The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: B011T7FRG4
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the late 1940s Patrick Leigh Fermor, now widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest travel writers, set out to explore the then relatively little-visited islands of the Caribbean. Rather than a comprehensive political or historical study of the region, The Traveller’s Tree, Leigh Fermor’s first book, gives us his own vivid, idiosyncratic impressions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti, among other islands. Here we watch Leigh Fermor walk the dusty roads of the countryside and the broad avenues of former colonial capitals, equally at home among the peasant and the elite, the laborer and the artist. He listens to steel drum bands, delights in the Congo dancing that closes out Havana’s Carnival, and observes vodou and Rastafarian rites, all with the generous curiosity and easy erudition that readers will recognize from his subsequent classic accounts A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.
about an hour short of dawn before we got back to our hotel. When, at last, slightly dizzy, I went upstairs, I must have mistaken the door, for suddenly I found myself in a strange room. A small fire of logs and charcoal had been built on a sheet of tin in the centre of the floor, filling the upper half of the room with smoke. Round it squatted a peasant family, a man and three little girls of diminishing size, and an old woman who was cooking their breakfast. Their gourd-plates were being filled
documents record that bloodshed reached such a pitch that the revolted Negroes appeared to be wearing gloves and stockings of scarlet. Then for days and nights ‘an oppressive silence hung over the north, broken only by the distant crackling of burning forests and the mournful winding of the conch-shells.’ It has also been set down that in many cases the slaves of humane masters, although wholehearted supporters of rebellion, rescued them from the indiscriminate fury of the mob, and guided them to
obscurity with obscurity. Dr. Louis Mars, who has written an excellent clinical report on his observations of the crisis of possession, is the most helpful writer on this particular problem. It is a phenomenon in which Haitian scientists and ethnologists are passionately interested and the brief attempt at explanation which follows is based on his essay, on the opinions of the other writers who have come to roughly the same conclusions, on conversations with various Haitians, and on limited
in flames by the grim and determined Christophe, so that when General Leclerc and Pauline Bonaparte landed, the town was a smouldering ruin. The port was the scene of Rochambeau’s atrocities, and the same mountains had echoed to the howling of the bloodhounds with which he hunted the straggling guerrillas.[2] Somewhere in the same region lay the house where Pauline had lived during the campaign. She conducted herself, it is said, with a frivolity which incurred, on her return to Paris after
Christophe’s custom to drill platoons of his troops here. To test their discipline, he marched them now and then clean over the edge. I have found no written verification of this extraordinary tale, but, apocryphal or not, it is an illustration of the type of myth that surrounds this figure. Over they went, the student said, and a twirl of his forefinger illustrated the descending arc of the uniformed insects as they spun down into the gulf. But Henri Christophe needs no rhetorical gift to