EXTRACT FROM LE TOUR DU MONDE VOL. XXXVIII. 975eme LIV. pp 162-224
Translation by Brian D. Oakes
A couple of notes on the translation:
As the Conception gradually advanced new vistas appeared and presented new perspectives. Towns, ruins, rivers, and mountains, spread out along the coast, islands, seeded on the waves, appeared one after the other.
I saw, distinctly, the mouth of the Artibonite, the Atiboniko of the Indians, the Nile of Haïti, that, from the top of Monte-Gallo, one of the spurs of the Cibao, where the river arises, tumbles through the rocks to the savanna of Guaba, absorbing with her the Libon on the right and the Rio de Canas on the left; carving its bed between the Loma del Peligro and the Honduras mountain; taking with her the Indian river and the Guayamuco river of Fer-à-Cheval; passing between Morne-au-Diable and Garry mountain, making a triumphal arch of it; crosses the Saint-Marc plain, this miniature Véga-Réal, and folding back on herself constantly over a distance of sixty lieues (270 km.), like a giant serpent with blue scales, and worn out from its long detours, happy to find rest, throws herself without regret into the sea near Grande-Saline {Several months ago the Haïtian Monitor published a contract that the government had just signed with Mr. D. Lefebvre, a Frenchman, who has undertaken to channel this river}.
The only flood of the Artibonite that caused any damage was that of the 11 to 12 October, 1800.
On the right side, five lieues (22 km.) from the sea in a straight line, and at two hundred meters from the river, on the shore of one of its effluents, you find the village that has taken the name of : Petite-Rivière-de-l'Artibonite.
It is in this village in 1794 that the Civil Commissioner Polverel, was taken by the outlaw leader Guiambois, who conspired in favor of the Spanish and wanted to deliver the Artibonite to them. Later Lully would cut Blanc Cassenave and his hoard of negros called Congos tout nus (completely naked Congos), into pieces there. This Blanc Cassenave was a mulatto in the pay of the Spanish, a drunk and ferocious, who drank blood from a skull. Another Artibonite, a negro, Cotro, upset at the massacres ordered by Toussaint-Louverture, took up arms. Dessalines invited him to talk. On the faith of his oath Cotro went to the meeting. They assassinated him and his parts were thrown into the river.
To the north-east of Petite-Rivière-de-l'Artibonite are the entrances to Grand and Petit-Chaos. To the west, on the same side of the river, at two hundred meters elevation, you see the Crête-à-Pierrot, on which is found a fort built by Laplaine Sterling and Guy the Elder, at the time that they were quarreling with Borel and his saliniers (salt-workers), who were getting coloniques crowns for trapping free-slaves.
The Crête-à-Pierrot is today nothing but a military post in ruins and badly guarded. Ditches still surround the fort, but are now filled with debris. The hedge is still there, half burned by the sun, eaten by the rain and insects. The bastions you see there are of recent date : it was Christophe who had them built. At the entrance, a small addition serves as a shelter for the soldiers of the post. An old rusty cannon, a few pyramids of cannonballs and shells litter the grass. Of the old buildings only the powder magazine has been conserved. Two twin cisterns, of which the interiors are in good shape, have their sides open to the rain and serve as underground vaults to the battalions of gray or emerald colored mabougas (?). The only remaining living witness to the fighting is a hundred year old mahogany, whose mutilated trunk tells tales of valor.
At its feet the Artibonite runs through the middle of high grasses, its waters indolent or angry, depending on its whims. The plain to which it gives its name, spreads before ones' amazed eyes, the eternal green of its prairies and their inexhaustible fertility. Your eyes linger with pleasure on the magic landscape that expands from north to south, from the mountains of Mirebalais to those of Gros-Morne at Gonaïves, and from east to west, from the Chaos chain of mountains to the mountains of La Selle. On one of the steepest flanks of the Matheux mountains you can see a waterfall that pours from the high summits as from a colossal urn and that shines in the sun like a big silver scarf (or sash).
Towards the west, lost in the distance, you can imagine Gonaïves, where the azure blue of the sea merges with that of the sky.
