Insects began to rise with the sun. We waved and slapped.
“The gnats and mosquitoes are the most constant,” Dinsdale said. “At the beaches and in the mangroves you see the land crabs-white, sickly, and hideous. Always wear shoes and stockings against chiggers, which can be agonizing. We also boast woodlice, bedbugs, lizards, and cockroaches that look hatched from lobsters. In the plantation houses the servants keep them at bay, but you’ll see field slaves with faces furrowed by cockroach scars. The creatures come at them at night when they sleep on the dirt of their huts. Ants, too, of course, billions of them. Termites. Wasps. Snakes.”
“Are you trying to frighten my wife, sir?”
“Certainly not, and I mean no offense. It’s simply that England paints a lyrical picture of the planter’s existence as a life of leisure, when, in fact, it is one of constant struggle. The spoonful of sugar in a cup of London tea has an epic story behind it. No European understands the real cost of cake.”
“You have fire as well, it seems.” Astiza was gazing beneath the brow of her wide planter’s hat as columns of smoke began to rise from distant fields.
“We burn the fields after harvest. It’s the only way to keep down the snakes and rats. We lose a third of our crop to vermin. At Carlisle, they put a bounty on rats-a cob or a crust for each one-and slaves caught thirty-nine thousand of them. Can you imagine? We joked they were breeding the pests. Sugarcane takes fourteen to eighteen months to ripen, and everything is done by hand, not the plow, so we have to keep animal invaders in check. Losing a slave to snakebite is more expensive than losing a horse. We burn the fields to make them safe.”
We passed some blacks planting new cane in a harvested field. Their skin glistened in the hot sun, hoes swinging up and down in ceaseless rhythm. Black overseers watched from horseback in the shade of a giant tree left standing for lunchtime shade. Clay jars lined the furrows, but whether the water was for the plants or the planters I didn’t know. The men were in loincloths, dust turning them red. The women were naked to the waist, some stooping with babies tied to their backs.
“A white man is lucky to live five years in this climate,” Dinsdale said. “But if he does, he can increase his fortune fivefold.”
We entered jungle again, a steamy corridor of plants snarled and voluptuous. Flowers erupted like dots of light. The mosquitoes became even more incessant, and we sweated in quiet misery.
“Apply vinegar for the bites,” the captain offered.
Then we began passing into lawns, a grand clearing in the forest. At its center was a stately house like a mansion in heaven. The plantation home was wrapped in a cool two-level porch, each window bordered with shutters, the clapboards painted a gay yellow and wicker chairs and hammocks beckoning us to rest. Huge tropical trees surrounded it with shade. A flower garden was a quilt of color, and a stream flowed into an artificial pool. It was an oasis.
“Carlisle mansion,” Dinsdale said. “Now you can discuss your real business with the governor.”
Chapter 16
A chief occupation of the planters of Antigua is dinner, a ceremony occupying three to five hours at the height of the day’s heat. Lord and Lady Lovington, corpulent yet dapper in their fine London clothes, greeted us enthusiastically on their shady veranda. Like all colonists, they were eager to hear the latest gossip from London and Paris. Fashion comes to the West Indies six months late, meaning winter costumes arrive just as the tropical summer deepens, but no planter can resist wearing them, everyone sweating without embarrassment.
Our hosts were as amiably tipsy as we from the water purified by wine and rum, imbibed from dawn to dusk to hydrate perspiring bodies. The governor and his wife were in their sixties, successful but not entirely secure; they were political survivors who had reluctantly sided with Prime Minister William Pitt in order to win appointment to a governorship that provided salary and brought them back to island landholdings burdened by debt. The truth was, for every planter who got rich, another went bankrupt, and Lovington returned to Antigua to prevent his plantation from declining into ruin. The jungle, storms, war, and the gyrations of markets were always threatening to destroy what had been built; and dreams of retiring to London were thwarted by the difficulty of managing holdings from thousands of miles away. The constant financial risk of the planter’s life gives island gaiety a sharp edge. I knew the demeanor from the swells I’d encountered at gambling tables. They are cocky, but desperate.
To go from the dazzle of the sunlit yard to the dining room was like entering a cave until our eyes adjusted, but once inside we saw a reasonable replica of England. There was a massive mahogany table and sideboards, fine china, heavy cutlery, prints of hunts and battleships, and silk wallpaper spotted with mold. The table legs rested in pans of water.
“Keeps the ants off the meat,” Lord Livingston explained, settling into his chair at the head of the table with as much weighty deliberation as starting a day of work. “I daresay if the Garden of Eden had so many bugs, Eve would have spent her time scratching instead of eating apples.”
“Governor, what a silly thing to say,” his wife scolded.
“I’ve no doubt Mr. and Mrs. Gage have made that observation on their own, eh? This island grows all things crawling, hopping, creeping, biting, and stinging, and grows them bigger, and faster, than any place civilized man is born.” He waved his arm and flies orbited our table. “You boys there, fan faster, will you?” Two young black domestics put a minute of brief energy into waving large palm fronds before going back to their usual desultory pace.
“The island certainly has lush beauty,” Astiza offered. “The forest is completely opposite my native Egypt.”
“Egypt!” Lord Lovington exclaimed. “Now that’s a place I’d like to see. Dry as toast, I hear.”
“Even hotter than Antigua,” I said.
“Hardly possible, what?” He laughed. “But we have our own advantages, too. No frosts. No coal fires. Rains in buckets, but stops like turning off a tap. Some good horse racing; maybe you’ll have time to see it.”
“I think our mission will force us to hurry on,” I said.
“Our three-year-old son is in the hands of a renegade French policeman on Saint-Domingue,” Astiza explained.
“What? Frogs have your boy?”
“They want to exchange him for a secret,” I said. “Trouble is, we don’t know what the secret is, and we need to find out.”
“That’s the most damnable thing I’ve ever heard. The French! Do you know we held Martinique for a time and were pounding English sense into it when we gave it back in the last peace? Foolish thing to do. Go back and bombard it, I should think.”
“What we really need is information and passage,” I said.
“Yes, yes. Well, let’s have a bite, and then I’ll show you the sugar factories, Gage. Plotting strategy, I think, works better after digestion.”
Like the room, our feast was a partial replica of England, a ridiculous cornucopia of rich food in limpid heat. There was lamb stew, hot and cold cuts of beef, hot and cold fish, turtle soup, pickles, white bread, ginger sweetmeats, roasted plover and doves, a ham, and slices of pineapple. There were sweet jellies, a bread pudding, cream, coffee, tea, and half a dozen wines and liquors. One servant was dressed like an English butler, his face beaded with perspiration, but other male and female blacks shuttled in and out dressed in secondhand calico and with bare feet. The huge palm fronds continued to fan the flies, while the open windows and doors allowed in not just island breezes but cats, dogs, skittering lizards, and a chicken that pecked at crumbs on the floor and was ignored by all involved.
“This new war is our chance to chase the French out of these islands once and for all,” Livingston went on. “The fevers are destroying their troops in Saint-Domingue. Their defeat is God’s will, I believe. Punishment for the reign of terror.”
“They hope to sell Louisiana to the United States,” I said.
“Do they now! To America? And whatever will you do with it?”
“President Jefferson estimates it will take a thousand years to settle.”
“Let England take it, is my advice. You Americans are having trouble enough governing what you have.
