Plotting in Pirate Seas | Page 8

snatched back "Little

Paris," and Cap Haitien became a huddled cluster of pitiful buildings
scattered among the rubbish-heaps and walls of a once-beautiful
stone-built town.
This appearance of desolation, however, was contradicted by the
evidence of commercial activity. The sea-front was a whirl of noise.
The din of toil was terrific. Over the cobblestoned streets came rough
carts drawn by four mules--of the smallest race of mules in the
world--and these carts clattered down noisily with their loads of
coffee-sacks, the drivers shouting as only a Haitian negro can shout. At
the wharf, each cart was at once surrounded by a cluster of negroes,
each one striving to outshout his fellows, while the bawling of the
driver rose high above all. Lines of negroes, naked to the waist, sacks
on their glistening backs, poured out from the warehouses like ants
from an anthill, but yelling to out-vie the carters. The tiny car-line
seemed to exist only to give opportunity for the perpetual clanging of
the gong; and the toy wharf railway expended as much steam on its
whistle as on its piston-power.
Stuart had visited the southern part of Haiti with his father, especially
the towns of Port-au-Prince and Jacamel, and he was struck with the
difference in the people. Cap Haitien is a working town and its people
are higher grade than the dwellers in the southern part of the republic.
The south, however, is more populous. Haiti is thickly inhabited, with
2,500,000 people, of whom only 5,000 are foreigners, and of these, not
more than 1,000 are whites. The island is incredibly fertile. A century
and a quarter ago it was rich, and could be rich again. Its coffee crop,
alone, could bring in ample wealth.
To Stuart's eyes, coffee was everywhere. The carts were loaded with
coffee, the sacks the negroes carried were coffee-sacks, the shining
green berries were exposed to dry on stretches of sailcloth in vacant
lots, among the ruins on the sides of the streets. Haitian coffee is
among the best in the world, but the Haitian tax is so high that the
product cannot be marketed cheaply, the American public will not pay
the high prices it commands, and nearly all the crop is shipped to
Europe.

"Look at that coffee!" Stuart's father had exclaimed, just a week before.
"Where do you suppose it comes from, Stuart? From cultivated
plantations? Very little of it. Most of the crop is picked from half-wild
shrubs which are the descendants of the carefully planted and cultivated
shrubs which still linger on the plantations established under French
rule, a century and a half ago. A hundred years of negro power in Haiti
has stamped deterioration, dirt and decay on the island."
"But that'll all change, now we've taken charge of the republic!" had
declared Stuart, confident that the golden letters "U. S." would bring
about the millennium.
His father had wrinkled his brows in perplexity and doubt.
"It would change, my boy," he said, "if America had a free hand. But
she hasn't."
"Why not?"
"Because, officially, we have only stepped in to help the Haitians arrive
at 'self-determination.' The treaty calls for our aid for ten years, with a
possibility of continuing that protection for another ten years. But we're
not running the country, we're only policing it and advising the Haitians
as to how things should be handled."
"Do you think they'll learn?"
"To govern themselves, you mean? Yes. To govern themselves in a
civilized manner? No. I wouldn't go so far as to say that slavery or
peonage are the only ways to make the up-country Haitian negro work,
though a good many people who have studied conditions here think so.
"The program of the modern business man in Haiti is different: Make
the negro discontented with his primitive way of living, give him a
taste for unnecessary luxuries, teach him to envy his neighbor's wealth
and covet his neighbor's goods, and then make him work in order to
earn the money to gratify these wishes, and civilization will begin.

"Mark you, Stuart, I don't say that I endorse this program, I'm only
telling you, in half-a-dozen words, what it really is. It is sure, though,
that when the black man rules, he relapses into savagery; when he
obeys a white master, he rises toward civilization."
Stuart remembered this, now, as he sat outside the café, and looked
pridefully at the tents of the U. S. Marines in the distance. He realized
that American improvements in the coast towns had not changed the
nature of the Haitian negro, or creole, as he prefers to be called.
Under his father's instruction, the boy had studied Haitian history, and
he knew that the Spaniards had ruled by fear, the French had ruled by
fear, the negro emperors and presidents