“At Last” Kingsley goes “Westward-Ho!”

Charles Kingsley’s visit to the Lesser Antilles and Trinidad at the end of 1869 and the beginning of 1870 was the achievement of a long-held dream. He had written a novel fifteen years earlier, Westward-Ho!, which involved a voyage to the Caribbean and had read much about it.[1] While much of Kingsley’s description involves the examination of the natural life and physiography of the Caribbean, he has quite a bit to say about its people. Black coalers on the Danish island of St Thomas, among the first blacks he encountered in the region, were excitable and coarse “half-civilised creatures”.[2] That the coalers sang only hymns and refrained from swearing when they had to work on Sundays seemed to Kingsley a good first step in religious training, although the habit of working only as long as necessary to provide sustenance for a long period of not working for pay struck him as “demoralizing”.[3] Already, we see the echo of Carlyle and Trollope in Kingsley’s judgment of Caribbean blacks.

Kingsley, observing black fruit sellers in St Kitts, makes the interesting observation that “the negro women are, without doubt, on a more thorough footing of equality with the men than the women of any white race” attributing this to near parity in physical strength between black men and women and to the ease with which “not merely food, but gay clothes and ornaments, can be procured by light labour” rather than to egalitarian African values.[4] Without the need for a man to provide for her, the black West Indian woman can be independent and “no schemes for civilizing the negro” will succeed without taking this into account.[5]

Kingsley was impressed that he could see “everywhere, health, strength and goodly stature, especially among women.” The West Indian black was unquestionable healthier than many European whites, and “they seem to enjoy, they do enjoy the very act of living like the lizard on the wall.” Nonetheless, while they should be doing more than enjoying life, Kingsley sees nothing wrong in their enjoying it, and notes that many people in Britain are no more “civilized” than the West Indian black, but much less healthy: “The Negro may have the corpus sanum without the mens sana. But what of those whose souls and bodies are alike unsound?”[6]

There is, however, a strong trace of Carlyle and Trollope in the note Kingsley takes of the fact that, in the absence of land available for settlement by blacks on Nevis means that the black population of that island “cannot squat, and so return to their original savagery; but are well-ordered and peaceable, industrious and well-taught, and need, it is said, not only no soldiers, but no police.”[7] Trollope is also recalled in Kingsley’s comment that the fertility of West Indian soil “put a premium on bad farming” making life too easy for the black peasant whose attitude is “pity the poor weeds”. [8] And there is a clear echo of Trollope in Kingsley’s description of brown Trinidadians as “a race who ought, if they will be wise and virtuous, to have before them a great future.”[9] Kingsley also takes time to consider the East Indians, expressing the fear that their values are so different from those of the blacks that the two groups “will never amalgamate.”[10] It is important to note that throughout the book Kingsley refers to Africans as “uncivilized,” and, while drawing distinctions among African ethnicities in terms of both culture and behaviour, expresses the concern that the more intelligent black ethnicities are less manageable than the less intelligent. Unlike Trollope and Carlyle, however, he acknowledges that black small settlers work, although their style of life in their own settlements is “semi-barbarous”. [11]

Oddly, or, perhaps, not so oddly given the prevailing prejudices of Victorian Englishmen, he can follow the depiction of work cheerfully done on a hot roof under an intense sun with the assertion that blacks in Trinidad live in a “perpetual Saturnalia” in which there is not “a single animal want which they could not satisfy”.[12] Brown West Indians, however, “claim to be, and are, our kinsfolk” and deserve not to be reminded of their servile origins. This will, Kingsley believes, make them “loyal citizens and able servants.”[13]

Kingsley also sympathises with criticisms of reform of Trinidad’s public education, through provision for secular state schools as well as support for religious schools, including the establishment of Queen’s Royal College. However, he believes the ordinance pushed through by the government altogether to the benefit of the colony.[14]

He also comments on the development of a peasantry, expressing doubt that the ability to engage in “la petite Culture” had survived the requirement to work in the “grande culture” of slavery. It would take several generations of training, Kingsley believed, before the blacks would be able to recover their knowledge of small-scale cultivation.[15] It would have to be the more civilized East Indians, rather than the blacks, that would develop a peasant cultivation that would “do justice to the inexhaustible wealth of the West Indian soil and climate.”[16] Kingsley sees considerable potential in the fertility of Trinidad and in the plants that grow there.[17] However, in a surprising departure from Carlyle and Trollope, for whom the sugar plantation was normative, Kingsley declares “extensive sugar cultivation, on the large scale, has been the bane of the West Indies” in part because it has led to a decline in the white population.[18] A peasantry, he believes, would make a better work-force and its growth and prosperity would develop a desire for manufactured goods that would tie blacks, browns, and East Indians firmly to the sugar plantations as disciplined labourers.[19]

Kingsley is in the tradition established by Carlyle and Trollope of the British observer (in the case of Carlyle, observer at a great distance) assuming his inherent superiority over the colonised, and racially different subject. As one recent scholar has put it, Kingsley, Carlyle, and Trollope “created a derogating discourse about black laziness to support claims for ‘saving’ and hence re-stabilizing imperial rule.”[20] This discourse presented blacks and East Indians as “differently inflected but intimately related Others” in a prefiguring of the coming ethnic divisions of Trinidad.[21]

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[1] Charles Kingsley, At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies; Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004 [1871], 3.

[2] Kingsley 2004, 19.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Kingsley 2004, 27.

[5] Kingsley 2004, 28.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Kingsley 2004, 28-29. On the other hand, Kingsley advocated settling “civilised” East Indians on Crown lands in Trinidad (Kingsley 2004, 190).

[8] Kingsley 2004, 112.

[9] Kingsley 2004, 74. Indeed, Kingsley refers to one brown West Indian he had never met, the Jamaican magistrate Richard Hill, as “admirable” (Kingsley 2004, 99).

[10] Kingsley 2004, 97-98.

[11] Kingsley 2004, 196. However, the sight of a black Trinidadian with European features led Kingsley to think positively of the “possible rise of the Negro” (Kingsley 2004, 256-257).

[12] Kingsley 2004, 235.

[13] Kingsley 2004, 236.

[14] Kingsley 2004, 272-289.

[15] Kingsley 2004, 300. The French phrases used by Kingsley mean, respectively, “small-scale cultivation” and “large-scale cultivation” and are not references to “culture” as the word is used in English.

[16] Kingsley 2004, 301.

[17] Kingsley 2004, 302.

[18] Kingsley 2004, 303-304.

[19] Kingsley 2004, 304-306.

[20] Amar Wahab, “Re-Writing Colonized Subjects: Disciplinary Gestures in Charles Kingsley’s At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871).” Revista Mexicana del Caribe , año/vol VIII, número 016, Universidad de Quintana Róo, Chetumal, Mexico, 2003, 144.

[21] Wahab 2003, 175.