The Sights, Sounds, and Smells of the Tropical Port System

For U.S. visitors, traveling to the tropical world was an experience charged with sensation. At the beginning of a journey from the United States aboard a Caribbean steamer, the days at sea would be filled with anticipation, fueled by the changing weather, encounters with fellow travelers, and the enforced idleness of life on ship. Viewed over glistening waters as it drifted into view, the first sight of a port town and its surrounding landscape heightened a visitor’s preconceptions about the region’s natural splendor and romantic past.Footnote ²¹ A panorama of bays, harbors and towns nestling in foothills, framed by the ocean below and azure sky or mountains above, was almost a textbook definition of the picturesque, in which visions aligned with older, stylized imagery of the region. The New York Herald correspondent Stephen Bonsal, who visited Samaná Bay, Santo Domingo, in 1903, offered a characteristic evocation, connecting signs of contemporary beauty with an idealized image of the region’s romantic, buccaneering past. Passing through a “fjord with alternating cliffs and beaches, the cliffs hung with vines and the beaches overtopped with cocoa palms” toward the “great landlocked harbor of Santa Barbara,” he imagined it as an “island upon which the pirates of a former age were accustomed to careen their vessels.”Footnote ²²

As their steamers approached land, visitors might catch exciting glimpses of imperial power in the looming presence of foreign gunboats, or marvel at the constellation of traders gathered to do business in Caribbean waters. Bridgetown, Barbados, was a particularly dramatic example. After it became the official headquarters of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in 1885, it consolidated its position as the first point of transit for transatlantic traffic heading to the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, or south to Brazil and Argentina. By the end of the century it was a bustling entrepôt, employing hundreds if not thousands of residents in shipping, longshore work, ship maintenance, and ancillary employment in processing, hosting, entertaining, and transporting travelers.Footnote ²³ Dozens of ships of all sizes were usually at anchor or moving in and out of Carlisle Bay, while small local boats darted between them.Footnote ²⁴ When the wealthy New Yorker Susan de Forest Day arrived there at the end of a journey through the West Indies in 1897, she counted “forty different vessels, ships, barks, schooners, men-of-war and training ships,” including the USS Essex, as well as “a great number of Gloucester fishermen in the harbor [that] have been bought by the West Indians for trading purposes between the islands.”Footnote ²⁵

Such images viewed from a distance were grand and romantic sights, and aligned with ideas of the tropics as an exciting, historical realm of imperial rivalries and piratical adventure. With greater proximity, however, the grubbier realities of port life came into focus, and the contrast with visitors’ early reveries exaggerated the intensity of their negative reactions. As he approached Jacmel, Haiti, from a distance, Bonsal had imagined it as “the haven of our dreams.” Upon landing, he decided it was little more than a “dung-heap embowered in palm trees.”Footnote ²⁶ “Our view of Fredericksted[, St. Croix,] from the vessel had prepared us for a beautiful place,” complained the editor of the New York Observer and travel writer, Charles Augustus Stoddard, “buildings with arched fronts and many white and pink and yellow houses, half hidden among strange tamarind and palm and mango trees, but when we got ashore the vision vanished. The arcades were clumsy and crumbling and dirty; the streets unpaved and irregular, and the cabins where the negroes lived were far from picturesque.”Footnote ²⁷ One visitor to Kingston, Jamaica, summarized a common reaction when he declared, “One wants to get out of the place to enjoy it.”Footnote ²⁸

The disappointing condition of many tropical ports could be explained by rapid, unplanned urbanization combined with unbalanced investment. Steam-powered transport had increased international trading and transport capacity and increased the number of ports capable of serving the global market, and to take advantage of these opportunities ports required modernization. Producers, governments, businesses, and imperial authorities, animated by hopes that ranged from ambitious to hubristic, pumped money into building the infrastructure of global commerce. Shallow access routes were dredged and deepened. Silted rivers were cleared and canals dug. Sea walls, quays and piers were built. Warehouses, cranes, and processing facilities were constructed to allow for the more rapid storage and processing of goods, and for the separation of the international trade from cabotage (domestic seaborne commerce). Customs and harbor officials as well as health inspectors were appointed. By the end of the century a few ports even boasted electric lighting and bus services.Footnote ²⁹

Investment in the architecture of global exchange surged far ahead of spending on the growing populations serving the port system, not least because port workers were often viewed with ambivalence. Marking the fault line between the local and the global, the ports of the greater Caribbean were dynamic, hybrid spaces that were both valuable and deeply contested, bound together by “thick connections” that crossed territorial boundaries and sometimes challenged the authority of central governments.Footnote ³⁰ From above, imperial power was felt in enclaves, protectorates, colonies, expatriate communities, shipping lines, trading houses, port operators, and military deployments.Footnote ³¹ From below, the region was home to highly mobile groups of political exiles, filibusteros, arms smugglers, sea workers, and migrant workers. Kinship networks, political associations, and religious communities tied the coastal mainland to the islands and encouraged the creation of transnational political communities.Footnote ³² As Julie Greene argues, “this hypermobile circulatory system” made “the very composition of the working classes much more fluid and quick to change, and … racial and gender relations themselves more fluid and changeable.”Footnote ³³ As a result, ports were often seen as “morally ambiguous places that leave the continental interior of the national body vulnerable to contamination.”Footnote ³⁴ Many ports in the region developed independent local identities and emerged as sites of political conflict and resistance to central governments. Bluefields, in Nicaragua, would provide an inception point for anti-government insurgencies in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1920s, as it would again in the 1980s. Veracruzeños hosted Júarez during the interregnum of 1858–61, would resist the Porfiriato, and fought against the U.S. occupation launched by Woodrow Wilson in 1914.Footnote ³⁵ Panama had diverged from the rest of Colombia well before the United States stage-managed its secession. Even on the Caribbean coast of South America, where several of the major ports were centuries old, there was a strong sense of coastal difference, which domestic elites as well as foreigners connected to the mixed-race communities that typically lived on the nations’ margins.Footnote ³⁶

