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The New Hebrides are the wildest and most lawless part of the world in which I have ever been. Yet nothing could have seemed more tranquil than those green bush villages where naked savages tended their gardens and fed their pigs, in tune, seemingly, with a harmonious universe.

Which is the way with lawless places.

To-day, when I read of towns and villages taken or lost by Mexican rebels, I can scarcely believe that troops are actually deploying over the lifeless and arid plains through which I drove; that those cool villages among the hills are emptied by rifle fire; that the quiet cafés in whose shade I drowsed away the intolerable heat of a sequence of April mornings are the resort and refuge of desperate and dying men. I am not easily bored, but I was in Mexico. It seemed that nothing had happened, that nothing ever could happen there. No place seemed less potential of dramatic life.

As it was in Mexico and the New Hebrides, so was it to be in Haiti.

When I told my friends in London that I was going there they raised their eyebrows. “Haiti,” they said. “But that's the place where they kill their presidents and eat their babies. You'd better buy yourself a large-sized gun.”

I did not buy myself a gun. It is those who go through the world unarmed who stand the best chance of passing unmolested. But it was certainly with the feeling that drama and adventure awaited me that I saw from the deck of the
Araguaya
the blue outline of the Haitian Hills. I was familiar with Haiti's story, a long and a dark story—so long and dark that no historian can trace to its certain source the river of black merchandise that flowed during the early years of the eighteenth century to the slave factories of the Guinea coast.

For the most part it was composed, that merchandise, of the riff-raff of Western Africa; of inferior tribes that had been subjugated by their neighbours, of weaklings who had sold themselves into slavery to pay their debts. And those who judge the coloured people of the world by the negroes of the West Indies and the Southern States of America should not forget that it is from the worst elements of Africa that they have grown. For the most part, the negroes who were shipped to the New World had in their country, through their own vulnerability, degenerated into a condition of slavery. There were, however, others of a different caste: proud princes of Dahomey taken in battle, in raids instigated by the slave traders—the conditions of slavery had made highly profitable the spoils of war—men of authority, used to the dignity and exercise of power; men of war, fearless and skilled in battle; the best that Africa could produce; fitted to match a colonial civilisation that luxury and easily come by wealth had weakened; men who were to write Haiti's history.

They were shipped, the black cargo of slaves and princes, packed close in holds three feet in height, in which it was impossible to sit or stand. There was no light, no air, no sanitation. They were bound by chains that as the ship rolled cut into their flesh. They were fed twice a day on rice, sustained by water that as often as not was tainted. Twice a week a ration of brandy or rum was issued to them. Eight in every hundred died upon the journey. During the latter half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, pamphlet after pamphlet, debate after parliamentary debate expressed the horrors of “the middle passage.” But the clearest picture of slave conditions that I have seen is to be found in a small handbook, published in 1811, on the treatment of negro slaves. It was written for the young planter, and was not unlike those tips for the newly-joined subaltern that were issued to one in the 1914-18 war. It consisted of practical advice. The anonymous author regarded the negro as so much machinery for the management of estates. His concern was the development of that machinery
to the highest level of efficiency. One of the early chapters describes the treatment necessary for slaves on their arrival. He assumes as a matter of course that for days they will be unfit for work. They will be sick, weak, poisoned. He catalogues the diseases from which as a result of their journey they are likely to be suffering. They will need very careful treatment. He presents his facts without comment: he accepts the conditions as a matter of course. He intends no criticism; the criticism that is implicit in that acceptance is a more potent witness than the statistics of a thousand pamphleteers.

To those who are interested in the question of the slave trade that handbook is an invaluable informant. Its argument that the slaves are the most valuable part of a plantation is usually overlooked by those who dilate on the cruelty of plantation life. A negro was worth between a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds. One does not by wanton cruelty lessen the value of one's property. On the well-run estates the negro was happy and well cared for. He had his own hut, his own garden, whose produce he could sell, and from which he could make enough to purchase his freedom if he cared. His old age and his children were provided for. The negress would show her babies proudly to her master. “Good nigger boy to work for Massa,” she would say. There were a number of suicides, but that was due to the negro's belief that when he died he would go back to Africa. In some plantations you would see cages containing severed hands and feet. This was not a warning of future punishment; it was a proof to the negro that though the gods of Africa might be able to transport to Africa the bodies of the dead, they could not transport the limbs that the white man had cut off. “Do you want,” said the planter, “to go home without hands and feet? Why not wait till you die of old age and can return there complete; for I shall certainly cut off the hands and feet of every one of you that kills himself.”

There were punishments, and brutal punishments, but they were used in an age of punishment, when the flogging of sailors and soldiers was regarded as a necessary piece of
discipline. Examples had to be made in a country where the white man was outnumbered by the black in the proportion of ten to one. It was useless to threaten punishment. The negro cannot picture to himself the reality of pain. He lives in the minute. The negro of the Southern States enjoys the preliminaries of his lynching, the publicity, the excitement of a whole town turning out to see him. The slave who, having had one ear lopped off, was threatened with the loss of the other, fell on his knees and besought his master to spare him on the grounds that he would then have nowhere to put his cigarette. And it is not difficult to understand the loathsome refinements of the torture that was applied. There is no person in the world whose stupidity can exasperate you more than the negro's can.

On those occasions when every carefully repeated order has been misconstrued, when your luggage has been put on the wrong boat and the chauffeur has gone to fetch you from the wrong hotel, when you have not been called in time to catch your train and the black servant who is responsible for these misfortunes looks up at you with his incredibly stupid and lifeless face and says, “No understand,” I have longed for the red-hot poker that would produce some animation in those silly features. And I can imagine how the planter, wearied with boredom and sick with heat, must have felt under the impact of some particularly exasperating circumstance. “This slave,” I can imagine him saying, “may be worth a hundred pounds, but my temper's worth a good deal more.” They were rich men, it must be remembered. The catalogue of punishment that Vaissière has patiently amassed would make the Marquis de Sade envious. Such punishments, however, were exceptional. Bryan Edwards was of the opinion that the condition of the slave in the West Indies was no worse than that of the European peasant. Nor, though he suggests that the avariciousness of the French made them overwork their slaves, did he consider that the French planters were any less considerate to their slaves than the Spanish or English were.

Two facts, however, contributed to make San Domingo a
more likely stage for disturbance than Barbados and Jamaica. The first that the French, though good colonists, are never really happy out of France. The second that the French system of the kept mistress led to a far more rapid growth of the mulatto class in San Domingo than in the English islands. The French never made their homes in the West Indies. They lived in large houses, in conditions of great luxury, attended by many slaves, but their halls were bare. They had no fine furniture, no pictures, no rich brocades. It was not worth the trouble, they said. They were there for so short a time. Their talk was of France; of their last visit there; of how soon they could return. Their one object was to live in Paris on the profits of their estates. And it was on the estate that the atrocities were committed. It was the absentee system that was responsible for the barbarities of West Indian life. There were many such estates in San Domingo.

There were also the mulattoes. They were rich; they had been educated in Paris; they were numerous. By the end of the eighteenth century a tenth of the French part of the island was in their hands. They had a grievance. In spite of their numbers, their riches, their education, they were allowed no voice in the government of their island. They could occupy no official position. They could get no redress from justice when they were assaulted or insulted by the
petits blancs,
the clerks and adventurers, the registrars of estates, dissolute and incompetent, whom the mulattoes knew to be their inferiors, whose acquaintance they would have derided in France, but who here could order them and outrage them because of that quartering of savage blood.

Nowhere was the colour line drawn more strictly than in Colonial France. Colour precluded a man from every right of citizenship. Nowhere were the distinctions of colour defined more exactly. Moreau St. Mery had catalogued the two hundred and fifty different combinations that interbreeding may produce. The man who was four-fifths white was incontestably superior to the man who was three-quarters white. But as long as there remained a drop of coloured blood a man was debarred the rights of citizenship. The mulattoes
were very conscious of their grievance. They were rich; they were educated; they were well bred; they carried in their veins the blood of the oldest families of France, of the healthiest and handsomest of the imported African. The half-caste is usually despised because he is a mixture of bad blood, of bad black and of bad white. The mulattoes of San Domingo, however, combined the best of France with the best of Africa—a mixture to which most of what Haiti has achieved is due. Such men found intolerable the insults of the
petits blancs.
In Paris they were respected; why should they be despised in their own country?

Many were the complaints that they addressed to the French Government. But the French Government, blind though it was to the interests of its colonists at many points, supported them in this. “The colour line,” insisted the whites, “must be maintained. We are outnumbered by the blacks in the relation of ten to one. We must uphold our prestige. We are superior to the mulatto. And by refusing to countenance the claims of the mulatto we must keep this fact before the blacks. Our prestige once lost, we should be powerless.” The Government upheld its colonists.

It was, however, one of the few points in which it did. The Creole whites had grievances. In the same way that the English Government had regarded its American colonies as nothing more than a profitable source of revenue to itself, so did the bureaucrats of Paris enforce harsh and tyrannical regulations on its colonial trade. Produce might only be carried in French ships and to French ports. Duties were levied at excessive rates. The planters grumbled. Everyone was grumbling. Everyone had a grievance of some sort.

Then came the revolution.

§

The story of those early months is too confused to be told in
précis.
To be understood it must be read in some such detailed study as Lothrop Stoddard's. In Paris there was a Government that changed its mind only less often than it changed its leaders, that sent out commissions and recalled
them, that imprisoned the colonial representatives as traitors, that one month passed an Act abolishing slavery and the next repealed it. There was a society called
Les Amis des Noirs,
very few of whose members had ever seen a negro, demanding the cancelling, with every distinction of class, of Moreau St. Mery's two hundred and fifty carefully compiled distinctions. There were the absent French owners, suspect as aristocrats, asserting that only on the old colour basis could the allegiance of the colonies be maintained, and Robespierre thundering back that it, was better to lose a colony than a principle.

In San Domingo there were the planters, several of them aristocrats by birth, all of them aristocratic by sympathy, terrified at the thought that everything they had believed in was being taken from them, the constitution and the King of France, the tradition of colonial rule, the bar of colour. There were the bureaucrats sent out from France, ignorant, prejudiced, distrustful of everyone, who sympathised with the old
régime.
There were the
petits blancs,
a worthless and crafty lot, knowing that there was nothing for them to lose, trusting that any commotion might be turned to their advantage. There were the mulattoes supporting the National Assembly, believing that at last they were to be recognised as their fathers' children. And there were the slaves, stupid and misinformed, vaguely aware that there was an idea about that they should knock off work.

A confused and hectic story, with the planters gradually losing faith in the French Government, deciding, with the example of the American before them, on independence, appealing to the English to protect them; with Paris losing interest in its colonies; with the slaves rising and slaughtering their owners, with the mulattoes desperately appealing to the slaves to combine with them against the whites; with English troops occupying Port au Prince and the Mole St. Nicholas; and the Spanish pushing across from the west into the plain of the Gonaïves, and every man's hand against his neighbour's.