Pouts of Peace

THOUGH sometimes the pigheadedness of mankind puts me in a huff, my nature is essentially pacific. The last fight settled by out-and-out force, in Smith annals, took place when I was aged five; on this occasion, for a decisive quietus, I brought down a train of toy iron railway cars on my small opponent’s head. Bottom up afterwards, and being spanked with a hairbrush, I tasted the bitterness of the fruits of victory. It was on, you would say, rather than at my mother’s knee that I learned those principles which since have guided me in the more subtly victorious ways of peace.

The history of Holland and the Scandinavian countries, as professional neutrals, I do not intend here to trace. Suffice it to say that these nations are as smart as I. Between the tinselly crown of glory and the blood-damped headpiece of the ashes of defeat they do not care to choose. Instead, for years and years now, they have worn the comfortable felt hat of neutrality. In it, and clucking their tongues over the excesses of their more heroic neighbors, they have been handy to lend aid; and the nice thing about friendly services so rendered is that nations at war do not quibble about paying a fair price for them. The felt hat is a badge financially worth wearing.

To cruise the northwesternmost of the West Indies, where neutral ports governed by the Swedes, the Danes, and the Dutch grew to great wealth in our Revolutionary and Europe’s Napoleonic eras, leads a thoughtful traveler to ponder neutrality as a paying business. These rocky bits of islands to left and right of the Anegada Passage, not even able to feed the cities that trade built upon them, have a useful lesson, perhaps, for the Peace Foundations.

The way to keep out of other people’s wars, we are constantly being told, is to lend assistance to nobody, but keep our hearts and our pockctbooks at home. The trouble with this is that there is no money in it. While we furiously tend to our own knitting, the suspicion galls that somebody else is getting rich. Intolerable! It obviously would be much more fun to put our hearts and pocketbooks at some brave fighter’s disposal, and gamble on united strength to win.

Meanwhile your more astute peacelover is successfully able to stay neutral, because he makes it pay. Hat pulled down on solicitous brow, he trades discreetly, fairly, and for cash. Such, at any rate, was the rôle played with marvelous reward by these West Indian ports in their day: Dutch Statia, Danish St. Thomas, and Swedish St. Barts.¹ A mercenary and macabre rôle, do I hear you grumble? Ah, dear hot-blooded reader, I see that delusions of military romance were not knocked out of you early, as mine were, by the flat side of a mother’s hairbrush.

I

Of the three ports, Statia has the most instructive story. Just when especially serviceable to the colony, its felt hat of neutrality was nipped off. In the fatal result our moral lies.

The island is a pair of volcanic cones with a saddle of hill between. One cone is old and shattered, the other is an upstanding youngster. When you come toward them (a Dutch steamer patriotically does call, ballasted with sea water since there never is a cargo), the forgotten city, with its bush-grown quays at the bottom of the cliff, slowly becomes visible. Some of its red roofs, to be sure, prove to be blossoming flamboyant trees, and the massive black church tower stands at the head of a roofless ruin. But a city there is, with amiable dogs of squat Dutch build frisking on the flagstone streets, and people who celebrate the mailboat’s monthly night in port with a dance.

Statia’s golden age coincided with our Revolution. England was pitched against France, too, at the time, which bedeviled Atlantic shipping. Military stores, however, as well as civil necessities, could be consigned safely to Dutch Statia, to be picked up there by vessels from Philadelphia or New England. Danger of loss by confiscation was reduced, say, by half. Little Statia, in fact, was one of the chief arteries through which the infant republic drew its lifeblood; and if it grew rich in this mercenary rôle, a good American really can’t complain.

Trade was enormous. The shore warehouses bulged with quick-moving goods. In their black-towered church on the cliff top the Dutch merchants gave thanks for profits received, while the Jews, in a synagogue a few streets distant, reviewed King Solomon’s sensible maxims, grateful for the opportunity Jehovah had vouchsafed them of assisting America to win its freedom.

At Statia it was that the Grand Union — the original, pre-Betsy Ross, American flag — was given its first recognition. Flying this rebel banner, a vessel entered to pick up a cargo of arms, whereupon Governor de Graef, spyglass to eye in old Fort Orange, ordered a salute. He was an impetuous soul, who soon had to be recalled to Amsterdam. For St. Kitts is Statia’s very close neighbor, and the British governor there, when he learned what had been done, first grew purple, then wrote a report which made London no less apoplectic. And not yet, in ‘76, was Holland ready to abandon the advantageous neutral rôle.

By 1780, however, Britain had not a friend in sight. The Empire seemed ready for its dissolution. Now was the safe time at which to recognize the United States, so Holland’s felt hat was flung off with a flourish.

