Reviews of the Week
Caribbean Journey The Traveller's Tree. By Patrick Leigh Fermor. (John Murray. 2 IS.) INFORMATIVE, and often enough entertaining, the standard English travel-books upon the Caribbean have usually been limited in scope. Fronde, who wrote one of the best, was more concerned with the political future of the West Indies than with their scenery, while Canon Kingsley concentrated upon the flora of Trinidad with a jerky rapture that excluded every other interest and gives to his charining At Last : A Christmas in the West Indies a clearly botanical bias. Six Months in the West Indies, by Henry Nelson Coleridge, who accompanied the Bishop of Barbados on a visitation of the Leeward Islands in 1825, is fuller, but unexciting and inhumane. Mr. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who would appear to have spent a good portion of a winter in the islands, has now produced the longest and most important contemporary contribution to the honourable literature of Caribbean travel : The Traveller's Tree.
The Traveller's Tree is the record of a slow, ebullient journey commencing in Guadaloupe, Martinique and Dominica, going thence to the Barbados and to Trinidad, and on up the island chain in a fairly leisurely progress to Haiti and Jamaica. On this enviable voyage Mr. Leigh Fermor was accompanied by a couple of friends, ambiguous personages who are heard but not seen in these pages, and whose presence you are allowed to sense like that of someone just round the next corner or in a neighbouring room. One of the two, Mr. Costa, is responsible for the fine series of photographs evidently selected to marry with the text, but which the publishers have bound together in an undigested lump towards the end of the volume.
One of the chief merits of Mr. Leigh Fermor's extremely instruc- tive book is the fact that he and his party took pains to stop off at islands ordinarily by-passed by strangers, and were serious as well as eager in /heir investigations when they reached them. They made their way to the palace of King Henry Christophe in northern Haiti ; they visited the ruins of La Pagerie, in Martinique, where the Empress Josephine was born and bred ; they climbed the Souffriere, and examined the cauldron-lakes of Dominica ; they made a friendly Call upon the handful of surviving Caribs in the same island—all that are left of the original denizens of the Antilles—and talked with the Poor Whites of The Saints, Breton exiles with blue eyes and fair hair. Beginning with that " aversion for tropical flora " which many persons feel on first contact with the gross and juicy plant-life of those regions, the author soon conquered this distaste ; his enthusiasm mounted until he seems even to have forgiven the mosquitoes and the rain-tempests which ruin every picnic or walk in the West Indies, and to have got to like the insipid, damp-linen flavour of the paw-paw- _
But this enamoured attitude of gay enthusiasm changes swiftly to one of hot indignation, as when Mr. Leigh. Fermor doubles his fists at the white society of Barbados, with its hypocrisy and snobbish- ness, colour prejudice and suburban habit& He shrewdly perceives that the English colonial system of pretending that there is no colour bar, while covertly enforcing one socially, is worse in its effects, and more confusing to the negro mind, than the French practice of racial equality or the frank American Jim Crow. Mr. Leigh Fermor's sense of these injustices, coupled with his genuine admira- tion of and sympathy for much of negro life, evidently won him the confidence of the coloured people he encountered, and it enabled him and his companions to explore thoroughly, and to describe at first, hand, the mystifying complexities and mazy systems of Haitian and Jamaican voodoo.
Mr. Leigh Fermor's absorption in matters of religion, colour and class, and his alert sense of, humour, did not obscure for him the supreme beauties of the Caribbean land- and sea-scapes, romantic evocations of which glow and glimmer through. his book. His literary style is marked by a rare gift for analogy, and for happy comparisons—what better describes the sombre, disappointing surface of the Pitch Lake in Trinidad than to say it has " the colour and texture of a gramophone record " ?—and throughout this book he displays a combination of gusto and curiosity, erudition and sensibility, with a passion for languages and dialects which almost recalls the similar interests and talents of that legendary Victorian traveller and scholar, Sir Richard Burton. The single fault of The Traveller's Tree might be said to be an excess of detail, which makes parts of the book as congested as the
undergrowth of a tropical forest. But this fault, possibly due to too faithful a use of a vet:), exact day-to-day diary, does little to impair the value and interest of a first-rate and durable piece of work, and one which deserves a distinguished place upon the same shelf as the classic volumes of Labat, that energetic and inquisitive seven- teenth-century priest whom Mr. Leigh Fermor has most justifiably chosen as the tutelary genius of his admirable book.
JAMES POPE-HENNESSY.
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