The ambivalence of elites toward the inhabitants of a port network that was commercially vital yet felt somehow alien may explain why, despite the energy and investment put into building port infrastructure, the needs of port society were often neglected. Neither national elites busy erecting statues of their leaders in capital cities nor the foreign corporations building warehouses and piers were much concerned with the lives and conditions of port worker communities, and one did not have to go far to see neglect amid the growth. Despite their commercial and cultural vibrancy, many port towns suffered from dirty streets, shabby worker districts, and the ill health born of overcrowding and poor public sanitation systems. As it grew, Barranquilla, Colombia, opened theaters, salons, dancehalls, banks, schools, newspapers, and factories, but it also experienced a devastating fire in 1873 and suffered a smallpox outbreak in 1880.Footnote ³⁷ Puerto Cabello, Venezuela’s second largest export hub, was by the 1890s an industrious town of 7,000 people, but whereas the workers lived in the overcrowded streets of the town, the wealthier residents and the officers of the foreign trading houses resided in nearby Valencia or San Esteban, insulating themselves from the rougher features of port life.Footnote ³⁸

U.S. visitors experienced this uneven development directly as their steamers approached land. In places like St. Pierre, Martinique, water running down the steep hillside was channeled through roadside drains, creating an effective system of sewerage, but these were relatively unusual in the region.Footnote ³⁹ Often, residents were forced to turn to ad hoc methods of household cleaning, dumping waste directly into the sea, which, especially in harbors lacking swift currents, gave off an unbearable stench. According to Day, at nine in the evening, the women of Castries, St. Lucia, would “take all the refuse of the house, together with the contents of the cesspools, and carry it in tin cans on their heads to the bay, there to dump it in the water.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Such practices turned harbor water unpleasant colors, leaving an arc of marine pollution contrasting with the open sea beyond. With the wrong wind, the smells could reach a visitor well before landfall. Kingston’s bay was reputedly “dirty yellow, and dank” and Havana harbor, which had no effective tidal flow, was notorious for its “thick black liquid,” “filthy with the pollutions of a dozen generations.”Footnote ⁴¹ Every time a paddle or propeller went through it, noxious odors were brought forth.Footnote ⁴² By the end of the century, Havana’s port had become a byword for poor hygiene. It was understood to be a principal source of yellow fever infection across the U.S. South, and became a cause of interventionist sentiment in the southern states, raised repeatedly as an issue of international concern in the years leading up to the war of 1898.Footnote ⁴³

Smells were not the only contaminants to make an early impression. Unexpected noises could be an irritant: visitors to Colón, Panama, during the era of the French canal project complained that the town had been turned into a freight yard, with locomotives “blowing continually on their whistles and ringing their bells, so that there is little peace for the just or the unjust.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Airborne particulates were a particular problem. At Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, sugar factories “vomit[ed] out black smoke.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In St. Thomas, St. Lucia, and elsewhere, soot from coaling stations blew over the town and vessels at anchor.Footnote ⁴⁶ Fine, black dust would pass through ships anchored downwind, blackening whitewashed walls and discomfiting travelers, who were forced to choose between the suffocating heat of lower cabins and sitting grumpily on deck among sooty clouds.Footnote ⁴⁷

The problems of urbanization and commercial development became even more obvious once visitors made landfall. Lacking organized garbage disposal systems, refuse was often left to decompose in the streets or in ditches. Fish, meat, and vegetable matter rotting in the tropical heat encouraged infestations of cockroaches and other tropical vermin, including “tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes, serpents, lizards, vampires, and chigoes, or ‘jiggers,’ as they call the little worms that harbor in the cracks of the tile floors, and bore into the feet of those who walk about barefooted, producing painful and often dangerous ulcers.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In Port of Spain, black vultures known as Johnny crows sat “like evil spirits upon the house-tops” and gorged on waste thrown into the streets.Footnote ⁴⁹

Short of capital for municipal improvement, the public spaces in overpopulated tropical port towns offered a feast of unpleasant sensations. The journalist and occasional bureaucrat William Eleroy Curtis wrote that the “most notable characteristic” of Venezuela’s main port, La Guaira, was its odor. There was nowhere “except China,” he claimed, “where one can find as great a variety” of smells, “with the same pungency, and their vileness surpasses their numbers and force.”Footnote ⁵⁰ One U.S. consul who had been posted there was so pleased to be leaving that he wrote a poem on the eve of his departure, which included the following lines:

