Chapter VII: Hither and Yon in the Haitian Bush (2)

The automobile in which we took our final leave of Port au Prince plowed its way for several miles along the thronged highway across the Cul-de-Sac plain, then turned west through an endless semi-desert bristling with thorny _aroma_. A dead negro lying a few yards from the road on the bare ground awakened no surprise from our native chauffeur or the gendarme in plain clothes beside him. There were no vultures flying about the body. Those natural scavengers were once introduced into Haiti, but the natives killed and ate them. Soon we came out on the edge of the sea, along the foot of those same cliffs we had seen while rolling in the doldrums on the Haitian navy three weeks before. What had then seemed a sheer mountain wall was in reality a flat narrow plain backed by sloping hills. Naked black fishermen were plying their trade thigh-deep in the blue water. Gonave island and the southern peninsula were almost golden brown under the early sun. For a long time the thorny desert continued, for southern Haiti had for months been suffering from drought. There were several ruins of ox-and-kettle sugar-mills, here and there evidences of former plantation houses; miserable native huts leaning drunkenly against their broken walls. Once we passed a massive old stone aqueduct. The parched and sun-burned landscape was now and then broken by green oases of villages. A little railroad followed us all the way to St. Marc, but there was no sign of trains. The town was carpeted in dust, a ruined stone church towered above the low houses, a dust-and-stone-paved central square had a grandstand and a fountain screaming in the national colors. Down on the edge of the deep bay crooked, reddish logwood dragged in by donkeys was being weighed on large crude wooden scales. This chief product of the region to-day lay in heaps along the dusty road beyond. Cannon bearing the Napoleonic device and date, left by the ill-starred expeditionary force under Leclerc, served as corner-posts of the bridges. The dense green of mango-trees contrasted with the dry mountain-walled plain; nowhere was there a sprig of grass, seldom a sign of water. _Pitimi_ grew rather abundantly, however, and there was some cotton. About the mouth of the Artibonite, sometimes called the “Haitian Nile,” was a spreading delta of greenery. Miserable thatched huts of mud plastered on reeds were numerous, yet blended so into the dull, dry landscape as scarcely to draw the attention. Negroes carrying huge loads of reed mats now and then jogged past in the hot dust; everywhere was what a native writer calls “l’aridité désolante de la campagne.” Yet though the drought occasionally flagellates portions of it, there is scarcely a spot in Haiti which would not produce abundantly under anything like proper cultivation.

Arid hills, with parched, purple-brown scrub forests, shut in the town of Dessalines, with its pathetic little forts that were long ago designed to protect the general of the same name. A small, dust-covered, baking-hot town well back from the sea in a kind of bay of the plain, it was indeed a negro capital. Farther on the dust and aridity largely disappeared. There was considerable cotton showing signs of languid cultivation, some fields were being hoed, others irrigated, as we snaked in and out along the wrinkled skirts of the rocky range on the right. Crippled beggars lined the way even here; in fact, there is a suggestion of India in the numbers of diseased mendicants squatting beside the dusty, sunny roads of Haiti. Women and children were bathing in brackish streams. Then it grew arid again, and we found Gonaïves, more than a hundred miles from the capital, in a very dry setting on the edge of a smaller bay. It claims twenty-five thousand inhabitants, some of whom live in moderate comfort. As in Port au Prince, one was assailed on all sides by the modern Haitian motto, “Gimme fi’ cents,” which is really not so serious a demand as it sounds, since it only means five centimes. It was in Gonaïves that independence was declared in 1804, and from here Toussaint l’Ouverture was sent to France in chains. The town is engaged chiefly in commerce. From it we turned back north by east into the country. A pathetic little railroad again began to follow us. The first few miles over a range of foot-hills were burned as dry as all the southern slope; then, as we climbed higher, it grew rapidly greener, the dust disappeared, we forded several small rivers many times, and were completely shut in by fresh and verdant vegetation before we reached Ennery.

This is a stony, sleepy little hamlet among the mountains, famed in Haitian history as the place where Toussaint was living when the French general Brunet wrote him, asking for an interview, at which he was traitorously arrested and sent to end his days in a French dungeon. There we left the road to Cap Haïtien and, still fording, rising constantly over long humps of ground, always turning, gradually gained coffee-growing elevation. A fine new road, passing one large marine camp, carried us higher still, until green mountains stood all about us, the air grew pleasant as that of our Northern spring-time, and at length we found ourselves among pine-trees. Just after sundown, in the soft gray-blue evening of the temperate tropics, we sighted the little white church of St. Michel, beyond which we spun across a floor-level plateau a little farther to the residence of an American estate manager. To say that we had covered a hundred and fifty miles comfortably, with one short and one long stop, between daylight and dark gives some idea of what American occupation has done for Haitian roads.

The great plains, fourteen hundred feet high, were flooded with moonlight all through the night, in which I several times awoke shivering for all my heavy blankets. By day the sea-flat plateau proved to be covered with brown grass beneath which was the blackest of loamy soil. Gasolene tractors were turning this up, working by night as well as by day, and operated by Haitians who had been trained on the spot under American overseers. It was virgin soil, for this region was Spanish territory in the time of the French and had been used only as grazing land. The new company would soon have hundreds of acres planted in cotton, with other crops to follow. Such enterprises, multiplied many fold, are among the most immediate needs of Haiti.

