240 I N A G U A 



similar gathering would have done in Haiti. The general air 

 of hopelessness and shiftlessness was apparent everywhere. 

 The world of these surf-encircled people was crumbling to 

 pieces around them; instead of bending their energies to re- 

 creating it they were allowing themselves to be swept along 

 with the tide of easy dissolution. Even doorsteps which could 

 have been repaired in ten minutes with a few strips of wood 

 or fragments of stone were permitted to fall of dry rot; it 

 was simpler to do without them than to rebuild. 



There was no leadership on the island. The one family of 

 mulattoes which might have, by force of example or unselfish- 

 ness, contributed to the welfare of the settlement was passing 

 the days in careless somnolence, or exploiting the little remain- 

 ing resources of the island for its individual benefit. The black 

 commissioner was helpless. He was doing his level best, but 

 like the others he was enmeshed in a web of circumstance. 



Monotony and frustration were written on every face, in 

 the very deportment of the inhabitants. I cannot be sure I 

 blame them too much. For all my interest in natural phenomena 

 and my fresh background of the outer world I was beginning 

 to slow down. The heat had something to do with it, the com- 

 plete sense of isolation fostered the condition; lack of outside 

 stimulation, of literature and music, gay companionship, caused 

 a slackening of activity. Birds and beasts, as wonderful as they 

 are, pall at times. I began finding excuses to sit and loaf. Yet 

 I had been on the island scarcely half a year; these people had 

 been born here, had been faced with insularity from the mo- 

 ment of their genesis. Even this, in many cases, was not under 

 very happy circumstances. Illegitimacy was common, blacks 

 bred with mulattoes, mulattoes with whites— as white as these 

 were— and these with the blacks again. The moral code was 

 low, a status to be expected in a colony that for long years had 

 fostered slavery and had promoted promiscuous breeding to 