Few ports received such relentless criticism as Colón, Panama, which had by the end of the century become notorious as a vector of disease. Helen Sanborn, who traveled through Central America as an interpreter and companion of her businessman father in the mid-1880s, seemed to take ill at the sight of the town, writing that, “fevers reign supreme; men die like dogs in the street, and no attention is paid to them.”Footnote ⁵² She and her father escaped on the first steamer that arrived, insisting they would sleep on deck if necessary just to get away. On departure, she felt “like one who had passed through a fiery furnace unscathed.”Footnote ⁵³

Still, the ports of Haiti, a nation which by the late nineteenth century had become an archetype of racial disorder for white Americans, arguably received the most vicious opprobrium. The travel writer and ornithologist Frederick Ober described Port-au-Prince as “the most foul-smelling, dirty, and consequently fever-stricken city, in the world,” concluding that, “[n]othing short of extermination, some aver, could effect a reform in the Haitian body politic.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Visitors described Port-au-Prince as once the “Paris of the Caribbean,” degraded by a century of Black rule.Footnote ⁵⁵ The poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who took several trips through the Caribbean at the turn of the century, wrote, “cities where wealth, civilization, commerce produced beauty and comforts, have degenerated into conglomerations of hovels, where filthy streets and filthier human beings send foul stenches to pollute the soft air.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The extremity of visitors’ responses to Haiti may have been enhanced because associations between urban squalor and racial mixing were augmented by widespread fears of the influence of African religion.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whereas arriving at a Caribbean port by sea was usually preceded by excitement and anticipation of tropical splendor, white visitors on their way to Haiti instead spent their time debating Vodou and cannibalism. Primed with the lurid rumors from the former British diplomat Spenser St. John’s notorious book, Hayti: or, the Black Republic (1884), and spread by white West Indians at seemingly any opportunity, travelers would discuss whether or not cannibalism and child sacrifice were practiced on the island. Most concluded that they were common, a product of the “dense superstition and barbarous customs” of African people.Footnote ⁵⁸ As his steamer passed along the coast at night, Stephen Bonsal speculated that flames he saw on the shoreline were coming from “orgies of Voodoo worship … and perhaps even cannibal banquets”—even after the steamer’s captain told him they were just normal fires.Footnote ⁵⁹ These horror stories bound together white travelers from Europe and the United States and, even as their respective nations competed for regional influence, strengthened their racial co-identification.

Wilcox spoke for many when she argued that the conditions in Haiti’s ports stemmed from the moral weakness of its citizens. “No evil government could prevent a man of any pride from cleaning the garbage from his own front yard,” she claimed.Footnote ⁶⁰ “The population of the port towns is profligate, degraded, and in all relations with the whites most treacherous,” argued Bonsal. “The relations between the sexes are those of barnyard fowls, and the ravages of alcohol are everywhere apparent.”Footnote ⁶¹ Haiti was thus used as a warning of the future for the region as a whole if Caribbean governments failed to manage what Wilcox called “the tragedy of mixed blood.”Footnote ⁶² Visitors compared Haiti unfavorably to Jamaica and Santo Domingo, where, it was suggested, white blood and white rule had so far limited the worst historical decay.Footnote ⁶³ In a lecture given at the New York yacht club in 1903 after his return from a trip through the Antilles, the sailor Anson Phelps Stokes suggested this was a lesson for the United States to draw for its own society: “If the statesmen of our reconstruction period had taken a yachting cruise throughout the Caribbean Sea, they could never have committed the terrible mistake, or offense against nature, of attempting to place a superior race under the domination of an inferior one.”Footnote ⁶⁴ His experiences thus functioned to reinforce the increasingly negative national consensus over the memory of southern Reconstruction, as well as the doctrine that new conflicts overseas could reunite a white American nation that had been fractured by the racial divisions of the Civil War and after.Footnote ⁶⁵

Emotions, the Senses, and Spatial Order in the Greater Caribbean

As the psychologists Paul Rozin and April E. Fallon point out, disgust originates as an aversive bodily response the function of which is to protect humans from ingesting potentially contaminated substances.Footnote ⁶⁶ It combines a register of risk with an acquired conceptual system of placement. A contaminant considered to be in its “right place” does not necessarily elicit a disgust reaction (one might think of a baby’s diaper), nor does the consumption of an inappropriate but non-dangerous object (eating a piece of chalk, say). As such, the disgust response depends upon links being drawn between humans’ attempts to protect their bodily health and socially acquired ideas about the order of things. On a larger scale, social interpretations of disgust work in a similar manner. They can be amplified when unhygienic experiences align with pre-existing fears about a social system, whereas unhygienic conditions can produce less disgust if a society is assumed to be orderly or controlled. “Above all,” writes William Ian Miller, disgust functions as “a moral and social sentiment. It plays a motivating and confirming role in moral judgment in a particular way that has little if any connection with ideas of oral incorporation. It ranks people and things in a kind of cosmic ordering.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Disgust reactions can be activated by a combination of sensory stimuli, especially taste, touch, sight, and smell. Commonly, taste and touch are key factors, but visitors to the Caribbean usually endeavored to segregate themselves from direct contact with locals. This may explain why smell, an invasive sense and one for the most part impossible to separate from, and sight played such a central role in travelers’ accounts of their experiences in the Greater Caribbean port system.

