The Traveller's Tree Quotes

“On the way back to Canefield House we passed through the more hilly district of Scotland, and observed, working in the fields or sitting in the doorways of miserable wooden shacks, not the Negro figures to which the eye is accustomed in such settings in the West Indies, but ragged white men with blue eyes and tow-coloured hair bleached by the sun. This little population of Redlegs, as they are called, are descendants of the followers of the Duke of Monmouth, who, after their defeat at Sedgemoor, were deported to Barbados by order of Judge Jeffreys at the Bloody Assizes. They have remained here ever since, in the same humble plight as when they were first herded ashore. Labat and many other writers talk of the presence in the islands of Irish deportees shipped here by Cromwell after Wexford and Drogheda, and it is perhaps due to them that the closest affinity of the Barbadian way of speaking is with the Irish accent.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands

“Unruly Scots were also packed off to Barbados in the early days, and the numbers of the original Redlegs or, as they are alternately styled, the Mean Whites, were steadily augmented by the deportation of convicts from England to the West Indies, who lived here in the same loathsome circumstances as the slaves, and when their sentences had expired, often settled here. It is significant of the gulf that yawns between them and the other white islanders that even in this colony where a white complexion is considered to be of inestimable and intrinsic merit, they seldom rise in the world, or play, as the Negroes do, a rôle in island politics. These pale, Nordic people, standing barefoot in the dust with loads of sugar-cane on their heads and gazing listlessly as the trim limousines go bowling past, are pathetic and moving figures, and their aspect has none of the cheerfulness of the inhabitants of the Saints or of the pleasant solidity of the whites of the Guadeloupean hinterland. They look like poor devils and nothing else.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands

“the addiction of the Spaniards of America to the dances of the jungle indicates a common ancestor to all the Latin-American dances that evolved in the ensuing centuries. Surely the earliest begetter of the rhumba, the samba, the son, and even the tango, can be none other than this calenda from the coast of Guinea? Even if its authentic African origin were not known, the description of the dance of the Congolese at once suggests to anybody who has seen it the Conga of the Negroes of Cuba.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands