Читать книгу Seven League Boots - Richard Halliburton - Страница 12

Table of Contents

For two hours, from the airplane in which I traveled, I had been watching three hundred miles of tropical scenery unfold below. We had taken off from Santiago, circled over the hill-framed harbor, climbed high above Morro Castle and sailed on down the coast of Cuba in the opposite direction from the scene of the naval battle. We flew over Guantánamo Bay, the greatest American naval station in the West Indies, sighted a few warships at anchor, rushed on past to the eastern tip of Cuba and saw before us a hundred miles of open water—the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, the passage through which the Vulcan had towed the hulk of the Maria Teresa.

Before long the Haitian mountains, floating in the sky, appeared ahead. And then we found the coast of the long narrow peninsula that extends westward toward Cuba, and for another hundred miles followed the procession of romantic little offshore islets set in a pale green sea, little bays splashed with ten shades of blue, and the endless lines of royal palms leaning out to greet the great white waves rolling in from the Caribbean.

Changing to a smaller plane at Port-au-Prince, the capital of the Black Republic, I was carried on north through the interior of the island, hoping that the single motor of our ship would not fail, for in the wild confusion of jungled canyons and cloud-topped summits below, there was nothing to land on but the tops of trees.

The northern coast now appeared in the dim distance. Twenty miles back from it, right in our path, the pilot pointed out to me a peculiar peak that stood forth bold and isolated—a peak marked on my map Le Bonnet à l’Évêque, the Bishop’s Bonnet.

This peak was my destination, for on its pinnacle, three thousand feet above the valley, soared the ruins of one of the most spectacular castles on earth—the Citadel of Christophe, the Black King of Haiti.

Christophe has been dead more than a hundred years, but this incredible Citadel still stands guard over what was once his kingdom, to remind the world that the man who built it was a giant, a genius, a tyrant and the most masterful Negro in history.

The name Haiti, to most people, suggests merely the western half of a backward island in the West Indies, populated by primitive Africans addicted to voodoo worship, and once policed by the U. S. Marines. Yet during the latter part of the eighteenth century, as a French colony, Haiti was one of the richest countries in the world. By 1785 the French were operating several thousand sugar and coffee plantations, worked by half a million slaves. The chief metropolis, Cap Haitien on the north coast, rarely saw less than a hundred ships in the harbor. Compared with it, New York was only a modest little port of secondary importance whose merchants, when they came to Haiti, were always astonished at the brilliance and richness of the social life. From Paris the planters imported the most beautiful and luxurious furnishings money could buy for their palm-shaded châteaux. Commerce and industry came to be so highly developed and so profitable that the revenues from this one colony provided the greatest single source of income for the French Government.

This was the scene in which a Negro slave, Henry Christophe, one hundred per cent black, rose to a position of dictatorial power not matched in the Western hemisphere by anyone, black or white, before or since.

Christophe was born in 1767 of slave parents, so one legend tells, on the West Indian island of St. Kitts. Taken to Haiti as a boy, he became a waiter and dishwasher at a public bar. But such a menial job was not to hold him forever. He was too strong, too tall, too intelligent, and much too unruly. A slave rebellion, vengeful and determined, ignited the island when Henry was twenty-seven, and he promptly gave up washing dishes to join the insurrection against the French masters. His natural ability to command was soon recognized, so that before the long and bloody conflict was ended, Christophe was a “General.” And his generalship, as much as anything, brought about the victories by which the slaves completely wrested the island from French control.^[1]

But France was not to be disposed of so easily. Napoleon was in power and declared he had no intention of losing his richest colony to a mob of savages. In 1802 he dispatched eighty ships and an advance contingent of twenty-two thousand veteran soldiers to regain Haiti from the slaves, placing General LeClerc, one of his most successful officers, in command. The General was accompanied by his beautiful young wife, none other than Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s favorite sister. No one expected a real war.

But after three years of the most vicious fighting, fifty thousand French soldiers lay dead from battle and disease. LeClerc himself contracted yellow fever and died—and Pauline fled back to France. A British fleet, likewise warring with Napoleon, blockaded the harbor. To this fleet the despairing French surrendered, and were carried off to European prisons.

Napoleon had been utterly and permanently expelled. Scarcely a white man remained alive in Haiti.

Christophe’s ambition soared. Another ex-slave, Jean Jacques Dessalines, thanks to his unrivaled ability in murder and slaughter, had become Emperor, with Christophe next in command. But Christophe had visions of himself as dictator. And his visions were all realized when, in 1806, Dessalines having been assassinated, he was able to seize complete mastery.

The new ruler’s civil administration turned out to be no less remarkable than his military leadership. He could not read or write; he knew nothing of politics or science; but he did know that his black followers must be controlled with an iron hand if they were to maintain their hard-earned freedom.

So he had himself crowned King Henry I. Now he could, and did, have discipline. He began to force his ex-slave subjects with lash and bayonet, to work, to build, to produce, to obey. Mussolini and Stalin, a hundred and twenty-five years later, were to seem like weak sisters compared to this towering black tyrant. Anybody caught loafing in King Henry’s country was shot. No one could escape from serving his relentless ambition to rehabilitate the ravaged country, to give it self-respect and security and pride.