Moreover, the centrality of the smell sensation means that disgust often would have felt to many visitors like an unmediated reaction. (In moving directly to the amygdala rather than the cortex, smell connects to human emotions and memories directly rather than through areas designed for conscious cognition.) In fact, as Daniel Bender argues, disgust reactions were often conditioned. When Euro-Americans first visited Malaya, their response to the smelly durian fruit was not disgusted; this response only emerged as derogatory notions of the local society developed and the smell was recontextualized.Footnote ⁶⁸

Americans at the time were certainly being conditioned to place a high value on cleanliness, and encouraged to see it as a proxy for judgments about societies at large. The later-nineteenth-century United States witnessed an explosion of concern about hygiene, driven by marketing imperatives.Footnote ⁶⁹ As Mark S. R. Jenner points out, cleaning and personal hygiene products emerged as a key early element of mass consumerism.Footnote ⁷⁰ Through advertising and social pressure the perfumed consumer was encouraged to associate cleanliness with civilization and disgust with disorder in ways that went beyond basic health into understandings of social and civic order.Footnote ⁷¹ Domestic campaigns to promote social cleanliness in the Progressive Era ranged from urban regeneration projects and good government schemes to campaigns for immigration control and segregation. Such “racial olfactory conceits” were commonly applied to non-white and immigrant communities in the United States and gradually developed to justify a form of social engineering.Footnote ⁷² As Connie Chiang writes, in making decisions about smells as being good or bad, U.S. citizens also signaled “what activities and people they valued.”Footnote ⁷³

American tourists brought these concerns about social hygiene with them on their Caribbean journeys; as a result, disgust reactions transformed anxieties over dirt and disease into criticisms of societies that were believed to be disorderly or uncontrolled. This was an increasingly common feature of imperial thinking at the time, which justified international hierarchies on the back of registers of civilization that placed social order and hygiene at their center. As the historian Andrew J. Rotter writes, “Civilization was decorum, politeness, respect for the everyday habits of social intercourse. Civilized people did not offend or affront the senses—such is the essence of manners. People who looked shabby, were noisy and smelly and ate strange foods, were uncivilized and thus unfit for self-government.”Footnote ⁷⁴ “How can a civilized people be willing to turn the civic house-cleaning over to a lot of vultures?” asked Ida Starr, after visiting Port of Spain during a cruise in the winter of 1901. “No wonder that plagues and fevers rage upon these beautiful islands.”Footnote ⁷⁵

When talking about space and place people often develop stylized notions of geographical “authenticity” built from a combination of ideological assumptions about a place and distorted or reductive narratives of history and historical change.Footnote ⁷⁶ They struggle to accommodate the kind of complexities and internal contradictions characteristic of most places and favor instead a small number of dominant tropes about a place and its people, including ones that attribute the strengths and weaknesses of a location to the quality of its population. Chaotic, urbanizing port towns, starkly different from the idealized and underpopulated tropical spaces evoked in tourist narratives of the Caribbean, were a jarring departure from American expectations. Their strangeness could be explained as signs of a broader failure of governance in tropical territories, suggesting that the Caribbean was struggling to cope with a world of commerce, industry, and trade, that there was some kind of rupture between a romanticized imperial past and the present.

In connecting fears of contamination to conceptions of social order and historical development, disgust thus became an important tool for circulating politicized interpretations of the port system. Instead of empathizing with locals struggling to sustain families and communities in the midst of the kind of urban poverty also found in the United States at the time, visitors blamed the negative material conditions they observed on their inhabitants. Rather than as places struggling with the throes of commercial modernity, port towns were seen as threatened by a kind of unregenerate savagery surging in the absence of concerted white dominance.Footnote ⁷⁷ These accounts promoted stylized judgements of local societies that drew on and extended existing stereotypes about Latino, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbean populations.

Not all ports in the Greater Caribbean gave rise to the disgust-fueled criticisms commonly articulated about the major island ports. Indeed, some stereotypes about Latin Americans were less viscerally connected to fears about racial hygiene and related instead to themes of labor and lethargy. Latin Americans were often depicted by Americans as an indolent population with “Indian” blood, who, as Richard Harding Davis put it, “better appreciate the amenities of life than its sacrifices.”Footnote ⁷⁸ O. Henry’s fictional town of Coralio in his popular 1904 novel Cabbages and Kings, modeled on the ports of the Honduran Caribbean the author observed during his six-month residence in Trujillo from mid-1896 to early 1897, presented a classic version of this languid archetype to the American reader. Orientalized and gendered as a town reclining “like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem,” Coralio was populated with down-at-heel whites and idle, gossiping locals subjected to various, usually unsuccessful schemes to encourage them to adopt a consumer ethic assumed to be unnatural to them.Footnote ⁷⁹

As long as marine traffic remained intermittent and opportunities for work were scarce, then, many Central American ports could be written off as “non-places” rather than as sites of contagion. Davis described a stay at Corinto, on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, as “so many days of non-existence … when we were no more of this world than are the prisoners in the salt-mines of Siberia.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The U.S. writer and traveler Frank Vincent dismissively described the same port as “a miserable little village.”Footnote ⁸¹ The arrival of a commercial steamer could temporarily inject the energetic tempo of the Anglo-Saxon commercial world as “the passengers came on shore to stretch their legs and buy souvenirs, and the ship’s steward bustled about in search of fresh vegetables, and the lighters plied heavily between the shore and the ship’s side, piled high with odorous sacks of coffee.”Footnote ⁸² But the town itself was seen as a space of stasis.

