"It was noon that day when we entered the Carib reservation and found ourselves at last in the El Dorado I had so fondly pictured in my imagination."
"In Old Roseau" is the title of a thoroughly charming little volume by Dr. William S. Birge (1857-1925) published in 1900, dealing with life on Dominica, one of the little Windward Isles in the Carribean. Dr. Birge spent some time in old Roseau, the principal town of Dominica. and also paid a rather prolonged visit to the interesting settlement of the Carib Indians on the island.
The work abounds in interesting stories connected with the annals of the island; but perhaps the most interesting pages are devoted to the author's personal experiences, including as they do a trip to the great sulphur lake, which is in the form of a mighty cauldron ever seething on the summit of one of the principal mountains of Dominica; an exciting wild boar hunt in which the author plays anything but the part of a story-book hero: and a sojourn in the house of a family among the Carib Indians who were half French and half Indian. His description of leprosy is unusually free from loathesomeness, yet he paints its horrors with the colors of truth, and his more attractive passages lose none of the force displayed in dealing with more grewsome subjects. Regarding the tropical agriculture of the island, Birge writes: "The soil of all the islands is rich, and with little cultivation will produce three or four crops a year."
The two frank and unsophisticated maidens, Marcella and Louise, may have served to prolong our author's visit, as they certainly were unconventional islanders near to Nature's heart. The affection which the elder entertained for the visitor, though giving a romantic tinge to his long stay, saddened the closing days of his visit. "In Old Roseau" is a delightfully restful though instructive and entertaining little volume.
In describing his memories of the island, Birge writes:
"The In these West Indian Islands you live in a climate averaging 80°. The air has no longer any harshness or asperity. It feels soft and bland to the skin. Every breath is healing. You are beside a tinted and eye-delighting ocean, where soft breezes are constant and strengthening; amid lovely scenes of vivid and varied hues, and beneath fair, solemn and deep blue skies, whose brief sunsets are glorious beyond the painting of words, and whose prismatic stars glow like steel when not quenched by the most mellow and brightest of moonlights. The mind partakes of the tranquility of it all, and year by year after you have come away you will look back to those verdant hills, to those palm-bordered roads, to that purple and rosy sea, to those brilliant noons and beautiful nights, to the charming climate."
