Caribbean (144 page)

Authors: James A. Michener

BOOK: Caribbean

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A novel like this serves a commendable purpose if it encourages the reader to consult other books on the subject. The University of Miami, where I worked during the writing, has a library with a wealth of Caribbean material. No matter how obscure the subject on which I required information, the librarians invariably found the books I needed. From the hundreds I consulted, I recommend the following. Most of these titles, if not in your bookshop, should be available through your local public-library system.

Maya.
To supplement my research on the ancient cities of the Yucatán Peninsula, I found
The Ancient Maya
by Sylvanus Morley (Stanford University Press, 1983) and
The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization
by J. Eric Thompson (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966) to be particularly helpful.

Columbus.
In his magisterial biography
Admiral of the Ocean Sea
(Little, Brown, 1942), Samuel Eliot Morrison summarizes standard views of the great discoverer. Salvador de Madariaga, in
Christopher Columbus
(Hollis & Carter, 1949), assaults the argument that Columbus was, in any way that mattered, an Italian and argues instead that he was probably a wandering Jew.

Spanish Caribbean.
In
Caribbean Sea of the New World
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), Germán Arciniegas provides a brilliantly composed defense of Spain’s accomplishments in the Caribbean. Strongly argued, rich in detail. On the stories of Cartagena, Eduardo LeMaitre’s comprehensive
Historia General de Cartagena
has not yet been translated from the Spanish, but an abbreviated account in English does exist (no date, but 1980s) and is worth the search.

Pirates and Buccaneers.
Nobody knows for sure the spelling of the man’s name or his nationality, but in 1684, Alexander Esquemeling published in London a powerful, some say mendacious, personal reminiscence of Henry Morgan and other pirates,
The Bucaniers
[sic]
of America
(Scribner, 1898, reprint). In a modern work of great merit, Dudley Pope’s
Harry Morgan’s Way
(Alison Press, 1977) gives a less hysterical but more astonishing account of Morgan’s exploits. And
The Sack of Panama
by Peter Earle (Viking Press, 1972) brilliantly re-creates Morgan’s most memorable, indeed incredible, adventures.

Sugar and Slavery.
Sugar and slavery will forever be linked as the glory and shame of the Caribbean Islands, and for this inexhaustible subject three books were particularly valuable:
Sugar and Slavery
by Richard B. Sheridan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974);
The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean
by Lowell J. Ragatz (Century, 1928); and
A Jamaican Plantation
by Michael Crayton and James Walvin (University of Toronto Press, 1970).

British Islands.
Alec Waugh, elder brother of Evelyn, gives a fine portrait of an imaginary English colony in
Island in the Sun
(Farrar, Straus, 1955). The gallantry of the Cavaliers on Barbados in offering to fight the entire British Empire in defense of King Charles I is told by N. Davis in his
The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados
(Argosy Press, 1887). James Anthony Froude’s
The English in the West Indies
(Scribner, 1897) is probably the worst travel book written by any historian on any subject at any time. A boastful champion of white supremacy and a merciless reviler of blacks and Irishmen, the author reveals himself as such a consummate ass that the modern reader alternately shudders and guffaws.

The Seamen of England.
If the battles for naval supremacy in Europe were rehearsed in the waters of the Caribbean, two English sailors contributed monumentally to the course of history. The exploits of Francis Drake are well recorded in
The Life of Francis Drake
by A. E. W. Mason (Hodder & Stoughton, 1941), and his major claim to fame in
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
by Garrett Mattingly (Jonathan Cape, 1959). Chronicling the extraordinary career and unashamedly venal temperament of Horatio Nelson are
The Life of Nelson
by Robert Southey (Constable, 1916) and Carola Oman’s classic
Nelson
(Doubleday, 1946).

The French Connections.
Cuba’s finest novelist, Alejo Carpentier, in his
Explosion in a Cathedral
(first published in Mexico in 1962 and now available in Penguin Books, 1971), gives a dramatic portrait of Victor Hugues, with a background prior to his “reign” in Guadeloupe much different from the one I offer. An excellent book.

Haiti.
Haiti’s fight for independence under a brilliant black general who outfoxed the French, the Spanish and the British is well told in
The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture
by the Reverend John Beard (Ingram Cook, 1923). The subsequent pitiful course of that independence is well covered in
Black Democracy, The Story of Haiti
by H. P. Davis (Dial Press, 1928) and in
Haiti, the Politics of Squalor
by Robert I. Rotberg (Houghton Mifflin, 1921). I especially recommend the work of a brilliant Trinidad scholar, C. L. R. James,
The Black Jacobins
(Secker & Warburg, 1938).