Colonel W—— of the Marine Corps and Major General W——, Chef de la Gendarmérie d’Haiti, who are one and the same person, set out that afternoon on an inspection trip through the heart of Haiti, and invited me to go along. The region being _caco_-infested and a “restricted district” in which white women were not allowed to travel, Rachel was to continue by automobile on the well-guarded highway to Cap Haïtien. The colonel and I left the plantation by car also, skimming for more than an hour across the wonderful grassy plain without any need of a road. Groups of horses were grazing here and there, but there were no cattle. Occasionally we met a lone gendarme plodding along in the shoes to which he was still far from accustomed. An unfinished road carried us on from where the plain began to break up into rolling country, with clusters of trees in the hollows. Now and then the colonel brought down one of the deep-blue wild pigeons which flew frequently past, but the flocks of wild guineas usually found in this region had evidently been warned of his marksmanship. Four-footed game does not exist in Haiti, and even its harmless reptiles are rare; Noah evidently did not touch the West Indies. Gradually the forest appeared, growing thicker and thicker, until we were inclosed in tunnels of vegetation, fording many small rivers. Suddenly a great hubbub ahead caused us to make sure that our rifles were in readiness, but it was only a cock-fight in the woods, the men standing, the women seated on little home-made chairs outside the male circle about the ring, made of barrel staves driven upright into the ground. In the next mile we passed a dozen black men, each with a rooster under one arm, hurrying to the scene of conflict.

At the town of Maissade we halted at a marine camp on a hill overlooking the surrounding country, and commanded by Captain Becker, a famous hunter of _cacos_. His tent was almost filled with captured war material: rifles of every kind in use a century ago corded like so much stove-wood; revolvers and pistols enough to stock a museum devoted to the history and development of that arm; French swords dating back to the seventeenth century; rapiers such as flash through Dumas’s stories; heaps of rusted machetes, battered bugles, bamboo musical instruments, and hollow-log tomtoms from voodoo temples; drums abandoned by Leclerc; ragged pieces of uniform decorated with ribbons; dozens of hats and caps of “generals,” of felt, cloth, and straw, all more or less ragged, and all bearing such signs of rank as might be adopted by small boy warriors. Then there were beads and charms, Obeah vials found on the bodies of dead _cacos_, mysterious articles of unknown purpose and origin. The captain dissected one of the charms. It consisted of a bullet wrapped in a dirty bit of paper on which were scrawled a few strange characters, the dried foot of a lizard, and what was apparently a powdered insect, all inclosed in a brass cartridge-shell, with a string attached to it long enough to go around the neck of the original owner, whom it was supposed to protect against bullets. The captain had shot him a few days before, and as he fell he cried out in “creole,” “O Mama, they’ve got me!” then died cursing the Obeah man for making an imperfect charm. Some of the _cacos_ in the region had recently surrendered, and had been made “division commanders,” with the duty of helping to hunt down their former comrades. One of them had showed the marine who shot him the bullet which he had dug out of his flesh with a machete, and now followed him everywhere like a faithful dog.

In the town itself the gendarme detachment was in command of a native lieutenant who was rated an excellent officer, but he had barely a touch of negro blood. Beyond was a road of boulevard width along which we spun at thirty-five miles an hour. Wild pigeons, parrots, and negroes far less ragged than those of Port au Prince enlivened the striking scenery, and at sunset we drew up before the gendarmerie of Hinche, the birthplace of the departed Charlemagne. There was something amusingly anachronistic in the sight of half a hundred marines playing baseball and basketball on the plain about their camp at the edge of town, for Hinche itself had little in common with such scenes.

All Haitian towns have a close family resemblance. There is always a big, brown, bare, dusty central _place_, with a tiny bandstand with steps painted in the national colors and surmounted by a single royal palm-tree, called the “_patrie_.” From this radiate wide, right-angled dirt streets lined by low houses, some of plastered mud, a few whitewashed, many of split palm trunks, most of them of _tache_, nearly all with earth floors, all except the few covered with corrugated iron in the center of town being roofed with thatch. Some have narrow sapling-pillared porches paved with little cobblestones, these sometimes also whitewashed; and where houses are missing are broken hedges of organ cactus on which hang drying rags of clothing. Facing the _place_ is a more or less ruined church, farther off a large open market-place, with perhaps a few ragged thatch-roof shelters from the sun. Then there is sure to be a spick-and-span gendarmerie, with large numbers of docile prisoners and proud black gendarmes, perhaps a group of marines, or at any rate of their native prototypes, here and there stalking through the dusty streets, ignoring the respectful greetings of the teeming black populace squatted in their doorways or on their dirt floors. Little fagot fires on the ground behind or beside the huts, a well-worn path down to the river, and an indefinable scent of the tropics and black humanity living in primitive conditions complete the picture. Men who have seen both assert that a Congo village is a paradise compared with a Haitian hamlet.

The curate came over to smoke a cigarette and drink a sip of rum with us after supper. He was a large, powerful Frenchman from Brittany, of remarkably fine features, sparkling blue eyes, and no recent hair-cut or shave, dressed in an ecclesiastical bonnet and enormous “congress” shoes run down at heel, and the long black gown which seems so out of place, yet is really very convenient, in the tropics. For twelve years he had shepherded Hinche and the neighboring region, being much of the time the only white man in it. He expected to complete twenty-five years’ residence, then go home in retirement. He traveled freely everywhere within his district, _caco_ sentinels and the bands themselves hiding when he passed rather than molest him. Cannibalism was certainly practised to this day, in his opinion, especially among the hills, where there were many negroes older than he who had never come to town. There was less superstition in this district, he asserted, because the people came somewhat under the more civilized Dominican influence. While we talked, two former _cacos_, now “division chiefs,” came in to report to the efficient young American gendarme commander, simple old souls with childlike eyes and Napoleon III beards whom one would scarcely have suspected of harming a chicken. The day before two native women had brought in a _caco_ whom they had cudgeled into submission, and that afternoon an old man, unarmed, had presented the commander with another, leading him by a rope around the neck.

In these circumstances we set out on horseback next morning in no great fear of the bandits, though we kept our rifles and revolvers handy. With us went a curious dwarf who lived in the next town and who had attached himself to the Americans like a stray mastiff, which he closely resembled in expression and in his devotion to them. He was of full size from the waist upward, but his legs were scarcely a foot long, and his bare feet hardly reached to the edges of the saddle in which he sat, once he had been placed there, with all the assurance of a cow-boy of the plains. Then there was “Jim,” looking like the advance agent of a minstrel show. “Jim” was a descendant of American negroes, his grandparents having come from Philadelphia to Samaná, Santo Domingo, where a number of black colonists from our northern states settled at the invitation of the Haitians when they ruled the whole island. He spoke a fluent English, with a mixture of Southern and foreign accent, as well as “creole” and Spanish, and having served the colonel as interpreter years before during the marine advance from Monte Cristi to Santiago, had come to Haiti to join him again when he took charge of the gendarmerie. He had been assigned to plain-clothes duty, but “Jim’s” conception of that phrase did not include the adjective, and he had set forth on what promised to be anything but a dressy expedition in a garb well suited for a presidential reception. This was already beginning to show the effects of scrambling through the underbrush in quest of the wild pigeons which had fallen before the colonel’s shotgun.

The mayor of Hinche, a first cousin of Charlemagne, saw us off in person, holding the colonel’s stirrup and bidding him farewell with bared head. We forded the Guayamoc River and wound away through foot-hills that soon gave way to a brown, level savanna which two years before had been covered with cattle, now wholly disappeared. Once we climbed over a large hill of oyster-shells, which geologists would no doubt recognise as proof that the region was formerly under the sea; but the French colonists of long ago were probably as fond of oysters as are their fellow-countrymen to-day, and it is worthy of note that these were all half-shells. We passed one small village in a hollow, with a mud hut full of gendarmes; the rest of the morning the dry and arid, yet lightly wooded, country was almost wholly uninhabited. For long spaces the scornful cries of black crows were the only sounds except the constant switching required to keep our thin Haitian horses and mules on the move.

Thomasique, where we halted for lunch at the mud-hut gendarmerie, was a dismal little hamlet of lopsided thatched hovels. The commander of the district had found a new use for captured _caco_ rifles, using the barrels as gratings for his outdoor cooking-place. The _juge de paix_, the magistrate, and the richest man of the town, ranging in color from quadroon to _griffe_, called to pay their respects to the general, frankly admitting by their attitude that the young American lieutenant of gendarmes was their superior officer. Under his guidance the revenues of Thomasique had increased five fold in a single month. It was evident from the manner of the judge that he had something on his chest, and at length he unburdened himself. The Government, it seemed, had not paid him his salary—of one dollar a month—for more than half a year, and he respectfully petitioned the general to take the matter up with the president upon his return to Port au Prince. There was probably a connection between his lack of funds and the auditing of the village accounts by the lieutenant.

The country was more broken beyond. Pine-trees of moderate size grew beside girlishly slender little palms with fan-shaped leaves. A high bank of blue gravel along a dry river-bed would probably have attracted the attention of a miner or a geologist. In detail the country was not pretty; in the mass it was vastly so. Brown, reddish, and green hills were heaped up on every hand; the play of colors across them, changing at every hour from dawn through blazing noonday into dusk and finally moonlight, made up for the monotony of the near-by landscape. There were almost no signs of humanity, the silence was sometimes complete, though here and there we passed the evidences of former gardens in dry _arroyos_. Toward sunset we burst suddenly out among banana-groves, starting up a great flock of wild guineas, and at dark rode into Cerca la Source, a more than usually whitewashed little town nestled among real mountains. It was Sunday, and the great weekly cock-fight having just ended at the barrel-stave pit in a corner of the immense open _place_, the hubbub of settling bets had not yet subsided, and for a half hour afterward scores of negroes with pretty game-cocks under their arms wandered about in the moonlight shouting merry challenges to one another for the ensuing Sabbath.

Beyond Cerca la Source a steep mountain trail climbs for hours through the stillness of pine-forests where birds, except the cawing crows, are rare and almost no human habitations break the vista of tumbled world over which even the native horses make their way with difficulty. A telephone wire known among the marines as the “beer-bottle line,” those being the only insulators to be had when it was constructed by our forces of occupation, is the one dependable guide through the region. Four hours brought us to a score of sorry huts in a little hollow known as La Miel. Even that had its hilltop gendarmerie and prison, commanded by a native sergeant, who had his force drawn up for inspection when we arrived, though he had no warning of the colonel’s approach or any other proof of his official character other than the blouseless uniform he wore. A white rascal owning a marine uniform could play strange tricks in Haiti. Even here there was a big French bell of long ago supported by poles at some distance from the broken-backed church, and Spanish influence of the Dominicans beyond the now not very distant border showed itself in such slight matters as the use of “_yo_” for “_ge_” and “_buen_” instead of “_bon_.” There followed a not very fertile region, with more pine-trees and long, brown, tough grass, with only here and there a _conuco_, shut in by the slanted pole fences native to Santo Domingo, planted with weed-grown _pois Congo_, _manioc_, and tropical tubers. In mid-afternoon, where the vegetation grew more dense, it began to rain, as we had been warned it would here before our departure from Port au Prince. The first sprinkle increased to a steady downpour by what would probably have been sunset, the trail became toboggans of red mud down which our weary animals skated for long distances, or sloughs so deep and slopes so steep that we were forced to dismount and wade, or climb almost on all fours. Dripping coffee-bushes under higher trees sometimes lined the way, the best information we got from any of the rare passers-by was that our destination was a “little big distance” away. That it remained until we finally slipped and sprawled our way into it.

It rains the year round in the dismal mountain village where we spent the night, until the thatched mud houses are smeared with a reeking slime, and the earth floors are like newly plowed garden patches in the early spring. The place was more than three thousand feet above the sea, and the cold seemed to penetrate to the very marrow even within doors. It was ruled with an iron hand by an “old-timer” who had been so long a sergeant in the Marine Corps that he had come to divide all the world into exact gradations of rank. My companion he unfailingly addressed as “the General,” never by the familiar pronoun “you,” and he took personal charge of everything pertaining to his comfort, even to removing his wet garments and extracting the bones from his chosen portions of chicken. Nothing would induce him to eat before the general had finished or to sit down in his presence. Myself he treated almost as an equal, or as he might have another sergeant who slightly outranked him in length of service, with now and then a hint of scorn at my merely civilian standing. He was probably as small a man as ever broke into our military service, yet the stentorian voice in which he invariably gave his commands to the great hulking negro who served as cook in the unsheltered “kitchen” outside and as general factotum about the hut never failed to cause that person to prance with fear. The natives he addressed in the same tone, and the whole town seemed to spring to attention when he opened the door and bawled out into the night for the mayor to “Report here on the double quick.” How the Haitians managed to understand his English was a mystery, but they lost no time in obeying every order. After the general had retired, the lieutenant, for such was his rank in the gendarmerie, confided to me that he had several books on “creole” and was preparing to learn it. As I had been on the lookout for something of the kind since my arrival in Haiti, hitherto in vain, I expressed a desire to see them. The lieutenant cast aside a soaked tarpaulin and handed me half a dozen French grammars such as are used in our own schools.

The colonel’s clothing was dry and newly pressed when we set out again next morning, though my own was still dripping. “Jim’s” plain clothes were by this time worthy a still more commonplace adjective, for in addition to the mishaps of the trail, he had spent the night in them on the bare earth floor of the gendarme barracks. There came a few more red mud toboggans, then we came out on a vista of half northern Haiti, to which we descended by a rock trail worn horseback deep in the mountain-side and so steep that even “Jim” for once deigned to dismount. The rain ceased a few hundred feet down, though the sky remained dull and overcast, in striking contrast to the speckless blue heavens of southern Haiti, for the seasons are reversed in the two parts of the country. A few hours’ jog across another savanna of denser vegetation than the plateau of St. Michel brought us to the considerable town of Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican border, where an automobile bore us away to the west. The great Plaine du Nord, once completely covered with sugar-cane and dotted with French plantation houses and mills, was now a wilderness teeming with blue-legged wild guineas, here and there some bush-grown stone ruins, through which a mud road and a single telephone wire forced their way. We passed the populous towns of Terrier Rouge and Le Trou, famed for their _caco_ sympathies, and Limonade, in the grass-grown old church of which Christophe, Emperor of northern Haiti, was once stricken with apoplexy, and brought up in the mud and darkness at Cap Haïtien.

Meanwhile Rachel had reached “the Cape,” as it is familiarly called, by the usual route. Leaving Ennery, this had begun at once to climb the mountain Puilboreau, winding in and out along its wrinkled face. The vegetation was rather monotonous, with a yellowish tinge to the several shades of green, now and then an orange cactus blossom, a purple morning glory, a pink vine, or the old-gold bark of a tree adding a touch of color. The view back down the valley, with its tiny specks of houses, remained unbroken until they reached the summit three thousand feet above the sea at Bakersville, so called for the marine who had charge of this difficult bit of road building, when there burst forth as far-reaching a scene to the north. The Plaisance Valley lay under the heavy gray veil of a rain-cloud, the harbor of Cap Haïtien visible far below, and far off on the horizon was the faint line of what seemed to be Tortuga, chief of Haiti’s “possessions” and once the favorite residence of buccaneers. The change of landscape was abrupt; heavy, dense green vegetation smelling of moisture surrounding the travelers on every hand as they wound down the mountain-side by a mud-coated highway, passing here and there gangs of road laborers. This northern slope was more thickly inhabited, thatched huts conspicuous by their damp brown against the greenery occasionally clustering together into villages in which some of the mud walls were whitewashed or painted. Market-women bound for “the Cape,” men grubbing in the fields, women paddling clothes—sometimes those in which they should have been dressed—in the streams, all gave evidence of the slighter dread of _cacos_ on this northern slope. Then came another climb and a descent into the valley of the Limbé, some miles along which brought them to the village of the same name and to the greatest difficulty to the automobilist in Haiti.

The fording of the Limbé is certain to be the chief topic of conversation between those who have traveled from Port au Prince to Cap Haïtien. At times it is impassable, and has been known to delay travelers for a week. This time men and women were crossing with bundles on their heads and the water barely up to their armpits. A gang of prisoners was brought from the village gendarmerie, the vitals of the car removed and sent across on their heads, then with the passengers sitting on the back of the back seat, the baggage in their laps, the reunited gang, amid continual shrieks of “_Poussez!_” and an excited jabbering of “creole,” eventually dragged and pushed the dismantled automobile to the opposite shore. An hour and a half passed between the time it halted on one bank and started out again from the other, which was close to a record for the crossing. From there on the wide, but muddy, road, now thronged with people returning from market with their purchases or empty baskets, passed many ruins of old plantations, and the crumbling stone and plaster gate-posts which once flanked the only entrances to them.

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Cap Haïtien, the second city of Haiti, sometimes called the “capital of the North,” is situated on a large open bay in which the winds frequently play havoc. On its outer reef the flagship of Columbus came to grief on Christmas eve, 1492, and the discoverer spent Christmas as the guest of the Indian chief who then ruled the district. The wreckage of the _Santa Maria_ was brought ashore near the present fisher village of Petit Anse, and here was erected the first European fort in the New World. In the days of Haiti’s prosperity Cap Haïtien was known as the “Paris of America” and rivaled in wealth and culture any other city in the western hemisphere. Then it had an imposing cathedral, several squares and _places_ decorated with fountains and statuary, and was noted for its fine residences and urbane society. Old stone ruins still stretch clear out to the lighthouse on a distant point. Destroyed by the revolting blacks, by Christophe in his wars against Pétion, by an earthquake or two, and by more than a century of neglect and tropical decay, it retains little evidence of its former grandeur. Some of its wide streets, however, are still stone-paved, and bear names which carry the imagination back to medieval France. A few of its citizens live in moderate comfort; the overwhelming majority are content to loll out their days in uncouth hovels. It is so populous that it supports a cinema, and some of its business houses are moderately up to date and prosperous, though these are in most cases owned by foreigners. The acrid smell of raw coffee everywhere assails the nostrils; coffee spread out on canvas or on the cement pavement of one of its few remaining squares is constantly being turned over with wooden shovels by barefooted negroes who think nothing of wading through it; here and there one passes a warehouse in which chattering old women sit thigh-deep in coffee, clawing over the berries with their fleshless black talons. Its market-place is large and presents the usual chaos of wares and hubbub of bargaining; its blue vaulted cathedral easily proves its antiquity, and American marines are everywhere in evidence. On the whole, its populace is somewhat less ragged than that of Port au Prince, but whatever it lacks in picturesqueness is made up for by the view of its surrounding mountains crowned by the great Citadel of Christophe.

Election day came during our stay at “the Cape.” In olden times such an event was worth coming far to see, provided one could keep out of the frequent mêlées accompanying it. Under the Americans it is tame in the extreme. To obviate the necessity of counting more votes than there are inhabitants, the marines have introduced a plan charming in its simplicity. As he casts his ballot, each voter is required to dip the end of his right forefinger in a solution of nitrate of silver. The nail of course turns black, for the finger-nails even of a negro are ordinarily light colored,—and remains so until election day is over. Far be it from me to suggest that such a scheme might be adopted to advantage in our own country. A few district commanders, to make doubly sure, use iodine. The rank and file accept this formality as cheerfully as they do every other incomprehensible requirement of their new white rulers, most of them making the sign of the cross with the wet finger. But the haughty “_gens de couleur_” are apt to protest loudly against this “implied insult to my honor,” and if they can catch the American official off his guard, are sure to dip in the wrong finger or merely make a false pass over the liquid, meanwhile scowling into silence the low-caste native watchers.

