes added to the formality of the occasion. Complimentary addresses were presented in the old a.s.sembly House, where the Prince shook hands with a remarkably long line of returned military and naval officers and men, for Barbados sent an extraordinary large proportion of her sons to the war.
A fleet of motor-cars then turned up and the Prince was taken for a drive through the island. The procession was headed by that veteran planter and member of a.s.sembly, Mr. Graham Yearwood, who seemed to have at his finger-ends every local romance of the past three hundred years, from the story of the ”Rendezvous” on the coast, where loyalist planters repelled the onslaught of Cromwellian squadrons, to that of a certain cavernous gully which we also saw, where, for long months, was hidden the body of a swashbuckling moss-trooper slain in single combat by a Barbadian planter. The Prince was also conducted over the buzzing machinery of an immense, up-to-date sugar-factory, fitted with the latest appliances, and learnt something of the vicissitudes of the sugar industry, an enterprise which was doggedly operated through years of low prices, bad crops, and hurricanes, and only narrowly saved from complete bankruptcy by a grant obtained from the British Parliament by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. At the time of the Royal visit, it was in a state of abounding prosperity with prices at twelve times their pre-war level.
Even with the year's by no means favourable season the current crop was valued at eight times the average of five years previously, which meant ease and comfort to all connected with this premier industry of the island.
The whole of the city portion of the route was lined--in places ten deep--with cheering, laughing, bowing coloured people and their women and piccaninnies; the folk of the cane fields and factories. In the country portion of the route, negroes rushed to the roadside from their work in the fields the moment the Royal car appeared in sight. ”G.o.d bless you!” they cried to the Prince. ”Come! Come! Lookee here, he too sweet boy!” ”G.o.d bless my old eyes that have seen him,” mingled with laughter and the clapping of hands, while old men bowed low, with dignified, wide-armed, slow gesticulation, and women and girls, sometimes smartly got-up with head-kerchiefs made of Union Jacks, and always with strong, free hip-gait, and the widest of white-toothed smiles, came running to drop a curtsy or bend in salute. It was real contagious joy and excitement, like the overflowing froth of a bottle of Guinness, and as for the noise only a Jazz Band could describe it.
The road was sometimes crowded with four-wheeled mule-drawn carts, piled high with fresh-cut, yellow sugar-cane, on its way to the presses, each stem the thickness of a rolling-pin and the length of a cavalryman's lance, for the harvesting was in full swing. The negroes take the crop, which looks much like sorghum or Indian corn, with cutla.s.ses, primitive work done by primitive people. The luscious growth needs a good deal of fertilizing and care the year round, and generations of these simple folk have thriven upon it since the middle of the seventeenth century. Seventy-four thousand acres of it there are and probably a hundred thousand negroes producing it, all, so far as we could observe, delighted to see the Prince of Wales.
The road wound sometimes through pillared aisles of stately sago-palms, past dense groves of green mahogany and bread-fruit trees or brilliantly red flowering devil-trees, hibiscus, and silk-cotton. Sometimes one saw brown heaps of sweet potatoes, as large as turnips, just dug from the earth. The procession climbed through open fields of uncut sugar-cane and sorghum, getting a fine view of rolling cultivation, bordered with blue sea and white surf-swept beach. Ancient windmills swung black, droning sails on the hill-tops. Tall brick chimneys told of long-established crus.h.i.+ng mills close to the cane fields. Cheerful villages of flimsy wooden shacks and solid stone houses followed one another in quick succession, each with its inhabitants lined up in holiday clothes to cheer. Again and again the Prince alighted to inspect boy-scouts, girl-guides, and war-workers, or to say a pleasant word to a.s.semblies of school-children. One gathering proved a community of ”Red-legs,” descendants, now of mixed race, of Scotch and Irish prisoners of war and ”unruly men” exiled and sold for seven years as white servants to the colony in 1653. It was easy to pick out in the white-clad crowd individuals with negro features and pale Celtic skins.
Later in the day, the Prince attended a formal state dinner, and evoked a storm of applause by contradicting emphatically a rumour, which had been causing a good deal of anxiety in the island, to the effect that there was a possibility of some of the West Indies being disposed of to America. ”I need hardly say,” said His Royal Highness, downrightly, ”that the King's subjects are not for sale to other governments. Their destiny, as free men, is in their own hands. Your future is for you yourselves to shape, and I am sure Barbados will never waver in its loyalty, three centuries old, to the British Crown.”
It would thus appear that Cromwell's experiment is not likely to be developed by the present government. The a.s.surance was noteworthy as the first of the pleasant and telling things the Prince had to say during his progress, opportunities which he never missed and which, in the aggregate, enhanced so greatly the success of his mission.
III
PANAMA
At dawn, in hot, soft, hazy weather, the _Renown_, followed by the _Calcutta_, left the blue, transparent waters of the Caribbean Sea and entered the green, muddy channel, fringed with dense, verdant forest, which is the beginning of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Three aeroplanes, each bearing the stripes of the American Air Service, droned overhead in noisy welcome. Resonant concussions and white, fleecy puffs of smoke amidst low wharves and jetties where Colon lay in the forest, spread a Royal salute upon the vibrating air. Music arose upon the _Renown_, while staff-officers arrayed themselves in gold-lace and helmets, ready to receive the Prince's guests. Launches arrived at the s.h.i.+p bringing the British Minister to Panama, Mr. Percy Bennett, accompanied by Captain Blake and Major-General Beth.e.l.l, respectively naval and military attaches at the British Emba.s.sy at Was.h.i.+ngton. An hour's quiet steaming, thereafter, brought us to the giant Gatun locks, which stand in three black tiers of steel, the gates rising, one above another, in a ma.s.sive setting of grey, rounded concrete, a severing gash in the high, green hill which is the Gatun dam. Here, Senor Lefevre, President of the Panama Republic, Admiral Johnston and Colonel Kennedy, commanding the American naval and military forces in the Panama Zone, also Engineer Colonel Harding, Governor of the Ca.n.a.l, and Monsieur Simonin, French Charge d'Affairs, came on board.