Trinidad.
The complexities of an island shared equally by ethnic heritages of Africa and India are well cited by Morton Klass in
East Indians in Trinidad
(Columbia University Press, 1961). Her emergence as an independent republic is ably reported by Donald Wood in
Trinidad in Transition
(Oxford University Press, 1968).

Jamaica.
There is a wealth of material on Jamaica, written at all stages of her history. Oliver Cox’s
Upgrading and Renewing the Historic City of Port Royal, Jamaica
(Shankland Cox, London, 1984) is an enchanting official report replete with maps and plans. Robert F. Marx’s
Pirate Port, the Story of the Sunken City of Port Royal
(World Publishing, 1967) provides a capitulation of the basic facts. On the tragedy of the Morant Bay rebellion under the governorship of John Eyre, Australian apologist Geoffrey Dutton, in
The Hero as Murderer
(Collins, 1967), depicts Eyre as an unquestioned hero during his tenure in Australia and as the cool-headed savior of the white man in Jamaica. In
The Myth of Governor Eyre
(Woolf, 1933), Lord Olivier, a later governor of Jamaica, proves his predecessor to have been a bumptious fool. For current books on Jamaica generally, two contemporary Jamaicans have made excellent contributions. Sir Philip Sherlock’s
West Indian Nation
(St. Martin’s Press, 1973) and Clinton V. Black’s
History of Jamaica
(Collins, 1961) pull no punches, albeit in their own gentlemanly fashion. Sherlock was personally most helpful in guiding me toward experts on many aspects of Jamaican life, past and present.

Cuba.
Of many instructive books, I used three which pertained directly to my story. R. Hart Phillips’
Cuba, Island of Paradox
(McDowell, Obolensky, 1959) is the intimate report of steps leading to Castro’s triumph, by the mother superior of newspaper correspondents. Carleton Beals’s
The Crime of Cuba
(Lippincott, 1933) is the standard pre-Castro warning of a liberal observer. Tad Szulc and Karl E. Meyer’s
The Cuban Invasion
(Praeger, 1962) is a gripping account of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Of the more formal histories, I profited from Jaime Suchlicki’s
Cuba from Columbus to Castro
(Scribner, 1974).

Rastafarians.
Two books attempt to explain the many confusing aspects of this mystifying religious movement.
Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica
by Joseph Owens (Sangster, Kingston, Jamaica, 1976) and
The Rastafarians
by Leonard E. Barrett (idem, 1977) are supplemented by a gripping biography of reggae star Bob Marley by Timothy White,
Catch a Fire
(Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1983).

Cricket.
The importance of the Caribbean’s other main religion, cricket, is rarely appreciated by the outsiders, but I have not exaggerated its significance. From the score of technical treatises I recommend two delightful reads: C. L. R. James’s
Beyond a Boundary
(Pantheon Books, 1984), a reminiscence of boyhood in Trinidad, and Frances Edmonds’
Another Bloody Tour: England in the West Indies 1986
(Kingswood, 1986), the irreverent report of an Englishwoman intellectual married to a professional cricketer. (England was massacred by the islanders, 5 matches to 0.)

Caribbean.
I found that most islanders pronounce this Car-ib-
bee
-an, and dictionaries give that as preferred, with Ca-
rib
-ee-an in second place as acceptable. A wag explained: “The hoi polloi use the first, but intellectual snobs prefer the second.” And so do I. I have been unable to pin down when the word was first used to designate the sea which now bears that name. We know for sure that this confusion started with the first Spaniards who saw that the all-important Isthmus of Panama ran not vertically north to south, as laymen would always believe, but horizontally east to west. This caused early mariners to refer to the Pacific Ocean as La Mar del Sur (South Sea) and the future Caribbean as La Mar del Norte (North Sea). Sir Francis Drake did not sail into the Pacific on his historic circumnavigation
of the globe: he ventured into the South Sea, and this usage continued through the sixteenth century and probably into the seventeenth. Sir Henry Morgan and his pirates ravaged the North Sea, not the Caribbean, and I have seen maps printed as late as 1770 still using the older terminology. I would appreciate instruction clarifying this interesting geographical puzzle.

THE SETTING