Haiti has long dreamed of some day uniting the several bits of miniature railroad scattered about the country into a single line between the two principal cities. The existing section in the north, twenty odd miles in length, connects Cap Haïtien with Grande Rivière and Bahon. Its fares, like those of the equally primitive lines out of Port au Prince, are so low that for once the assertions of the owners that they lose money on passengers can be accepted without a grin of incredulity. To raise them, however, is not so simple a matter as it may seem, for the Haitian masses are little inclined as it is to part with their rare _gourdes_ for the mere privilege of saving their calloused feet. There were far more travelers along the broad highway out of “the Cape” than in the little cars themselves in which we followed it through a region that might have been highly productive had it been as diligently tended by man as by nature. The train stopped frequently and long at forest-choked clusters of negro huts varying only in size. Such scenes had grown so commonplace that we found more of interest in the car itself, particularly among the marines who sprawled over several of the seats. The majority of our forces of occupation are so decidedly a credit to their country that it needed the contrast of such types as these to explain why the “Gooks,” as the natives are popularly known among their class, generally resent our presence on Haitian soil. Loudmouthed, profane, constantly passing around a grass-bound gallon bottle of rum, and boasting of their conquests among the negro girls, they were far less agreeable traveling companions than the blackest of the natives. Their “four years’ cruise in Hate-eye,” one would have supposed in listening to them, was a constant round of these things and “fighting chickens,” with an occasional opportunity of “putting a lot of families in mourning” thrown in. Yet underneath it all they were good-hearted, cheerful, and generous, despite the notion prevalent among too many Americans that boisterousness and rowdyism is a proof of courage and manhood.

Grande Rivière is a town of some consequence in Haiti, prettily situated in a river valley among green hills. Its grassy _place_ and the unfailing “_patrie_” in its center are decided improvements on most of those in the republic; the several large church bells under a roof of their own at some distance from the building itself still retain their musical French voices. A dyewood establishment is its chief single industry. The crooked logwood, carved down to the red heart before it leaves the forests, is gnawed to bits by a noisy machine, boiled in a succession of vats, the red water running off through sluiceways, and the waste tossed out to dry and serve as fuel, and the concentrated product, thick as molasses, is inclosed in barrels for shipment. Scarcely an hour passes between the picking up of a log and the rolling away of the barrel containing its extract.

But of all the sights in any Haitian town the market-place is surest to attract the idle traveler. It was Saturday, or beef day, and two long lines of venders were dispensing mere nibbles of meat to the clamoring throng of purchasers, no portion of the animal being too uninviting to escape consumption. Of a hundred little squares on the ground dotted with “piles” of miscellaneous wares the inventory we made of one is characteristic of all, and its sum total of value probably did not reach two dollars. There were long, square strips of yellow soap, brooms and ropes made of jungle plants, castor-beans (the oil from which is used in native lamps), unhulled rice, all kinds of woven things from baskets to saddle-bags, peanuts, green plantains, pitch-pine kindling for torches, huge sheets of cassava bread, folded twice, rock salt, gay calicoes, all tropical fruits, unground pepper, old nails, loose matches, cinnamon bark, peanut and _jijimi_ sweets, pewter spoons, scissors, thread, little marbles of blue dye, unassorted buttons, cheap knives, safety-pins, yarn, tiny red clay pipes and the reed stems to go with them, rusted square spikes of the kind used a century ago, shelled corn, ground corn, _pitimi_, several kinds of beans, tiny scraps of leather, four tin cans from a marine messroom, five bottles of as many shapes and sizes, one old shoe, and a handful of red berries used in Haiti as beads.

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A bare five days from New York stands the most massive, probably the most impressive single ruin in America. One might go farther and say that there are few man-built structures in Europe that can equal in mightiness and in the extraordinary difficulties overcome in its construction this chief sight of the West Indies. Only the pyramids of Egypt, in at least the familiar regions of the earth, can compare with this gigantic monument to the strength and perseverance of puny man, and the pyramids are built down on the floor of the earth instead of being borne aloft to the tiptop of a mountain. It is curious, yet symbolical of our ignorance of the neighbors of our own hemisphere, that while most Americans know of far less remarkable structures in Europe, not one in a hundred of us has ever heard of the great Haitian Citadel of Christophe.

We caught our first view of it from “the Cape.” The January day had broken in a flood of tropical sunshine, which brought out every crack and wrinkle of the long mountain-range cutting its jagged outline in the Haitian sky to the southward of the city. On the top of its highest peak, called the “Bishop’s Bonnet,” stood forth a square-cut summit which only the preinformed could have believed was the work of man. Twenty-five miles away it looked like an enormous hack in the mountain itself, a curious natural formation which man could never have imitated except on a tiny scale. It is a standing joke in Cap Haïtien to listen in all solemnity to newcomers laughing to scorn the assertions of the residents that this distant mountain summit was fashioned by human hands.

Now and again as we journeyed toward it on the little railroad to Grande Rivière we had a glimpse of the citadel through the dense tropical vegetation, yet so slowly did it increase in size that its massiveness became all the more incredible. Where we descended at a cross-trail in the forest a group of small Haitian horses was already awaiting us. The gendarme officer in charge of them was a powerful young American beside whom a native of the color known as _griffe_, in civilian garb, looked like a half-grown boy. For the pilots assigned us on this excursion were none other than Captain Hanneken and Jean Batiste, now Lieutenant, Conzé, the exterminators of Charlemagne.

The trail broke out at length into a wide clearing which stretched away as far as the eye could follow in each direction, its grassy surface cut up by several wandering paths along which plodded a few natives and a donkey or two. It was once the “royal highway” between Christophe’s main palace and Cap Haïtien, outdoing in width the broadest boulevards of Europe. An hour or more along this brought us to Milot, a small town lined up on each side of the road like people awaiting a procession of royalty. At the back of it the highway ended at a great crumbling ruin which had about it something suggestive of Versailles.

