The ‘provision grounds’ of the Negroes were very interesting.  I had longed to behold, alive and growing, fruits and plants which I had heard so often named, and seen so often figured, that I had expected to recognise many of them at first sight; and found, in nine cases out of ten, that I could not.  Again, I had longed to gather some hints as to the possibility of carrying out in the West Indian islands that system of ’Petite Culture’ ­of small spade farming ­ which I have long regarded, with Mr. John Stuart Mill and others, as not only the ideal form of agriculture, but perhaps the basis of any ideal rustic civilisation.  And what scanty and imperfect facts I could collect I set down here.

It was a pleasant sensation to have, day after day, old names translated for me into new facts.  Pleasant, at least to me:  not so pleasant, I fear, to my kind companions, whose courtesy I taxed to the uttermost by stopping to look over every fence, and ask, ’What is that?  And that?’ Let the reader who has a taste for the beautiful as well as the useful in horticulture, do the same, and look in fancy over the hedge of the nearest provision ground.

There are orange-trees laden with fruit:  who knows not them? and that awkward-boughed tree, with huge green fruit, and deeply-cut leaves a foot or more across ­leaves so grand that, as one of our party often suggested, their form ought to be introduced into architectural ornamentation, and to take the place of the Greek acanthus, which they surpass in beauty ­that is, of course, a Bread-fruit tree.

That round-headed tree, with dark rich Portugal laurel foliage, arranged in stars at the end of each twig, is the Mango, always a beautiful object, whether in orchard or in open park.  In the West Indies, as far as I have seen, the Mango has not yet reached the huge size of its ancestors in Hindostan.  There ­to judge, at least, from photographs ­the Mango must be indeed the queen of trees; growing to the size of the largest English oak, and keeping always the round oak-like form.  Rich in resplendent foliage, and still more rich in fruit, the tree easily became encircled with an atmosphere of myth in the fancy of the imaginative Hindoo.

That tree with upright branches, and large, dark, glossy leaves tiled upwards along them, is the Mammee Sapota, beautiful likewise.  And what is the next, like an evergreen peach, shedding from the under side of every leaf a golden light ­call it not shade?  A Star-apple; and that young thing which you may often see grown into a great timber-tree, with leaves like a Spanish chestnut, is the Avocado, or, as some call it, alligator, pear.  This with the glossy leaves, somewhat like the Mammee Sapota, is a Sapodilla, and that with leaves like a great myrtle, and bright flesh-coloured fruit, a Malacca-apple, or perhaps a Rose-apple. Its neighbour, with large leaves, gray and rough underneath, flowers as big as your two hands, with greenish petals and a purple eye, followed by fat scaly yellow apples, is the Sweet-sop; and that privet-like bush with little flowers and green berries a Guava, of which you may eat if you will, as you may of the rest.

The truth, however, must be told.  These West Indian fruits are, most of them, still so little improved by careful culture and selection of kinds, that not one of them (as far as we have tried them) is to be compared with an average strawberry, plum, or pear.

But how beautiful they are all and each, after their kinds!  What a joy for a man to stand at his door and simply look at them growing, leafing, blossoming, fruiting, without pause, through the perpetual summer, in his little garden of the Hesperides, where, as in those of the Phoenicians of old, ’pear grows ripe on pear, and fig on fig,’ for ever and for ever!

Now look at the vegetables.  At the Bananas and Plantains first of all.  A stranger’s eye would not distinguish them.  The practical difference between them is, that the Plaintain bears large fruits which require cooking; the Banana smaller and sweeter fruits, which are eaten raw.  As for the plant on which they grow, no mere words can picture the simple grandeur and grace of a form which startles me whenever I look steadily at it.  For however common it is ­none commoner here ­it is so unlike aught else, so perfect in itself, that, like a palm, it might well have become, in early ages, an object of worship.

And who knows that it has not?  Who knows that there have not been races who looked on it as the Red Indians looked on Mondamin, the maize-plant; as a gift of a god ­perhaps the incarnation of a god?  Who knows?  Whence did the ancestors of that plant come?  What was its wild stock like ages ago?  It is wild nowhere now on earth.  It stands alone and unique in the vegetable kingdom, with distant cousins, but no brother kinds.  It has been cultivated so long that though it flowers and fruits, it seldom or never seeds, and is propagated entirely by cuttings.  The only spot, as far as I am aware, in which it seeds regularly and plentifully, is the remote, and till of late barbarous Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.