Squash! There was life in the British lion after all. Down came a heavy paw on Statia. Admiral Rodney took the island, but kept the Dutch flag flying over it as long as it served to lure in enemy ships. If Fort Orange had chosen to honor the rebel American flag, its own could very nicely be put to dishonorable uses.

This was the end of Statia. Its fort still stands, and cannon still are mounted on its palmy ramparts. But they are toys out of a past age, used by small black boys for hobbyhorses. No Dutch prayers have been said in the Dutch church these many years, nor has a Jew been seen in the synagogue with his hat either on or off. The solemn warehouses, strung a mile along the shore, are bushchoked ruins on whose walls the sea derisively slaps.

II

St. Thomas’s story is more of a comfort. During the two and a half centuries of Danish rule it was one of consistent neutrality; and though this long period was marred by occasional short periods of unprofitable European peace, the city has survived, and is great and beautiful to this day.

Its zenith came in the era of the privateers. Here was one port where ships seized, and merchandise confiscated, found a market with no questions asked. Like Statia, it served the American patriots as an important depot of supply. In fact it was anybody’s port to use, a free port, a neutral port, and as cosmopolitan, crowded, and active a port as the world of those days had to show.

So long-continuing a rôle has given the place a character. Business is its business. If it were not for the French recent-comers from St. Barts — the tallhatted fishermen of Cha Cha Town and the gardeners of Mafolie — every mouthful of food eaten on the island would have to be imported.

As for shrewdness: ’I’m a perfect lady — perfect!’ a black crone told me one day, when, our paths coinciding, we walked along together. Her apron screamed for a washing; her shoes were ‘cut down’ for ventilation. But the old spirit was in her. ‘That’s what I am!’ she repeated, warming to her technique. ‘When I walk along with a gentleman like you, I never think of begging. No, I’m a lady, a poor widow-lady with no children to give me help, and the sickness closes up my stomach. God help me, what I suffer! But there’s no good begging of a gentleman: if he is a real gentleman, and has a heart of kindness, he’ll see my need without my asking, and put his hand in his pocket just like you got yours now. But if his heart is a stone and he is not a real gentleman, he won’t bring up nothing for all you beg him. And so, because I am a perfect lady, I just don’t mention these things to a gentleman, but put my trust in the Lord.’

Here was a little masterpiece of business persuasion from the old trader’s capital. And for a Scandinavian touch, the dog that scampered along ahead of her was named Frithjof.

St. Thomas in its great days also developed a character in its architecture. It was built as a business city strictly, conveniently compact. For gardens there was little room, but the Spanish trick of gardening in tubs and flowerpots has brought gayety to the picturesque and crowded groups of buildings. Like the cemetery’s inscriptions, which would tax the knowledge of a Berlitz, the elements that make the St. Thomian style are of all nations. Spanish shop doors, French galleries, English paneling, and the Dutch-Scandinavian Baroque of pudgy pilasters and curved masonry stairs, bit by bit were combined to form it.

Luckily, after the style was set, and had pervaded the city, prosperity receded enough to let the beauty of the place stand undisturbed. If Venice, say, had gone on being Mistress of the Sea forever, most of its palaces on which we now rapturously feast our eyes would have been pulled down, as time passed, to make way for structures more up-todate. So with St. Thomas. But the two ports had been rich enough long enough, before having to adjust themselves to more frugal ways, to breed families sufficiently substantial and conservative to keep them from ruin.

St. Thomas is, in fact, one of the world’s most charming cities. When I footed the hill road above it, to look down on its white-shining masonry and strawberry and cherry roofs, with the clear green of the mahoganies glistening in clumps and avenues, I was joined by an elderly string-bass player, out on the same errand. He had never traveled much, but was fond of boats, and some globe-trotting yachtsman friend had toid him that St. Thomas was the prettiest spot on earth. So, heaven being his not-distant destination, it occurred to him that it would be interesting to compare the Heavenly City with earth’s best; whereupon, before it was too late, he put his bull fiddle in the closet and came down to take a look.

Although he knew he would go back to his grandchildren and his fiddling in four weeks, he was enjoying a fit of indecision over how best to spend the rest of his fife on the island. Now that he was on the hill, he wanted a breezy hilltop house, but when he looked back at the harbor, or down at Magens Bay, or off to Hans Lollik Island and the multitude of others grouped away toward the British Virgins, he fell in love with the idea of living in a boat, and smoking his pipe in one turquoise anchorage after another. And then, when we came down into the hill lanes of the city, he found house after house that was his very heart’s desire. ‘It would be more sociable,’ he explained.