The formality attending these official arrivals, so often to be repeated throughout the tour, was practically always the same. The visitor who came up the gangway from the dock or the launch, as the case might be, saluted the quarter-deck--a survival this from the days when it bore a crucifix--and was saluted in turn by the Officer of the Watch, who, with his telescope tucked under his arm, conveyed the stranger past the row of marines drawn up at attention to the Captain and the Equerry in waiting, who brought him up the starboard companion to the mezzanine deck. Here he would be received by the Prince attended by his Staff. The visit seldom exceeded twenty minutes. When H.R.H. left the s.h.i.+p for the sh.o.r.e the Captain awaited him on the quarter-deck and conducted him past the marines presenting arms to the gangway. On these occasions the junior members of the party were the first to step off, finis.h.i.+ng with the Admiral and last of all the Prince, both Admiral and Prince being ”piped over the side” to the shrill music of the bos'n's whistle. There was as little variation about the arrival on sh.o.r.e. Always the guard-of-honour, the band, the stunting aeroplanes, always six bars of ”G.o.d Save the King” and the pause at attention, always the hand-shaking with the officer commanding the guard-of-honour, the inspection, and so to the business and pleasure of the visit.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PANAMA Ca.n.a.l: A SHARP CORNER]
[Ill.u.s.tration: SURF-BOARDING AT HONOLULU]
On this occasion the guard of American soldiers in white uniforms and the familiar wide-brimmed hats was drawn up upon the lawn beside the topmost lock. Thence, past some thousands of prosperous-looking employees of the Ca.n.a.l, and their families, who had turned out to see the reception, the Prince was taken to the Control House, whence the whole of the operations of the locks are regulated, from the manipulating of the little, black, towing mule-engines, which ran busily, like scarabaeid beetles, up and down rails set in concrete slopes on the top of the lock walls, to the opening and closing of the seventy-foot high gates, and the letting in and letting out of the green sluggish water.
From the veranda of the Control House we got our first striking impression of the dramatic achievement of the Ca.n.a.l. We were on the level of the wide island dotted expanse of the Gatun lake. The enormous _Renown_ and the tiny _Calcutta_ lay, side by side, in thousand-feet-long pools, at our feet, in a turmoil of waves of rus.h.i.+ng water, out of which, from time to time, some frightened fish would leap, a silver gleam that disappeared before one had made out its shape or kind. The great design was in action before our eyes. The locks opened and closed with extraordinary speed and almost noiseless efficiency, and by the time the Prince had returned from inspecting the monster spillway and power-house, to which he was carried in a tiny train that was in readiness alongside the locks when we arrived, the _Calcutta_ was already entering the lake, while the _Renown_ had surmounted the locks and was only waiting to take on the Royal party before following in her wake.
The route thereafter lay at first through the green water of the lake, past islands covered with densest jungle. About the middle of the lake, we pa.s.sed ma.s.ses of bare tree-trunks, standing erect in the water, on either side of the broad track that is kept clear for the pa.s.sage of s.h.i.+ps. These trees are what remain of a forest that covered the bottom of the valley before the building of the dam which converted it into a lake. The trunks, though standing in some seven fathoms of water, still keep their branches and project many feet above the surface; and have to be avoided by pa.s.sing s.h.i.+ps. This dismal avenue has kept its place for ten years. It must have been green once. Like a forest after a great burning it stands in skeleton and carries no leaf now, a curious reminder that water can be as pitiless as fire.
In the afternoon we entered the Culebra cut. Here man has been at grips with nature in her least amiable mood. The channel becomes a winding gorge through steep, rugged crags and rounded hills. The stupendous cutting shows treacherous alternating layers of red gravel, yellow sand, brown crumpled rock, and soft, slippery blue clay. A number of mammoth floating steam dredgers were here at work, a fresh slip having occurred a few days previously. Progress, therefore, had to be of the slowest. A climax was reached near the end of the cutting, where, at a sharp curve in the channel, a whole hillside, half a mile each way, had commenced to move, the debris extending right into the ca.n.a.l, which was also impeded by a small island, apparently squeezed up from the bottom by the terrific pressure of the slipping hill. The place looked almost impossible, the great length of the _Renown_ making the manoeuvring of her in what remained of the channel one of the trickiest pieces of navigation imaginable. Naval officers are not easily put off, however, and by the most delicate handling, the vessel ultimately crawled past the obstruction. The cheerful little red-roofed towns.h.i.+p of Pedro Miguel was reached soon afterwards. Here the entire population had turned out to see the Prince, the girls in brilliant costumes, amongst which one might sometimes see the black mantilla of Spain; the men in anything, from working overalls and slouch hats, to the leisured fas.h.i.+ons of New York. At Pedro Miguel began the slow process of descending to the level of the Pacific. The first lock dropped us some thirty feet into the picturesque lake of Miraflores, surrounded by rounded gra.s.s-grown hills, emerald in the setting sun. Two more locks followed at the end of the lake, and we entered a stretch of water at ocean level, which took us to the docks at Balboa, upon the Pacific, close to the city of Panama.
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