There it regularly springs up in the second growth, after the forest is cleared, and bears fruits full of seed as close together as they can be pressed.  How did the plant get there?  Was it once cultivated there by a race superior to the now utterly savage islanders, and at an epoch so remote that it had not yet lost the power of seeding?  Are the Andamans its original home? or rather, was its original home that great southern continent of which the Andamans are perhaps a remnant?  Does not this fact, as well as the broader fact that different varieties of the Plantain and Banana girdle the earth round at the Tropics, and have girdled it as long as records go back, hint at a time when there was a tropic continent or archipelago round the whole equator, and at a civilisation and a horticulture to which those of old Egypt are upstarts of yesterday?  There are those who never can look at the Banana without a feeling of awe, as at a token of holy ancient the race of man may be, and how little we know of his history.

Most beautiful it is.  The lush fat green stem; the crown of huge leaves, falling over in curves like those of human limbs; and below, the whorls of green or golden fruit, with the purple heart of flowers dangling below them; and all so full of life, that this splendid object is the product of a few months.  I am told that if you cut the stem off at certain seasons, you may see the young leaf--remember that it is an endogen, and grows from within, like a palm, or a lily, or a grass ­actually move upward from within and grow before your eyes; and that each stem of Plantain will bear from thirty to sixty pounds of rich food during the year of its short life.

But, beside the grand Plantains and Bananas, there are other interesting plants, whose names you have often heard.  The tall plant with stem unbranched, but knotty and zigzag, and leaves atop like hemp, but of a cold purplish tinge, is the famous Cassava, or Manioc, the old food of the Indians, poisonous till its juice is squeezed out in a curious spiral grass basket.  The young Laburnums (as they seem), with purple flowers, are Pigeon-peas, right good to eat.  The creeping vines, like our Tamus, or Black Bryony, are Yams, ­best of all roots.

The branching broad-leaved canes, with strange white flowers, is Arrowroot. The tall mallow-like shrub, with large pale yellowish-white flowers, Cotton.  The huge grass with beads on it is covered with the Job’s tears, which are precious in children’s eyes, and will be used as beads for necklaces.  The castor-oil plants, and the maize ­that last always beautiful ­are of course well known.  The arrow leaves, three feet long, on stalks three feet high, like gigantic Arums, are Tanias, whose roots are excellent.  The plot of creeping convolvulus-like plants, with purple flowers, is the Sweet, or true, Potato.

And we must not overlook the French Physic-nut, with its hemp like leaves, and a little bunch of red coral in the midst, with which the Negro loves to adorn his garden, and uses it also as medicine; or the Indian Shot, which may be seen planted out now in summer gardens in England.  The Negro grows it, not for its pretty crimson flowers, but because its hard seed put into a bladder furnishes him with that detestable musical instrument the chac-chac, wherewith he accompanies nightly that equally detestable instrument the tom-tom.

The list of vegetables is already long:  but there are a few more to be added to it.  For there, in a corner, creep some plants of the Earth-nut, a little vetch which buries its pods in the earth.  The owner will roast and eat their oily seeds.  There is also a tall bunch of Ochro ­a purple-stemmed mallow-flowered plant ­whose mucilaginous seeds will thicken his soup.  Up a tree, and round the house-eaves, scramble a large coarse Pumpkin, and a more delicate Granadilla, whose large yellow fruits hang ready to be plucked, and eaten principally for a few seeds of the shape and colour of young cockroaches.  If he be a prudent man (especially if he lives in Jamaica), he will have a plant of the pretty Overlook pea, trailing aloft somewhere, to prevent his garden being ‘overlooked,’ i.e. bewitched by an evil eye, in case the Obeah-bottle which hangs from the Mango-tree, charged with toad and spider, dirty water, and so forth, has no terrors for his secret enemy.  He will have a Libidibi tree, too, for astringent medicine; and his hedge will be composed, if he be a man of taste ­ as he often seems to be ­of Hibiscus bushes, whose magnificent crimson flowers contrast with the bright yellow bunches of the common Cassia, and the scarlet flowers of the Jumby-bead bush, and blue and white and pink Convolvuluses.  The sulphur and purple Neerembergia of our hothouses, which is here one mass of flower at Christmas, and the creeping Crab’s-eye Vine, will scramble over the fence; while, as a finish to his little Paradise, he will have planted at each of its four corners an upright Dragon’s-blood bush, whose violet and red leaves bedeck our dinner-tables in winter; and are here used, from their unlikeness to any other plant in the island, to mark boundaries.