By contrast, obviously imperial ports even produced positive reactions among American tourists. When visiting British-controlled Belize, for instance, Richard Harding Davis likely saw signs of port squalor not dissimilar to elsewhere in the region, but the familiar imperial iconography of the British empire—its flags, uniforms, and military presence—gave the port a comforting sense of historical permanence that overcame his disquiet: a British colony, he argued, was “always civilized; it is always the same, no matter what latitude it may be, and it is always distinctly British.”Footnote ⁸³ An imperial space, then, could be exonerated from the kinds of sensory critiques commonly found in independent, post-colonial territories, or in places where the imperial presence was less visible. The rest of the region’s unbounded port zones—spaces with buildings, features, and material culture that did not fit with prior expectations and that were governed in ways he didn’t fully understand—occasioned feelings that there had been a “disruption between the past … and at least some elements of their present or the potential future.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Observing the Public

Emotional and sensory reactions to the Greater Caribbean were not only confined to its commercial spaces. Tourists loved to observe a local population during their sojourns and their disgust reactions encouraged speculations about local character in ways that contributed to broader theories about social fitness and degeneracy in the region.

As with the spatial milieu, American experiences of Caribbean people began to take shape before visitors even set foot on land. Many ports lacked deep-water harbors, so vessels would anchor at sea and lighters, sailboats, or canoes would handle the loading and unloading of passengers and freight. A steamer sounding its horn or firing a gun on arrival would be the signal for local workers to leap into action, and dozens of small boats would approach and compete for business.Footnote ⁸⁵ Disembarkation at St. Thomas, Stoddard wrote, was “pandemonium and purgatory … Yelling and screaming, pushing and pulling, vociferating the names and attractions of their boats, and abusing one another in the grossest language, the half-naked negroes struggled and bid for passengers.”Footnote ⁸⁶

After days of lassitude at sea, this experience could be hectic, even intimidating. Boats brought vendors of food, especially exotic fruit, souvenirs such as pieces of coral and rare plants, and washerwomen offering to clean passengers’ clothes. “Corals and cocoanuts are literally [sic] forced down your throat,” Day recorded, “Laundresses pester you with their demands for clothes to wash, and when you refuse, look in a meaningful way at those you are wearing, as though even they would be improved by a judicious use of soap and water.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The publisher of the New York World and travel writer, William Agnew Paton, compared the “congregation of traffickers” at St. Kitt’s to “cabmen at a railroad depot at home in New York.”Footnote ⁸⁸ These reactions would be echoed in later Progressive-Era criticisms of working-class American life at home, and sensitivities to class distinctions clearly played an important role in both cases in marking out the observer from the observed. Revealingly, however, visitors to the Caribbean rarely drew upon industrializing America for its metaphorical language. Rather, they fell back on animalistic stereotypes of barbarism, describing local traders and haulers as “gangs of naked men howling like savages” or “wild beasts,” and boats “swarming” around like “flies about a sweetmeat.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Once a passenger made it to land, more locals offered their services carrying bags, transporting them to onward destinations, as guides for excursions, begging for charity, and selling more souvenirs.Footnote ⁹⁰ On mail days, the roads in and out of a busy port like Bridgetown would be packed with carriages, carts, and drays, with drivers shouting and yelling for business, or simply to get past.Footnote ⁹¹ The orchestrated chaos was largely good-tempered, but to be immersed in this unfamiliar scene could be disconcerting. Indeed, the freneticism may have been partly intended to put outsiders on the back foot in negotiations that, in a context of abundant labor and scarce capital, would otherwise have played to their advantage. Visitors with a sharper eye occasionally noted that while “the impression conveyed was of confusion and muddle,” underneath “a great deal of business was being carried on,” and that the shouting and screaming stopped almost the moment a deal was agreed upon.Footnote ⁹² Nevertheless, these initial encounters were important in fixing visitors’ impressions of contemporary tropical society as disorderly, not least because they aligned with prior American stereotypes of people of African descent as being physically suited for tropical labor but emotional and chaotic absent the steadying hand of white rulers.

Although the invisible structures of social power, the allure of the dollar, and the hidden hand of local policing normally entrenched white dominance in these interactions, Caribbean encounters were not always one-sided. Especially before mass tourism had fully developed, locals were as often interested in outsiders as the reverse, and, not least in the British West Indies, “brought with them a distinctive racial culture rooted in a history of struggle.”Footnote ⁹³ In a manner that was typical in the Caribbean but would have been increasingly unacceptable in the segregating United States, locals looked back and formed their own judgments of the visitors.Footnote ⁹⁴ As colonized subjects knew, unwanted scrutiny could generate feelings of objectification and shame, and this experience was occasionally shared by white U.S. visitors. Day found it to be “really embarrassing” when locals “would lie in their boats, quietly sucking pieces of sugar cane, evidently their only meal, until one of us came on deck. Then they would stand up the better to see, stare in utter silence for a time, and every now and again go off into great guffaws of laughter … We try to make believe we see the joke and laugh too in a sickly kind of way.”Footnote ⁹⁵ After a similar “extremely embarrassing” experience on Martinique, Paton felt his party “had disgraced ourselves before the public—a black public, too, and for a time were humbled in spirit, looking at one another with reproachful glances of mingled surprise and reproof.”Footnote ⁹⁶