As for the pride, he set them a grand example. Being a royal personage now, he wanted a suitable dwelling to proclaim his majesty. So he began to build, twenty miles inland from Cap Haitien, a château whose lavish beauty was not equaled this side of Europe. When it was finished, it contained fifty rooms, with a magnificent façade approached by a double staircase where sentries stood guard. The rooms inside and the gardens outside shone with royal splendor. Christophe called it Sans Souci.

With a Versailles of his own, the King next tried to organize a court similar to that of Louis XVI. He created a “nobility” with princes and barons, and ladies-in-waiting for Marie-Louise, his Queen. All the Negro love of showy spectacle and bright colors burst like fireworks in this Haitian court. Napoleon and Josephine never saw such scarlet uniforms, so much gold braid, such fancy plumes, as the black nobles and their black consorts wore in the black King’s throne room. A few whites were permitted to join the court. Christophe’s health was guarded by a Scotch doctor, and two American maiden ladies came from Philadelphia to teach the two Princesses, Améthyste and Athénaire, the graces of polite society, including poetry, the harp and the straightening of kinky hair.

This court was not just an empty show, but the visible symbol of a rich and well-disciplined monarchy. In its best days under France, Haiti had never known such prosperity as the masterful ex-slave gave it. His notion of the public welfare, however, was sometimes a little unusual. For example, when it became obvious that Haiti would need an increased population to work the cane-fields, Christophe decided to inflate the birth-rate. In one provincial town, he ordered all the women, young and old, to assemble in the public square before the church. On assembling, those already married were excused, leaving only maidens. The Royal Guards were then commanded to advance and seize, each for himself, the handiest virgin—regardless of the number of obligations he might already have at home.

But for Christophe, prosperity and fecundity were not enough. He wanted security too, and race-consciousness. His people had no tradition, no heroes. They were just animals being driven. He would give them a national symbol to respect, a national monument that would get into the blood of every citizen, for with their own blood and brawn they themselves should build it—an impregnable fortress on the summit of the Bonnet à l’Évêque, three thousand feet above Sans Souci, placed so as to lord it over the plain and the town and the bay. It would be invulnerable to attack; stronger than Napoleon, or the voodoo enchantments, or the devil himself—something incomparable in any land, something to make the world, and all the hated white men in it, stare with astonishment and admiration.

So Christophe dreamed, and so his dream came to pass in brick and stone.

French architects drew the original plans and in fact began to lay the foundations. But the work had hardly started when they were expelled. Christophe, being determined to make the fortress into a monument to himself, greatly enlarged the design and changed the details to his own taste. The overpowering grandeur of this grim, contemptuous Citadel bears the stamp of his spirit alone. The north bastion, a vast prow of sheer cannon-crowned wall a hundred and thirty feet high, jutting arrogantly toward the harbor where Napoleon’s army had landed and departed, toward France and all white domination, might be his own huge black fist.

With his genius for organization, Christophe marshalled his nation’s forces as for war. Thirty thousand people were driven, like the slaves of Pharaoh, to work on the walls. Day and night they toiled, not just men alone but women as well. The women carried eight ten-pound bricks or an equivalent weight of cannon balls on each ascent from the valley three thousand feet below. Barrels of lime and gunpowder, crude machinery, and cannon, cannon by the score, heavy as the sandstone blocks of Cheops’ pyramid, had to be dragged, amid groans and sweat and agony, to the summit. The ascending and descending slaves made two continuous lines each six miles long, an army of reluctant black ants. And all along the way were drivers with whips to speed the laggards.

Christophe himself became obsessed with the work. He stormed up and down the steep trail shouting orders, threatening his masons. It is said he even shot to death numbers of his cannon-sled crews to encourage those remaining to move faster.

Twelve months went by. Two thousand laborers had perished (ten times as many more were yet to die), but only the foundations were in place. Christophe demanded more slaves, more speed, more victims, more bricks. The Citadel must be finished before the French came back.

And so the years succeeded one another, with the forced labor never ending on the peak. The walls rose to greater and greater—to unbelievable—heights, continuing the upward sweep of the mountain side, walls strong and cruel as Christophe’s heart. And crowning them were battlements for the great bronze guns. Christophe already had the three hundred which LeClerc had left behind, but he wanted thrice three hundred. So every ship that sailed to Europe sailed back with cannon and cannon balls, to be dragged by whip-lashed blacks up into the clouds.

Eight years passed. Napoleon had been five years a prisoner on St. Helena. Christophe was fifty-three, but he was still in power, and still his castle-madness grew. To command the strongest fortress on earth had become his dominant obsession. It is said that when he learned another fortress, called Gibraltar, was stronger, he executed the architect who had dared to plan the Citadel on a smaller scale.