I have not dared ­for fear of prolixity ­to make this catalogue as complete as I could have done.  But it must be remembered that, over and above all this, every hedge and wood furnishes wild fruit more or less eatable; the high forests plenty of oily seeds, in which the tropic man delights; and woods, forests, and fields medicinal plants uncounted.  ’There is more medicine in the bush, and better, than in all the shops in Port of Spain,’ said a wise medical man to me; and to the Exhibition of 1862 Mr. M’Clintock alone contributed, from British Guiana, one hundred and forty species of barks used as medicine by the Indians.  There is therefore no fear that the tropical small farmer should suffer, either from want, or from monotony of food; and equally small fear lest, when his children have eaten themselves sick ­as they are likely to do if, like the Negro children, they are eating all day long ­he should be unable to find something in the hedge which will set them all right again.

At the amount of food which a man can get off this little patch I dare not guess.  Well says Humboldt, that an European lately arrived in the torrid zone is struck with nothing so much as the extreme smallness of the spots under cultivation round a cabin which contains a numerous family.  The plantains alone ought, according to Humboldt, to give one hundred and thirty-three times as much food as the same space of ground sown with wheat, and forty-four times as much as if it grew potatoes.  True, the plantain is by no means as nourishing as wheat:  which reduces the actual difference between their value per acre to twenty-five to one.  But under his plantains he can grow other vegetables.  He has no winter, and therefore some crop or other is always coming forward.  From whence it comes, that, as I just hinted, his wife and children seem to have always something to eat in their mouths, if it be only the berries and nuts which abound in every hedge and wood.  Neither dare I guess at the profit which he might make, and I hope will some day make, out of his land, if he would cultivate somewhat more for exportation, and not merely for home consumption.  If any one wishes to know more on this matter, let him consult the catalogue of contributions from British Guiana to the London Exhibition of 1862; especially the pages from lix. to lxviii. on the starch-producing plants of the West Indies.

Beyond the facts which I have given as to the plantain, I have no statistics of the amount of produce which is usually raised on a West Indian provision ground.  Nor would any be of use; for a glance shows that the limit of production has not been nearly reached.  Were the fork used instead of the hoe; were the weeds kept down; were the manure returned to the soil, instead of festering about everywhere in sun and rain:  in a word, were even as much done for the land as an English labourer does for his garden; still more, if as much were done for it as for a suburban market-garden, the produce might be doubled or trebled, and that without exhausting the soil.

The West Indian peasant can, if he will, carry ‘la petite Culture’ to a perfection and a wealth which it has not yet attained even in China, Japan, and Hindostan, and make every rood of ground not merely maintain its man, but its civilised man.  This, however, will require a skill and a thoughtfulness which the Negro does not as yet possess.  If he ever had them, he lost them under slavery, from the brutalising effects of a rough and unscientific ‘grande culture’; and it will need several generations of training ere he recovers them.  Garden-tillage and spade-farming are not learnt in a day, especially when they depend ­as they always must in temperate climates ­for their main profit on some article which requires skilled labour to prepare it for the market ­on flax, for instance, silk, wine, or fruits.  An average English labourer, I fear, if put in possession of half a dozen acres of land, would fare as badly as the poor Chartists who, some twenty years ago, joined in Feargus O’Connor’s land scheme, unless he knew half a dozen ways of eking out a livelihood which even our squatters around Windsor and the New Forest are, alas! forgetting, under the money-making and man-unmaking influences of the ‘division of labour.’  He is vanishing fast, the old bee-keeping, apple-growing, basket-making, copse-cutting, many-counselled Ulysses of our youth, as handy as a sailor:  and we know too well what he leaves behind him; grandchildren better fed, better clothed, better taught than he, but his inferiors in intellect and in manhood, because ­whatever they may be taught ­they cannot be taught by schooling to use their fingers and their wits.  I fear, therefore, that the average English labourer would not prosper here.  He has not stamina enough for the hard work of the sugar plantation.  He has not wit and handiness enough for the more delicate work of a little spade-farm:  and he would sink, as the Negro seems inclined to sink, into a mere grower of food for himself; or take to drink ­as too many of the white immigrants to certain West Indian colonies did thirty years ago ­and burn the life out of himself with new rum.  The Hindoo immigrant, on the other hand, has been trained by long ages to a somewhat scientific agriculture, and civilised into the want of many luxuries for which the Negro cares nothing; and it is to him that we must look, I think, for a ‘petite culture’ which will do justice to the inexhaustible wealth of the West Indian soil and climate.

