Caribbean (70 page)

It would be popular in later decades to claim that Admiral Horatio Nelson had forged his revolutionary strategies and imperturbable character during his varied experiences at sea, especially in the Caribbean, but that was not the case; they were painfully annealed in those four dismal years when he was “on the beach” in his father’s rectory in Norfolk. There, humiliated, impoverished and ignored, he had hammered out his principles and devised those stratagems which would make him perhaps the finest officer ever to command a battle fleet. Aware of the miracle that had been wrought within him, he said farewell to his self-enforced prison in Norfolk, turned his face toward London, and cried: “Horace no more! Horatio forever!”

On 7 February 1793, when France was ablaze with war, Nelson, once again an active captain in His Majesty’s Navy, stepped aboard the trim 64-gun
Agamemnon
, turned aft to salute the quarterdeck, and took immediate steps to whip his handpicked crew into fighting shape.

Some days later, with all the excitement of a midshipman eleven years old hastening forward to inspect his first ship, he shouted to his men: “Cast off!” and to his helmsman: “Steady as she goes!” Feeling the great ship laden with guns rolling beneath his feet, he headed down the Channel for the Mediterranean, where destiny waited to award him victory at sea, scandal in Naples with the bewitching Lady Hamilton, and immortality at Trafalgar.

^*
As originally phrased by Nelson, it was “Nelson confides every man …” in the old sense of
is confident that
. One fellow officer suggested that
expects
was a more idiomatic word, another that the message would be stronger if it said
England
expects … and Nelson eagerly accepted each improvement. The word
that
was not included in the final twelve-flag hoist, done in the system devised by Sir Henry Popham in 1803.

I
N
1784
VISITORS TO ONE OF THE LIVELIEST SPOTS OF THE
C
ARIBBEAN
, the public square of Point-à-Pitre on the French island of Guadeloupe, were likely to chance upon three young creoles—clearly the best of friends, even to a casual observer—who, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, would be plunged into a drama not of their own making and culminating in horrid excesses.

The square was a spacious, friendly area, lined with trees and made hospitable by numerous wooden benches and a central kiosk where the town band played and from which citizens could purchase hot coffee and croissants as they relaxed in the sun. At its broad southern end the square opened upon the sea, where boats clustered, white sails shining against blue waters. The other three sides were defined by private homes built in the style of Mediterranean France, except that where stone would have been used in Marseilles, here the preferred material was wood, most often a handsome mahogany impervious to insects. Each house had a second-floor veranda adorned with bright tropical flowers, making the square a garden in which happy citizens congregated throughout the day.

Off the eastern side of the square ran a small street, and on a corner thus formed stood a house that was a masterpiece: three stories high, with two verandas, not just one, and cascading from each,
flowers—yellow, red and blue. But what made it unforgettable to those who admired it as they took their coffee from the kiosk below was the delectable latticework, woven with very slender iron strands, which decorated the two extended verandas. “Metallic lace,” an approving woman had called the effect, and her description had stuck:
Maison Dentelle
—House of Lace.

On the ground floor, Monsieur Mornaix, one of Point-à-Pitre’s leading citizens, kept the office from which he conducted his banking and money-lending business, but the upper levels, the ones with the lacework, were reserved for his family, and often young men idling their time in the square below would gaze longingly at the flower-bedecked house and sigh: “There she is!” and their eyes would follow Eugénie Mornaix, the banker’s lovely young daughter, as she strolled one of the verandas. “She’s one of the flowers,” the young men said.

Their adoration was fruitless, for her affection had been claimed. In the much simpler wooden house on the opposite corner—two stories, one modest veranda, a few flowers—where the town’s apothecary, Dr. Lanzerac, kept his small shop, lived his son Paul. He had known Eugénie since birth, and they had now reached the exciting age when they were beginning to realize that each had a special attachment to the other, for he was fourteen and she, much more clever at the moment, was twelve.

Their parents, hardworking shopkeepers of the upper middle class, approved of the special relationship which seemed to be developing between their children, for the two families shared many attributes and interests. Both were devoutly Catholic, finding the church a comforting guide to behavior on earth and later in heaven; both were frugal, believing that God meant for His children to work hard and save their money to ensure protection throughout a long life, and every member of both families loved France with a passion that had never been exhibited by the Spanish colonists for their homeland. Monsieur Lanzerac, the apothecary, liked to tell the young people: “A Spaniard respects his homeland, a Frenchman loves his.” In the entire reach of French influence, from the Rhine River to St.-Domingue, there were no Frenchmen more patriotic than those found on the sugar island of Guadeloupe.