Even so, by 1820 the end of the endless labor was in sight, and Christophe redoubled his merciless efforts to bring his castle to completion. His tyranny became demonic. In paroxysms of impatience, he would beat his ministers with his riding whip and order his generals to work on the walls like ordinary slaves. The number of laborers who died from brutality or exhaustion reached new and dreadful totals. The slightest hint of insubordination brought down his murderous wrath. Suspecting the fidelity of a company of Citadel guards, he lined them up, so one story goes, on the highest battlement and commanded them to march forward, right over the edge of the hundred-and-thirty-foot wall. And so iron-fisted was Christophe’s discipline that they obeyed, to be dashed to pieces on the rocky mountain side below.

One thing alone could give the builders release from Christophe’s bloody tyranny. As John Vandercook tells so well in his splendid biography of Christophe, Black Majesty,^[2] the King was a devout churchgoer and regularly took a recess from his shootings and lashings to attend Mass. Early one morning in the summer of 1820, he was kneeling before the altar, praying to be forgiven for having executed a traitorous priest. Suddenly he saw, or thought he saw, standing before him, the ghost of the priest himself. Horrified, with a stifled shriek, Christophe fell gasping to the floor, half his body paralyzed.

The fateful news of King Henry’s stroke spread across Haiti with the wind and the tom-tom telegraph. Christophe was the State, the Law, the heart-beat and the will-power of the nation. If he slipped, the whole tyranny-built structure crumpled. He knew, and Haiti knew.

Consequently, paralyzed or not, he must maintain front. He had his soldiers drawn up before the palace, and prepared himself, by means of a supreme effort, to mount his horse and ride before them, to show his army, to show himself, that he was still Christophe. But his effort was to no avail. His legs would not obey. Clutching at his saddle, he collapsed, and lay helpless in the dust.

Among those who saw him fall there was no pity for the King, only rejoicing that this despot who had driven them so mercilessly was stricken and defenseless. The packs of his revengeful subjects began to close in on the wounded lion. In a few days more the army, released from its brutal discipline, was swept by the wildfire of rebellion. On hearing this good news the thousands of slave-laborers, struggling with their cannon up the trail to the Citadel, dropped their hateful burdens with shouts of joy and rushed down the mountain side, brandishing clubs and bricks and trowels, to swell the forces of destruction.

The yelling and exultant mobs were pounding on the very gates of the château. Christophe had seen other victims torn to pieces under his own orders, by just such mobs as these. He knew what to expect. Better go painlessly and decently—and quickly, before the door was broken down. Alone in his bedroom, he took from its case his favorite weapon, a silver-mounted pistol given him by an English admiral. With it went a supply of bullets. He fired one straight into his heart.

In an effort to preserve the King’s body from the rioters, the Queen, with Améthyste and Athénaire and one faithful mulatto companion, hurriedly lifted the corpse onto a litter and, escaping from a rear door of the château, started off with their heavy burden to climb to the Citadel, where Marie-Louise hoped to be able to bury her husband.

With the savage shouts and the flames of Sans Souci behind them, the pitiful cortège struggled upward. They passed cannon and cannon balls, bricks and stone, abandoned in the middle of the path by the suddenly liberated slaves. But there was no time to take notice of this—the mobs were already in hot pursuit, shouting for the Black King’s head. Desperate and almost spent, the three women and one man reached the Citadel’s towering prow just ahead of the rebels. They stumbled through the entrance, across the inner moat and bridge, along the first cannon-gallery, into the great court. The gravel underfoot in the courtyard was hard as stone. There was no opportunity to dig a grave—the rebels were running headlong through the lower gates. Then Marie-Louise noticed a huge vat of liquid lime, left there by the runaway plasterers. Into this white and all-consuming bath the black corpse of Christophe was dropped, and pushed downward until it disappeared.

The bullet that killed Christophe killed his kingdom too, which without him collapsed like a stuck balloon and was annexed by a rival neighbor. In the anarchy that followed, Marie-Louise and her daughters escaped to Europe, but the Crown Prince was murdered. The dukes and duchesses took off their shoes again and went back to work in the fields of cane. Haiti returned to its primitive African ways and soon forgot that it was once the proudest land in the Americas.

As for the Citadel, from the day of the King’s death until now it has remained intact, but abandoned, an unfinished nightmare, fearfully shunned by the black men of Haiti. Only the jungle has dared creep up to inhabit it—one of the most marvelous monuments in the world.

An incredible story? Yes, until you have seen with your own eyes the great fortress which is evidence of its truth. Perhaps I myself half disbelieved until I looked down from the airplane upon the Bonnet à l’Évêque and saw the enormous lichen-covered walls swelling up from the peak-top, saw the one-hundred-and-thirty-foot prow thrusting toward the sea, saw the foothills, three thousand feet beneath, where the Black King wrought his empire. I could not doubt the story then. The Citadel was there, to be entered, admired, explored. Having beheld it I became eager to do all three.

And so next day, down to earth again, I set out from the little hotel at Cap Haitien to climb the Bishop’s Bonnet, knowing that I had before me a profoundly moving experience.

[1]

For the facts of Christophe’s life, and for the history of Haiti at this period, I am especially indebted to the English historian, W. W. Harvey, whose book, Sketches of Hayti from the Expulsion of the French to the Death of Christophe, is the all-important source for anyone writing on these subjects.

[2]	Published by Harper & Brothers.