34 2 To the River Plate and Back 



the land back of Bridgetown. The island produces 

 annually about ninety thousand hogsheads of sugar. 

 Along the roads barefooted women and girls were 

 trooping into the town, carrying small quantities of 

 fruits and vegetables to market in trays and baskets 

 balanced upon their heads. At most their burdens were 

 of little value measured in coin. We stopped and 

 priced the articles they had for sale. A few pennies, 

 a shilling, would have bought what the most heavily 

 laden of their number was carrying over the hot roads. 

 The poverty of the swarming multitude impressed itself 

 upon us. The island is indeed over-populated, and the 

 struggle for existence is acute, leading to a great emi- 

 gration of laborers to other parts. Many of the men 

 have in recent years found employment at Panama, 

 where they have been helping to dig the big ditch which 

 is to link the waters of the Caribbean with the Pacific. 



On the way we passed a clergyman. The driver 

 told us it was 'the Moravian minister." A flood of 

 memories was awakened. My father was a Moravian 

 missionary in the West Indies when I first saw the 

 light of day. My mother's grandfather was a Moravian 

 missionary in the West Indies, the colleague and friend 

 of another Moravian missionary, John Montgomery, 

 the father of James Montgomery, the poet. John 

 Montgomery served in Barbados, and he and his wife 

 are buried on Tobago. My mother's father was born 

 at a Moravian mission-station in the West Indies, and 

 with his brothers was sent more than a hundred years 

 ago, while they were still little children, to Bethlehem 

 in Pennsylvania to be educated. There they lived and 

 died, and there their descendants after them lived, some 

 of them helping to make history. One of them was 

 the founder of the great Bethlehem Steel Company, the 