And indeed it was easy to picture a set of silver-thatched cronies with cellos and violins under their arms, climbing the steps across some flagged gutter, and turning in at a gate with the bust of Orpheus in white marble over it, for a long, happy, earnest bout of musicmaking.

At night I met him again, standing under the windows of Bethania Hall, where a prayer meeting was in progress. Joining in the hymn in a private hum, and gazing up to where the choir’s black heads were bent, he gave me an absentminded hand to shake. ‘“How lovely are Thy dwelling places!"' he remarked after the Amen, blowing his nose in a big handkerchief. It was a moonlit night, and the date palm leaning around the corner of the plain old building cast a Biblical shadow down the wall.

Choir music was something I was enjoying, myself, in St. Thomas. On practice nights I was sure to be in one church or another, applauding the struggle silently from a dark corner pew. The Lutherans’ taste, for example, was pleasingly austere; and in the middle of their lofty galleried old room hung a ponderous antique iron chandelier, from whose scrolls and curling foliage mermaidangels protruded, lighting the choir’s labors with their lamps —the faithful singers, the fastidious organist, and the black boy who pumped the bellows: I see that boy now, loose-necked, heavenward-looking, falling back to bring his full weight on the lever.

In 1672, when the Danes came to St. Thomas and Lutheran hymns first were sung there, they were sung in the Fort. Absence from worship in those days entailed a fine of twenty-five pounds of tobacco. The Fort, indeed, for many years did duty as the people’s church — a humorous sort of little castle, painted red, as if the prayers said in it, and that courageous color, were all the town needed for protection. St. Thomas was a port of peace; there was no point in converting it into a fortress like closedport San Juan.

The Danes, in fact, seemed to have the knack of making their West Indian troops effective, not by virtue of being dreaded, but of being liked. Uniforms were perfect for ballroom display, and the soldiers’ exploits were of the human rather than the inhuman kind.

For example, one sergeant major, on a trip to Copenhagen, won the National Beer Drinking Contest, and returned the island hero. And a master-of-ordnance, asked to report why West Indian brass cannon so constantly had to be replaced, replied (with a wink): ‘Cockroaches.’ The last laugh in this latter piece of fun came when headquarters stiffly called for specimens of the species. ‘For the Copenhagen professors, I fancy,’ mused the master-of-ordnance, sharpening his quill. ‘Your Excellencies will understand,’ he wrote, while his brother officers held their sides, ‘that insects so destructive to brass cannon would make short work of any container in which we might try to ship them, and proceed to endanger the seaworthiness of the vessel chartered to carry them to Denmark.’

After all, the most useful kind of army for a place like St. Thomas, whose one wish was to be on good terms with everybody, is the convivial, fun-loving kind, well drilled in ballroom dancing.

III

As for St. Barts, perhaps you will be surprised to know that Sweden ever formally administered a New World colony. But I tell no lie; she did, and until a mere sixty years ago. Moreover, this quite-forgotten island served as a port for vessels by the thousands. Goods were piled sky-high on its noisy quays.

Europe’s sweetness in 1800 was derived from the West Indian sugar lands; cotton and tobacco were fetched from the Caribbees in huge quantity; in those days, thus, St. Barts was very near the New World’s commercial hub. But it was a mere eight-square-mile scrap of unproductive scenery, far inferior in trade to St. Thomas, where the stimulus of neutrality had been working for a hundred years.

At just this juncture Napoleon, ‘that little man,’ unfolded his arms. The world split, and astounded St. Barts woke to find itself the sole neutral portof-exchange in the Western Hemisphere. Even Denmark got hauled backward near enough to danger to prompt Britain to hold St. Thomas till the fight was over. As for the United States, technically neutral, its shipping was so harassed by the war-nervous British that we had to jump in and fight the War of 1812. Of all the powers with interests in America, only Sweden managed to keep the felt hat of neutrality on its head. St. Barts’ position was unique.

Prosperity was instantaneous, meteoric. But when Napoleon went to St. Helena, St. Barts went to the dogs. Their fortunes waxed and waned together.

For a symbol of greatness lapsed, the morose skeleton of a stone-built inn looms by the harbor mouth, with the moon staring through its glassless windows. The flagstone quays are steeped in a profound inanimation. But do not think St. Barts is dead. Its dizzy fling was like the one great adventure in a quiet life, which enriches it with anecdote, and leaves a halo of romance around what otherwise might be prosaic. Over the grass-grown quays the bowsprits still bristle in crowded rows, if you listen to the stories of the place. ‘In Swedish times . . .’ the tales begin invariably.

