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LETTERS FROM THE WEST INDIES.

BY “BARTIMEUS.”

II. CURACOA.

ONE has a way of deciding quite definitely beforehand what a place with a familiar name, but not hitherto visited, is going to look like. Australia, for instance, I saw as a perfectly flat expanse of land thickly covered by sheep all nibbling the leaves off a stunted shrub, which presumably represented the Bush. When I found that in actual fact it was otherwise, I accepted the mountains and rivers and bell-birds and lovely gum-trees with astonishment and gratitude. But my conception of what Curacoa looked like got no further than rows of orange-trees in little green tubs, William of Orange and the Dutch and the taste of the liqueur being inextricably mingled to produce the vision; and so, seeing it for the first time, I was conscious of a vague feeling of disappointment.

We passed through the narrow entrance of the harbour, and on either side the quaintly gabled houses were crowded almost to the water's brink. They were saffron and rose and lemon and salmon-coloured, and alongside the wharves coasting schooners and merchant shipping were gay with bunting in honour of the arrival

that day of a local commercial magnate. There, there! I said to myself; and indeed nothing could have been gayer under the blue sky or more full of colour than the houses and the bunting. The crowds of negroes who thronged the water - side and the guard paraded on the bastion of an ancient fort should have satisfied any normal yearning for the picturesque. But I missed the orange-trees in the little green tubs something silly.

A pontoon bridge opened to let us through, and we came presently into a wide expanse of water like an inland sea, and there anchored. In the centre of this broad lagoon lay the secret of the visible prosperity of the place, of the gay flags, the crowded wharves, of the line of squat oil-tankers we had sighted as we approached, strung out to the horizon in the direction of the Venezuelan coast.

It was an island; and upon this island, belching smoke to the heavens, were the clustered chimneys and warehouses, the rows of tanks and tankers of a Refinery. The odour of crude mineral oil filled our nostrils : it permeated everything with a reminder of its presence, and

lay, to the anguish of the First Lieutenant, in a rich treacly deposit along the waterlines of our newly painted boats.

The place palpitated with energy and enterprise, but it was not beautiful. Neither, for the matter of that, would any vital internal organ be if suddenly exposed to view. And this Refinery is very much the vital organ of Curacoa; moreover, it is presently going to transform in a very startling fashion that arid island which for a century has been content to export orange-peel for the fabrication of liqueurs, and to lie in a forgotten corner of the Caribbean Sea lost in dreams of buccaneers, of raiding French and British Squadrons, of slavetrading and Van Tromp, and the glory that was Spain.

Because of this rapidly growing prosperity the Curacoans are gay-gay to a degree one does not look for in the Dutch. But the pure Dutch type is rare, anyhow at the evening junketing ashore. The real Curacoan is to Holland what the Maltese is to England, and his language, which is called papiamento, is a patois of Dutch and English, French and Spanish, bearing the same relation to any of these tongues that Maltese does to, say, Italian. In the varied physiognomies a Semitic strain intrudes upon the Venezuelan, which in turn has in it hints of other blood than pure Castilian. Their music, to which the young

men whirl their partners in a dervish - like gyration that makes the beholder dizzy, beats out a quick passionate throbquickening and quickening urgently, as though trying to convey some insistent message such as a traveller hears rising uncomprehended from an equatorial jungle. They call it the Curacoa Waltz.

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Here," said one of the gay young men of the town one evening at the height of a revel-" here you see we are different-different to Holland, different to all the world. In us there is the hot Latin blood. Ja! We have temperament. Ideas. We do all things different. Listen. I will tell you. I myself "-he tapped his breast-" only yesterday, I was given a watermelon. In the way of business. A water-melon. Ja!" He stepped back a pace dramatically, inviting the listener to consider the situation in every aspect.

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precise difference lies, which I suppose is the moral of the water-melon story, eludes one.

It was difficult in that queer polyglot community to find out much of the internal history of the island. No doubt archives exist, but the records are probably written in sixteenth century Spanish and seventeenth century Dutch. It was said that there was a priest living in a monastery somewhere in the north of the island who had made a study of its romantic chequered history. But I did not meet him, and all the inquiring mind had to feed on was scraps of legends picked up here and there, supplemented by imagination.

The place must have appealed very strongly to the buccaneers as a refuge for careening their ships unseen from the outer sea. During an earlier period of Dutch occupation I was told an English privateersman, refitting at leisure in the harbour, was called upon by the Dutch to assist in repelling a raid by a French squadron. England being then at war with France, he realised that if the French took the place he would find himself in somewhat of a predicament, and accordingly landed guns and men and assisted in the defence. The French were beaten off, and the English rover having thus had an opportunity of sizing up the strength of the Dutch garrison, decided, to employ

a modern metaphor, that it was a case of money for jam. He accordingly fell upon the Dutch, and captured the island.

My acquaintance with Dutch being nil, I could not verify this story; but it has a familiar ring about it; and if it did not happen at Curacoa, I have no doubt that it did elsewhere, although for obvious reasons it is probably omitted from school primers. These questionable tactics belong to a bygone, one likes to think forgotten, age.