The preference of Dessalines for this Artibonite plain, theater of his exploits, brought him to build his residence there when he was made emperor. In 1804 he transformed the Marchand plantation, found at the entrance to the Chaos gorge, into a town that was named after him, Dessalinesville. The local population, that had worked on the construction of houses and fortifications, started during the war against Paris, quickly finished. It was there that the soldiers, to distract themselves, composed a dance and a song called the Carabinier, a kind of pyrrhic that did not take long to go from the camps to the living rooms of Haïtians. On the southern side of the mountain; which dominates the new town, you can still see six forts : the Source, the Culbuté, the Décidé, the Innocent, the Ecrasé, and the Fin du Monde, where Bedouet was imprisoned. Very near to Marchand, at Baurin, a plantation watered by the Courte-Haleine river, a gunpowder factory was built so as not to be short on supply if the French blockaded the island.
On the twentieth day after our departure from Cap-Haïtien, the dawn was embellishing the sky when the schooner entered into the channel of Saint-Marc, which separates Haïti from Gonave, the ancient Guanabo or Guanacana of the Indios of Xaragua, for whom it would become the last refuge after the torture and death of Ana-Kaona {See; Los Indios, history of the conquest of Haïti by the Spanish}.
Saint-Marc presented itself to us after we had rounded Pointe-du-Diable.
Founded in 1716, this town was initially nothing but an agglomeration of unorderly houses, separated by small irregular streets. She would grow bit by bit and, before 1791, it was one of the prettiest towns of the colony. The roads are thirty, forty-eight, and sixty feet wide. The quarries that are found in the area have permitted the construction of stone houses.
Amongst the ruins that abut the north shore, I noticed one that is called Saint-Macary house. Seen in the moonlight, she has the appearance of the ruins of an ancient Greek temple.
Saint-Marc saw, meeting within its walls, on the 25th of March 1790, under the presidency of the Bacon de la Chevalerie, the two hundred and twelve members of the Colonial Assembly, a group to which the provincial assemblies had delegated the direction of the internal affairs of the colony, and that, dominated by the influence of the plantation owners, declared itself empowered, in virtue of the powers of its constituents, and contrary to the advice of the minority, that proposed to state : In virtue of the decrees of Paris. The Governor Peinier, supported by the better part of one third of the colonial commons, dissolved this insurrectional assembly.
Saint-Marc, burned in 1802 by Dessalines, became, during the war of the South against the North, the frontier town of Henry I. The eighth regiment would turn against him here and deliver the town to Pétion.
On the Conception there were, as I have already said, several locals. Even when the wind prevented our forward advance we would not have complained if we had had a little comfort, and if the sun, that was so strong, had not hit us directly on our heads. We took our meals on the rear forecastle where we hung sheets in such a way as to give us a little shade for our brows. Petit-Frère brought us plantain, sweet potato, and the cod dish, that made up the regular everyday menu. Arranged in a circle, we ate gaily chatting about the originality and frugality of our table. Excited by the sea breezes, our appetite rendered us less picky about the choice of foods. After the meal, as a form of distraction, we watched globular sea-urchins circle around the boat, diaphanous as lace, or I would give lectures, that everyone listened to, sailors and passengers, who held onto the rails, who sat on the gunwale, who lay on the deck, everyone in dream worlds. Moonbeams drew, on the blue background of the sky, their diversely colored profiles. They were very enthusiastic about their island like all good Haïtians. I questioned them like a judge of instruction, according to the words of one of them, and he named me the places that I saw.
That point is Cap Saint-Marc; those islets at water level, near Gonave, are the Gros-Ilot and the Mar island, fine pearls; those villages are Montrouis; Willanson, fortified by the English in 1795; the Vases, of little importance; that mountain, that's Mont-Terrible, superb giant that looks on the side like a warrior standing guard.
We are no more than eleven lieues (50 km.) from Port-au-Prince. There is Arcahaie, on the road to Saint-Marc, on the left bank of a small river of the same name, in the middle of a plain planted with sugarcane and that is five lieues (20 km.) long from east to west, by six kilometers from north to south.
