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                            THE WEST INDIES

                         _By the same Artist._

                                MOROCCO

                 containing 74 full-page reproductions
                   in colour of MR. A. S. FORREST’S
                               pictures.

                        TEXT BY S. L. BENSUSAN.

                           _Price 20s. Net._

             [Illustration: COMING FROM MASS, ST. LUCIA




                            THE WEST INDIES

                       PAINTED BY A. S. FORREST
                           DESCRIBED BY JOHN
                         HENDERSON · PUBLISHED
                          BY ADAM AND CHARLES
                         BLACK · LONDON · MCMV

                            [Illustration]




Contents


CHAP.                                                               PAGE

I. HISTORICAL                                                          1

II. JAMAICA                                                           11

III. THE TOWN OF KINGSTON                                             27

IV. THE PEOPLE OF JAMAICA                                             41

V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF A JAMAICAN GAMIN                                 57

VI. THE DEVOTION OF THE JAMAICAN NEGRO                                65

VII. TURTLE FISHING                                                   73

VIII. THE WOMEN OF WILD MAN STREET                                    81

IX. THE WEST INDIAN ARMY                                              89

X. A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE                                          99

XI. THE MILITARY CAMP AT NEWCASTLE                                   107

XII. THE RECREATIONS OF THE BLACK MAN                                115

XIII. THE DANDY AND THE COQUETTE                                     127

XIV. BOG WALK                                                        135

XV. THE POLITICS OF A JAMAICAN NEGRO                                 143

XVI. THE WHITE MAN’S POLITICS                                        155

XVII. THE RAILWAY IN JAMAICA                                         163

XVIII. ALLIGATOR SHOOTING IN A WEST INDIAN SWAMP                     171

XIX. COMMERCIAL JAMAICA                                              181

XX. THE FLORA OF JAMAICA                                             193

XXI. A WEST INDIAN RACE-COURSE                                       201

XXII. THE HILL STATIONS                                              211

XXIII. A FRAGMENT                                                    219

XXIV. MATTERS OF INTEREST TO TOURISTS                                227

XXV. CERTAIN THINGS THE WEST INDIAN TOURIST MUST NOT DO              237

XXVI. THE CARIBBEAN GROUP                                            243

XXVII. HAYTI                                                         257

XXVIII. IN CONCLUSION                                                265




List of Illustrations


1. Coming from Mass, St. Lucia                             _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

2. Lightermen, off Barbadoes                                           4

3. Sunrise over the Hills, Jamaica                                     8

4. Castries Bay, St. Lucia                                            12

5. Kingston Harbour and Port Henderson                                16

6. Constant Spring, Jamaica                                           18

7. A Negro                                                            22

8. A Street in Kingston, Jamaica                                      26

9. An Old Gateway, Kingston                                           30

10. A Fruit-Seller on a Side-Walk, Kingston                           34

11. The Tobacco Market, Kingston                                      38

12. A Market Woman, Jamaica                                           40

13. An Old Woman                                                      44

14. Cocoanut Palms, Falmouth, Jamaica                                 46

15. A Milkmaid, Barbadoes                                             48

16. Waiting Maids                                                     52

17. Diving Boys, Kingston                                             56

18. Diving Boys, off Barbadoes                                        60

19. Going to Church                                                   64

20. A Gingerbread-seller, St. Lucia                                   70

21. The Turtle Wharf, Kingston, Jamaica                               72

22. Boats off Dominica                                                76

23. Night, Anotta Bay, Jamaica                                        80

24. A Coloured Girl                                                   84

25. A Soldier of the West Indian Regiment                             88

26. A Tropical Landscape near Castleton                               92

27. Outside a West Indian Court House                                 98

28. A Negro Nurse with Chinese Children, Jamaica                     104

29. Tropical Rain                                                    106

30. A House on the Hills                                             110

31. Going to Work, Barbadoes                                         114

32. Rosie, a Jamaican Negress                                        120

33. Countrywoman going to Market, Barbadoes                          124

34. A Martinique Lady                                                126

35. On the Road to Market, Jamaica                                   132

36. A House near the Bog Walk, Jamaica                               134

37. Dry Harbour, Jamaica                                             138

38. Sunset, North Coast, Jamaica                                     144

39. On the Beach, Barbadoes                                          148

40. Off Trinidad                                                     150

41. Steamers unloading, Barbadoes                                    154

42. An Evening Party, St. Thomas                                     160

43. A Roadside Market, Jamaica                                       162

44. The Arrival of the Royal Mail Steamer, Dominica                  166

45. A Quay, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica                                   170

46. Outhouses on a Plantation, Jamaica                               174

47. Mid-day Heat, Jamaica                                            178

48. A Fruit-seller, Barbadoes                                        180

49. A Waiter                                                         184

50. The Market-place, Barbadoes                                      188

51. A Terrace Garden on the Hills, Jamaica                           192

52. Hut on a Plantation, Jamaica                                     196

53. A Jockey at Cumberland Pen, Jamaica                              200

54. A Coloured Lady on a Race-course, Jamaica                        204

55. A Bungalow on the Hills, Jamaica                                 208

56. The Market, Mandeville                                           210

57. Stalls outside the Market, Mandeville                            214

58. A Road in Mandeville                                             216

59. Sunset over the Hills                                            218

60. Huts, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica                                     222

61. The Cathedral at Spanish Town, Jamaica                           226

62. A Garden Terrace, Jamaica                                        230

63. Resting by the Way, Jamaica                                      234

64. Outhouses near Kingston, Jamaica                                 236

65. The Capital of St. Thomas                                        240

66. Black River, Jamaica                                             242

67. Roseau, the Capital of Dominica                                  246

68. Mont Pelée, Martinique                                           248

69. An Old Man, St. Thomas                                           250

70. Nevis                                                            252

71. A Guadeloupe Lady                                                256

72. Huts on a Country Road, Jamaica                                  260

73. Passengers embarking from a Quay, St. Ann’s Bay                  264

74. Evening after Rain, Jamaica                                      268


     _The illustrations in this volume were engraved in England by the
                    Hentschel Colourtype Process._

[Illustration]




HISTORICAL




CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL


In Britain we have lost the art of correct perspective. We see distant
things through jaundiced eyes; as a nation we are too prone to regard
over-sea lands and peoples with compassion tempered with contempt, or
with envy and timidity. To ensure our respect and sympathy a country
must be successful; we have no room in our Empire for failures. America,
because of her commercial genius and industrial enterprise, we respect
and revere and imitate. We exaggerate the successes of the States and
credit the American with commercial omnipotence. The word American
stands in the unprinted national dictionary as meaning efficient,
successful, up-to-date. I have heard that English tradesmen have
labelled English-made goods “American” in order that a quick sale might
be ensured in Britain’s capital. We refuse to believe that America has
ceased to be related to us by ties of kinship; to the Englishmen of the
homeland Americans are first cousins. And so it is, conversely, with
England and the West Indies.

At home we are apt to think of the West Indies as a scattered group of
poverty-stricken islands, barren of riches, planted somewhere in some
tropical sea, and periodically reduced to absolute desolation by
hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes. The poverty of the Western
Indies is proverbial. Occasionally Imperial Parliament brings forward
some measure, which, in the opinion of some individual, might tend to
relieve the distress and commercial poverty of our West Indian
possessions; at other times a fund is started at the Mansion-House to
help the West Indian victims of some fearful tornado or earthquake. That
is all that is generally known of the great islands of the Caribbean
Sea. In our dreams of Empire we prefer to think of Canada, Africa, and
strenuous Australasia. Commercially and politically our West Indies are,
according to the general idea, more than half derelict, and wholly
without the attractions of wealth and promise. We forget that these
Western islands were at one time the richest of England’s possessions;
we do not realise how rich they, some day, will again become. If Britain
only understood aright she would know that it is only through her own
neglect, through her half-hearted, penurious West Indian policy, that
our Caribbean Empire is not in the front rank of her richest possessions
to-day. The riches of the West Indies played a large part in the
formation of Britain’s greatness. We swept the islands clear of all
their surface wealth at a period when England was most in need of gold.
And because to-day we cannot send ships from Plymouth with empty

[Illustration: LIGHTERMEN, OFF BARBADOES]

holds and crowded quarter-decks, to return from a six months’ voyage in
the Indies crowded with treasure and glory, we count the islands barren.
We forget that West Indian wealth was invested in Britain’s greatness
years before we had an empire. We forget that Britain’s navy was founded
by men who were trained to war and seamanship among those islands of the
West. More than once have these islands seen the pride and glory of
England hanging in the balance, and once, at least, the Indies knew
before the homeland that a blow, which had threatened the very
foundations of British greatness, had been hurled in vain.

That was in the time of Burke and Fox and Rodney. Spain and France and
Holland had combined, and in one great battle threatened to crush the
power of England, and to wrest from her the supremacy of the seas.
England trembled, and the popular party advocated surrender and peace.
France and Spain wanted the Indies. Rodney sailed from England to uphold
the power and dominion of his race. He sailed amidst the sullen silence
of a people whose power he was to uphold. A few weeks after his sailing
a message was despatched from Parliament commanding him not to fight. He
was to strike his colours and surrender the Indies. But the message
arrived too late. Rodney had already fought and won when the craven
message reached him. The battle had happened off Dominica, and the flag
of England remained triumphant in the Caribbean Sea. The English ships
were victorious, and Rodney had saved his country against his country’s
will. And since that day no one has challenged England’s supremacy in
the islands of the West.

The history of the West Indies is filled with chapters as strong even as
this; in no corner of the world have so many brave deeds been done for
“England, home, and beauty.” Stories of mighty Spanish galleons sunk by
British ships of war; of pillage and bloodshed and treasure; of the
battles of France and Spain and England; of the wealth of the Spanish
main, intercepted among these islands, and stored in some West Indian
port for convenience of British merchant adventure houses, are
encountered at every step on our journey through the records of the
Caribbean group. We read of buccaneers and filibusters; of Morgan, the
last of the tribe, knighted and made Vice-Governor of Jamaica; of the
doings of the redoubtable Kidd; of the bloodiness of Blackbeard; of the
countless list of names, some high-sounding, which at last were painted
in crimson splashes on the gallows slip at Port Royal headland. Port
Royal itself deserves a niche in the temple of fame. The richest and the
most vicious town the world ever knew; so it was before the clean ocean
washed away its vice and corruption, and buried it deep in the pure
water of the blue Caribbean. When Morgan knew it, when the prizes of
Kidd and the others were moored alongside its treasure-laden wharves,
the strip of land contained the richest city in the world.

Bearded seamen, bronzed and weather-stained, but decked with priceless
jewellery and the finest silks of the Orient, swaggered along its quays,
and gambled with heavy golden coins whose value no one cared to
estimate. The drinking shops were filled with cups of gold and silver,
embellished with flashing gems. Each house was a treasure store. The
place was a gilded hell, and mammon held sovereign sway over its people.
Such wealth and vice and debauchery had never been dreamed of. Common
seamen bathed in the richest wine, and hung their ears with heavy gold
rings studded with the costliest gems. Dagger thrusts were as common as
brawls, and the body of a murdered man would remain in a dancing-room
until the dancing was over. Gold and precious stones were cheap, but
life was cheaper. And every man in that crowd of pirates lived beneath
the shadow of the gallows.

Finer it is to remember the Western voyages of Drake and Hawkins and all
the old sea-dogs who first proclaimed the might of British seamen.
Picture them, scurvy-stricken, reduced by disease and famine, resting
and recruiting in the wide bays of any West Indian isle. Imagine their
joy at finding luscious fruits and sweet, health-giving water. Then see
them in their tiny ships darting from behind the cover of some wooded
neck of land, surprising a galleon ten times their weight, scuttling the
little vessel and manning the Spanish leviathan with British seamen. How
many little English barques lie beneath the dark blue waters of the Gulf
of Mexico! Having found their prize and tasted the joy of victory, the
British captains thirst for more. They sail the Spanish seas in a
Spanish ship, and sack the coast towns, levying heavy toll; they fight
great battles and pound the deeply laden treasure ships with Spanish
cannon trimmed by British gunners. They select the richest spoil and
fling the rest to the waves. How many bars of gold and silver, how many
crates of silks, and iron boxes filled with gems; how many sacks of
doubloons have sunk in these Western waters, and lie there now, buried
amidst the skeleton of a rotting vessel!

All these things were done in these seas by Englishmen in the days of
old, done for greed of gain and the lust of bloodshed. Done also in the
name of religion, and because two sects, worshipping the same God,
quarrelled in regard to ritual; and because one sect put a sword at the
throat of the other and said, Do as we do, or die. Just as the
Inquisition proved to be the undoing of the might and wealth of Spain,
so did the Inquisition, indirectly, give the West Indies to the English.
The West Indian waters formed the training school of Drake and
Frobisher, Hawkins and Raleigh; and these men founded the navy. In later
days Rodney revived the Caribbean school, and there Nelson learned how
to outwit the French in ocean battles. Because of these things, but not
only because of these things, do we owe a great debt to these Antillean
islands.

So far as we are concerned the history of the Indies is a medley of
romance, the romance of British greatness. There we laid the foundation
of our Empire; the Caribbean Sea is the font of the temple of our
greatness.