It may be that wounded masculinity or an injured sense of racial pride resulting from the unsettling experience of being observed also fed into American tourists’ hostile perceptions of the region. Autonomy was a valorized attribute in white society, yet U.S. elites struggled to make sense of even minor examples of Black independent-mindedness, so different was their behavior from the deference increasingly expected of African Americans. Just as the Caribbean was supposed to be a land without industrial modernity, African-descended people were expected to be servile; inquisitiveness—or even amusement—were surprising, embarrassing, and alienating. “While perhaps as irresponsible and improvident [as African Americans], they are far more independent, not to say insolent, in bearing,” Lindsey complained of Afro-Caribbeans.Footnote ⁹⁷ Europeans and white West Indians informed American visitors that this was another negative consequence of emancipation and a sign of the decline of white dominance in the region.Footnote ⁹⁸ Under slavery, the Black man had been “faithful and affectionate, like a favorite dog,” the British traveler E. A. Hastings Jay informed his readers, but he had since “acquired an exaggerated impression of his own importance.”Footnote ⁹⁹

One group of particular voyeuristic interest, to which social significance was routinely attached, was the female Black worker, where an array of American conventions around gender, race, and physical appearance were disturbed.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Afro-Caribbean women took on many roles working in port towns, and while some, such as laundry work, broadly matched U.S. gender norms, others involved the kind of heavy labor that middle-class women in the United States were expected to avoid. Women were particularly noticeable as the majority of the workers who would haul heavy baskets of coal up gangplanks all day to refill a ship’s bunkers as the heat bore down relentlessly.Footnote ¹⁰¹ U.S. travelers recorded their features and movements in degrading detail as the workers’ faces became smeared with coal and perspiration. Once again eschewing comparisons to American stevedores or other port workers, offensive supernatural and diabolic metaphors were commonly deployed. Arriving at St. Thomas at night, Ober likened the refueling scene he witnessed to “the borders of the infernal regions, for flaring flambeaux illumine the dark waters, [and] dusky forms glide about with strange and discordant cries, yells and whistlings.”Footnote ¹⁰² Using even more dehumanizing language, Stoddard compared the women to “beasts of burden. With long arms, great prehensile hands and fingers, large, misshapen and unshod feet, with dirty turbans on their heads, bare breasts, and rags half concealing their nakedness, they marched up and down the planks for hours, a weird and disgusting spectacle.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Tourists argued that these women had lost their femininity and referred to what they saw as their “hard, unsexed faces.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As Mona Domosh writes, “adherence to Victorian gender roles was seen as indicative of civilization” whereas in “savage” societies, women were typically “seen as coarse, often performing manual labor similar to men …”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Ida Starr’s anti-feminist husband even told his wife that these scenes offered an important lesson for U.S. political reformers at home. This “working example of equal rights for women,” he believed, had led to “a sad breaking down of all womanliness.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Through their prurient observations, American visitors adopted the pose of amateur anthropologists. They used their privileged vantage point to dissect the various racial compositions of the different island and coastal societies they visited and to use these to draw specious conclusions about local manners, morals, and character. Aversive reactions to the spaces of Caribbean ports reinforced racialized anxieties about Caribbean commercial activity absent white leadership; similarly, social reactions of disgust and embarrassment to Caribbean people were intimately connected to beliefs that they were ill-equipped for the transition to modernity.

Certainly, as Hogue notes, it seems that American tourists were more comfortable observing communities that lived apart from the region’s bustling commercial ports than with those who worked in them, presumably because the former were seen as more “appropriately” primitive.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Visitors often lingered on lighter-skinned creoles in their descriptions, praising their “pure and fine complexions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indigenous communities and those who participated in “pre-industrial” activities such as farming and fishing were depicted with condescending affection and rarely elicited disgust reactions. Frederic A. Fenger, an adventurer who traveled in 1911 through the lesser Antilles in a hand-built canoe and littered his account of his travels with racist abuse of Afro-Caribbeans, wrote with “absolute certainty” that Indigenous communities “lived clean lives and kept themselves and their huts clean.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Pre-industrial authenticity was even praised in the case of South Asian indentured laborers, despite the fact that they been displaced thousands of miles to serve the needs of Caribbean commercial expansion. Stoddard argued that “the Hindu bears himself with dignity and reserve … his manners are those of a civilization of which the negroes know nothing.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ These elements of tropical society were not seen as incongruous; they implied a continuity between imagined past and present. By contrast, Black port workers—urbanized, commercial workers in a modernizing export economy—elicited fear and hostility. In this sense, disgust reactions may have served to accelerate the cultural norms around race and capitalism that were developing in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

When Afro-Caribbeans were willing to perform roles that aligned with stereotypes of how colonized subjects should behave, visitors’ reactions were more positive. In many ports, for instance, boys too young to work (and men when work was scarce), swam out to ships and performed tricks for cash, diving down under water to grab coins thrown overboard, or swimming underneath a ship’s hull for pennies.Footnote ¹¹¹ This provided an opportunity for tourists to anatomize unthreatening and obedient Black bodies as they performed to order—and perhaps even eroticize them, given that female travelers were occasionally banished to their cabins during such displays.Footnote ¹¹² “Great muscular fellows they were,” the Bostonian N. Allen Lindsey wrote of divers in Roseau, “with magnificent chests and shoulders, and skins ranging in color from warm brown to ebony.”Footnote ¹¹³ Having the poor perform for scraps was not unique to the tropics. On a family tour in Italy, a young Theodore Roosevelt and his siblings had amused themselves by forcing beggars to catch bread thrown into their mouths and to eat from their hands in humiliating fashion, “like chickens.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ But diving for pennies became such a common feature of tropical travel that in this period it established itself as a part of the tourist itinerary as ubiquitous as the rum cocktail.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In these ways, tourist spending power incentivized locals to conform to stylized images of “primitive” tropical behavior.

