One can well believe the story of the northern engineer who, when brought over to plan out a railroad, shook his head at the first sight of the ’high woods.’  ‘At home,’ quoth he, ’one works outside one’s work:  here one works inside it.’  Considering the density of the forests, one may as easily take a general sketch of a room from underneath the carpet as of Trinidad from the ground.  However, thanks to the energy of a few gentlemen, who found occasional holes in the carpet through which they could peep, the survey of Trinidad is now about complete.

But in those days ignorance of the island, as well as the battle between old and new interests, brought lawsuits, and all but civil war.  Many of the French settlers were no better than they should be; many had debts in other islands; many of the Negroes had been sent thither because they were too great ruffians to be allowed at home; and, what was worse, the premium of sixteen acres of land for every slave imported called up a system of stealing slaves, and sometimes even free coloured people, from other islands, especially from Grenada, by means of ‘artful Negroes and mulatto slaves,’ who were sent over as crimps.  I shall not record the words in which certain old Spaniards describe the new population of Trinidad ninety years ago.  They, of course, saw everything in the blackest light; and the colony has long since weeded and settled itself under a course of good government.  But poor Don Josef Maria Chacon must have had a hard time of it while he tried to break into something like order such a motley crew.

He never broke them in, poor man.  For just as matters were beginning to right themselves, the French Revolution broke out; and every French West Indian island burst into flame,—­physical, alas! as well as moral.  Then hurried into Trinidad, to make confusion worse confounded, French Royalist families, escaping from the horrors in Hayti; and brought with them, it is said, many still faithful house-slaves born on their estates.  But the Republican French, being nearly ten to one, were practical masters of the island; and Don Chacon, whenever he did anything unpopular, had to submit to ‘manifestations,’ with tricolour flag, Marseillaise, and Ca Ira, about the streets of Port of Spain; and to be privately informed by Admiral Artizabal that a guillotine was getting ready to cut off the heads of all loyal Spaniards, French, and British.  This may have been an exaggeration:  but wild deeds were possible enough in those wild days.  Artizabal, the story goes, threatened to hang a certain ringleader (name not given) at his yard-arm.  Chacon begged the man’s life, and the fellow was ’spared to become the persecutor of his preserver, even to banishment, and death from a broken heart.’ {65}