I suppose that people had been looking for a galley shape on the island itself; they would have been looking for something big and noticeable. They wouldn’t have considered the worn rocks out at sea, which the admiral would have seen from the other side. The caravels were small; the galleys would have been even lower.
It occurred to me that from that side, the ocean side, that first, fifteenth-century Mediterranean view might still exist; whereas from my position on the rocks I was looking at a remnant of the aboriginal island.
It was hard to hold on to that romantic way of looking. I had never tried to do that as a child: pretend I was looking at the aboriginal island. No teacher or anyone else had suggested it as an imaginative exercise. It was something I had found myself trying to do, on visits, many years after I had gone away. And now, to leave the Point, to travel back along the county roads, the overgrown cocoa estates with their weathered grey-black cocoa drying-houses, the villages with the little wooden or concrete houses in dirt yards, to the crowded towns beside the highway, was to be taken back into a version of the colony I had known as a child. It was to be taken back to old ways of feeling, where no moment of beginning, no past, seemed possible, and the aborigines might never have existed.
I USED TO feel — in the way of childhood, not putting words to feelings — that the light and the heat had burnt away the history of the place. I distrusted the ideas of glamour that were given us by postcards and postage stamps (ideas repeated by our local artists): certain bays and beaches, the Pitch Lake, certain flowering trees, certain buildings, our mixed population.
Many years later I thought that that feeling of the void had to do with my temperament, the temperament of a child of a recent Asian-Indian immigrant community in a mixed population: the child looked back and found no family past, found a blank. But I feel again now that I was responding to something that was missing, something that had been rooted out.
Like people of small or far-off communities, we liked the idea of being visited. And though I distrusted tourist-board ideas of glamour, I feel that without these ideas (if only as things to reject or react against), without the witness of our visitors, we would have been floating people, like the aborigines first come upon below Point Galera, living instinctive, unobserved lives.
I suppose visitors, tourists, began to come in number when steam replaced sail. The tourists at the turn of the century didn’t come for the sun. They came for the sights; they protected themselves against the sun. With Edwardian layers of clothes, and with hats and umbrellas and parasols, they came to look at the diggings for the Panama Canal; they walked on the hard surface of the Pitch Lake; they looked at cocoa pods and coconuts growing on trees (crops requiring abundant plantation labour).
They also came for the history. They wanted to be in the waters of the great naval battles of the eighteenth century, when the powers of Europe fought over these small, rich sugar islands of the Caribbean. After the First World War, that idea of glory vanished. The naval battles and the once great names of the eighteenth-century admirals were forgotten. The tourists came for the sun, to get away from winter and the Depression; they came to be in places that were unspoilt, places that time had passed by, places, it might be said, that had never been discovered. So history was set on its head; the islands were refashioned.
EVERY YEAR the cruise ships brought one or two writers who were keeping journals and taking photographs for their “travel books.” These books, though descended in form from Victorian travel journals, were not like the books of Trollope or Charles Kingsley or Froude of fifty or sixty years before. There were no imperial “problems” now about the islands and the Spanish Main: no Victorian gloom about labour shortages after the abolition of slavery, about neglected or disaffected colonies, the rivalry of other powers, no nerves about an empire shrinking.
These cruise books, though very much about travel in the colonies, were about a part of the world that had, as it were, been cleansed of its past. The grainy photographs of, say, the fortifications of Cartagena in Colombia were photographs of an antiquity, something dimly connected with gold and galleons and the Spanish. The ruins of the black Emperor Christophe’s Citadelle in Haiti were like an Egyptian mystery. This world was dead and safe.
These cruise books resembled one another. They couldn’t have made much money for anybody, and I suppose they were a product of the Depression, written by hard-pressed men for public-library readers who dreamed of doing a cruise themselves one day in warm waters somewhere. Though this particular travel form required the writer to be always present, and knowledgeable, and busy, the books they wrote were curiously impersonal. That might have been because the writers had to get in everything earlier writers had got in; and also, I feel, because the writers of these travel books were really acting, acting being writers, acting being travellers, and, especially, acting being travellers in the colonies.
The Trinidad chapter of such a book would begin with an account of docking in the morning. It would speak of the mixed population in the streets. One writer might observe African people walking about and eating bananas; another would notice East Indian women with their jewellery and Indian costumes. There might be a visit to the Angostura Bitters factory; the Pitch Lake and the oilfields; a bay; a visit to a calypso tent or, if it wasn’t the calypso season, a visit to a yard connected with one of the ecstatic local African sects, Shango or the Shouters.
There would be a well-connected local guide in the background. He had acted as guide for other writers and knew the Trinidad drill. Apart from him — and he would be white or mulatto and slightly aloof — the local people were far away, figures in the background. Of these people anything could be said. The Africans who had been seen eating bananas by one writer might, by another writer, be put into two-toned shoes. They might be put into new and squeaky two-toned shoes; and the writer might go on to say that Africans were so fond of squeaky shoes that they took brand-new shoes to shoemakers and asked them to “put in a squeak.” As for the Indians of the countryside, they were a people apart; very little was known about their language or religion; and it was felt by the writer and his guide that this kind of knowledge didn’t matter.
These books didn’t cause offence. Very few local people read them. Some of the more extravagant things — like the squeaks in the two-toned shoes — chimed in with the local African sense of humour, the calypso fantasy. And then — hard to imagine now — local people lived with the idea of disregard. You could train yourself to read through this disregard in books and find things that were useful to you.
A book about Trinidad in the early 1930s had the pidgin or creole title of If Crab No Walk. It was by Owen Rutter, a name which has no other association for me. In his book Owen Rutter wrote this sentence: “The trains are all right, but the buses are a joke.” My father hung a whole article for a local magazine on these words of Owen Rutter’s. This would have been not long after I was born. Some years later — still a child — I came upon the magazine in my father’s desk. I was entranced by the article, with its comic drawings and its examples of the wit and nonsense destination-rhymes of local bus conductors. I looked at this article many times; I suppose it was one of the things that helped to give me an idea of where I was. Without the Rutter book my father might not have seen that the local buses were something he could write about. So there is a kind of chain.
I am not sure, but I believe it was words of Owen Rutter’s again that a local literary magazine put below a photograph of a Trinidad beach: “The desolate splendour of a palm-fringed beach at sunset.” That was set next to a photograph of a sunset sky with some words from Keats below it: “While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Beaches and sunsets were beautiful, of course; but those words of Keats (though they didn’t match the photograph, and were mysterious) and Rutter’s foreign witness were like an extra blessing.