War, Occupation, Resistance, and Sanitary Redemption

Americans’ taxonomies of blood thus blended with and reinforced late-nineteenth-century ideas about civilization, empire, race, hygiene, and modernity. In his influential book The Revolutionary Mission, Thomas F. O’Brien examined the emergence of an expansionist United States corporate culture that contrasted consumerist and individualistic white American workers with Indigenous, Black, and Mestizo populations who, like these subjects of the American tourist gaze, were considered to be ill-equipped for modern commercial activity. O’Brien traced the roots of this thinking to a racialized national coalition of expansion that developed in the United States in the era of the war with Mexico and “presented Mexicans as a deplorable mix of Indian and Spanish blood which had created an immoral race lacking in intelligence and initiative, a race incapable of developing its own national resources.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Such arguments aligned hierarchies of racial difference with arguments about who should be in charge of capitalist enterprises, and travelers’ observations in the late-nineteenth century may well have been framed by similar ideologies. The effect was to encourage observers to be more accepting of developing commercial enterprises if they conformed to the expected racial hierarchies of the era, specifically if they revealed white racial leadership. The poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox described herself as an aesthete, spiritualist, and theosophist, but it is rare to find in her travel narratives concerns over commercial capitalism per se; only when such activities were connected to non-white or mixed-race societies or associated with the independent-minded behaviors of local Afro-Caribbean actors did they generate hostile disgust reactions.

These encounters therefore raise intriguing and potentially significant questions about the way globalization, race, and empire interacted in the context of emerging tourism in the Caribbean. As Amy Kaplan argued, imperial ideologies represented metropolitan elites in the position of agent, moving through the world easily and viewing it with eyes of detached expertise, whereas colonized peoples were supposed to be static objects of spectacle or obedient, deferential performers.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As the ports of the Greater Caribbean became venues for expanded international trade, labor mobility and a degree of subaltern agency followed. When whites observed non-white actors acting as commercial agents, independent port workers, or entrepreneurs, or found themselves the objects of detached or amused examination, anxiety over this changing role fueled a desire for new mechanisms of control that might “restore” tropical societies to an “authentic,” meaning passive or dependent, state.

Port towns were an inescapable part of any journey through the American tropics, and—as literally the first ports of call—were crucial in shaping wider impressions of the region. But they were also the places where the contradictory realities of tropical society were most visible and contrasted most starkly with mythic expectations of beaches lined with palms and idle locals gathering fruit and swimming happily in warm, blue waters. Rather than seeing how globalization was creating comparable problems in both tropical and temperate societies, visitors refracted the smells, dirt, and discomforts of the port environment through their racial and gender prejudices to generalize about the nations they visited and the people they observed. For an expansionist such as Richard Harding Davis, there was something both fascinating and disturbing about the incongruous zinc roofs and palms trees of a tropical port, a sense that the disorderly connections they were establishing were somehow different from the transnational networks of British imperial power found in an “orderly” place like Belize. Objects had been moved out of their correct position and placed in unsettling arrangements. Perhaps witnessing them and writing about them would allow them to be ordered anew.

As the nineteenth century came to an end, traveler accounts were augmented by a new set of martial narratives of U.S. invasion and occupation. When soldiers and war correspondents arrived in Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898 to observe the chaos left in the wake of the Spanish defeat, their descriptions of what Colonel Roosevelt called “quaint, dirty old Spanish cit[ies]” reiterated well-worn themes.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Some of the reporters embedded with the troops had, like Davis, traveled across the region previously; others, like Bonsal, would begin reporting on the war and follow up with Caribbean travel journalism in the new century. Similarly, when Faustin Wirkus, the Marine who wrote perhaps the most famous account of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, landed with his fellow troops in 1915, he offered a familiar image of Port-au-Prince as a “gateway into a world of jumbled savagery,” his descriptions reiterating the tourist gaze that had developed before the military invasion. Wirkus expressed the same enamored feeling viewing the city from a distance as civilian visitors had before him, witnessed the same cavalcade of fruit-sellers and boatmen as their transport ship set anchor, and made similar connections between the disgust he felt walking through the streets of the city and the dominant narrative of Haitian post-imperial decline: “Fairyland had turned into a pigsty,” he wrote.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In this sense, the experiences of the traveler and the soldier were not very different.Footnote ¹²⁰

When Roosevelt as president made his famous journey in 1906 to inspect the canal zone in Panama that had been seized by his administration three years earlier, the passage of his steamer between Haiti and Cuba evoked a vivid constellation of historical images that showed how strongly the iconography, sensory milieu, and mythology of the region had come to shape U.S. understandings of the region. Meditating on the “two great, beautiful, venomous tropical islands,” the president evoked a mythic narrative of the “historic seas” ranging from Columbus to the age of buccaneers, the extermination of Indigenous people, and the establishment of slavery, and concluding with the “decay of most of the islands, the turning of Haiti into a land of savage negroes, who have reverted to voodooism and cannibalism” and the redemptive “effort we are now making to bring Cuba and Porto Rico forward.”Footnote ¹²¹ To justify U.S. intervention in the tropics, it was necessary to prove not only that there was a commercial upside to expansion, but also that corrupt local regimes and mixed-race societies had produced disorderly and diseased communities. U.S. involvement could then be seen as the reversal of historical decline. In this sense, travelers’ accounts produced in the preceding decades played an important role in preparing the ground for intervention.

