V.
… WE look back over the upreaching yellow fan-spread of cane-fields,
and winding of tortuous valleys, and the sea expanding
beyond an opening in the west. It has already broadened
surprisingly, the sea appears to have risen up, not as a
horizontal plane, but like an immeasurable azure precipice: what
will it look like when we shall have reached the top? Far down we
can distinguish a line of field-hands—the whole atelier, as it
is called, of a plantation slowly descending a slope, hewing the
canes as they go. There is a woman to every two men, a binder
(amarreuse): she gathers the canes as they are cut down; binds
them with their own tough long leaves into a sort of sheaf, and
carries them away on her head;—the men wield their cutlasses so
beautifully that it is a delight to watch them. One cannot often
enjoy such a spectacle nowadays; for the introduction of the
piece-work system has destroyed the picturesqueness of plantation
labor throughout the island, with rare exceptions. Formerly the
work of cane-cutting resembled the march of an army;—first
advanced the cutlassers in line, naked to the waist; then the
amareuses, the women who tied and carried; and behind these the
ka, the drum,—with a paid crieur or crieuse to lead the song;—
and lastly the black Commandeur, for general. And in the old
days, too, it was not unfrequent that the sudden descent of an
English corsair on the coast converted this soldiery of labor
into veritable military: more than one attack was repelled by the
cutlasses of a plantation atelier.
At this height the chatting and chanting can be heard, though
not distinctly enough to catch the words. Suddenly a voice,
powerful as a bugle, rings out,—the voice of the Commandeur: he
walks along the line, looking, with his cutlass under his arm. I
ask one of our guides what the cry is:—
—"Y ka coumandé yo pouend gàde pou sèpent," he replies. (He is
telling them to keep watch for serpents.) The nearer the
cutlassers approach the end of their task, the greater the
danger: for the reptiles, retreating before them to the last
clump of cane, become massed there, and will fight desperately.
Regularly as the ripening-time, Death gathers his toll of human
lives from among the workers. But when one falls, another steps
into the vacant place,—perhaps the Commandeur himself: these
dark swordsmen never retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as
before; there is hardly any emotion; the travailleur is a
fatalist. … *
[_]
* M. Francard Bayardelle, overseer of the Prèsbourg plantation
at Grande Anse, tells me that the most successful treatment of
snake bite consists in severe local cupping and bleeding; the
immediate application of twenty to thirty leeches (when these
can be obtained), and the administration of alkali as an
internal medicine. He has saved several lives by these methods.
The negro panseur method is much more elaborate and, to some
extent, mysterious. He cups and bleeds, using a small couï, or
half-calabash, in lieu of a grass; and then applies cataplasms
of herbs,—orange-leaves, cinnamon-leaves, clove-leaves, chardon-béni,
charpentier, perhaps twenty other things, all mingled
together;—this poulticing being continued every day for a month.
Meantime the patient is given all sorts of absurd things to
drink, in tafia and sour-orange juice—such as old clay pipes
ground to powder, or the head of the fer-de-lance itself, roasted
dry and pounded. … The plantation negro has no faith in any
other system of cure but that of the panseur;—he refuses to let
the physician try to save him, and will scarcely submit to be
treated even by an experienced white over-seer.