It lay only eighty-five miles north of Martinique, but it cherished the differences between the two colonies, for as Lanzerac Père explained to Dutch sea captains who worked their ships through the blockades to sell their contraband goods at Point-à-Pitre: “You ask the
difference between the two islands? Simple. Back in France they always speak of ‘The Grand Messieurs of Martinique,’ because nobody there does a day’s work, and of ‘The honest
bonnes gens
of Guadeloupe,’ because they know that here we do. What does Martinique send the homeland? Polished reports. What do we send? Sugar and money.”

There was a greater difference: Martinique was an ordinary kidney-shaped island, a clone of hundreds like it in the world, but Guadeloupe was completely unique, beautiful in fact, mysterious in origin. In shape and color it resembled a green-gold butterfly, drifting lazily to the northwest; the green came from the heavy cover of vegetation, the gold from the constant play of sunlight. It was really two islands with the two butterfly wings separated by a canal so preposterously narrow that a drunk once said: “Give me three beers and I’ll jump from one island to the other.” The eastern wing of the butterfly was low and flat and composed of tillable farmland; the western, of high and rugged mountains that permitted no cross-island roads. The explanation for this remarkable difference lay in the origins of the two halves: the eastern had risen from the rock base of the Caribbean forty million years ago, and this had provided ample time for its peaks to be eroded away, but the western had achieved its rise to the surface only five million years ago, and its mountains were still young. Born of different impulses at vastly different times, the two halves were now semijoined in one magnificent whole, and the people who lived on Guadeloupe said: “Ours is an island a man can love,” and they felt sorry for those who had to live on what they called “that other island,” Martinique.

In this green-gold paradise the two creole children developed a passionate attachment to both their native island and their French homeland, so that words like
glory, patriotism
and
the French manner
echoed in their hearts like the Angelus sounding for evening prayer. These were solemn commitments, profound allegiances, and Paul, who attended the school taught by the local priest, often told Eugénie, who stayed at home in her House of Lace learning the secrets of kitchen and laundry: “When I’m older I shall go to France and study in Paris and become a soldier of the king.” When he said the awesome word
king
he meant Louis XVI, whose woodcut portrait printed in great numbers graced the main rooms of both homes. To the children, King Louis, with his round face and wig reaching beyond his shoulders, was a person whom they expected to meet personally someday if they ever reached France.

The children were being raised to be good Catholics, loyal patriots and protectors of the king, and as such they represented the aspirations of ninety-nine out of a hundred citizens on their island. Their only enemies were the British, whose nefarious behavior toward their island enraged them. In 1759, long before they were born, a British expeditionary force comprising many ships and thousands of soldiers had invaded Guadeloupe without reason and captured the western half of the butterfly; the British established a strong base and then attempted to conquer the eastern half, where the Lanzeracs and the Mornaixs of that time lived.

“It took them about a year,” Lanzerac Père explained to the children, “to accumulate their strength before they felt powerful enough to attack our part of the island, because they knew we Grande-Terre people were fighters, but in due course they came at us, and that was when your great-grandmother earned her place in the pantheon of French heroes.” Whenever he reached this point in his narration he would pause dramatically and remind his listeners: “I said heroes, not heroines, for Grandmère Lanzerac was the equal of any man.”

What she did was to retreat into the Lanzerac storehouse out on the sugar plantation, bring all her slaves behind its walls, and arm them with guns collected from the other less formidable plantations, and there, as one British general recalled in his memoir of the campaign:

They were a handsome pair of children: Paul with blond hair, bright open face and freckles; Eugénie with dark hair, a beautiful face and a willowy figure that resembled a wisp of marsh grass when she was twelve, the bending of a young tree when she became fourteen. They went through the normal periods of intense association when Paul walked the flowering verandas with Eugénie, sharing secrets and impossible dreams. Then there were months when they drew apart, heading in separate directions, but always they moved back together, for they recognized an affiliation that would never dissolve. They could not know whether it might blossom into normal love experiences, and as for even considering marriage, that would have been ridiculous to think about at their ages.

They were trapped in ambiguities and they knew it, and the cause was the final creole
^*1
of their trio, a delightful olive-skinned mulatto girl named Solange Vauclain, daughter of an immigrant from France who had been hired as a plantation manager and had married one of the slave girls. Solange lived with her parents on what was now one of the larger sugar plantations, east of town, and it was, Solange told her friends in Point-à-Pitre, “really a garden of flowers,” for all the spaces not utilized for sugar were crowded by a wealth of the varied flowers which made Guadeloupe a wonderland. Birds-of-paradise that looked like golden canoes at sunset, flaming anthuriums, delicate hibiscus and a magnificent red plant that would later be named bougainvillea. Over all, arched stately coconut palms, hundreds of them, as if they were huge green flowers, and about the plantation buildings grew the mysterious crotons which could show any of six or seven different colors. But the one Solange chose as her own was the red ginger, shaped almost like a human heart. “That’s the flower
of Guadeloupe,” she told her friends, “big and bold and brash. You won’t find it on Martinique. Down there they like roses and lilies.”