Given this, it was hardly surprising that, as numerous scholars have noted, the United States prioritized urban renovation, disease control, and sanitation projects within its later colonial, and corporate colonial, efforts in the region.Footnote ¹²² Indeed, the United Fruit Company designed company towns specifically to project an image of “nature made orderly, sanitary, productive and visually appealing” and routinely propagated racially hierarchical idealizations of white leadership in its corporate magazine, Unifruitco.Footnote ¹²³ Over time, these imperial reforms would even reshape policies of government at home. Thus, “at both the symbolic and substantive levels, public health was central to empire.”Footnote ¹²⁴

As this process unfolded, tourists would again be on hand to legitimate these actions within a broader arc of the region’s history, offering a narrative of redemption through sanitation and tropical hygiene. According to William Thomas Corlett, a Cleveland physician who took a winter cruise through the Caribbean in 1908, those “who recall the Havana of a decade or two ago would be surprised at her cleanliness and the absence of odors [today] … Havana the beautiful has washed her face.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The editor E. H. Howe claimed that, under U.S. control, even Panama had become “as healthy as New York.”Footnote ¹²⁶

Travel narratives not only connected with discourses around invasion and occupation; they also fed into a transformation of the region through tourism and dollar power. To present a tropical world “at her most loving,” it was necessary to restrict the visitor’s access to those parts of the region that did not conform to the myth of tropical purity, especially the port towns that had previously been primary locations of encounter.Footnote ¹²⁷ Over time, tourists would spend less time on land and more time at sea, made possible as steamers became more comfortable and luxurious. As well as carefully shaping an itinerary to target “untouched” destinations, commercially sensitive travel operators intervened in other ways to reduce the likelihood of the kind of dissonant encounters experienced by earlier visitors. Souvenir sellers were brought individually on board ship to sell their wares under controlled conditions.Footnote ¹²⁸ Excursions were pre-organized, rather than left up to individuals to arrange on landing.Footnote ¹²⁹ Those who wished to disembark were either given tickets for boats marshaled by ships’ officers, or transported on a steamer’s private launches.Footnote ¹³⁰ In smelly La Guaira, visitors would find a train waiting for them at the pier that would take them directly to Caracas and bypass the town altogether.Footnote ¹³¹ This did not stop tourists from gazing upon locals and speculating about the fate of racially-mixed societies: this remained one of the most appealing aspects of traveling. As Ida Starr commented, “we kind o’ forget the mummies when there are live human beings to watch.”Footnote ¹³² But it did ensure that such encounters were monitored and manipulated to ensure they better conformed to the image of the Caribbean being sold at home.

As time passed, both invading armies and armies of invading tourists could not help but notice a changing attitude among locals toward the increasingly dominant U.S. presence in the region. Tourists began to sense an “air of suppressed dislike, an undercurrent of ill-feeling” in San Juan that had not been obvious before, a mood of hostility in Havana that paralleled the rising influence of U.S. fashions and manners, and, across the British islands, a new spirit of cold commerciality.Footnote ¹³³ According to Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the first time she visited Jamaica, everyone “smiled, bowed, or spoke a pleasant word of greeting. Flowers were flung into carriages, and the present of a half penny or a penny gave delight.” More lately, “flowers are no longer offered, and if bought, are placed at florist prices; and where ten gave the pleasant greeting as they passed, one gives it now.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Port towns began to transform into venues of cynical commercial exchange, or even resistance to U.S. power.Footnote ¹³⁵ Indeed, the conspicuous display of U.S. privilege likely nourished domestic “nationalist identities rooted in injured masculinity.”Footnote ¹³⁶

In understanding their emotional and sensory experiences of port society, U.S. visitors drew on long-standing racial and historical tropes that disguised the modern sources of tropical inequality. By transposing the darker side of globalization onto the “darker races,” visitors were able to protect their fantasies of an exotic, authentic, and separate Caribbean in the face of more complex and interconnected realities, to reject the obvious fact that the problems of Caribbean development were ones that bound the tropical and temperate worlds together rather than dividing them. While propagating the implicit belief that emotional and sensory reactions were non-political, that they were simply responses to the conditions any observer would witness, American tourists’ sensations would help to build a wall of distance between peoples who might otherwise have recognized their shared needs and interests in a rapidly globalizing world. Instead, the effect was to reinforce norms about the need for white leadership in the region, both within the world of tourism and across political life more widely. The United States’ twentieth-century experience—attempting to engineer this idealized racial hierarchy across the greater Caribbean by force of finance or use of arms—was the troubled and tragic result.