The English occupied this village in 1798. Destroyed to its foundations by Lapointe, upon the departure of General Maitland, burnt in 1802, it was abandoned during the war of the North against the South and rebuilt in 1820. It takes its name from the province of Cayaba, that was part of Xaragua's kingdom.
In the Pensez-y-Bien mountains, that rise up behind it, they say there are iron and copper mines. Here again is the Cul-de-Sac plain, whose length is eight lieues (35 km.) from east to west, and whose width varies from two to four lieues, from north to south. The river of the same name fertilizes it, and sugarcane is produced there in abundance. Found there is the village of Croix-des-Bouquets, where colored men, under the direction of Pinchinat, Bauvais, and Lambert, took up arms to acquire the rights that colonial arrogance had disputed with them for so long.
In the same commune gush forth the thermal springs called Sources puantes (stinky waters), which have sometimes cured reportedly incurable diseases.
The eyes, enchanted, travel over the panorama diminishing in proportions or changing in color, depending on whether the scenery gets closer or further away. Naturally we learn to regret that this jade island, so rich, so productive, under the dominance of the French, has fallen into the bottom ranking of the small States, as soon as the inhabitants have tasted a little freedom it degenerates very quickly into licentiousness.
Pushed by a dying breeze, the schooner, leaving the Arcadins to port, islets that emerge from the waves in front of Grosse-Pointe, the most southern cape of Gonave, dropped anchor in the small harbor entry of Port-au-Prince, on a beautiful night, one month after our departure from Cap-Haïtien.
Above our heads, the sky was an iris blue, At sunset, the horizon, enflamed by the sun, that formed a golden tangent on the moving arc of the seas, offered the image of a vast inferno. The summits of mount Pensez-y-Bien on the north coast, the promontories opposite Arcahaie and Lamentin, the bay of Gonave, were all bathed with the warmest light.
Here we are at the back of a deep gulf, on low shoals, Port-au-Prince, vast agglomeration of wooden houses and buildings, or fire-proofs, in dressed stone, next to piles of ruins the length of the large streets, intersecting each other at right angles, but without names or numbers, a veritable labyrinth where the foreigner gets confused and lost.
Mountains, arranged in a semicircle behind this town, spreading their slopes towards her, where one can distinguish many habitations, that from far, resemble white flowers springing from a dark green lawn. The highest of these mountains, wears like a diadem, Fort Alexandre, from the top of which the lookouts signal the ships that come into port. It is in this fort, built by him in 1804, that Pétion is buried. From the buildings nearest the sea, on the piers, up to the wharves, the land is flat, interlaced with canals, covered with debris and objects of all kinds.
Called Hopital by its founder, Mr. De la Caze, in 1749, this city owes its name Port-au-Prince, according to Charlevoix, to Mr. André, commander of the vessel le Prince, that he boarded in 1706, and, as stated by Count Estrée, to the Prince islets locate in the harbor entrance.
I give these two versions in order to avoid having to commit myself to their respective value.
The freemen, on the rise, to the vexation of the petits blancs (little whites) in 1793, would call it Port-au-Prince Port-aux-Crimes. Polverel, in his turn, would change this name, on 22 September 1793 when he forced the plantation owners to sign the declaration of liberty of their slaves, to that of Port-Républicain. In 1806, Christophe, at war with Pétion, would again name it Port-aux-Crimes; in 1811, the city retook the designation of Port-au-Prince.
Its topographical position, favorable in relation to the four republics; and its proximity to the rich plain of Cul-de-Sac, whos agricultural products and markets were the motives for prefering it to the prejudice of Cap. Its area, including the public squares and buildings, is estimated at nine hundred and sixty thousand square meters, divided into one hundred and one unequal blocks. The twenty-six streets are thirty to thirty-three meters wide, but badly maintained. The housekeepers filled the gutters with their house sweepings and kitchen waste. The elder General Brice, plenipotentiary minister of Haïti to Paris, debarking in 1872, did not hide the disgust that this filthy exhibition inspired in him.