Christophe’s palace of Sans Souci, for such it was, is wholly uninhabitable to-day, yet there is still enough of it standing to indicate that it was once one of the most ornate and commodious structures in the western hemisphere. Two pairs of mammoth gate-posts, square in form and nearly twenty feet high, guard the entrance to the lower yard-platform, bounded by a heavy stone wall. On the inside these are hollowed out into unexpected sentry-boxes, for Christophe was a strong believer in many guards. Higher up, sustained by a still stronger wall, is another grassy platform, from which a stairway as broad and elaborate as any trodden by European sovereigns leads sidewise to a balustraded entrance court, also flanked by sentry-boxes. Crumbling walls in which many small bushes have found a foothold tower high aloft above this to where they are broken off in jagged irregularity. The palace was evidently five stories high, built of native brick and plaster, and the architecture is still impressive despite its dilapidated condition and for all its African-minded ostentation. The roof has completely given way, and in the vast halls of the lower floor grow wild oranges and tropical bush. Those higher up, of which only the edges of the floors and the walls remain, are said to have included a great ball-room, an immense billiard-hall, separate suites for the emperor and his black consort, and apartments for the immediate royal family. At some distance from the palace proper stand the lower walls of the former lodgings of minor princes, a host of courtiers, the stables, and the caserns. The several _parterres_, once covered with rare flowers watered by irrigating canals, are mere tangles of jungle. The _caimite_-tree under which the black tyrant is said to have sat in judgment on his subjects, after the example of Louis IX of France, still casts its mammoth shade in the back courtyard; a small chapel lower down that was probably used by the lesser nobles serves Milot as a church; with those exceptions there is little left as Christophe saw it. Our forces of occupation are threatening to tear down the walls, which are soon likely to fall of themselves, to clear away the vegetation, and to build barracks of the materials that remain.

The narrow trail that zigzags from the back of the palace up the mountain may not be the one by which those condemned under the _caimite_-tree were carried or dragged to their death before the ramparts of the citadel, but there remain no evidences of any other route. Much of the way it is all but impassable even during a lull in the rainy season, for the dense vegetation shuts out the sun that might otherwise harden the mud in which the hardiest native horses frequently wallow belly-deep and now and then give up in frank despair. For a time it leads through banana- and mango-groves, with huts swarming with negro babies here and there peering forth from the thick undergrowth; higher still there is a bit of coffee, but the last two thirds of the journey upward is wholly uninhabited. Only once or twice in the ascent does one catch a glimpse of the goal until one emerges from a brown jungle of giant grasses, to find its grim gray walls towering sheer overhead.

Before this mammoth structure the memory of Sans Souci sinks into insignificance. As the latter is ornate and cheerful in architecture, the citadel is savage in its unadorned masculine strength. The mighty stone walls, twenty feet thick in many cases, are square-cut and formidable in their great unbroken surfaces. The northern side is red with fungus, the rest merely weather-dulled. Even the cannon of to-day would find them worthy adversaries. Time, which has wrought such havoc on the palace at the mountain’s foot, has scarcely made an impression on the exterior of this cyclopean structure, and even within only the wooden portions have given way. Great iron-studded doors groaning on their mammoth hinges give admittance to an endless labyrinth of gloomy chambers, dungeon-like in all but their astonishing size. Cannon of the largest makes known when the fortress was constructed are to be found everywhere, some of them still pointing dizzily out their embrasures, stretching in row after row of superimposed batteries, others lying where the rotting of their heavy wooden supports has left them. Many bear the royal arms of Spain’s most famous monarchs, several those of Queen Elizabeth, and the rest evidences of English and French origin. Tradition has it that Christophe mounted three hundred and sixty-five cannon of large caliber in the citadel, and it is small wonder that his successors have not had the courage to attempt to remove them. The imagination grows numb and helpless at the thought of transporting these immense weapons by mere man power to the summit of a steep mountain three thousand feet above the plain below. Yet not only these, but the uncounted mammoth blocks of stone of which the acres of thick walls are constructed, the mortars, the iron chests, the smaller cannon, the heaps of huge iron cannon-supports, the pyramids of cannonballs that are found wherever the footsteps turn in the clammy chambers or the jungle-grown courtyards, were all brought here by sheer force of human arms.

Higher and higher the visitor mounts by great dank stairways through story after story of immense rooms, the vaulted stone ceilings of a few partly fallen in, most of them wholly intact, all dedicated to the grim business of war, to come out at last in an upper courtyard with the ruins of a chapel and the mammoth stone vault in which Christophe lies buried. Some of the marvels of the place are the stone basins always full of clear running water, the source of which no man has ever been able to discover. Here the group of prisoners whom the captain had sent ahead with the paraphernalia and provisions for an elaborate picnic lunch were shivering in their thin striped garments until their black faces seemed to be blurred of outline. Yet they had less cause to tremble than their fellows of a century ago who were herded in this same inclosure to await their turn for being thrown from the ramparts above. For such was Christophe’s favorite method of capital punishment. The throwing-off place is a long stone platform ten feet wide at the very top of the citadel. From its edge the sheer wall drops to a sickening depth before it joins the mountain-slope almost as steep, forming that great hack in the summit which looks from “the Cape” like a natural precipice. Men hurled from this height must have fallen nearly a thousand feet before they struck the bushy boulder-strewn face of the mountain, down which their mutilated remains bounded and slid to where they brought up against a ledge of rock or a larger bush, there to lie until their whitened bones crumbled into dust. Multitudes of his subjects are said to have met this fate under the black tyrant, some in punishment for real crimes, more for having unintentionally aroused his enmity or to satisfy his whims. The story goes that Christophe and his British ambassador once got into a friendly argument on the subject of soldierly discipline. The black emperor contended that there was no order which his troops would not unhesitatingly obey, and to prove his point he led his guest to the top of the citadel, where he set a company to drilling and at a given command caused it to march off the edge of the wall. This particular tale should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, but there is unquestionable evidence of similar playful acts on the part of the heartless monarch.

Once the visitor can withdraw his eyes from the jagged Golgotha below, the view spread out before him is rivaled by few in the world. All Haiti seems to be visible in every detail: the ocean, the entire course of meandering rivers, high mountains, deep valleys, a sea of greenery, form a circular panorama bounded only by the limitless horizon. Little houses in tiny clearings on the plain below, a dozen towns and villages, “the Cape,” Ouanaminthe, even the hills of Santo Domingo, stand forth as clearly as if they were only a bare mile away, some flashing in the tropical sunshine, others dulled by the great cloud shadows crawling languidly across the landscape.

Henri Christophe was a full-blooded negro who passed the early days of his life as the slave of a French planter. When the blacks rose against their masters he led the revolt on his own plantation and quickly avenged his years of bondage. Serving first as a common soldier under Toussaint l’Ouverture, he rose to the rank of general and became one of the chief supporters of Dessalines. The assassination of the latter in 1806 left Christophe commander-in-chief of the Haitian forces and led to his election as the first President of Haiti. His first official act was to protest against the newly adopted constitution on the ground that it did not give him sufficient power. Civil war broke out between him and the mulatto general Pétion, who drove him into the north and became president in his place, leaving Christophe the official ranking of an outlaw. Pétion, however, was never able to conquer his rival. Proclaiming himself president under a new constitution drawn up by an assembly of his own choosing, the rebel took possession of the northern half of the country and ruled it for thirteen long years with one of the bloodiest hands known to history.

In 1811 he proclaimed himself king, honored his black consort with the title of queen, and proceeded to form a Haitian nobility consisting of his own numerous children as “princes of the royal blood,” three “princes of the kingdom,” eight “dukes,” twenty “counts,” thirty-seven “barons,” and eleven “chevaliers,” each and all of them former slaves or the descendants of slaves. These jet-black “nobles,” many of whom added to their titles the names of such native towns as Limonade, Marmalade, and the like, soon became the laughing-stock of more advanced civilizations, though candor forces the admission that Christophe was only following the example of those who ennobled the robber barons of Europe in earlier centuries, with the slight difference in the matter of complexions. As “King Henry” he surrounded himself with all the pomp and ceremony of royalty, erected nine palaces, of which Sans Souci was the most magnificent and the only one that has not completely disappeared, built eight royal châteaux, maintained great stables of horses and royal coaches, innumerable retainers and servants, and a tremendous bodyguard. Later, feeling that he had not done himself full honor, he named himself hereditary emperor under the title of “Henri I,” and having come within an ace of conquering the entire country, settled down to govern his portion of it in a manner that would have been the envy of Nero.

The name of Christophe, in so far as it is known at all, is synonymous with unbridled brutality. Yet there is a certain violent virtue in the efforts by which the ex-slave sought to force his unprogressive black subjects to climb the slippery ladder of civilization. He founded schools, distributed the estates of the exiled Frenchmen among the veterans of his army, reëstablished commercial relations with England and the United States, created workshops in which the word “can’t” was taboo. His methods were simple and direct. Causing a French carriage to be placed at the disposition of his workmen, he ordered them to produce another exactly like it within a fortnight on pain of death. Similar tasks were meted out in all lines of endeavor, the tyrant refusing to admit that what white men could do his black subjects could not do also. His despotism, however, was not bounded by the mere desire for advancement. When he passed, the people were compelled to kneel, and death was the portion of the man who dared look upon his face without permission. Thievery he abhorred, and inflicted capital punishment for the mere stealing of a chicken. It came to be a regular part of his daily life to order men, women, and even children thrown from the summit of the citadel.

Tradition asserts that thirty thousand of his black subjects perished in the building of this chief monument to his ambition. All the French and Belgian architects and the skilled mechanics who worked on it are said to have been assassinated when it was finished. The tale is still going the rounds in Haiti that the emperor once came upon a gang of workmen idling about one of the massive blocks of stone destined for the citadel above, and demanded the reason for their inaction.

“It is too heavy, Sire,” replied the workmen; “we cannot carry it to the mountain-top.”

“Line up,” ordered the tyrant; then turning to his bodyguard, he commanded, “Shoot every fourth man. Perhaps you will feel stronger now,” he remarked to the survivors as he rode onward.

On his return, however, the stone was no higher up the hill.

“It is quite impossible, your Majesty,” gasped the foreman; “it will not budge.”

“Throw that man from the precipice,” said the despot, “and repeat the order of this morning.”

The remaining workmen, according to the tale, succeeded in carrying the stone to its destination.