THE WEST INDIES: Hot & Cool Welcome

Little boys dangled from saman trees to gape, and thousands of brightly dressed West Indians packed the roadside in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to cheer. Princess Margaret, slightly sunburned after her first two days in the tropics, but somehow managing to look cool in a full length white satin gown, rolled slowly along in an open car, smiling and waving.

At the Red House, the island legislative building that serves as temporary headquarters for the new West Indies Federation, a packed chamber of officials had been waiting for half an hour, sweating in white wool wigs and red and black robes. The princess walked to the speaker's platform and eased into the bliss of an "air-conditioned" chair. While the pipes underneath blew cool air up around her, Margaret read the Queen's congratulations and her own on the new union. Prime Minister Sir Grantley Herbert Adams responded, and with this the federal legislature, elected March 25, was inaugurated, and the new nation, joining ten island governments, was in business.

For the next three days the princess marched with easy dignity through a dull, crowded round of ceremonies. She watched a track meet (again from her cooled chair), attended a garden party, laid a cornerstone, visited a sugar mill. Relaxing one night at a private calypso party, she watched in awe as nimble "limbo" dancers wriggled under a ten-inch-high bar without touching the floor with their hands, showed no reaction (although officials blanched) when a calypso singer, in an improvised lyric, referred to her broken romance with R.A.F. Group Captain Peter Townsend. At week's end she flew off for ten days in Tobago, British Guiana and British Honduras. Behind her, in Trinidad, Prime Minister Adams dug into the knotty problems—including overpopulation, unemployment, tariff and migration barriers within the islands—that the new nation faces.