The fine inn of those Swedish times, and their rowdy sailor taverns, have been supplanted by Madame Guyer’s boardinghouse on the Rue Oscar II. ‘All in the American style,’ she beams, hustling the newcomer to see the bathroom. But it is American with a difference. No water connects with the familiar fixtures.

As for her American front door, it had been installed with the night latch ‘on’ when the house was built, which had proved very unhandy all these years: Madame could go out, but not come in. But she had got used to trudging around to the back, and regarded it as the American way, until, having released the latch, I ignorantly altered the course of household habit, and stepped in with a casual hello.

Madame was dumbfounded. It was as if Edison had invented something before her very nose. But when she was sure of the miracle, in and out she rushed, crying, ‘My God, my God! It opens from both sides!’

This good and hospitable lady is descended from the Swedes, and looks it; and, though she knows no Swedish, her speech carries in it the cadence of that tuneful singsong language. But she and her (generally dark) city neighbors do not dominate the island. The human débris of a great trading era, they are like people shipwrecked long since on an alien shore — rooted in it thanks to a freak of history, but not yet really native. St. Barts was French before its Swedish century, and is French again. When the drum rolls and the town crier reads a proclamation, it is read in St. Barts’ more natural tongue.

But the deeper-rooted country folk are, after all, Scandinavian in their remote ancestry, Norman fishermen and herders. Their stone-walled lanes and grassy pastures, their well-kept stoneterraced gardens, look very odd and pretty on the windy tropic isle. The girl who puts you on the right road to Corossol, when you are walking, is a Norman peasant in starched white sunbonnet and flowered apron; and most strange and charming she looks, too, found under a palm tree.

Corossol, on the sickle of its beach, has no Norman air as a village, to be sure. The hurricanes have dictated other architecture. ‘Little house fall light,’ as the darkies say. But its doings and its people are another matter, and their featherbeds, and the twice-normal-size tambourines that set the rhythm of their music.

In white bonnets every Tuesday the good housewives climb a hill path of leg-breaking steepness to Colombier Church to confess their sins. Monday, in Corossol, is the day for washing clothes; Tuesday, the day for souls. The woman who told me had a face like a clear window into the simple heart.

I tried the penitential path myself — a staircase of gully boulders. For all its heat, the tamarinds cast a welcome shade across it, and the banks on either hand quivered with the motion of gold butterfly wings.

Beyond the church I climbed still farther, up and around the mountain by circuitous wind-blown lanes, to say goodbye to Des Cayes, azure Baie de St. Jean, and Pointe de Lorient, with its bands of colored rock slanting from the surf. Here, these days past, I had swum and clambered and greedily wolfed cactus radishes; watched the casting of nets and the plaiting of high-crowned Cha Cha hats, and been nudged in the ribs and poured full of Norman wit — as full, that is to say, as my own shallow linguistic wit permitted. ‘The man with shoes on travels the whole world through,’ I had been told, with a friendly push, and understood it: in St. Barts the shod man is the man with money. But these names of villages and bays and headlands have little meaning. Nobody goes to St. Barts to remember the pocket-size grandeurs of that most nearly perfect of small islands. Nobody has done so, that is, since Napoleonic times.

Visiting the place, as a matter of fact, is not especially easy. I went over in a schooner from Marigot, itself a port not vulgarly accessible; then came away to Philipsburg — have you heard of Philipsburg? — in an open boat across sixteen miles of deep-chasmed blue Atlantic surges. Neither trip was designed for the timid, really, though the latter one, thanks to an expert St. Bartian hand on tiller and sail, was an idyll for a sealoving landlubber like myself.

More hair-raising was the schooner journey. Even the moon that night, hurtling through the clouds, seemed intent on melodrama. When the ship tacked, she reared like a frightened animal, the sails boomed great guns, and the helmsman, a freckled mulatto in wooden shoes, bawled orders in gibberish seaFrench to the scurrying crew. Goosefleshy to the soles of my Minnesota feet, I shivered in a coat.

All the same, these undangerous terrors pleased me. It was like an approach to St. Barts, or Statia or St. Thomas, in the times of their big business and their riches. No less pleasing was the entry into port: kindly and slowly the harbor closed about us, as it had about so many sailing ships in those perilous years. The anchor, let go, sent calm rings of moonlight toward a shore trustfully unawake.

‘Till morning, monsieur,’ said the barelegged mousse, tugging at my sleeve, and pointed to a doghouse on the afterdeck. In I rolled, dog-tired. And till morning, with mouth organ in one pocket and swimming trunks in another, I slept such sleep as the merchants must have known, when (safe, too, with their goods) they came to anchor at last, in the old times, in these same ports of peace.