As for the house, which is embowered in the little Paradise which I have been describing, I am sorry to say that it is, in general, the merest wooden hut on stilts; the front half altogether open and unwalled; the back half boarded up to form a single room, a passing glance into which will not make the stranger wish to enter, if he has any nose, or any dislike of vermin.  The group at the door, meanwhile, will do anything but invite him to enter; and he will ride on, with something like a sigh at what man might be, and what he is.

Doubtless, there are great excuses for the inmates.  A house in this climate is only needed for a sleeping or lounging place.  The cooking is carried on between a few stones in the garden; the washing at the neighbouring brook.  No store rooms are needed, where there is no winter, and everything grows fresh and fresh, save the salt-fish, which can be easily kept ­and I understand usually is kept ­underneath the bed.  As for separate bedrooms for boys and girls, and all those decencies and moralities for which those who build model cottages strive, and with good cause ­of such things none dream.  But it is not so very long ago that the British Isles were not perfect in such matters; some think that they are not quite perfect yet.  So we will take the beam out of our own eye, before we try to take the mote from the Negro’s.  The latter, however, no man can do.  For the Negro, being a freeholder and the owner of his own cottage, must take the mote out of his own eye, having no landlord to build cottages for him; in the meanwhile, however, the less said about his lodging the better.

In the villages, however, in Maraval, for instance, you see houses of a far better stamp, belonging, I believe, to coloured people employed in trades; long and low wooden buildings with jalousies instead of windows ­for no glass is needed here; divided into rooms, and smart with paint, which is not as pretty as the native wood.  You catch sight as you pass of prints, usually devotional, on the walls, comfortable furniture, looking-glasses, and sideboards, and other pleasant signs that a civilisation of the middle classes is springing up; and springing, to judge from the number of new houses building everywhere, very rapidly, as befits a colony whose revenue has risen, since 1855, from 72,300 pounds to 240,000 pounds, beside the local taxation of the wards, some 30,000 pounds or 40,000 pounds more.

What will be the future of agriculture in the West Indian colonies I of course dare not guess.  The profits of sugar-growing, in spite of all drawbacks, have been of late very great.  They will be greater still under the improved methods of manufacture which will be employed now that the sugar duties have been at least rationally reformed by Mr. Lowe.  And therefore, for some time to come, capital will naturally flow towards sugar-planting; and great sheets of the forest will be, too probably, ruthlessly and wastefully swept away to make room for canes.  And yet one must ask, regretfully, are there no other cultures save that of cane which will yield a fair, even an ample, return, to men of small capital and energetic habits?  What of the culture of bamboo for paper-fibre, of which I have spoken already?  It has been, I understand, taken up successfully in Jamaica, to supply the United States’ paper market.  Why should it not be taken up in Trinidad?  Why should not Plantain-meal be hereafter largely exported for the use of the English working classes?  Why should not Trinidad, and other islands, export fruits--preserved fruits especially?  Surely such a trade might be profitable, if only a quarter as much care were taken in the West Indies as is taken in England to improve the varieties by selection and culture; and care taken also not to spoil the preserves, as now, for the English market, by swamping them with sugar or sling.  Can nothing be done in growing the oil-producing seeds with which the Tropics abound, and for which a demand is rising in England, if it be only for use about machinery?  Nothing, too, toward growing drugs for the home market?  Nothing toward using the treasures of gutta-percha which are now wasting in the Balatas?  Above all, can nothing be done to increase the yield of the cacao-farms, and the quality of Trinidad cacao?