There is a small English community resident in Curacoa whose men-folk are employees of the Refinery. When oil was first discovered in Venezuela, access to the wells was only possible to small-draught vessels owing to the shallowness of the lagoons across which it had to be brought to the sea. The company accordingly purchased from the British Admiralty all the available shallow draught monitors on the sale list, and converted them into tankers.

A British merchant captain, late of the Royal Naval Reserve, brought this squadron out, and remained as Marine Superintendent. Another Englishman with experience of the sea, who had commanded a mine-sweeper during the Great War, became his assistant, and together they sounded and surveyed and laid moorings, working after the fashion of their kind without fuss or very much in the way of outside assistance the type

of men Kipling possibly had in mind when he wrote

"They do not teach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose;

They do not preach that His pity allows them to leave their work when they dam-well choose."

A pipe-line is now running from the Refinery to the east of the island where, in a bay buoyed and sounded by these sons of Martha, deep-draught ocean steamers will presently connect up direct to the glaring new oil-tanks and fuel in their stride.

It is not wise to prophesy, but I should like to see that little wooded bay, with its ancient Spanish fort on the headland and the lizards scuttling about in the sunny silence of its rocks, in ten years' time. I said so to the man who had first, with a seaman's eye, noted its possibilities, whose mooring lighter lay swaying on the gentle swell in the indigo shadow of the cliffs. "Yes," he said, and stared out across the Caribbean Sea, which lay like burnished silver in the glare of the declining sun. "Yes, this'll be different. I had nothing but a sextant when I started . . . He turned to his assistant. "Fred, we'll have to lift that buoy out there to-morrow and bleed it."

The other grunted affirmatively. "Brand-new buoy just out from Holland," he grumbled. The man whose only

scientific equipment had been a sextant added, "But I shan't be here in ten years' time to see it. A Dutchman is taking my job on next year."

The setting sun threw the shadows of their sturdy selfreliant figures sprawling over the coral trash of the beach, and the whimsy flitted through my mind that perhaps the Dutch Directors of the Refinery had been studying the records in the archives of Curacoa, and were taking no chances.

There was a fourth person present during that conversation, taking no part in it, the eleven-year-old daughter of the Marine Superintendent. We had driven for ten miles in a stout-hearted Ford car, over roads so appalling that every now and again I looked back to see if she had been jolted clean through the hood. It would have astonished me less than it did to see her still sitting sedately in the back seat holding a little attachécase on her lap with a bathing costume in it.

The arid country was covered with short scrub, and very sparsely populated. A few negro habitations were scattered along the highway, each with its clump of struggling maize. In the distance the grey hills rose in abrupt formations, miniature resemblances to Gibraltar, scattered over the landscape. To the north the country was thickly wooded, and here a few deer still roam, and iguanas and

peacock. We came at length to a narrow defile originally hewn out of the volcanic rock by slaves, and the road swung round into a little bay. On one headland stood the Spanish fort, the old brickwork (every brick had been brought from Spain) warm and mellow in the late afternoon sunlight. Beneath it and on the opposite headland were the grey buildings of a hospital and yellow fever isolation quarters, built half a century ago, and now derelict. The blue water of the bay lapped upon a curved beach of white coral, and an old steamer moored offshore as a temporary oiling-berth stood out very black against the western light.

tossing the mop of short hair out of her eyes.

"I like the nostrils awfully,"

I said.

She nodded complacently. "Yes, they're good." Nostrils were evidently her forte; but I suspect it was the method rather than the effect which was so peculiarly her own. She studied my somewhat feeble attempt at a corsair's profile in generous silence.

"I could do his ear the same way," she volunteered.

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Go on," said I.

She stooped and stabbed.

Then she flung away the shell, dusted the sand from her hands, and ran away to dress.

Ten minutes later I took leave of the Marine Superintendent and his daughter. He stood with one foot on the step of the car and scanned the bay, shell-pink in the setting sun, as though, like me, he was seeing it for the first and last time.

"Good-bye," he said. "I'm glad I've been able to show it to you like this. My work

From a little jetty which advanced into six feet of utterly transparent water the child and I presently bathed. She dived and swam like a young otter, and after a while, taking me by the hand, she guided me through the sea-eggs in the shallows to a patch of virgin white sand. This she explained was good for drawing faces on, and sank down in one swift next year He movement into an unconscious glanced at his daughter, and pose of perfect grace, to be climbed into the driving seat, instantly absorbed in artistic a British seaman not given to I contented myself eloquence but apparently handy with profiles, but she was for with a sextant. The child the feminine full face, execut- took her seat beside him, and ing the nostrils with two par- sat nursing the despatch-case ticularly cunning stabs of a on her knees, crinkling her pointed shell, and adding a hazel eyes against the rays of wealth of curly hair as a final the burning sunset that, slantflourish. ing under the hood, had found "There!" She sat back, her where she sat. "I can't

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