The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-04-10
THE CAPITAL OF TRINIDAD
AFFAIRS OF TO.DAY IN THE
 ENGLISH ISLAND.
Wealth and Luxury in Port-of-spain- Also Many Snakes, VuitUres ana Other Animals and Insecfs-Thc Fih- est Botanic Gardens In the Western Hemisphere.

!
 Hemisphere.
 Special Correspondence of the Journa
 and Courier)
 Port-of- Spain, Trinidad, W. l.
 March 15, 1902
 The stranger in these isolated and
 mostly unimproved Negro Edens finds
 many surprises; but nothing which SC
 astonishes him as the wealth and lux
 ury displayed at Port-of-Spain, Here
 the rule is reversed-of a city set on a
 hillside, which from afar looks beau-
 tiful as ad ream of white-Walled pal
 aces, but proves on inspection to be
 filthy, squald and poverty stricken; for
 this British colonial Capital does not
 show up from the harbOr, but with true
 English reserve discloses it's beauties
 only on close acquaintance. Your first
 impression is of a nasty place, with an
 atmosphere like that of freshly
 guanoed hot-bed full of saXage or stu
 pid black faces, vultures that sit like
 evil spirits upon the housetops wait
 ing for people to die that they may
 tear their flesh; earth and air sWarming l with unclean creatureS--VampireS 1 deadly serpents, tarantulas, scorpions | centipedes, lizzards-to say nothing of | the demons and disease and pestilence
 that nightly stalk abroad with the dews
 that fall and miasmas that ascends.
 With unaccustomed fervor you repeat your prayers to be delivered from dan | gers seen and unseen" having in mind | 1,,J nf yx,h ioI l the least, because commonest, are pois-
 onous beetles crawling into the food, hairy spiders skurrying up your trous- ers leg, vipers, not longer than your smallest finger exactly the color of the leaves under which they lie in wait to murder tiny enats that go cheerfully buzzing by and leave an infinitesima1 egg under the skin, which soon de- velops into a family of Wriegling worms, to be dug out with a sharp knife, and chigoes, or ''jiggers," that turk in every crack of pavements and tiled floors, to bore themselves bodily through the soles and under the toe nails of pedestrians These are only few of Trinidad's objectionable resi- dents and by and by you learn that even these are some of them not un- mitigated evils. The snakes, for exam pie, that have their homes between the double walls of houses, in matched roofs and garden arbors, swallow myriads of Hazards, reaches, and other vermin that would otherwise make life uncomfortable; jiggers compel the shoe ing. and sometimes even the washing, of the feet of an extensively smelly pop uation and; the vutures are public blessings in the way of scavengers. They are che most valuable and indus trious of all the native inhabitants and without them lacking any system of sewerage, the city would offer from a perpetual plague.
 Port-of Spain has wide, badly-paved straight streets, long as the purses of it's English nabobs, shaded by the most splendid trees of the tropics, and with open gutters down each side through which torrent rushes after every shower. carrying down to the water front a fotsam of offaI, dead cats and dogs, and kitchen refuse. ct cetera. The population is officially enumerated al % 000; but you imagine it to be much greater. on account of the number of people who are lounging about every where. prompting all the shady street corners and park benches, apparently | without care or grievance in the | world and with nothing whatever to do | It is said that fully one-ffth of the [ twenty-five thousand residents of Port [ of-Spain are without visible means of | support but would disdan to work if | it were offered them at highest wages, | They seem to be as happy and content ed as they are lazy, always laughing, | eating or sucking canestalks, sleeping [ anywhere in the open and subsisting . mainly on fruits. which are plentiful as vermin and literally "dirt cheap
 In Trindad's motley population the thoughtful reader of history may easily find the connection between cause and effect He sees numerous traces of the aboriginal Indians and the Carlos, as well as of the early Spanish owners of the islend When Don Josef Maria Chacon was governor he strove to break the Spanish rule by inviting all foreigners, fprovitling always that they were Roman Catholics) to come to Trinidad and settle on liberal grants of crown land Each white person, of either sex, was offered gratis. thirty  and half that amount additional, for every slave he or she should bring along. Free colored people were also encouraged to come and given sixteen acres each So into Port-of-Spain pour cd a mostley crowd, principally French, to the number of twenty thousand with in few months: and soon the island was Spanish only In name. But the cld left indalib1e marks be- hind, in the names architecture, lam suage. laws, customs and municipal As everybody knows has been a British colony since 1902 Five years before that Spain ra ashly declared war aginst Johnny Bull, with the result that great naval bat ties were fought in these waters. be tween Spanish. English French. Dutch and Danish fleets; and finally Colun1- bus island of the Holy Trinity passed forever into the unrelaxing clutch of England The brave and noble Spanish governor, Chacon, capituIated and Pic tons iron rule began, Nowadays the population of the whole island is per haps two hundred thousand of which number half are of mixed Indian and frican blood, and two-thirds of the 1a1f ,