For this latter industry, at least, I have hope.  My friend ­if he will allow me to call him so ­Mr. John Law has shown what extraordinary returns may be obtained from improved cacao-growing; at least, so far to his own satisfaction that he is himself trying the experiment.  He calculates that 200 acres, at a maximum outlay of about 11,000 dollars spread over six years, and diminishing from that time till the end of the tenth year, should give, for fifty years after that, a net income of 6800 dollars; and then ‘the industrious planter may sit down,’ as I heartily hope Mr. Law will do, ‘and enjoy the fruits of his labour.’

Mr. Law is of opinion that, to give such a return, the cacao must be farmed in a very different way from the usual plan; that the trees must not be left shaded, as now, by Bois Immortelles, sixty to eighty feet high, during their whole life.  The trees, he says with reason, impoverish the soil by their roots.  The shade causes excess of moisture, chills, weakens and retards the plants; encourages parasitic moss and insects; and, moreover, is least useful in the very months in which the sun is hottest, viz.  February, March, and April, which are just the months in which the Bois Immortelles shed their leaves.  He believes that the cacao needs no shade after the third year; and that, till then, shade would be amply given by plantains and maize set between the trees, which would, in the very first year, repay the planter some 6500 dollars on his first outlay of some 8000.  It is not for me to give an opinion upon the correctness of his estimates:  but the past history of Trinidad shows so many failures of the cacao crop, that even a practically ignorant man may be excused for guessing that there is something wrong in the old Spanish system; and that with cacao, as with wheat and every other known crop, improved culture means improved produce and steadier profits.

As an advocate of ‘petite culture,’ I heartily hope that such may be the case.  I have hinted in these volumes my belief that exclusive sugar cultivation, on the large scale, has been the bane of the West Indies.

I went out thither with a somewhat foregone conclusion in that direction.  But it was at least founded on what I believed to be facts.  And it was, certainly, verified by the fresh facts which I saw there.  I returned with a belief stronger than ever, that exclusive sugar cultivation had put a premium on unskilled slave-labour, to the disadvantage of skilled white-labour; and to the disadvantage, also, of any attempt to educate and raise the Negro, whom it was not worth while to civilise, as long as he was needed merely as an instrument exerting brute strength.  It seems to me, also, that to the exclusive cultivation of sugar is owing, more than to any other cause, that frightful decrease throughout the islands of the white population, of which most English people are, I believe, quite unaware.  Do they know, for instance, that Barbadoes could in Cromwell’s time send three thousand white volunteers, and St. Kitts and Nevis a thousand, to help in the gallant conquest of Jamaica?  Do they know that in 1676 Barbadoes was reported to maintain, as against 80,000 black, 70,000 free whites; while in 1851 the island contained more than 120,000 Negroes and people of colour, as against only 15,824 whites?  That St. Kitts held, even as late as 1761, 7000 whites; but in 1826 ­before emancipation ­only 1600?  Or that little Montserrat, which held, about 1648, 1000 white families, and had a militia of 360 effective men, held in 1787 only 1300 whites, in 1828 only 315, and in 1851 only 150?

It will be said that this ugly decrease in the white population is owing to the unfitness of the climate.  I believe it to have been produced rather by the introduction of sugar cultivation, at which the white man cannot work.  These early settlers had grants of ten acres apiece; at least in Barbadoes.  They grew not only provisions enough for themselves, but tobacco, cotton, and indigo ­products now all but obliterated out of the British islands.  They made cotton hammocks, and sold them abroad as well as in the island.  They might, had they been wisely educated to perceive and use the natural wealth around them, have made money out of many other wild products.  But the profits of sugar-growing were so enormous, in spite of their uncertainty, that, during the greater part of the eighteenth century, their little freeholds were bought up, and converted into cane-pieces by their wealthier neighbours, who could afford to buy slaves and sugar-mills.  They sought their fortunes in other lands:  and so was exterminated a race of yeomen, who might have been at this day a source of strength and honour, not only to the colonies, but to England herself.

It may be that the extermination was not altogether undeserved; that they were not sufficiently educated or skilful to carry out that ‘petite culture’ which requires ­as I have said already ­not only intellect and practical education, but a hereditary and traditional experience, such as is possessed by the Belgians, the Piedmontese, and, above all, by the charming peasantry of Provence and Languedoc, the fathers (as far as Western Europe is concerned) of all our agriculture.  It may be, too, that as the sugar cultivation increased, they were tempted more and more, in the old hard drinking days, by the special poison of the West Indies ­new rum, to the destruction both of soul and body.  Be that as it may, their extirpation helped to make inevitable the vicious system of large estates cultivated by slaves; a system which is judged by its own results; for it was ruinate before emancipation; and emancipation only gave the coup de grace.  The ‘Latifundia perdidere’ the Antilles, as they did Italy of old.  The vicious system brought its own Nemesis.  The ruin of the West Indies at the end of the great French war was principally owing to that exclusive cultivation of the cane, which forced the planter to depend on a single article of produce, and left him embarrassed every time prices fell suddenly, or the canes failed from drought or hurricane.  We all know what would be thought of an European farmer who thus staked his capital on one venture.  ‘He is a bad farmer,’ says the proverb, ’who does not stand on four legs, and, if he can, on five.’  If his wheat fails, he has his barley ­if his barley, he has his sheep ­if his sheep, he has his fatting oxen.  The Provencal, the model farmer, can retreat on his almonds if his mulberries fail; on his olives, if his vines fail; on his maize, if his wheat fails.  The West Indian might have had ­the Cuban has ­his tobacco; his indigo too; his coffee, or ­as in Trinidad ­his cacao and his arrowroot; and half a dozen crops more:  indeed, had his intellect ­and he had intellect in plenty ­been diverted from the fatal fixed idea of making money as fast as possible by sugar, he might have ere now discovered in America, or imported from the East, plants for cultivation far more valuable than that Bread-fruit tree, of which such high hopes were once entertained, as a food for the Negro.  As it was, his very green crops were neglected, till, in some islands at least, he could not feed his cattle and mules with certainty; while the sugar-cane, to which everything else had been sacrificed, proved sometimes, indeed, a valuable servant:  but too often a tyrannous and capricious master.

But those days are past; and better ones have dawned, with better education, and a wider knowledge of the world and of science.  What West Indians have to learn ­some of them have learnt it already ­is that if they can compete with other countries only by improved and more scientific cultivation and manufacture, as they themselves confess, then they can carry out the new methods only by more skilful labour.  They therefore require now, as they never required before, to give the labouring classes a practical education; to quicken their intellect, and to teach them habits of self-dependent and originative action, which are ­as in the case of the Prussian soldier, and of the English sailor and railway servant ­perfectly compatible with strict discipline.  Let them take warning from the English manufacturing system, which condemns a human intellect to waste itself in perpetually heading pins, or opening and shutting trap-doors, and punishes itself by producing a class of workpeople who alternate between reckless comfort and moody discontent.  Let them be sure that they will help rather than injure the labour-market of the colony, by making the labourer also a small free-holding peasant.  He will learn more in his own provision ground ­ properly tilled ­than he will in the cane-piece:  and he will take to the cane-piece and use for his employer the self-helpfulness which he has learnt in the provision ground.  It is so in England.  Our best agricultural day-labourers are, without exception, those who cultivate some scrap of ground, or follow some petty occupation, which prevents their depending entirely on wage-labour.  And so I believe it will be in the West Indies.  Let the land-policy of the late Governor be followed up.  Let squatting be rigidly forbidden.  Let no man hold possession of land without having earned, or inherited, money enough to purchase it, as a guarantee of his ability and respectability, or ­as in the case of Coolies past their indenture’s ­as a commutation for rights which he has earned in likewise.  But let the coloured man of every race be encouraged to become a landholder and a producer in his own small way.  He will thus, not only by what he produces, but by what he consumes, add largely to the wealth of the colony; while his increased wants, and those of his children, till they too can purchase land, will draw him and his sons and daughters to the sugar-estates, as intelligent and helpful day-labourers.

So it may be:  and I cannot but trust, from what I have seen of the temper of the gentlemen of Trinidad, that so it will be.