Bunches of grapes, at St. Kitts, lay among these:  and at St. Lucia we saw with them, for the first time, Avocado, or Alligator pears, alias midshipman’s butter; {26a} large round brown fruits, to be eaten with pepper and salt by those who list.  With these, in open baskets, lay bright scarlet capsicums, green coconuts tinged with orange, great roots of yam {26b} and cush-cush, {26c} with strange pulse of various kinds and hues.  The contents of these vegetable baskets were often as gay-coloured as the gaudy gowns, and still gaudier turbans, of the women who offered them for sale.

Screaming and jabbering, the Negroes and Negresses thrust each other’s boats about, scramble from one to the other with gestures of wrath and defiance, and seemed at every moment about to fall to fisticuffs and to upset themselves among the sharks.  But they did neither.  Their excitement evaporated in noise.  To their ‘ladies,’ to do them justice, the men were always civil, while the said ‘ladies’ bullied them and ordered them about without mercy.  The negro women are, without doubt, on a more thorough footing of equality with the men than the women of any white race.  The causes, I believe, are two.  In the first place there is less difference between the sexes in mere physical strength and courage; and watching the average Negresses, one can well believe the stories of those terrible Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey, whose boast is, that they are no longer women, but men.  There is no doubt that, in case of a rebellion, the black women of the West Indies would be as formidable, cutlass in hand, as the men.  The other cause is the exceeding ease with which, not merely food, but gay clothes and ornaments, can be procured by light labour.  The negro woman has no need to marry and make herself the slave of a man, in order to get a home and subsistence.  Independent she is, for good and evil; and independent she takes care to remain; and no schemes for civilising the Negro will have any deep or permanent good effect which do not take note of, and legislate for, this singular fact.

Meanwhile, it was a comfort to one fresh from the cities of the Old World, and the short and stunted figures, the mesquin and scrofulous visages, which crowd our alleys and back wynds, to see everywhere health, strength, and goodly stature, especially among women.  Nowhere in the West Indies are to be seen those haggard down-trodden mothers, grown old before their time, too common in England, and commoner still in France.  Health, ‘rude’ in every sense of the word, is the mark of the negro woman, and of the negro man likewise.  Their faces shine with fatness; they seem to enjoy, they do enjoy, the mere act of living, like the lizard on the wall.  It may be said—­it must be said—­that, if they be human beings (as they are), they are meant for something more than mere enjoyment of life.  Well and good:  but are they not meant for enjoyment likewise?