To get into the houses one is obliged to pass over gutters where infected water stagnates, on rotten boardwalks, so insecure underfoot that their groaning appears to advise you to walk around them. If you get caught in the rain in the middle of the street it is advised to leave the street and seek shelter under the balconies. The height of the soil, which does not form continuous paths, varies in front of each house. The paths are also cut by many small channels that serve each property. Walking under the balconies you expose yourself to either falling in a hole or of walking into a pillar, and the result of a fall or of hitting a pillar can be equally disastrous.
Many public squares ornate the city. The four principal ones are Pétion, Indépendance, Vallière, and Geffrard. On the latter, surrounded by an iron fence, is a bandstand and several stools near to which, in the grass, lie fallen statues. The other squares are covered by temporary huts, itinerant shops in which hawkers hold the Saturday market.
Most of the fountains, attributable to Barbé de Marbois, are in a poor state. Often there is only one at which porters can supply themselves with water, who transport it to their homes in quarts, small barrels whose contents cost five to ten centimes hard currency, depending on the scarcity.
Under the administration of the above named intendant, the most honest and most wise that the colony has ever had, according to the judgement of Haïtian historians themselves, reservoirs were dug, the two terraces of Independence Square were built, and cast-iron pipes laid to bring water to the city.
The church, pompously given the title of cathedral, was repaired under the reign of the emperor Soulouque. The episcopal palace is located behind it, between the court and the garden. The seminary is a few steps from there. On the Square called Terrasse, there is an enormous mango tree, planted, if you believe the tradition, by Barbé de Marbois.
The National Palace, finished in 1772, no longer exists. President Salnave had it blown up when he left it.
The current President lives in Church Street, in a wooden house of no architectural value, under the balconies of which passerbys see, with astonishment, soldiers of the guard sleeping in the shade on benches or on the flagstones. Their peaceful rifles, piled up before the doors, watch over the head of state all by themselves.
The prisons, hospital, arsenal, high school, customs, Lancasterian (?) school, Secretaries of State, Principal Administration, treasury, courts, bank, Pantheon (war memorial), Deputies Chamber, Senate, buildings that are no more important than their names, are dispersed throughout this Capital. All the buildings require repairs; most of them only exist in the memories of the inhabitants. The State armory, destroyed by the explosion of a few kilograms of gunpowder, the 12th of February 1827, has not been rebuilt.
In the past they built in stone. This method of construction was abandoned after the earthquake of 1751, which was a rumble compare to that of 1770, much more disastrous.
This time, the event started at the spot called le Gouffre, where the Cul-de-Sac and Léogane rivers have their origin, at the foot of the Selle mountains, that seem on the point of crumbling into the plain.
The 3rd of June, day of the Pentecost, at seven at night, the people were enjoying the coolness of the evening on their balconys, when they felt the earth tremble under their feet. They ran into the streets, as large as they are today and planted with young elms on the sides that have now disappeared. The earth shook all night, and up to the 18th of June they counted, on average, one hundred aftershocks a day.
The factories of Cul-de-Sac were destroyed; the river that crosses the plain, after having ceased to flow during six hours, saw its waters return all of a sudden and it overflowed with great violence. In the city the Governor's Palace, the police station, the Council, the Church, the gunpowder magazine, the barracks, and many individual homes, were nothing more that piles of rubble.
One hundred people would die in this catastrophe.
Alexandre Pétion was still at his mother's breast. His mother, upset by the terror, the confusion, the screams, abandoned him in her bedroom, asleep in his cradle. The unfortunate could only mumble the name of her child, she cried for help; but the terror and the danger froze everyone's courage; nobody moved. At last the nursemaid ran, at the risk of her life, into the tottering house and brought out the little Sansandre safe and sound.
The people lived for many months in tents. To avoid famine the governor general, Count of Nolivos, , and the intendant, President Bongars, required the ships in the harbor to supply bread until such time as the ovens were rebuilt. The inhabitants of the surrounding areas who were less affected by the events, with the greatest generosity, sent food of all kinds. In the aftermath, a police ordinance required that all citizens rebuild their houses in wood. This avoided one danger but exposed everyone to another, no less destructive, and just as terrible, and certainly more frequent, fire. The fires of Saint-Pierre November 21 1794, of August 15 1820, and of December 16 1822, each in their turn ate up part or all of the city.
