Pax Britannica by Jan Morris Page A

coal, placed as it was safely andconveniently on the trade routes between North and South America, with the best deep-water docks in the West Indies. In 1897 947 ships entered Castries, 620 of them steam, and in tonnage handled Castries was the fourteenth most important port in the world. Night and day the stalwart island women, singing jolly shanties, trudged up and down the gangplanks with baskets of coal on their heads—109 lb of coal apiece—and to thousands of sailors St Lucia meant above all the smell, filth and back-breaking toil of a coaling ship.
    The pace of business was set by the handful of British merchants in Castries—resented often by the old French landowners, not always welcomed by the snootier officers of Government, but doggedly making their fortunes none the less. Socially St Lucia tended to dwell upon a past that seemed to get more gracious every year—a whirl, it appeared, of balls and soirées, carriages perpetually at the door, French comedies, mazurkas swinging among the fireflies and duels in the blush of the morning, in the days when the planters lived in paternal and cultivated ease among their slaves and sugar-canes. Now it was mostly coal. Balls were infrequent, except in the mess, and were rarely graced, as the old ones had so often been, by visiting Marquises of exquisite sensibility. The Peters, the Barnards and MacFarlane Moffatt set more down-to-earth standards, and the creole landowners had withdrawn into their own inbred society, seldom appearing at functions in the town. The polo field and the racecourse existed mainly for the garrison. The British community was there either to rule or to make money: or else it always had been.
    For many of the most British inhabitants of the British West Indies had not been born in Britain. Some were planters themselves, men of substance, relics of the days when these sugar islands were the most valuable possessions of the Crown. Jamaica had its own English aristocracy, living in decayed splendour in lovely old country mansions: Barbados had provided several eminent soldiers for the Empire, besides bishops, statesmen and an editor of The Times . Many more of the island British were poor white, scattered through these golden territories like castaways of history. These people were coloured a chestnut brown, from generations in the sun, and they talked with a gentle and baffling lilt, a dialect very nearly properEnglish, but somehow not quite. There was often some Negro in them, and they were often to be found gaunt and high-cheeked on the verandas of rickety sun-bleached cottages, sunshine parodies of Englishmen, washed up on these shores by war, commerce or exile—for many of Monmouth’s supporters had been banished to these parts, and other ‘unruly men’ from England, sold as servants for seven years’ service, never went home again.
    A small educated middle class had also come into being, over the years, and few expatriates need now be summoned from England to fill the middle ranks of business and official life. The Peters and the Barnards were fast becoming St Lucians themselves, and the Rector of Castries was John Robert Bascomb, a tall brown man with a patriarchal beard, whose father had been a clergyman in the neighbouring island of Grenada, and who had been born in the West Indies himself, and educated at a school for clergy’s sons in Barbados. Bascomb had married into a well-known Castries family, the Coopers, and was as absolute a native of these parts as any creole patrician or wild voodoo-man of the forests.
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    St Lucia’s Diamond Jubilee accordingly had a tang very different from the overwrought festivities of London. The island was a long way in space from Buckingham Palace, and a long way in temperament from the pomp of the New Imperialism. The triumphs of Benin or the tribulations of the poor Afridi must have seemed inconceivably remote, seen through the columns of the Voice of St Lucia. The pioneers of St Lucia had not been