The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of UlyssesFroude, James Anthony
History
The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of Ulysses
Froude, James Anthony
Great Britain -- Colonies -- Administration; West Indies -- Description and travel; West Indies, British -- Description and travel
The anchor was got up immediately that we were on board. In the morning
we were to find ourselves at Port of Spain. Mr. S----, the Windward
Island governor, who had joined us at St. Vincent, was, as I said, going
to Tobago. De Foe took the human part of his Robinson Crusoe from the
story of Juan Fernandez. The locality is supposed to have been Tobago,
and Trinidad the island from which the cannibal savages came. We are
continually shuffling the cards, in a hope that a better game may be
played with them. Tobago is now-annexed to Trinidad. Last year it was a
part of Mr. S----'s dominions which he periodically visited. I fell in
with him again on his return, and he told us an incident which befell
him there, illustrating the unexpected shapes in which the schoolmaster
is appearing among the blacks. An intimation was brought to him on his
arrival that, as the Athenian journeymen had played Pyramus and Thisbe
at the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, so a party of villagers from
the interior of Tobago would like to act before his Excellency. Of
course he consented. They came, and went through their performance. To
Mr. S----'s, and probably to the reader's astonishment, the play which
they had selected was the 'Merchant of Venice.' Of the rest of it he
perhaps thought, like the queen of the Amazons, that it was 'sorry
stuff;' but Shylock's representative, he said, showed real appreciation.
With freedom and a peasant proprietary, the money lender is a necessary
phenomenon, and the actor's imagination may have been assisted by
personal recollections.
FOOTNOTES:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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