Shortly before my arrival, Fronts-Forts Street, the most commercial, and the busiest, was reduced to ashes in just a few hours.
Threatened each time by this second danger, the owners, in order to avert it, returned to using brick, which did not prevent Port-au-Prince from catching on fire at least twice a year, as I would learn to my expense.
The day after my arrival I went on horseback to Martissant to make a visit to the Count of Lémont, at who's home I had dined a few days before.
Leaving Port-au-Prince, by the Léogane gate, I followed a rough road that unrolled along the feet of the mountains near the sea. Huts, like Indian wigwams, scattered on either side, whiten in the middle of patches of bananas. On the left hand side, a small path, squeezed between two hedges of wild acacia garlanded with crazy vines, climbs, turning and not too steep, towards the home of the Plenipotentiary Minister of France.
A large, well kept park, where a black gardener comes to open the gate at the sound of the my horse's feet on the gravel of the drive, spreads its Guinea grass lawn on the slopes of the Piémont hills and descends like an amphitheater to the sea. Sitting on one of the tiers of the mountain, dominated by the high peaks that rise behind it, veiled below by a curtain of palms and mangos, the mansion reveals itself to the visitor by its roof of slate, that appears above the trees. Secluded, it rises out of the ground like a nest that the lark hides between two furrows in a wheat field. It is square, one floor, and the roof of the outside porch, supported by its wooden pillars, goes completely around the house. The French flag flew over it and the tropical breezes played in its folds. In front of the house, the flowerbed, where the native flowers blend their lively nuances, sparkle to the eye, as colorful as a Scotch tartan. A stream that flows from the spring of Madame Leclerc, runs through the grass and escapes across the plain, with its drowsy and melancholy murmur inviting one to dream.
The Count showed me the way to the source of this spring. He also showed me the house of Jean-Pierre Ibos, honored papa-loi, that President Salnave often consulted.
From this elevated place, the sight plunges, between the trees of the garden, on a scene of colossal proportions and truly grandiose view. The mountains, Cabri, Chandelle, and Diable, always cloudy, skirt the horizon like a screen painted forest green. On the gulf, islets, covered with mangroves and palétuviers (another type of mangrove), looking like pontoons of greenery anchored in the middle of waters that are never troubled.
Flers and Cabat would find new inspiration there for their paintbrushes.
Returning to the city, I examined the ruins of the National Palace of the former Senate and other buildings built under Geffrard to house the offices of the Secretaries of State; Fort Riché, that is nothing but a trace; the tomb of A. Pétion, from where it seemed I heard a voice that said : In politics, you have to rely on the institutions and never on men. Next to this mausoleum, I saw the sarcophaguses destined to hold the remains of Father of the Republic and his daughter Célie. They are in white marble of good workmanship. A garland of laurel with a spike of rosemary decorates the cover of that of the hero. On the sarcophagus of his daughter, unfurls a garland of roses around a cross on which we read : I am the resurrection and the life. The rain and the sun browns the white stone that the soldiers have broken the corners of when sharpening their machetes.
Several days later I went to pay a visit to a French artist, Mr. A. Auroux, a former player of popular concerts held in Paris by Mr. Pasdeloup.
An avenue of tall coconuts, following the path that we took into the mountains, ended at the home that we barely saw, hidden as she was by clumps of trees.
We found Mr. Auroux in the barn yard. In charge of the direction of a music school, at which the courses are followed irregularly, he abandoned the Bohm clarinet, to which he owed much success, to raise American pigs and Chinese cocks that he was trying to acclimatize. Misfortune had overtaken him. This trial gave him a thousand problems without any profit. Every night he had to keep a lookout on the barn yard and the stables, to which local pilferers made frequent stops. The unfortunate was loosing his mind.
Port-au-Prince not only houses a Conservatory but it also has a medical school. The director, Mr. Jean-Baptiste Dehoux, doctor of medicine from the Faculty of Paris, is a very friendly Haïtian, of charming manner, and very knowledgeable in science. Deprived of materials, little supported by the state, nevertheless he fought with prodigiously against the insurmountable difficulties in order to create a true school, the dream of his life. We could but admire the energy with which he devoted himself to this daunting task.
While I remember, I must tell you that the Pétion National Lycée is not the only public secondary school. There is another lycée, Philippe Guerrier in Cayes, the National Lycée in Cap-Haïtien, and the Pinchinat College in Jacmel.
Those institutions offering some security to families are: the Petit Séminaire [College Saint-Martial], held in Port-au-Prince by the PP of Saint-Esprit, the Saint-Nicholas Institute in Cap-Haïtien, and the Lasségne Institute in Cayes.
In the days immediately following my arrival in Port-au-Prince, I spent long hours leaning out of one of the windows of the rooms I occupied on the first floor of a house on Fronts-Fort Street.
At one time my gaze would wander indecisively on the town or on the palms and coconuts that lifted their disheveled heads whose somber greenery interrupts the uniform color of the roofs; one time it would follow the sinuous, nebulous lines of the Bel-Air mountains that the sun bathed with a blinding light; one time it would fall on the harbor where I saw, at the end of the street, the sails of ships that were higher than the tallest houses.
On certain nights the sky was dark. The silence was disturbed at only rare intervals by the Qui-êtes-vous? of a watchman. Other times, the transparent shadows seemed to fear veiling the sky full of stars. The moonbeams fell square on the slopes of the hills, on the flat roofs of the buildings, on the boardwalks, each object to shine and silhouetted on the walls the frail or massive pillars of the balconies. The cucuyos, so proud of their bright luminescence, that make them look like fire flies, came and went, tracing phosphorescent zigzags in the air. You could see them plain as day all the way to the horizon.
During the day, these buildings of every height, of every form; these balconies that, like houses built in air, seemed to be the home of zombies; the endless babble of the talking brooks; the braying mules, the pigs that foraged in the garbage piles, the dogs that barked, all gave Port-au-Prince a seal of strange originality.
Saturday, market day, was an indescribable chaos. I could have thrown a needle from my window onto the crowd and it would not have touched the ground. The residents of the mountains descended into town from the heights of La Coupe, by the Lalue road, raising clouds of dust.
Negresses passed, carrying baskets on their heads, in the manner of canephores (maidens who carried sacred urns on their heads), of goods, oranges, bananas, pineapples, pois-congo. You might say Egyptian statues come down from their pedestals, to see them dragging their feet in a flot d'indienne (crowd of Indians?), their heads surmounted by a kerchief knotted in a bun. Others, dressed in a long gingham shift, went on mule back, sitting between two sheaves of Guinea grass. Beggars were to be found on the sides of the road, standing or crouching on the boardwalks with their white coco-macaque (monkeys?) and begging bowls, asking the passersby for alms. Cries erupted from everywhere.
Here the water carrier walked heavily, bent over by the barrels that were supported on each end of a pole balanced on his shoulders, like a balance beam with the plates equally weighted. In the middle of this anthill passed a cavalryman. A wheelbarrow, a type of vehicle that looked like an ancient chariot, pulled by scrawny horses, obstructed the road. The driver, reins in one hand, whip in the other, screamed thundering oaths, proud as a triumphant roman. Oxen, reminding one by their size and color of the cows of Midi, pulled heavy carts, just like the ones ridden by the ox-drivers of Périgord. The merchants, the clerks, the brokers, run along the seaside. The crowd bustled on the Vallière Square, and the cries of the beggars imploring public charity reached, from time to time, my ears.
A couple of notes on the translation: Comments in ( ) are my own or question words for which I have no translation or do not know the meaning of. If anyone else can help me with these it would be much appreciated. Comments in { } are footnotes of the author that I have introduced into the body of the text. Comments in [ ] are La Selve's text comments in parentheses. I would very much appreciate any comments or suggestions anyone has on the translation job. Would anyone be interested in editing this text into readable English once it is completed?
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