But, for the islands themselves, there is little record

[Illustration: SUNRISE OVER THE HILLS, JAMAICA]

of history save where their existence first influenced the politics of
Europe. The Spaniards were the first white men to tread their fragrant
shores and bring destruction to a race of wild red men whose first
instinct was that of fear. Columbus, the Genoese mariner, first and
greatest of all explorers, anchored his tiny vessels in Morant Bay,
Jamaica, on his second voyage to America. The beauty of the place
bewildered him, and when his patron, the King of Spain, asked for a
description of the island, the artistic Genoese crumpled a piece of
paper, and presented that as a picture of the rugged formation of the
Queen of the Antilles. Four times did Columbus journey to the Indies,
which were annexed by him to the Spanish Crown. The horrors of the early
Spanish rule can only be imagined. Millions of the gentle Caribs were
transported to the mainland, and worked to death in the Spanish gold
mines. Those that were permitted to remain were, if they survived the
Inquisition, pressed into slavery.

So the Spaniards ruled for a century and a half; for one hundred and
sixty years they claimed the bulk of the West Indian islands as their
own. This claim was uncontested by the powers of Europe, but the
Spaniards were harassed always by the buccaneers, French and English,
whose ships swept the main in search of prey. Whether England was at war
with Spain or not, the English sea-dogs were always at the throats of
Spaniards in the western hemisphere.

The Protector Cromwell essayed to break the Western power of Spain, and
sent Penn and Venables to crush them out of the Indies. In an
engagement off Domingo the British were defeated, but the doughty
English captains retired on to Jamaica, which they annexed to England.
Then the French filibusters drove the Spaniards out of Hayti, and gave
it to the crown of France. The French had held the smaller
Antilles--Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Antigua. In
times of war with France, Britain had taken these islands, but they had
been retaken by the French. It was in Rodney’s time that they all came
permanently under the English flag. Nowadays the British hold all the
larger islands, the French retain the smaller lands of Martinique,
Guadaloupe, Deserva, Marie Galante, Les Saints, St. Bartholomew, and
part of St. Martin, the Dutch hold five, the Danish three, and Spain
still holds three. One or two are part of the Venezuelan Republic,
Puerto Rico belongs to the U.S.A., and several are independent.




JAMAICA

[Illustration: CASTRIES BAY, ST. LUCIA]




CHAPTER II

JAMAICA


Sitting under the shade of a verandah, watching the brilliant
butterflies and many-coloured birds fluttering and wheeling among the
sweet-scented flowers of Jamaica, it is difficult for one to remember
how one passed out of England--I had almost written out of the
world--and reached this land, which surely should be called God’s
Island. But, I remember, a day or two ago we reached Turk’s Island, and
after handing a few bags of mails to a black, buccaneer-like boatman,
who said he was the postmaster, we glided along the shore--a few miles
of low-lying, palm-treed coral-land--and sailed into the Caribbean Sea.
And so we reached the tropics--the other side of the world. At last we
were among the hundred isles of the West Indies, and in the full glare
of the tropic sun. The paint blistered and bubbled on the handrail, and
the sea seemed a giant mirror, on which the sun flashed silver-white,
with never-ceasing, blinding force. There seemed to be no air; the space
it should have occupied was transparent, and, apparently, empty. It was
difficult to move; truth to tell, I remember feeling a little
uncomfortable; but, all the same, it was heavenly.

By Turk’s Island it rained. There was a sudden darkness, the blinding
sun disappeared, the air became cooler, and then down came the rain. The
deck of the ship became a waterfall, and for thirty minutes or so we
were enveloped in a furious deluge.

But ten minutes after the rain had ceased, the deck, the sails, and the
canvas deck-awnings were dry as though sun-scorched for centuries. That
was our weather. We lived on fruit and tepid baths. It was too hot for
sleep, too hot for work, too hot for conversation. In the tropics the
only thing possible is “nothing"--and a long, iced drink.

Lolling on deck in the daytime, we could watch the flying fish, the
dolphin, the drifting nautilus, and the hungry shark; or view the
islands as slowly they glided backwards into impenetrable haze. To the
right Cuba, a thin irregular line on the horizon, glistening gold above
the blue-white of the sea; to the left Hayti, the land in which the
black man is supreme, and where, in spite of science and the twentieth
century, cannibalism and child murder exist. The white patches, which
show above the green of the plantations as you crawl along the shore,
are houses. They stand as monuments to the French, who once were masters
of the land--masters until, by order of their Government, the
French-owned slaves were free--when, by way of exercising their
new-found freedom, the niggers slaughtered every white on the island.
Since then Hayti has been a republic--a republic with many presidents
and many disturbances.

At night there was the wonderful moon and the cool, fresh air. It was
pleasant to watch the sea; astern, we left a living, toiling, twisting
thread of silver foam; ahead, our bows struck the water, and it flashed
fire. Sometimes all was dark; sometimes the sea blazed with
phosphorescent light. But always overhead the yellow moon and the golden
stars were studded in the blue-black dome of night.

A few hours after leaving Turk’s Island we found Jamaica. Afar off,
through the brilliant air of the morning, we saw a tiny pepper-box,
which presently turned into a sugar-caster, and gradually, by many
complicated but interesting evolutions, developed into a full-fledged
lighthouse. The lighthouse is on Morant Point, and Morant Point is the
beginning of Jamaica. Columbus named the island Santa Gloria; he was the
first European to be bewitched by that low coast-line, all gold shot
with green and darker green, stretching back from the sea to the foot of
the great Blue Mountains; the Blue Mountains, whose peaks, shrouded in
white mist, are buried deep in the hazy sky. Along the shore we sailed,
past cane plantations, banana groves, white houses, snow-white roads,
and great everlasting clumps of graceful palm-trees. Ahead, standing out
at the end of a neck of land, we saw Port Royal--the real, wonderful,
most romantic Port Royal, doubly robed in glory by fiction as well as
history. Here came Nelson, Rodney, Jervis, Collingwood, and every mighty
sailor England ever had.

Moored to these wharves have lain prizes, rich beyond compare, newly
snatched from Spain and France. Here England’s flag, proudly flung from
masts of wooden warships, has proclaimed victory; and here also English
ships, battered and war-stained, have lain under the dread banner of the
buccaneer. For Port Royal was a pirate stronghold centuries before it
became a British naval base.

Sailing along the six miles of narrow coral ridge which connects the
town with the land, it is not difficult to conjure up the Port Royal
Nelson knew. The palm-trees and the luxuriant tropical foliage still
abound; the native craft and the nigger boatmen do not seem to belong to
to-day, and Kingston, hidden and guarded by this strip of land, seems
somehow to suggest romance and mystery. The sea all round is studded
with treacherous coral reefs, some of which, just showing above the
water, are thickly grown with palm-trees. The effect is beautiful in the
extreme; the clumps of trees, planted apparently on nothing, are growing
straight out of the sea.

As you round Port Royal you discover Kingston, a large, white,
straggling town, on the land side entirely hemmed in by the Blue
Mountains, and seawards washed by the waters of a lagoon seven or eight
miles long, and nearly half as wide. Slowly we steamed to the town,
passing an ancient, dismantled and deserted fort, which once mounted its
hundred guns.

[Illustration: KINGSTON HARBOUR AND PORT HENDERSON]

I remember that our good ship was at last made fast to the wooden quay,
and the black-faced, white-coated labourers grinned us greeting as we
stepped ashore. After some excitement with many half-castes representing
the Customs, the hotels, and the buggies, who each and all claimed a
portion of our baggage, we safely emerged from the dock district into
the dusty main road of Kingston. It was strange to find up-to-date,
twentieth century, American, electric cars screaming along roads which,
if they were ever built at all, were certainly completed two centuries
back; and it was even more strange to learn that these cars have not
entirely depopulated Kingston.

I remember being possessed of a great idea of walking to my hotel. A
fresh sea breeze was blowing, and the prospect of a stroll through the
town was peculiarly inviting. But unfortunately the dock gates were
barricaded with buggies, and to successfully evade the manœuvres of
one only meant falling into the clutches of another. Passage between the
vehicles there was none, and when I attempted to step through one
carriage to get clear of the others, the fiendish driver whipped his
ponies and whirled me out of the dockyard before I could regain my
presence of mind. Outside, the delighted man claimed me as a passenger,
and when I found that I was sitting on a singularly pompous and
overheated Britisher, who had been captured in the same enterprising
manner, I forgot to be angry, and began to apologise. The result was
entirely satisfactory--the pompous Britisher never forgave me. We
dropped him, I remember, the first time the ponies took it into their
heads to slow up, but the worthy man seriously offended our driver by
refusing to pay. For half an hour they wrangled in the crowded main
street, and frequently I feared the sudden death of my white friend.
However, the storm came to a sudden and dramatic finish by the skilful
capture of the weary Englishman by another buggyman. We left him cursing
Jamaica and buggies, and particularly all black men. After a series of
adventures and narrow escapes we at last reached the Constant Spring
Hotel. The driver suggested that I should pay him a sovereign, but he
accepted ten shillings with the utmost cheerfulness. Afterwards I
discovered that the fare was certainly not more than a dollar.

I sat in a comfortable wicker chair in the commodious entrance hall of
the hotel and tried to collect my scattered senses. The excitement of my
buggy journey, and the interest of my first glimpse of the capital of
the Queen of the Antilles, had somewhat unstrung my thinking faculties.
I was alone in a strange hotel in a strange country. My luggage was
heaven knows where, and my companions, Forrest and the others, were left
on a crowded quay somewhere down in the dock district.

I called for a cooling drink and mentioned my trouble to the coal-black
waiter.

“That’s al’ light, sah. They come soon, sah.”

So I remained in that comfortable chair in the vestibule of the hotel
and waited. A ragged, disreputable-looking

[Illustration: CONSTANT SPRING, JAMAICA]

John crow, perched on a bush of scarlet blossoms just in front of where
I sat, regarded me with a look of thoughtful contempt. As my nerves got
more settled I became conscious of the rich perfumes of the flowers; the
insects were buzzing and chirping outside, and the strong sun gave to my
shaded resting-place an air of quiet coolness. Graceful negresses were
watering the flower-beds; they carried the watering-cans on their heads
until they found the particular plant they wished to sprinkle with the
refreshing liquid. Their movements were slow and deliberate and very
graceful.

It was a peaceful summer day; from where I sat I could see, afar off, a
thin edge of blue beyond the distant confines of the town, and I made
out the white patches of the sails of little vessels. I lit my pipe and
waited. Suddenly there was a jangle and a crash, and a buggy stopped at
the hotel door; in it the head of my friend Forrest appeared from amidst
a heap of sketch-books, easels, portfolios, and virgin canvases. I could
see by the agonised expression on his flushed countenance that he was
very angry. I called the waiter and told him to help the poor struggling
artist to disentangle himself from the debris of his paraphernalia.

Poor Forrest came to where I sat and sank into another wicker chair. He
seized my cooling drink and emptied the glass at one gulp.

“Where am I?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Where’s Large and the Colonel?”

I shook my head.

“Seen my luggage?”

I shook my head again.

He glanced through the doorway and caught sight of the disreputable John
crow perched on the bank of scarlet blossoms, and, fumbling for a
pencil, made his first Jamaican sketch there and then. I ordered another
cooling drink, and so we waited for our luggage and our friends.

Jamaica is the largest and most important island in the British West
Indies. It contains an area of some two thousand odd square miles, and
supports a population of three quarters of a million people, only two
per cent of whom are white. The blacks claim the predominating
proportion of seventy-seven per cent, the “coloured” people represent
nearly twenty per cent, and the remainder of the population is made up
of whites, Indian coolies, and Chinese. The ten thousand coolies at work
on the plantations in the interior have become a force in the island,
and they are destined to play a considerable part in the commercial
salvation of the country. The negroes are, of course, the descendants of
the slaves imported from Africa in the days of the slave trade; the
coloured class are the offsprings of the union of the whites with the
blacks, or of the half-breeds with the negroes. The coolies are of
recent importation from India, and the Chinese have come, no one knows
how, to trade with the negroes in up-country districts.

In the days of old, Jamaica waxed fat on the profits of her sugar
estates and the rich prizes of her rum trade. Fortunes were made almost
without effort or exertion by old-time planters. Sugar was sold at
absurdly high prices, and the planters cultivated their plantations
entirely by slave labour.

The Emancipation Act of 1834 flung the industries of the island out of
joint, and although the Imperial Government granted compensation to the
extent of nearly six millions sterling to the owners of the three
hundred thousand slaves they had liberated, the dry rot of decay set in,
and Jamaica fell from her high position among commercial communities.
The richest planters sold out their plantations and returned to the old
country; the poorer planters who remained in the island were terribly
handicapped for lack of labour. The freed slaves refused to work for
their late masters, and the labour difficulty set in. Factories were
forced to stop work; fields lay unplanted and untended for lack of
workers. And this labour difficulty has remained more or less acute from
that day to this. It was believed by the authorities that the
introduction of the ten thousand coolies would help to solve the
difficulty. The negroes had built for themselves little huts, and were
content to live on the native fruits and vegetables. The pleasant
indolence of their new life suited their tastes to a nicety; the rewards
offered in return for their labour were neither sufficient nor in any
way attractive. The warm climate and rich soil were all the Jamaican
African required to make his life all that he desired. Sugar
plantations were abandoned and rum factories were shut down, and poverty
came to the land of wood and water. Naturally the white people resented
the idleness of the blacks, and several eruptions occurred; the Gordon
riots, and other disturbances less notorious, were directly caused by
the impatience of the whites and the impertinence of the blacks.

Fine as is the picture of those three hundred thousand Africans climbing
the mountain sides of their island prison-home in order that they might
face the sun on the morning of the emancipation, we must not ignore the
prospect of the valleys, lying in the deep shadows of those mountains,
which were to be half desolated by the glory of that sunrise. If the
black men were willing to work as hard now, or even half as hard, as
their fathers once were forced to work, we should hear no dreary stories
of Jamaica’s poverty. The island has got an ideal climate, a
marvellously productive soil, and labourers in plenty; it lacks but the
spirit of labour. The natural wealth of the country is vast enough, but
the harvesters are idle and unwilling to work. The fact that the
Government was forced to bring ten thousand coolies from distant India
to work in the plantations and factories is a lasting disgrace to most
of the five hundred thousand black men and many of the hundred and fifty
thousand coloured folk. The pity of it is that neither of these classes
seems to feel the sting of the disgrace. The negro has in his being no
instinct for labour; the women only are willing workers.

[Illustration: A NEGRO]

Solve the Jamaica labour problem and the commercial problem will solve
itself.

The climate of the island is as nearly perfect as any climate can hope
to be. It is a country of perpetual sunshine and blue skies. The heat of
the day is tropical, but it is always tempered by cool sea breezes; and
when the sun has gone the evenings and the nights are deliciously cool
and refreshing. The island is really possessed of many different
climates. The towns and villages among the hills on the mountain slopes
are always cooler than the cities of the plains. The climate of the
place has always been grossly maligned by people of the homeland. On my
first journey out to Jamaica I imagined that I should find the place
filled with yellow fever and malaria; I thought of it as a sort of West
Africa--only a little worse. And I found it the most pleasant and
healthy place imaginable. In spite of all the statements and statistics
to the contrary, the conservative people of England still believe that a
journey to the Queen of the Antilles includes the risk of yellow jack.
Fevers there are, of course, just as in England there are coughs and
colds; and I would choose a Jamaica fever before an English cold. Yellow
fever is a disease which attacks you when you least expect it, and
leaves you quite dead, or nearly so. It is an uncanny, unwholesome
thing, and is not a respecter of persons. Really, for all practical
purposes, Jamaica is free of yellow fever; the disease has been stamped
out. People die of it even to this date; but even England is not
entirely free from smallpox. Yet one cannot describe smallpox as one of
the characteristics of our little island. In the same way it would be
foolish to associate Jamaica with yellow fever.

The Jamaicans discuss the disease with dispassionate, respectful dread.
It is a thing to be avoided; if met face to face it must be combated
with heroism, and a particular remedy peculiar almost to every
inhabitant. Many there are alive on the island who have had the yellow
jack and lived; many more there are who still mourn the loss of those
who bowed before its malignant power. The younger colonists--those
people who have lived there only ten or fifteen or twenty years--talk of
the ’97 outbreak; the old inhabitants speak of the last real epidemic,
the ’77 affair. So and so went down then, and poor old what’s-his-name
died in two hours. I met one man who told me of a picnic he gave in the
mountains some seven years ago. Sixteen guests sat down; eight died of
yellow fever before the year closed down. That would be in the ’97
outbreak. But these are rare cases.

Malarial fever is common in the towns and some parts of the country in
Jamaica, but it is a little fever without strength; it is not dangerous.
There is no malignant malarial. Though Jamaicans contract malarial as
frequently perhaps as Englishmen catch cold in London, the malarial is
not so dangerous as the cold. So it is not of much account. Jamaica is a
pleasanter place to live in than London, but new arrivals should adapt
themselves to the condition of things. Clothes and habits admirably
adapted for the English climate are generally out of place in a tropical
island.

The staple products of the island are entirely agricultural. Jamaica has
embraced the fruit trade. Half the total value of her exports is
represented by her over-sea trade in bananas, oranges, grape fruit, and
pine-apples. The sugar and rum trades take secondary positions, but
coffee is rapidly coming to the front.

To-day the island has little political significance save for the fact
that it is a strong naval base. It is probable that the completion of
the Panama Canal will give to it a more important status in the
political world. With the opening of the new ocean route to the East,
Jamaica will become a naval base of the utmost importance to Britain.

[Illustration: A STREET IN KINGSTON, JAMAICA]




THE TOWN OF KINGSTON




CHAPTER III

THE TOWN OF KINGSTON


The town of Kingston is made up of mean streets crammed with little
bungalow houses, filled to overflowing with people coloured in all the
shades of black and yellow. If the place resembles any well-known
capital it must be New York; but a New York built by children in
doll’s-house style, and painted green and white. In the manner of New
York the streets stretch to the wharves and quays of the giant harbour,
and electric tram-cars clang along the busy roads by day and night.
Electric poles stick up along the roadway in blatant disregard of the
finer feelings of romantic tourists. The shops are usually called
emporiums, and they flash with all the gaudy fitments common to the
meaner streets of New York city. Some there are that might be
English--quiet and respectable places in which the white man finds his
needs supplied by intelligent half-breeds, who do not count themselves
among the coloured class. These aristocrats among Jamaica’s shop
assistants have all the polish of a London draper, mixed with an
obvious consciousness of vast responsibility. As a rule he affects gold
spectacles, and closely resembles an Indian Babu studying law. With this
class of salesman it is impossible to exercise one’s powers of
bargaining. The suggestion of a reduction in the price of a linen collar
would be to these commercial gentlemen entirely in the nature of an
insult. They do not live to amass money. Their mission is to supply
Jamaican Englishmen with necessary comforts at the lowest possible
price; there is no suggestion of gain in their commerce. Homilies on the
ethics of tradesmanship, delivered with great eloquence and a religious
accent from behind a dark face screened with gold spectacles, are
impressive in the extreme. The real salesman is to be found in smaller
stores. There the tradesman regards as a man without wisdom the dull
buyer who pays more than half the sum asked for any article. It is on
such that the people wax fat in the land. This acute process of buying
is tedious if the buyer lacks experience. The easiest method is to offer
the merchant just one quarter the sum asked for any article. This gives
the keeper of the shop a shock, but impresses him with the fact that he
is not likely to be able to swindle you to an unlimited extent. It has
become legitimate trade with him, and so when you double your offer and
proffer half the original figure, the desired commodity is wrapped up
and money changes hands. It is only by adopting this method that a
tourist can afford to live in Jamaica. There is still another class of
seller, but with this class the white man has no dealings. The women who
sell sticky

[Illustration: AN OLD GATEWAY, KINGSTON]

sweetmeats or sweating pastries along the kerb-stones, do not appeal to
the adult of the race of England. Such sellers are the native
costermongers. They have no barrows or elaborate stalls; their
paraphernalia consists of a broken basket, or piece of board supported
across the knees. They are the sellers of fruit, sweetmeats, tobacco,
eggs, live poultry, and the sticky, greasy pastries dear to the heart of
the negro, be he old or young. As a rule the basket stalls are placed at
the roadside, well in the glare of the sun. The saleswoman is usually
very old, and her costume is of dull rags constructed to resemble a
lady’s dress. Her face is creased at the jaws, and the cheek bones stand
out like gnarled fists; her remaining teeth are very yellow, and her
skinny hands are for ever shuffling the contents of her basket. Such
women make no bid for trade; the buyer comes or he comes not. The dull
face shows no emotion. It may be that the basket and its contents are
the property of a negro speculator; she, the seller, perhaps, is simply
an agent working for her daily yam. These are not the merry women of the
market-place who come in from the country with a load of produce to sell
and to spend a day in town. If it were not for the sweetmeats they would
pass as ancient beggars. Of course Kingston has its gamin--the wild,
bareheaded, barelegged boy, who is always shouting or running or playing
his mysterious games of the streets. He, of course, is the essence of
youthful happiness. His day is divided between the harbour, where he
dives for pennies among the sharks alongside ocean-going passenger
boats, and the streets, where he is prepared for anything, from stealing
a water melon to chasing the donkeys of the market-place. When a
stranger accosts him he becomes all grinning innocence and flashing
teeth. “Me work, sah, yes, sah, very hard work, very little money. I ask
you for a penny, sah, for my mother’s sake, sah, one penny.” It seems to
me that every boy, be he black or white, or yellow or red, whether he
live in London, Paris, Tokio, or Kingston, Jamaica, is afflicted with
the same genius of mischief.

The capital of Jamaica has its pest also. In most places frequented by
tourists the great pest is the guide pest; in Jamaica it is the
buggyman. The buggy, of course, is the cab of the Indies, and the
buggyman is the curse of the country. With him we will deal at length
elsewhere. But the buggies and the buggyman should always be considered
as the Jamaican pests.

It is curious to see the long electric Canadian road car swing at
ten-mile speed down these narrow streets crowded with the picturesque
people of the Western Indies. The effect of the streets is
kaleidoscopic; the sudden appearance of a car reminds one of the
mutoscope which shows a railway train rushing at the audience. Such is
the impression of the road car in the crowded Jamaican streets. The
people have become accustomed to this touch of a vigorous Western world.
The noise of its rushing and the horrible jangle of its clanking bell
have ceased to provoke interest. The car is a thing on which, for a
copper or two, the workers may ride home. It saves great fatigue and
much walking. The market baskets may be placed beneath the seats; the
town slips rapidly behind, and home is reached. Heaven knows what moves
the car along. There are no horses, and no engines like those on the
railway. It is a thing causing annoyance to the buggyman, that is all.
For the rest you can ride five or six miles at ten miles an hour speed
for four Jamaican pennies.

The country-people, who come once a week to sell their produce in the
great Saturday foregathering of agricultural Jamaica, still show wonder
and fear at the approach of a tram. They still jump into the hedges as
the tram flies along--still turn their eyes away from the chaff of the
negro conductor. But that is the only respect shown to this foreign
importation.

The dusty streets of the capital melt into country lanes with scented
hedges as you swing out of the city on a journey to the Constant Spring
terminus of the tramway. White dust takes the place of the darker city
dust. The scent of half the flowers of the world crush out the musty
odour of crowded alleys, always stewing beneath a tropic sun. That is
the great charm of the tramway, the only real excuse for its existence.
By it you can rush out of evil town-life into the sweetness of the most
beautiful country in the world. To see a high range of purple mountains,
fronted by heavy fields of banana trees and towering pines, and
brilliant flowers of every tint and shade and shape--to see all these
from the seat of a tram car which might just as well be taking you from
Shepherd’s Bush to Kew, is a thing every one should experience. The
attitude of the native to the cars is representative of ingrained
indifference to everything.

Of all places in and about Kingston, the market-place is the most
fascinating. Really there are two buildings--two groups of compact
sheds, walled in and guarded by lazy constables of justice. They are
distant from each other to the extent of about half a mile, but the road
which links the one to the other is, on market days, just as busy a
place as either building. So it is easier to count both buildings and
roadway one long market. And it is better to trade in the open highway
than it is to haggle with women in a crowded building reeking with
strong smells of fruit and fowls and vegetables, musty basket-work,
decomposing meat, and a few hundred healthy negroes. Of course it is
necessary that we should go the round of the covered stalls and stand
the cross-fire of two rows of anxious saleswomen, whose lung power is of
artillery force. After the first ten yards of the passage any ordinary
Englishman has lost his power of blushing. The blandishments of the
women are crude and full of personalities. One calls you a pretty
English gentleman, and shouts her strong opinion that you would look
very handsome in her fine hat of Ippi Appa straw. Another hails you as
her long-lost lover; and a younger woman, more brazen than her seniors,
invites you to greet her with a “fine big kiss, my love.” It is
embarrassing, especially if you show embarrassment. A blush on your
cheek is, as it were, a red flag to

[Illustration: A FRUIT-SELLER ON A SIDE-WALK, KINGSTON]

the wit of three hundred women. Soon you find your utter abandon and
exchange compliments. The negro woman respects a white man who has no
reserve. At one stall you will find all the fruits of the Indies:
succulent mangoes, golden grape fruit, oranges, bananas, guavas,
nazeberries, pine-apples, and a half hundred others. The combined force
of all the smells is terrific. Next, an aged basket-woman displays
examples of the only real art-work produced by the West Indian negroes.
The baskets are really good. You can buy one of any shape, any size, and
any and every design. Coloured grass is let into snow-white reed with
fine cunning, and without regard for any canon of conventionality. The
character of the casual negroes is shown in the patterns of their
basket-work. All the younger women are told off to superintend the
stalls which cater to the weaknesses of tourists. The women are given
silver ornaments to wear on their coal black wrists, and frequently
their ears are hung with heavy Eastern rings. This is a fashion copied
from the coolie women. All the woman’s personal jewellery is offered for
sale. She will explain the meaning of the most complicated article of
native manufactures with cheerful languor. She assumes an air of
indifference so long as she knows you intend to buy. When you begin to
show indifference, the instinct of the saleswoman springs to life in
her, and she is all entreaty. She offers wonderful whips made from the
lace bark tree, whips whose butt and long plaited lash are both made
from one piece of wood. She offers walking sticks of ebony, groo groo
palm, pimento, bamboo, or cinnamon. Or if you prefer it, you can
purchase a shark’s backbone mounted on a steel rod and fitted with a
handle of scented sandal wood. This, the lady will tell you, is in
England a great novelty, and surely worth five little dollars. Of course
there is basket-work, and some pottery shaped out of red Caribbean clay.
There are strings of coloured seeds and flower-pots made from wide
bamboos. Gourds are carved and coloured and cut into useless shapes
alleged to be ornamental, and cocoa-nuts are carved into men’s heads,
the red hair left to make a frizzy beard. These, the lady says, are very
fine. There are little gourds set on wooden skewers, and so formed into
babies’ rattles. These the arch maiden sells to young men and maidens.
Last of all, she produces dainty d’oyleys and table-centres and fine
ornaments made from the lace bark-tree, and fashioned with ferns and
pressed blossoms. These things cost a great deal of money, but as a rule
they are very decorative. When you leave her stall, the lady pursues you
for many yards with a mammoth lamp-shade, which, she assures you, will
be greatly appreciated by your home folks.

But the stall of the tourist caterer suggests artificiality. After all,
the real market is under the vestibule of the great square building.
Here are the native people with their pepper-pods and cocoa, their live
fowls and jackass rope. The latter, be it understood, is tobacco. Sold
in rope form at one penny or twopence per yard, the tobacco is called
jackass rope, for what reason I could not discover. It is in this
corner of the market-place that one meets the negro only. The woman
minds the stall and does the selling, while the husband gossips with his
fellows, or sips strong liquids at the rum bars. The anxious wife
squats, nigger fashion, beside her heap of pepper-pods, and her hands
play with them listlessly, just as we imagine a miser plays with his
gold, until the heap is sold. She is patient and ladylike. The white man
walks along her strip of market land, and she voices no light banter. If
you ask questions as to her wares she answers with modesty and with
intelligence. This is the country-woman, polite and unsophisticated.
Beyond the department devoted to the sale of spices and pepper-pods and
tobacco, we come to the chicken saleroom. Jamaican market-women nurse
captive fowls just in the same manner as Englishwomen fondle lap-dogs.
They stroke them and play with their feathers, open a wing to show the
strength and youth of a bird, and hold the beak towards their face as if
pleading with the doomed fowls for farewell kisses.

Fronting the poultry-women are the sellers of native vegetables and
fruits. These wares are heaped on strips of torn sacking spread upon the
stone floor of the market. Each woman sits next her piece of sacking and
noisily shouts the merits of her own particular goods. When no customers
are about, these women are content to wrangle among themselves as to the
comparative merits of rival heaps of fruit; from commercial squabbles of
this description it is easy for the conversation to descend to the
level of vulgar personalities and strong abuse.

The meat market is the only selling place which offers no attraction to
the idle lounger. For myself I was content to smell it afar off and pass
quickly by. Opposite the main entrance to the principal building is the
market courtyard, a square patch of grey dust enclosed by an iron
railing, and containing a drinking fountain for the people and a long
water-filled trough for the donkeys. This is the resting-place for the
workers and idling-place for the idlers. Littered about the dust are
groups of children, and donkeys, and adults. The children are playing
their games, the donkeys are munching at heaps of half-dried green
grass, and the adults, stretched at full length on the dust, or on the
grass heaps at which the donkeys are taking their meal, are for the most
part sleeping the sleep of the tired negro. A few there are who have
chosen to lie in the shadow of empty market carts, but more are to be
found sleeping in the full glare of the sun.

The fountain in the centre of the courtyard is the drawing-room of the
market place. Here come the youth and the maiden to gossip and flirt
over the midday cup of water, and here lounge the matrons to discuss
prices, and costumes, and husbands. The men for the most part have found
the rum bars, but the women and the striplings congregate round the
drinking fountain, drink cups of water, and bathe their hands and faces
in the donkey’s drinking trough. The noise of the laughter and talking
is louder than the sound of a

[Illustration: THE TOBACCO MARKET, KINGSTON]

heavy tide breaking over a pebbly beach. And the place is filled with
grey dust-clouds as the people pass and repass, moving from the fountain
to make way for new-comers. The blackness of their bare legs is hidden
by the dirty grey dust. No matter how supple or glossy the skin may
really be, two minutes’ walking in the courtyard gives bare legs the
appearance of age, and suggests the existence of loathsome disease. The
grey dust rises up and powders the women’s hair until the black curls
are lightened to the colour of brown pepper. In fact the unpleasant dust
envelopes everything under a cloud of unclean greyness. In the courtyard
of the market-place the black people seem grey and diseased; the white
folk never pass beyond the entrance gate.

It is on market days that one can see in the Kingston high roads, and in
the suburban lanes, groups of country women walking beneath heavy
head-loads of garden produce. In all the world there is nothing more
graceful than the carriage of a negro woman swinging along, with free
and easy motion, under a head-load which would be heavy to an ordinary
white man. With head erect, straight neck, chest flung forward, and arms
swinging with unconscious freedom, the women present perfect examples of
graceful strength. Their stride is long, and easy, and very regular.
They are the most graceful walkers in the world. I have never seen a
lady in Europe with a carriage as perfect as that of the ordinary
Jamaica negro market-woman.

[Illustration: A MARKET WOMAN, JAMAICA]




THE PEOPLE OF JAMAICA




CHAPTER IV

THE PEOPLE OF JAMAICA


At one time Jamaica was peopled by a race of red men whose beauty and
timidity were the wonder and convenience of the little band of Europeans
who were the first whites to tread the fragrant shores of the Pearl of
the Antilles. To-day not a trace of these Caribs remains. Unfit for
competition with the strenuous white or muscular black, the race, so far
as Jamaica is concerned, has run its course. The red people are
remembered only by the stone implements and rude pottery preserved in
the Jamaican museum. Nowadays the island is peopled by whites--English,
American, and those of Spanish blood; blacks--grandchildren
of the slaves imported from West and West Central Africa; and
half-breeds--yellow and brown people--the descendants of those intrigues
of the white man and his black servant which, not many years back, were
common among the people of the country.

The white man needs but little description; you can see him in England
or in any colony: an Englishman who takes his cold bath, and considers
himself not the least important member of the most important race
extant. His arrogance is undiminished by the tropic sun, though his
habits of life may have become West Indianised. He rises at six and
breakfasts at ten or eleven, lunches at two or three, and dines at
seven. His food is as it is in England, save that fruit and vegetables
are more plentiful. His house is built bungalow fashion, and his
servants (with whom he has more trouble than his brethren in London) are
blacker than the blackest hat. His complexion is either white with a
yellowish tinge, or red mahogany. His women-folk dress in the latest
Parisian creations, and suffer only from lack of exercise. It is not a
climate for exertion, and the English lady goes to the length of taking
none at all. She crosses the street in her buggy, and has a black maid
to hand, so that she may never be called upon to make any unnecessary
movement. The man has his polo, and tennis, and pigeon-shooting, his
saddle-horse, and golf. If he is very brave and a great enthusiast,
there is the cricket field. The lady always prefers the unhealthy luxury
of repose. So her face is milk-coloured; she is whiter than her husband.

The society of the island is divided into three sections--the military,
the civil officials, and the others. The three sets meet occasionally
when one matches itself against another at sport, or when there is a
great reception at Government House. These foregatherings are of
interest to those who deal in scandal. In the clubs the men mix more
frequently, but it is not the men who make the social life of Jamaica.
The life of the Englishman

[Illustration: AN OLD WOMAN]

differs from that of the Anglo-Indian at a hill station; it is not the
same as the life in a provincial town. But somehow it is a strange
mixture of these two, except that in the social life the bachelor plays
but a puny part. Not many mothers take their daughters to Jamaica, so,
in the capital, the bachelor lives in one of the hotels and plays
billiards in the evenings. It would be a blessing to the single men if a
few enterprising mothers with many daughters would take up their abode
in some of the charming villa residences a few miles out of Kingston.

The life of the Jamaica negro is almost ideal. As a rule he either
entirely ignores the little work he ought to do, or leaves it to the
exhaustless energy of his indefatigable wife. He spends his life in
shady parts of the market-place, or lolls in the sun outside the place
of his abode. Nothing worries him. He is imperturbable; glorious in his
idleness, happy in a blissful ignorance which takes no account of
yesterday or to-morrow. His only grievance, if he has one, is the
limited working power of one woman. Happy is the man who is the father
of many able-bodied youngsters. If by some mischance--the accident of
domestic misfortune, or the promptings of _ennui_ born of inaction--he
is forced to work, he works with cheerfulness, and with a happy grin
complains through the day, and then spends his night in revelry. When
you have questioned one black man as to the extent and remuneration of
his labour, you have interviewed the island. The temperament of the
negro is inborn; it never varies; all negroes are blood brethren. Ask
any man if he works hard and you will hear--

“Yes, me work very hard, sah.”

“You look well on it.”

“No, me no well, sah; me not fit for work; too sick.”

“But you get well paid.”

“No well paid, sah. Plenty work; very little money, sah.”

All this with a satisfied grin except when he describes the weakness of
his health; then his eyes roll and his face clouds in a manner almost
convincing to new arrivals.

With the women it is different. They have no time for conversation with
idle strangers; they work with unceasing energy. If they pause, it is
only to stare with an air of half-timid wonder, or to break into long
peals of boisterous laughter. If it were not for the women folk, Jamaica
would indeed be hard put to it for workers.

In character the Jamaican negroes are a mixture of good and bad; of
Africa and Europe, with the vices of both the blacks and the whites, and
only some of the virtues of the people of Europe. They are civilised
with a sort of quasi-civilisation, which somehow suggests an
indifferently humorous burlesque performed by irresponsible amateurs. It
takes many months to educate a new-comer into treating the black
Jamaicans with becoming seriousness. As a rule they are well-meaning
people, full of curious mannerisms, with which

[Illustration: COCOANUT PALMS, FALMOUTH, JAMAICA]

it is difficult for the white man to be in entire sympathy. The ideas of
a black man are different from those of white. He sees things from a
different point of view, and cannot really be happy with a white, who,
legally his equal, is actually in many ways infinitely his superior. In
many ways the Jamaican native resembles his coloured brother of the
American States; he is just as arrogant--even more so--but he is not
quite so really independent, and by no means so energetic. It is
certainly a fact that the Jamaican negroes are the happiest, relatively
the richest, and quite the most comfortable inhabitants of the globe.
Though there may be poverty among them, there is no unsatisfied hunger.
The fields and the hedges, as well as the market-places, afford food and
comfort for the dweller in this land of perpetual sun. Clothes they have
in too great an abundance. It is only for the purposes of pride and
vainglory that clothes are worn at all. The climate is warm enough to
justify nudity, and although this happy condition of freedom is not
compatible with the canons of modern society, it is easily possible for
a native to be clad and outwardly furnished for a very few shillings per
annum. Overcoats are unknown. Coals are only associated with the
steamships in Kingston Harbour, and the railway. Meat is an unnecessary
luxury--almost an unhealthy one. The people live on fruit and
vegetables, with an occasional dish of salt fish caught in the rivers or
from the waters of the Caribbean Sea, and cured with a total disregard
for delicate sweetness. At the first and the twenty-first glance, the
European would pronounce the dried fish of the Jamaican nigger bad, if
not entirely putrid. The popularity of this form of diet among the
people is evidence of the over-sensitiveness of the civilised nose. The
West Indian soldier of the line receives full rations as well as his
shilling a day. The meat he receives from a beneficent Government is the
same as that served out to his English brother-in-arms, and it is from
this source that the old English settler draws the supply of fresh meat
for his own table. It is better to go among the West Indian messrooms
and buy the soldiers’ meat rations than it is to chance the tenderness
of the joints on the market butcher’s slabs. By a little enterprise and
a good deal of bargaining with a coal-black mess sergeant, you are
certain of obtaining the juiciest steak to be found on the island; and
in doing so you materially add to the popularity of the army among
possible recruits by enlarging the pocket-money of the black soldiers of
the line. Our West Indian Tommies prefer the saltest of stale salt-fish
to the juiciest of fresh juicy-steaks, and as a rule the officer of the
day is quite prepared to wink at a little irregularity which makes for
the happiness of his men and the comfort of the island. Besides, it is
probable that the same officer of the day is occasionally invited to
dine out in the bungalows of older inhabitants. The readiness with which
the soldier is prepared to part with meat rations is proof that flesh
foods are an unnecessary luxury for the West Indian native.

The negroes of the island are sharply divided into

[Illustration: A MILKMAID, BARBADOES]

two classes: those who live in the towns, and the country labourers. The
two classes differ as much as do English agriculturists and Londoners.
In Jamaica the country people are superior to the town-bred class. The
influences of town life are not good for emotional people whose fathers’
fathers hunted men in the forest lands of Western Africa. They receive
impressions too easily. They are impressed by the bad as well as by the
good. A black servant is always his own idea of his white master. A
black man must imitate; his race has only just come in contact with
civilisation. Instinctively he imitates because he has not yet reached
that state which some day may enable him to initiate. If he is to appear
in the guise of a civilised man he must follow; his experience is not
great enough to enable him to lead; his instincts are still African and
barbarian. So the town man, subject to the influences of a city in which
live types of every class of every European race, is necessarily at a
disadvantage compared with the man who lives with nature among people of
his own colour and only one or two white men of one race.

The dwellers in the Jamaican cities look down upon the country folk as
unsophisticated nonentities. The country people imagine the townsmen to
be priests of iniquity, cunning, and steeped in wickedness. Just as it
is in England, only more so. In the country all the coloured people are,
approximately, of one class; they all belong to one station. In towns
the buggyman looks down upon the costermonger as an inferior, just as
the wives of shopkeepers ignore the existence of Mrs. Buggyman. In
imitation of the English, foolish class distinction has given birth to a
form of snobbishness which is entirely ludicrous. In Kingston the
outward and visible sign of prosperity or social superiority is shown in
the costume of the women-folk, and in the simpering accent of the
maidens. The more uncomfortable a woman looks when she goes on church
parade, the more diffidence she shows before opening her mouth to answer
a simple question, the higher she is in the social scale, as it is
understood by native Jamaicans. This is as it is among the shopkeepers
and the proprietors of buggy horses and worn-out four-wheel tourist
conveyances. With the workers it is altogether different. The aged lady,
who sits for twelve hours of every day selling gingerbread beneath the
half-shade of a decaying arch fronting an important shop in the main
street, thinks little of costume and nothing of accent. She is persuaded
to talk with great difficulty, though her story would be really
interesting. An old black lady lacks that venerable appearance peculiar
to the aged dames of England. She does not appear too clean, her hair is
reduced to mangy patches of dusty black curls, showing here and there on
the top of her smooth black pate. The forehead is furrowed and her
cheeks sunken, the chin protrudes, and is the heaviest and most
noticeable of all the features. Her lips have vanished, and the eyes
peer through dull-red rims from behind a half-screen of fallen skin. She
is bent double by age and the infirmities born of rough work. There, all
day long, she sits selling gingerbread cake beneath the half-shade of
decaying archways. No one ever seems to buy her dainties, but there she
sits all day long staring vacantly into nothing. Occasionally she
fingers her cakes, and the movement of her hands disturbs a cloud of
flies who claim her cookies as their own. She is listless and entirely
dumb; there is no crowd of chattering loafers round her stall, no group
of children playing hide-and-seek under the shadow of her protection.
She is alone--a picture of desolation. She will sit there gazing at
nothing, heeding nothing, until she finds the consolation of the sleep
of death. As a conversationalist she is quite impossible. If a white man
stops to give her greeting, she replies not by word of mouth, but with
an out-thrust hand. She has money greed. Half her day is spent in silent
pleading for alms. Altogether she is not picturesque; she lacks the
elements of cleanliness, and her cookies are not wholesome. She is
something to pass by with a shudder--a human being of the lowest species
undergoing a very slow process of decay. If she has intelligence, it is
hidden with her life-story behind the shrunken eyes half-hidden by the
dull-red rims and hanging skin.

The most obvious inhabitants of Kingston are the drivers of the buggies.
A Jamaican buggy is a spider-like species of the four-wheeled vehicle,
known in England as the country fly. It is drawn by one horse, which is
neither a horse, nor a pony, nor a mule, but something remotely
resembling all these things, and raising sentiments of deep pity in the
hearts of all beholders. The driver of the buggy, the buggyman,
supplies the necessary enthusiasm to the horse and buggy alike. One
instinctively feels that but for the elevating spirit of sublime
optimism which the buggyman possesses to the fullest degree, the poor
horse would drop dead and the vehicle would fall to bits. The buggyman
ignores everything in life save possible customers. If you hire a buggy
you are the life and soul of the driver until you enter his crazy
carriage; then you become as less than nothing, and the driver
shamelessly bargains with pedestrians for the use of his coach when the
time comes for you to leave. The buggymen know Kingston as well as the
London cabby knows his London, and that is saying much. He drives with a
rattling carelessness which is entirely good for weakly nerves. He
ignores the protests of his nervous fare, and smiles in derision of the
warning hand of an outraged police. He cannons other buggies as though
they were billiard balls, and finally lands his victim, in a condition
entirely demoralised and feverish, at a place where he has no desire to
go. Then the driver blames the passenger for not giving correct
directions, and explains that to drive on will be another sixpenny fare.
The law in Jamaica reads, “Sixpence per passenger to any place in town,”
so the driver gallops to an unfrequented corner of the place and demands
an extra sixpence. The fare must pay, or walk back in the sun through
the stench of poorer Kingston. It is really better for tourists to buy a
buggy and a horse and to hire a driver if they intend to stay in the
island for

[Illustration: WAITING MAIDS]

more than three weeks. These can be as easily sold as they can be
purchased, and the possession of them saves the waste of much precious
energy, and it is better for the language and morals of a vigorous
person.

When he is not pursuing possible customers, the buggyman is asleep
inside his carriage. His battered hat is carelessly balanced on the tip
of his little nose, his feet are resting on the cushion of the front
seat, his hands hanging limp, and he slumbers deeply, exhibiting the
deep caverns of his mighty jaw. Flies settle and nest in his open mouth,
children swarm round his buggy and tickle him with half-chewed
sweetstuffs, women chaff him from the side walks, but he stirs not, not
an eyelid moves. But let a tourist or a white man come within one
hundred yards of him and he is alive again and in pursuit. He discovers
a possible fare by the sense of smell. He is all eyes and ears and nose
for white men. When he sleeps, his horse sleeps also. It is in many
cases all the rest the poor beast hopes to get. It is usual for the poor
beast to be dragged from his resting-place (it is neither stable, nor
nest, nor open field) and harnessed at 8 A.M. He retires when the night
is far spent, and the last straggler has settled beneath the mosquito
netting of his bungalow bedroom. During the day he is driven to the full
extent of his capabilities. He must always run his quickest. There are
no words spoken to him: he is driven with the whip, and with the whip
only. His food is coarse guinea-grass, and he is lucky if he finds much
of that; his water comes should his journeying carry him past a water
tank. For all that, he has the heart and soul of a carriage horse, and
he is as keen in his master’s hunt for fares as a trained polo pony is
in following the ball. In colour he is usually a bright yellowy red,
with mane and tail of light yellow. He always shows his ribs, and the
whip is pleasant to him because the lash disturbs the flies. He never
falls or stumbles; he has learned to be sure of his feet by carrying
tourists up high mountains by way of narrow winding paths. If he has one
vice it is sleepiness, but in that matter he is well under the control
of his driver.

When the buggy driver has finished his work he lolls about the drinking
shops--an important man. He is the hardest drinker in Kingston. He mixes
more with white men than do most of the other natives, and his calling
puts him in touch with the doings of men of all types. He calls for his
rum, and chaffs the barmaid, for all the world like a city clerk; and
his conversation is of horse-racing and betting odds, and worse. He is
well-to-do, and proud that the Government has sufficient confidence in
his personal character and in his prowess as a coachman to entrust him
with a license to drive a hackney coach. This license is to the Jamaica
buggyman exactly what his commission is to a newly-joined young officer.
It gives the black man status. It is a link between him and the
Government. It shows him and all Jamaica that he, buggy-driver, with a
license and a number, is not an unknown man, but an official with a
position recognised by officialdom.

When a buggyman marries he usually chooses his wife from among the
yellow women. The negress is beneath him. He likes to have as his wife a
woman who may call herself white when she receives his guests or attends
his chapel on the Sabbath. He will tell you that he married white, and
you will wonder how he managed it, until you see his lady. If you are so
inclined, you may abuse the driver and his wife and his children, his
horse and his buggy, his incapacity and everything that is his. He will
only laugh and crack his whip and sway about in his seat with merriment.
He will do anything to please you, on the chance of your dealing
generously with him when the time comes for payment. He is a
thick-skinned black man. He has no delicacy, and no false pride, and
little shame. This you will find out when you hand him your silver and
tell him to be gone. Compared with him the London four-wheel cabby is an
angel of mercy. The buggyman will abandon his horse and his buggy, and
follow you down side streets, shouting that you have paid him too
little. He will fling your silver to the ground and stamp on it. Then,
picking it up, he will follow you shouting that you owe him money. No
one heeds him. It is a common scene, and not worthy the attention of
Jamaicans.

[Illustration: DIVING BOYS, KINGSTON]




THE PHILOSOPHY OF A JAMAICAN GAMIN




CHAPTER V

THE PHILOSOPHY OF A JAMAICAN GAMIN


In the day-time it is good to sit on one of the jutting piers which
fringe the bay of Kingston, and, lolling under the deep shade of a heavy
roof, give the sea breeze free play with your hair. It is a touch of
health, a vision of sweet coolness, a sensation of rare joy. You are in
the atmosphere of Southern Europe. Round you spread the tropics.
Shorewards the palm bends languidly as it feels the breath of the sea’s
vigour; the sun, seen through an ocean breeze, is dulled into purple
haze; the moving boats and rocking masts give life and motion to a dead
world. At midday the West Indies present the picture of death. There is
no movement, no life current. It is as though the island of Jamaica were
scorched dead. The birds float like ragged strips of paper on the edge
of the breeze which dies on its journey inland. Here, by the sea, the
senses are lulled to sweet indifference to all things save the noise and
coolness of the breeze. Jamaicans call this breeze the doctor; it is the
doctor that makes Jamaica a place fit for the homes of the white men.
Without it, the place would be a fever-ridden land of pestilence. With
it, and not even the sun is more regular, the land is called a health
resort.

As I sit here musing, the strip of land on which are planted the forts
and military cantonments of Port Royal, swings seaward, a thin line of
deep green, a false horizon for a sea of richest blue. Parts of the
place are blotted out by sailing ships with canvas spread, or steamers,
painted white, and little fishing craft. Above Port Royal a single strip
of cloud rises from behind the land in a dull haze of grey; where the
cloud-chain touches the light blue of the sky it bellies out white to
the sun. The broad domes of this cloud-range are whiter than the snowy
caps of the ocean rollers.

As I sit, breathing in the sweet coolness of the breeze, a flash of warm
brown shoots from the blue of the sea, and a diving boy shimmers in the
laughing sun. He will dive for pennies he says. Better sit here and cool
I suggest, and in this manner I first get to know something of the inner
life of Timothy Dorias, gamin and diving boy, as good a young rogue as
you will find anywhere. Vicious and happy as the sun, joyous as the
sparkling wavelet, he is thirteen, and, apparently, already deeply
experienced in the vice of the world. Yes he goes to school--that is to
say, he has been to school; really on second thoughts he intended to
convey the fact that he is going to school--next month.

He is thirteen and has a wife--not really a wife, you know--there is no
suggestion of wedlock--but a wife nevertheless.

[Illustration: DIVING BOYS, OFF BARBADOES]

No he does not go to church--there are no boots. His father is a
fisherman, and he is of a family of eight. His two sisters stay at home
and help their mother, who sees to the children and the grandchildren;
the grandchildren are offsprings of the two sisters. “No, sah, they be
not married yet--some day perhaps.” He wishes to show us strange places
in the town of Kingston--a merry enough guide, but one lacking in
restraint. His accent is mellow and he is not black. A rich, dark brown
colour he is, with curly hair, white teeth, and deep black eyes. His
stories of Jamaica are of intrigue, dancing eyes, and sunlight;
green-shuttered windows and soft glances. He is a born Romeo, a West
Indian Don Juan.

The history of Jamaica he knows not, he says, neither can he tell us why
some people are black and some white. Best of all is to be brown, “like
me,” he says; then one is black to the black people, and white to the
white. Really it is a wise thirteen-year-old, witness the postscript. “I
should pass as white in England, but not here. Too many nearly white
here, sah.” He likes the black people best because they are “plenty more
happier,” but the money is in the hands of the whites. When he is old he
will catch fish and live alone in a house with his wife and children. If
ever he should tire of fishing, Jamaica is “plenty full of fruit.” A
little work would be necessary, perhaps, but he does not mind work.
Witness the time he spends in practising diving in the Kingston bay, he
says. Women will do his housework and attend to his fruit patch; his
wife will see to the clothes of his children. Yes, perhaps it would be
good to go out to the sea in big ships, and find adventure in lands
beyond the colour line of the setting sun. But in the big ships there is
little fruit, and women are not at hand to wait on men. No, it is better
to remain where people are safe. Sometimes the big ships go away and
never return. The reason is that some one on board has sinned in the
eyes of God. Yes, everyone sins plenty often, but God is kind and shuts
His eye, otherwise every living man and woman would be blasted dead.
Women are not so important as men. We tell them they are, because it
pleases them, and so they do more work. But really it is better to be a
man. Women are weak and little in their minds, they are too much afraid,
and too little given to thinking of big things. You must be kind, but
not too kind, to a woman. If you are too kind, she will think you weak
and foolish, and she will do no work for you. Yes, he loved his mother
and his sisters, but he loved his father most of all, because he was big
and strong, and fished in the bay even when the weather was very rough.
His father only laughed and cuffed him when he stole the bananas from
the cart in the market-place, but his mother talked of it for days, and
told all the neighbours that he was a thief and a bad boy; and she told
the parson man, who at any moment might tell God. Then he would be sent
to hell, all for one or two bananas. His father was angry with his
mother for telling the people, and his mother cuffed him still, because
his father had beaten her for telling people his son was a thief.

His own people were better than the blacks, because they were whiter,
and God himself is white. He was not certain whether black people would
go to heaven, but he was certain that white and brown folk could go
there and live in the skies in the same great house. When he went there
he should want to dive plenty much, and fish in the river with a rod
with a wheel on it. No, he was not afraid to die, except that if he died
now he would find none of his friends in heaven. He never thought of
sharks when he dived in the bay, but his friend had only one leg left,
because a shark took the other one off when he was diving for pennies
flung from an American fruit-boat. He guessed he made too much noise
himself to please the sharks; anyway he could dive under one if it tried
to bite him.

He was telling us of his passion for the English and of his love of
truth and justice, when suddenly he flung himself from our jetty and
splashed into the bay to reappear well out of reach of land. A policeman
appeared at my elbow and grinned quietly; he assured us that he would
have given much had the boy not caught sight of him as he crept towards
us. The rascal was a thief and a blackguard, and he would be arrested,
sure as eggs sah, and then birched or sent to gaol. This he assured us
was true and unvarnished fact, on his word as a constable of justice. So
much for Jamaican youth.

[Illustration: GOING TO CHURCH]




THE DEVOTION OF THE JAMAICAN NEGRO




CHAPTER VI

THE DEVOTION OF THE JAMAICAN NEGRO


The native of Jamaica flies to religion as an ant creeps to the
honey-pot. Give a nigger a few catch-words and a ritual in which he can
take a leading part, and there is no more religious man on the face of
the earth. I never met a native man or woman who was not either Baptist
or Methodist, Catholic or Church of England, or member of some other
sect to which he or she clung with the strength of pious madness. There
is no tolerance in the really religious Black. Every member of every
other sect is a member of the eternally damned. In the opinion of the
Catholic there is no hope for his Plymouth Brother. The Baptist cannot
hope for the salvation of the Free Methodist. Every Sunday every
religious nigger goes to church in the morning, in the afternoon if
possible, and then again at night. After evensong there are open-air
services where crowds of souls are saved, with great regularity, week by
week. They tell each other that they have been plucked like a brand from
the burning, and they dance and shout and sing; sometimes, in moments of
great exaltation, they grovel on the ground and clutch at the earth for
inspiration and spiritual comfort. It is impossible for a saved soul to
be cool. The idea of having so narrowly escaped from the burning
brimstone inflames the hearts of the newly saved at each weekly
performance. A revivalist ceremony closely resembles a fetich dance in
an African forest. The ritual is similar, though the cause and effect
are happily different. I do not wish it to be supposed that I venture to
scoff at the religion of the natives of Jamaica. My desire is simply to
attempt a description of the outward and visible effect of the religious
services. At heart every negro is most painfully emotional. After
undergoing the deepest sensation of salvation the negro wanders homeward
satisfied, relieved, and very merry. There is no evidence of deep
impression; no outward suggestion that the man is spiritually affected
to any great degree. The impression I gathered was that Jamaicans are
religious with their lips and voices; that salvation was a thing to be
regularly sought and experienced once a week--just as among certain
people in other more civilised countries. This capacity for the
endurance of great spirituality gives birth in Jamaica to many
lamentable exhibitions of religious humbug. Prophets arrive; new sects
are called into being by unscrupulous adventurers who claim to be in
direct contact with the Deity.

The story goes that a very little while ago a negro arrived in Kingston
from one of the Southern American States. He brought with him a
second-hand uniform of a captain of the British Navy, sword included.
He purchased a donkey in the market place and quietly attired himself
in all the glory of the blue and gold of the British Navy. He mounted
the donkey and loosely slung his sword so that the scabbard rattled
along the cobbles of the rough Kingston roadways. Then, slowly he rode
through the town. Men, women, and children followed him in mighty
astonishment. He rode slowly, with bent head, his arms folded across his
breast. By the time he reached the outskirts of the town the following
crowd numbered many hundreds. He led them to a great field, and halted
his sorry steed, and for several moments sat solemnly staring at his
donkey’s ears, making no movement. Suddenly he drew the sword from out
the scabbard and flung himself upright in his stirrups, waving the sword
aloft. Thrice he did this in silence. Then he turned to the wondering
crowd and shouted--“Kneel to the might of God. Bow down to His servant.
I am come to save you from sin.”

Then he preached to them for an hour. He remained in that field for
several days, and made many converts and found a multitude of followers.
These he marched in procession to the side of a river in which he
baptised them all. Part of his creed was that all people should bathe
every day in water which he had blessed with his all powerful sword. He
dispensed the blessed river water to many hundreds of people every day,
making a money charge for every gallon. When he had amassed a small
fortune he quietly disappeared, and left his flock leaderless and
disconsolate. There appears to be many such chapters in the religious
life of Jamaica. The people are at the mercy of any adventurer who has
sufficient intelligence and enough audacity to prey upon their
credulity, and play his own hand with unfaltering boldness.

It would not be fair to suggest that all the inhabitants of Jamaica
could be influenced by a jackanapes in a naval uniform and sword, riding
on a donkey. There are of course a large number, a large majority, of
really intelligent men and women who are properly religious. I mention
extreme cases in order that it may be possible for you to gain some
insight into the extraordinary character of the Black man. It is easy
for any educated man to make great crowds of Jamaicans profess and call
themselves Christians. To really imbue the people with a knowledge of
the elementary duties of Christian people is a task of great difficulty.
Sunday is their day of rest. The old people smoke their pipes and gossip
in the shade of their doorways, the youngsters parade the town in all
the glory of their gaudy finery. On Sunday the natural idleness of the
coloured man is as it were legalised. Once a week their besetting sin of
indolence becomes a real virtue. So the day is enjoyed to the full. It
is never necessary to drive home to a nigger the fact that it is wicked
to labour on the seventh day. The difficulty is to persuade him to work
on the other six.

Everyone has heard of the Jamaican revivalist meetings, those weird
religious orgies where men and women run riot in the name of great
salvation. They are difficult services to witness; the people,
especially

[Illustration: A GINGERBREAD-SELLER, ST. LUCIA]

the parson people, are shy in the presence of the unbelieving. You can
only enter a native synagogue by means of great cunning and an utter
absence of self-restraint. The interiors of such synagogues are
commonplace--you can see their furniture and fittings in any tiny bethel
in poorer London. The difference lies in the people only; in Jamaica
they are all utterly black and very happy. The preacher wears
spectacles, and has a white beard and conventional clerical collar and
white shirt. The congregation are attired in all the tints of a German
Noah’s Ark, and show examples of half the costumes known to civilisation
and Whitechapel. Of course there are more women than men, but still the
males that appear are not less zealous than the most excitable of the
ladies. When the service has half spent itself, order, and the souls of
the people, have become really affected. The solemnity of the place
entirely disappears, and pandemonium comes in like a rustling, choking
tornado. Men and women dance and pray and sing and shout, and then fall
backwards to the hard wood floor clutching the empty air in the agony of
spiritual exaltation. The preacher abstains from flinging himself into
the heat of the melée with infinite difficulty, and by exercising his
power of self-restraint in a manner inspiring to behold. The
congregation exhausts its frenzy and lies quiet and purified, in the
manner of a snake that has exhausted its poison gland in attacking the
sacking held by an experienced charmer. In this manner is a large
proportion of the population of the island every week, with great
regularity, saved from damnation. The parson is carried home to sup with
the senior deacon, and the congregation disperses into little groups of
devotees, each member anxious to examine the religious experience of his
brother, or explain at great length his own sensations of salvation.

[Illustration: THE TURTLE WHARF, KINGSTON, JAMAICA]




TURTLE FISHING




CHAPTER VII

TURTLE FISHING


“Turtles or tortoises constitute one of the orders of reptiles, the
_Chelonia_. They are characterised by having the trunk of the body
incased in a more or less ossified carapace, which consists of a dorsal
more or less convex portion, and of a flat ventral one, the so-called
plastron.”

If you could see a turtle panting for breath, sighing in fat breathless
agony, or swallowing nothing, in the manner of a nervous singer, you
would conclude that this description should be wrapped in more
sympathetic terms. I can imagine nothing more absolutely pitiable than
the sight of a full hundred turtle overturned, belly upwards, in the
full glare of a noon sun, awaiting shipment over the four thousand miles
of rolling Atlantic weather, to meet a doom intimately associated with
the beginning, the first course, of an Aldermanic dinner. The soulful
eyes of a panting turtle express knowledge of impending doom, and only
half conquer agony. It is a sight to turn away from--one which must
always be remembered at the first reading of a rich menu. But, really,
in his native haunts, the turtle is an elusive beast, a kind of marine
De Wet, who wants a lot of catching, but who, once caught, proves
himself or herself to be good all round. Good, that is, if belonging to
the succulent green species, for the Hornbilled variety is of little use
save for the production of tortoise-shell, and the Loggerhead is a
truculent rascal who is best left alone. Strictly speaking, of course,
the turtle is not a beast at all, but a reptile, dear to lovers of
callipee and turtle eggs, and otherwise useful in a score of ways.
Although this most succulent of all reptiles frequents all tropical
oceans more or less, his true home may be said to be at the
alligator-shaped island of Grand Cayman or Cairman, called by Columbus
Las Tortugas because of the hosts of turtle that he found there. Grand
Cayman is a dependency of Jamaica, and passed into the possession of the
Crown soon after the conquest of the Queen of the West India islands.

Hunting the turtle is carried on in different ways according to the
locality; the simplest plan, of course, is to waylay the female when she
leaves the shore after depositing her eggs, and then just turn her on
her back and wait until it is convenient to remove her to a kraal. There
is no risk or sport about this proceeding, which, in nine cases out of
ten, is successful; occasionally, however, a round-backed turtle will
roll over and make tracks for the sea with unexpected swiftness. Another
plan is to spear or harpoon the reptiles in open sea, and yet another to
entangle them in nets when they come to the surface to breathe.

[Illustration: BOATS OFF DOMINICA]

The inhabitants of Grand Cayman are born seamen and turtle hunters, and
they favour the last course. Their plan is to make large webbed fishing
nets from the leaves of the thatch palm, first denuding the leaf of a
certain membranous substance at the back, and then twisting into almost
unbreakable cords and drying. This laborious task is all done by hand,
and when the net is finished the strongest turtle vainly tries to
release his head or fin from its meshes. The folks of Grand Cayman are
their own boat-builders, and their custom is to sail in small fleets to
the banks off the coast of Nicaragua, and cast their heavily-weighted
nets in the direction the turtle is sure to take when intent upon an
egg-laying expedition. Often enough the boats are out for weeks before
enough turtle are captured to repay the boatmen for their labour. But,
once caught, it is easy enough to hoist the net-entangled turtle into
the schooners, where he is stored, shell downwards, in the hold, and fed
on sea-grass and weed. At one time the trade suffered greatly because
the Spaniards persistently destroyed the females before the eggs were
deposited, simply for the sake of obtaining calipee. But nowadays the
turtle is hunted with greater wisdom, and our civic fathers need not
tremble for the future of their beloved delicacy.

With their cargo of turtles aboard the schooners make tracks for
Jamaica, where their catch is deposited in kraals to await shipment to
Europe.

It is a commonplace story when reduced to a bare description, but really
the fishing is full of romance. The sailing amidst the golden islands
of the west, the anchorage off the sandy coast of Nicaragua; the casting
of the wide-meshed nets and the catching of heavy two or three hundred
pound turtles, desperately savage. The turning of a half-exhausted
turtle on to his shell-armoured back; the noise of the heavy flapping of
over two hundred fins stronger than a strong man’s arm; the pathos of
continual sighing, uncanny, half human, wholly unnerving. The journey to
the Jamaica jetty. The flopping of the catch into a deep-sea pool,
boarded off from the open bay; the feeding of the brutes with curious
grass which, seemingly ignored, somehow disappears gradually, when no
one is by to witness. Then the romantic drudgery of turtle fishing ends,
and the dangerous part begins. The danger lies in the fishing from the
pool, the turning on the hot wooden slab, the shipment, in a steamer
homeward bound, and--the dinner table.

Of late there has been some excitement over Jamaica turtle fishing. The
British fishers claim the right of fishing in places Nicaragua called
her very own. Schooners were detained and a British ship of war
journeyed to the fishing grounds to see that the game was played with
fairness. The affair has blown over now, at least so the black Jamaican
turtle fisherman told me. Not that he would care anyway; for his work is
only that of fishing up the turtle from the pool. He does not bother
about the troubles of schooners. His is pretty work, filled to
overflowing with dangerous possibilities. Still there are compensations.
The feeding of the turtle is employment entailing the expenditure of
very little bodily exertion; the thrusting of a few heaps of weed
through a loose board; and the fishing comes but seldom, once a week
perhaps, or once in two weeks. And, after all, a little danger is a good
thing for a man who must swagger before his women folk as one in
authority over more than a hundred turtle.

He will invite you to the fishing with all the joy of a young child
conscious of an audience before whom he knows he can carry himself with
distinction. First he strips in the full glare of noonday, and glories
in the exhibition of his nudity. “I go among all those savage fishes
with no knife, no, not even a gun,” he will tell you. Though why a gun
should be mentioned I cannot imagine, since his work is under water. He
strides to the loose board with the air of an African chieftain in his
village among his women and little children. And after all some
weakness, if weakness it be, is permissible in a man who has to play a
man’s part in the fullest meaning of the phrase.

With a single rope in his left hand he falls, feet first, into the pool,
in which the turtle are jostling each other for room. He disappears
absolutely; the surface of the pool is bare save for the half hidden
shells of a group of the turtle. After two minutes, it may be a little
less or perhaps a few seconds more, the man’s head reappears, and he
shouts to his watching mates the order to pull. They haul at the rope
the other end of which sank with the man, the fisher meanwhile floating
quietly and keeping a bright look out for the snapping heads of the
beasts he could not avoid disturbing. The result of the hauling shows
the white belly of a turtle as it is hoisted upwards, head first, out of
the water. The noise of the heavy sighs, and the heavier noise of the
sighing chorus in the pool, disturbs the whole jetty. Blood comes on the
giant fins in the places where they touch the back shell. First the
thrust head appears above the boarding, a head which at once resembles
the face of a flat-nosed snake and the top of a mammoth branch of
asparagus. The eyes roll like a drunken man to whom the shame of his
drunkenness has suddenly become apparent. Then come the flapping fins,
the broad white belly, and lastly the other fins. Then two hundred
pounds of soup flesh is flung upwards and crashed on to its hard back
shell; the rope which encircled its breast just below the fore fins is
unloosed, and the poor beast is left to sigh and flap and shake in
peace. It is almost impossible for a turtle to regain its legs once it
has been turned fairly on its back. Then the fishing game begins afresh.

I saw just one hundred fish brought to light in this manner. One beast
turned the scale at three hundred pounds. He was the giant of his tribe,
and he showed his high breeding when the time came for his uplifting.
All his fins flapped blood at each stroke and his sighing resembled the
noise of a young cow who has lost her first calf.

[Illustration: NIGHT, ANOTTA BAY, JAMAICA]




THE WOMEN OF WILD MAN STREET




CHAPTER VIII

THE WOMEN OF WILD MAN STREET


Wild Man Street is the central place of Jamaican gaiety. In the day-time
it seems an ordinary street, white in the roadway and green in its walls
of painted houses. The evening shadows blacken the place into an abode
of infamy.

We drove there through the wild scents of a tropic night. The bejewelled
skies sparkled no brighter than the flashing insects; the fresh sea
breeze struggled in vain to kill the half Eastern scents of the garden
flowers and aromatic woods. The singing of the insects made music which
the soft air translated into a sweet lullaby. As you drive to the town
of Kingston, the noises and the scents become more and more suggestive
of the East. The place might be Ceylon, Yokohama, or Hong Kong. We were
to see a bungalow which might be found with equal ease in the byways of
any of these places; the difference existing only in the skins and
tongues of the women. The place was larger than an ordinary house of the
working people; the gaining of fugitive wealth is the only compensation
looked for by the Jamaican dancing women.

The reception room was fitted with cheap muslins and common bamboo
furniture. The stained wood floor was relieved in patches by tiny
squares of matting or cheap imitations of the carpets of Turkey. Several
of the rickety tables supported brass ash trays in which cheap and
evil-smelling pastils smouldered unhealthily, half drowning the odour of
the scents the women used. With finger rings made of silver, flashing
with lack lustre glass or paste; arms and necks encircled with coral or
cheap pearl bands, the women, gowned in flowing robes of white or
yellow, listlessly sustained a difficult part. It is difficult for a gay
woman to appear gay without the aid of strong liquors. This place is one
of the houses where the women dance only at the bidding of white men,
the black man is not a welcome guest. The women call themselves white;
really they are brown or yellow or nearly black. They use powder freely,
and cheap rouge also. The effect is awful; a black man in war streaks of
white or vermilion is not more hideous; they speak the pigeon English of
an affected Eurasian, with a tincture of the sing-song drawl of an
educated negro. To these women all the other natives of Jamaica are
coloured. They speak of the England they have never seen as home. White
men are “chaps” or “felhers”; whisky is their drink, and they suggest
with proud frankness that they are the daughters of great white men. But
coloured people, especially coloured people of this class, are not
infallible. We gave them money, which they received with the grace of a
dissatisfied four-wheel cab driver,

[Illustration: A COLOURED GIRL]

but they produced liquor and became animated. White teeth flashed and
the accent became more coloured and so more natural. It was not pretty
talk, and it was lacking in the elements of refinement. The gaiety of
the women of this class always seems forced. As they talked and
gesticulated the paint and powder flaked off their cheeks as whitewash
scales off a crumpled ceiling. They lost their reserve and found
abandon. One, of uncertain age but decided embonpoint, took up a
mandoline, which was well varnished and hung with ribbons, but badly
tuned, and sang a song. The words were indistinct; the title of the song
I never knew; the tune I am glad to have forgotten.

The doors were closed and window shutters drawn; the unholy stench of
the pastils filled the room with suffocating smoke; it was as though
these women acted their parts and had obtained cheap properties and
mismanaged scenic effects. The amusement of the place, if it existed at
all, was colourless in the extreme. The dancing we did not see. So we
left the place and found the sweet-smelling night breeze.

If it is possible to find a place in which the stupefying smoke of a
burning pastil is not altogether bad, I would suggest that that place
might be a hall in which black people are dancing the dignity dance. To
the white man the negro is not without a curious odour, which seems to
get more powerful when the black man takes violent exercise. Picture a
room, bare as a barn, painted light blue, and filled to overflowing with
people of all shades of colour, from ebony to dark walnut. Though the
window shutters are half open the light night breeze is too delicate to
cool all the people in a room whose temperature must be above one
hundred degrees. Arranged in couples the dancers are executing most
weird and complicated antics--some with a certain degree of grace and
rhythm--to the noise of a band of three tired musicians. Probably the
dancing would be more regular if the music were abolished. If the three
men were playing the same tune, each had learned the piece in different
time, and was playing his hardest in order to show the others how the
thing should really run. However the dancers did not mind, so the
spectator had no right to grumble. The dancing waxed more furious, and
the lagging music raced to keep pace with the spirit of the dancers. The
more excited of the twirling crowd began to chant a weird chorus; the
words seemed to be entirely impromptu, the melody was monotonous, and
somehow it reminded me of the muffled sound of a band of tom-toms. The
dignity dance itself, if it has any set arrangement at all, is something
like the visiting and the grand chain in our lancers. The dancers,
twirling in couples at most giddy speed, frequently separated, and the
men in a long line approached the women, who in turn retired. When the
wall is reached the men retire, and the women do the advancing. A sudden
bang on the part of the orchestra, and a shout by the eager dancers, is
the signal for the breaking of the lines; and the men snatch their
partners and twirl more giddy circles. Interesting as the dancing was it
could not be called either fascinating or unique. Save for the coloured
skin of the dancers, and the curious odour of the room, a similar scene
can be witnessed in any European ballroom. From the dignity ballroom we
went to a concert hall where all the performers were coloured and all
the audience jet black. The performers seemed to enjoy the entertainment
most of all.

The songs were delivered in European concert fashion, and they were
mostly well known ballads:--“Robin Adair,” “I dreamt that I dwelt in
Marble Halls,” and other old airs of that description. It was not an
interesting performance. But the audience applauded everything, they
encored everyone, and when a reciter appeared and gave a rendering of
Hamlet by “Mr. William Shakespeare” members of the audience could
scarcely contain themselves. It was a bad recitation, but I fancy the
people in the body of the hall had paid their entrance money and were
determined to make the best of the business. Certainly they seemed to
like hearing themselves shout. We asked a supercilious half-breed, who
wore an evening suit and a crimson necktie, where we could hear some
native singing.

“If,” said he, “you refer to the songs of the negroes, I can only
indicate the low rum shops, and even there it is not permitted.”

Evidently his opinion of the musical abilities of the black man was not
a high one. However we accepted his advice and journeyed to the rum
shops.

In the architecture of their drinking saloons, as in nearly everything
else, the Jamaicans have imitated New York rather than London. You enter
a swing door and discover a long room fitted with a serving counter, and
otherwise bare of furniture. A man presides over the rum bottles, and
the drinkers are mostly negroes of the richer class; small shopkeepers,
clerks, buggymen, and adventurers. We put our heads in the doors of many
of the drinking shops but we never heard the native music.

We had to be content with a pilgrimage through the deserted streets of
the capital. Save for a few buggies and now and then a noisy road car,
Kingston was almost deserted. At some of the street corners groups of
men were engaged in violent conversation, and occasionally we saw a
policeman; otherwise the empty pavements echoed only the noise of our
walking. There are no theatres in Jamaica, and all the wealthier people
live in the distant suburbs. The poorer black men who live in the side
streets of the town have to be up betimes, so they do not waste their
strength by keeping up late at night. It is a cold and a deathly place
at night, this little town of Kingston. No shop keeps open after dark;
no lights appear in the windows of the houses; no crowds of people
promenade the High Street, and jostle each other in friendly rivalry.

Occasionally when passing a house we heard the echo of laughter, and
sometimes merry noise of music, but as a rule the homes were dark and
silent. It seemed a decayed, deserted city; a place from which all
people had fled.

[Illustration: A SOLDIER OF THE WEST INDIAN REGIMENT]




THE WEST INDIAN ARMY




CHAPTER IX

THE WEST INDIAN ARMY


In Jamaica the Army is mainly considered as a prop to society. Among the
whites the officers are in great request as dancing men, players at the
game of tennis and possible husbands for fair daughters. Among the
blacks the same applies to the coloured Tommy, except that there is no
tennis. The West Indian regiments have seen service, and have proved
their metal as fighting men in various parts of Africa. The West Indian
Colonels are as proud of their black regiments as any commander of any
white battalion of the line. But the languorous atmosphere of Jamaica
does not suggest strife; so, the tendency among Jamaicans, high and low,
rich and poor, is to regard the military as purely social people. When
the Governor is one guest short at a dinner or luncheon or tennis
function, an officer is requisitioned from the nearest garrison or camp.
When Mama is hard up for men at one of her select dances, the subaltern
receives a dainty invitation.

In the day-time the young West Indian Army officer gets through his
early morning work as quickly as possible, and then scrambles,
schoolboy fashion, into the playing fields. Drill is over by midday, and
then the uniform (khaki and sun helmet) is flung aside for cool flannels
or polo breeches. From midday until four the hours must be spent inside
a house, away from the sun. So after luncheon it is forty winks, or
cards or a game of pool. Then, when the full heat of the sun has
smouldered into the early evening glow, the games begin. Polo, cricket,
tennis, or golf; these are the first favourites. A few will take a spin
on a fast pony; others, it may be, will sail across Kingston Bay and
take a surf bath among the palisadoes. But for the majority it is either
polo, cricket, tennis, or golf. Golf for seniors, polo for the young
subaltern newly joined, tennis for the older captains, and cricket for
full lieutenants. The two hours between four and six mark the playtime
for the Jamaican Army. After six the clubhouses or mess smokerooms
tinkle with the music of many glasses, as the young officers refresh
themselves after two hours’ work in a climate marking well above 100° on
the thermometer. An hour with pipes and comrades over the friendly
glass, and then a bath and dinner. After dinner the officer becomes the
social animal, and the messroom and barrack-yard know him no more till
midnight. That is the life of the Army officer. It is rather dull and a
little monotonous; but the young men make the most of it and meanwhile
pray for leave and England.

With the Colonial Tommy it is different. He works at his drill or
musketry and then, at midday,

[Illustration: A TROPICAL LANDSCAPE NEAR CASTLETON]

dines. If he can he gets off for the afternoon; then he lounges into
Kingston and plumes himself on the side walks to the admiration of the
black and yellow girls. No sun has any terrors for your true West Indian
soldier. His skull is thick enough even without the protection of his
smart undress cap. His amusement is similar to that of an English Tommy
in any garrison town, except that he does not drink so much. He is the
idol of the populace; especially on the afternoon of the Sabbath, when,
after Church is over, he is permitted to parade at large in the
brilliant full-dress uniform of his regiment. Scarlet and yellow or
scarlet and white, zouave jackets, and white or yellow spats, his get up
is that of a French Zouave West Indianised; and he is the King of
feminine Jamaica. He is popular among men and women alike, since the
civilian men are conscious of a reflected grandeur when in company with
a soldier in full dress. A military comrade helps them with the women,
just as one returned yeoman peopled a smokeroom with heroes during our
South African War. The black Tommy is paid his shilling a day, just as
though he were a redcoated white man. He was recruited in some West
Indian island, or in Western Africa in the district Sierra Leone,--he
cares not where, for now his home is the cool barrack-room,--and he is
quite content to stand before a few thousand people as a soldier of the
King. Generally he has at least one silver medal to show that he has
heard the music of the Martini fired in anger. He has fought savage
races in lands where a white man has no right to go, and he knows that
he has his value. He is not jealous of the draft of the white British
regiment which, for some unknown reason, is always to be found in the
hills somewhere about Newcastle; he is not jealous because he is too
conscious of superiority. Could a white regiment have marched in the
full glare of the noon sun through Ashanti and not dropped a man? Could
a white man pierce jungle and fight through malarious tangled
undergrowth, wading slimy swamps, swimming rushing rivers, and live? Can
any company of white soldiers march with the swing of a West Indian
Regiment when the black pipers shriek the quick-step?

When the white men think they can, and say so, then West India rises by
half companies and ties service razors on stout sticks of ebony, and
there is riot in the land of perpetual sunshine. Black men are mauled
with heavy belts in the fashion of the British Infantry, and white men
stagger home gashed with razor cuts and faint for lack of blood. When
the civil war is over, each side, conscious of victory, willingly
forgives and for several months forgets. Then peace is found among the
huts at Newcastle, and sweet peace amidst the tents of the plains.

The black troops insist that it is necessary that their women should be
treated with respect, even deference, by their white brothers in arms.
This the white Tommy has not yet learned to do. Possibly the lesson is
difficult owing to the infinite extent of the acquaintanceship with
feminine Jamaica peculiar to the West Indian regiments. Every lady is a
friend of some soldier’s friend, if she is not his sister, aunt, wife,
or mother. So trouble sometimes springs from this source. Then it is out
belts and razors until the officers intervene. Shots have been fired,
but this is unusual. And the result of the court-martial offers no
encouragement to would-be marksmen. As a rule the Tommies, black and
white, mix and fraternise as well as may be expected. Each has a large
respect, well mixed with a great contempt, for his alien brother. Each
serves the same white King whose dominion over all the earth is
unquestioned. The King is the common sentiment to which hangs the
brotherhood of the British soldiers, white and black.

On the other hand the Jamaican police are not popular with the people of
the island. The uniform they wear is not sufficiently striking; there is
no great blaze of colour--no suggestion of power or rank or beauty. A
plain white tunic and dark blue trousers with a red stripe, a simple
white helmet and plain black leather boots, make up the uniform of the
Constabulary. It is impossible for a negro to respect such a costume, or
to be proud of a police so uniformed. So the people have come to look
upon the policemen as workers; men made for use, and not turned out for
the sake of ornamenting a town already bright and picturesque enough.
And it may be that this is the reason why the Jamaican constable is
regarded as a judicial potentate--a man whose word is law--a person to
be avoided, even feared. The presence of a policeman stops the noisy
jabber or a street crowd of fruit-sellers; his approach melts a group
of excited quarrellers; his uplifted hand stems the tide of rushing
traffic--just as it is in England. The police are efficient and
unpopular. The constable alone among the inhabitants of Kingston does
not lounge and laugh and chatter. If he smiles it is with an air of
conscious superiority. The mouths of the men are curved downwards in the
form of a perpetual sneer. The law cannot be merry; the limbs of the law
may not be humanly happy.

The Jamaican police force is well organised and very efficient. There
are inspectors and sub-inspectors, staff-sergeants and sergeants and
constables, and above all one white Chief. Most of the senior officers
are white men; the rank and file are black and brown, and yellow and
dusky white. It is on the rank and file that the work of Government
falls. A plain constable in Jamaica is a far more powerful man than any
white-gloved, long-sworded police inspector in England. Every regulation
beat in the island of rivers is a courthouse, presided over by an
impartial and all powerful policeman-judge. Fifty times a day he will be
called upon to arbitrate in matters of great delicacy. It may be that
there is a doubt in the minds of two women as to the ownership of a
valuable article of diet or furniture. The policeman weighs the evidence
of witnesses and pronounces judgment. He will, in cases of real
necessity, administer the oath to people whose mere word is open to
doubt, and he makes people swear, Scotch fashion, with uplifted hands.

Round such street-corner courts small crowds are allowed to congregate,
and respectfully listen to the words of one whose knowledge of
police-court ritual stands him in good stead. I have heard a policeman
restore to a woman that good name which the jealousy of a chattering
neighbour had flung to the four winds; the same man afterwards settled a
knotty point in regard to the freshness of a heap of fish which a
despondent purchaser pleaded were bad. This was a serious case; the
constable smelt the fish and handled them with the reverence of an usher
for a barrister’s brief bag. In this instance the judgment of the
constable gave satisfaction to one man and made him unpopular with a
crowd. It was openly suggested that he had received a promise of largess
from the man whose case he upheld. As a body the force has a
Spartan-like love for unpopularity, born of the exhibition of unbending
power in performing their illegal office of judge and jury. I once
toured the side streets of the city with a pompous black sergeant who
obviously knew the town only from the kerbstone to the railing. The
Jamaica police have no eyes that see through brick walls. They have a
love for intrigue, but lack the capacity of meeting cunning with
detective craft. If a thing is to be seen with the naked eye they see it
well enough; but, as a rule, they have no imagination and no power of
working up theories. Sherlock Holmes would have been a chemist only had
he been born a negro.

Every constable seems to imagine that, socially and politically, he is
far above the ordinary inhabitant. He feels towards his coloured
brethren in about the same way as a cavalry colonel feels towards a
newly-joined militia private. Between a member of the constabulary force
and an ordinary person there can be no close friendship. The black
policeman lives in a atmosphere of the police court, and seems always to
regard every member of the public as a possible prisoner and a certain
criminal. Really in his heart I think he feels the bitterness of his
exalted loneliness. He inwardly regrets the necessity of his aloofness
from human pleasures. He would probably prefer to be a soldier. This he
will never admit, even to himself. But, I repeat, probably he would
prefer to be a soldier of the line. The uniform is better; it is far
more picturesque. And the men of the West Indian Regiments combine
dignity and popularity in a manner entirely mystifying to the Jamaican
police. Besides, the brilliant-soldier companies march down the high
road to the music of pipes and drums, and the weary constable has to
stand by and see that the road is clear. The soldier is a picturesque
hero; the police constable is--a constable of justice and nothing
more.

[Illustration: OUTSIDE A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE]




A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE




CHAPTER X

A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE


A square room painted white and fitted with dull red benches and a
raised platform; on the platform the magistrate, a weary-looking man
with faded hair and wrinkled face, and eyes screened by gold-rimmed
spectacles. As he sits, listlessly playing with his papers, apparently
indifferent to the pleadings of the prisoners, or the garrulous
stormings of nervous witnesses, he seems to suggest a tired speculator
reading the first official details of his own bankruptcy. Occasionally
he raises his voice and a hushed court hears, “All right, get down now,”
and a witness, only just sufficiently recovered from nervousness to have
reached the period of unintelligible verbosity, gets down with a sulky
jerk and proud bearing. All Jamaican negroes speak a language officially
known as English. From the fact that it is alleged that he can
understand the unbroken flow of their fearful eloquence, the magistrate
must be counted a man of consummate linguistic ability. In front of the
platform is a huge table, at which all the whites and yellow-whites of
the district are foregathered to witness the administration of justice.
At the head of the table, and at the feet of the magistrate, is the
clerk; an ancient man with the remains of a weak voice, and a habit of
looking over his steel eye-glasses in the approved scholastic style. He
is an important, if not a picturesque personage. The decorative touch is
afforded to the court by the appearance of the inspector of police. He
sits at another corner of the large table behind a great white helmet
carefully placed on the summit of a large pile of important blue papers,
in the proper crown and cushion fashion. The helmet is the police
inspector’s shield and guard, and badge of office. It is an inflexible
example of the power and nobility of the law; it is an object on which
the prisoners may fasten their eyes, should they be unable to gaze for
ever into the inscrutable depths of the spectacles of the presiding
magistrate. Compared with the magistrate, the clerk and the inspector of
police, the other whites and yellow-whites are unimportant. Planters and
tradesmen, and commission agents, they lounge gracelessly round the
table, fingering their riding whips or pulling at the ends of their
scrubby beards. The table marks the boundary line of the charmed circle,
into which only the whites, and the not very yellow-whites, may enter
with impunity. Beyond, in the public benches, grouped carelessly in
picturesque disorder, are the natives. A sweltering crowd it is,
throbbing with silence, just as the tropical midday throbs with heat.
The prisoner at the bar, a ragged, unkempt negro, whose cleaner father
must have come from the malarial swamps behind the Gold Coast, is
answering to a charge of stealing, feloniously and with malicious
intent, one and a half pairs of meat known and described (in Jamaica and
elsewhere) as pig’s trotters. As we entered, the prisoner at the bar was
tearing at the mangy patches of his mud-coloured hair, and pleading “I
no took them master, sir, yer honor, I no took them; I ask to be set
free. I no see them, I no eat them, ’fore God in ’eaven.”

It was interesting to watch the varied emotions playing over the
expressive faces of the watching crowd of the man’s enemies and friends.
Enemies first, because the natives seemed as cruelly thoughtless, and
quite as vicious, as the ladies in any balcony at a Spanish bull-ring.
When the monotonous mumble of the magistrate has finished, only the
pleased smile of the prisoner told us the news of his acquittal. To the
unexperienced ear, the magistrate’s mumble was just as incomprehensible
as any of the jargon of the witnesses themselves.

The next two or three cases were concerned with the question of
paternity, and in each instance the plaintive lady received the
consolation of eighteen-pence a week for a period of years. Then
followed a charge of assault. One lady had beaten another with an
implement remotely resembling a carpenter’s stool. On each side there
were many witnesses and, apparently, many liars. One coquette in a West
Indian gown of yellow, green, blue, and pink, ventured to repeat to the
court some of the vulgar abuse which, in her opinion, contributed to,
and completely justified, the assault referred to. Hers was an eloquent
and ingenious pleading. First, she swore before God and Heaven that the
assault was not an assault at all, “Ester did not lay a finger on the
woman”; then she justified the assault in language which stirred even
the lethargic magistrate. “Such language will do your friend no good; it
only serves to show that you are a low abandoned woman"--he ventured to
remark in a low, even monotone.

“So’s she, she is low and abandoned too; she is ... and she said"....
The woman was on her metal, and desired above all things to incriminate
the enemy of her friend.

In the end someone was fined eight shillings and costs. Who it was I
never knew; but my impression is that it was either a witness or the
police constable.

Two young and innocent-looking boys were charged by a one-legged baker
with stealing a loaf, value one penny. The baker was evidently a man of
parts, one of which was religion. He kissed the book with a vivacious
reverence and commenced, “Your Honour and gentlemen:--Them two boys
Simon Fogarty and Thomas Smiff was in my bakery on the pretence of
executing a purchase. I ask them to lift a board in order that I may
take up bread enough to supply them. They become impertinent. I rebuke
them. They only laugh and say I too much fool. I again rebuke them, and
then I get over the counter in order to chastise them. They fly; but I
seize one, Simon

[Illustration: A NEGRO NURSE WITH CHINESE CHILDREN, JAMAICA]

Fogarty, and he struggle so hard that I oblige to call in the aid of
Constable Perkin, who shall come before your Honour and say I speak the
truth only. When I go back to my shop I find that one loaf had gone. I
run into the street and see Thomas Smiff with my loaf to his lips. I
call witness to see him also, and they tell you how the wicked boy, who
is the pest of the street, eat my loaf for which I receive no payment.”
The police constable confirmed the baker’s statement, and the magistrate
looked bored to extinction. It is just the police court in which that
ancient suburban drama “Black justice” might be performed with
propriety.

In spite of the eloquence of the baker and the accurate testimony of the
police constable, those boys might have been let off with a caution;
but, just as justice was looking its weakest, the police inspector rose,
and, placing one hand gracefully upon the summit of his helmet,
addressed the court.

“May I venture to say that those boys are the most incorrigible rascals
in the district. They do no work; they are dirty, lazy, and a terror to
the neighbourhood. They give more trouble to the police than any other
man or woman on the island.” The quality of mercy is immediately
strained, and although the pardon flows out (mainly because the baker
requests it) the dregs remain in a sentence to come up for judgment when
called upon to do so.

The boys jointly attempt to hide a wide and intelligent grin behind the
battered remains of what must once have been a felt hat.

And so the court goes on.

The merry hum of the day insects mingles with the shrill tones of
singing birds, and the chatter of anxious litigants in the yard below.
The magistrate continues his anxious calculations, and the clerk is
assiduous in his endeavours to balance a pair of rusty pince-nez on a
nose obviously too slippery with sweat. The police inspector frowns
round the room from behind the majestic screen of his helmet, and the
black usher shouts silence, or swears a witness after the usual caution
of “Take se bible in you righ’ ’and"....

[Illustration: TROPICAL RAIN]




THE MILITARY CAMP AT NEWCASTLE




CHAPTER XI

THE MILITARY CAMP AT NEWCASTLE


In the streets of Kingston I had frequently seen companies of one or
other of the brilliant West Indian Regiments swinging along to the music
of their drums, and on dance and dinner nights I had noticed Artillery
officers lounging about the terraces of my hotel. I had seen a couple of
Service Corps men trying their polo ponies, and afar off, among a
sparkling group of bejewelled women, I once caught sight of a glittering
aide-de-camp. But of our friend Tommy of the line I had seen nothing. A
friendly Artilleryman assured me that some of the British Line were on
the island. I met him in the Kingston High Street, and he pointed
towards the mountain chain which overhangs the town. “They’re up there,”
he said. Following his direction, I saw a few white specks faintly
showing through the summit haze of a mountain peak. The white specks, I
discovered, were the cantonments of Newcastle, the military hill station
of Jamaica.

The next morning we started at nine, and drove along shaded lanes and
dusty, open roads, flanked by gardens and plantations, banana trees,
pines, and cocoanuts. Around us the air was transparently clear, above
us a sky of the deepest blue, and everywhere--above, below and
around--we felt the sun. For two miles we had the level road, and then
we reached the mountains.

A rushing mountain torrent crashing through a deep chasm filled almost
to the brim with giant boulders, on which trees and plants and creeping
flowers had found abundant soil; a road twisting like a tangled thread
up and along the face of the mountain, and then lost in the mists of the
summit; a heavy scent of tropical flowers; a vast sea of flashing
colour--these things marked the beginning of the mountains. Slowly we
crawled along a road just wide enough to contain our buggy. On one side
the mountain walled us in; on the other a precipice deepened as we
ascended. The valley below and the walls around were clothed in yellow
grass and thickly set with trees; cotton and pine and cocoanut, banana,
orange, and a hundred others grew in clumps and groves and lines, just
as their father-seed had fallen or casual native had chanced to plant.
Sometimes we passed a mile or so of level stretch, and there we found
plantations and nigger huts. Below us we could see coffee mills and
sugar estates; halfway up another peak a little church appeared amidst a
tiny hamlet; but far above we made out Newcastle and the upper heights,
bare and frowning amidst the gloom of the mountain mists. Soon the
climate changed. In place of fruit and flowers, we found brown scrub and
English gorse. Rainbows became common as trees. Then the sun
disappeared,

[Illustration: A HOUSE ON THE HILLS]

and we found the clammy rain-mist. Somehow we had slipped away from
joyous sun-kissed Jamaica and found Newcastle.

If I were a soldier I should pray all day long that I might never see
the military station at Newcastle. Imagine a small parade-ground,
levelled by spade work; a straggling collection of huts, built on
never-ending steps; a few cottages for the officers; a very obvious
burial-ground, well stocked with tombstones streaked with names, planted
among the huts just outside the reading-room, and you have the
cantonments of Newcastle. On the parade-ground, half a yard from the
face of a step of rock thirty feet high, a couple of posts and a tape
enable the sporting Tommy to practise goal shooting from dawn till
sunset. Failing this he has half-a-dozen six-week old English newspapers
in the reading-room, and a magnificent view of Kingston always to be
seen through the mists and rain which seem for ever to bedim this eerie
camp. The officers, I believe, have a tennis-court; but for Tommy it is
shooting the goal, the newspapers, or the view, if he wishes to avoid
the cells. Otherwise----

I heard the story from Tommy himself. He showed us the camp; first the
burial-ground, and then--“Well there ain’t much more to see ’ere. That’s
the parade-ground, and that’s the sergeants’ mess. We sleeps over there,
and bein’ Sunday, the canteen don’t open to-day till six. We usually
shoots the goal, and smokes, and sometimes we rags the blacks. See that
nigger ’ut? Well, we goes there sometimes--of course, it’s out’er
bounds--and takes the beer and rags the blacks. Once we chucked three
or four of ’em over the gully because they set on one of ours. There’s
one or two in cells now for molestin’ the natives. Then some of us
deserts, you know. Goes off down to the coast, ships as firemen and gets
to the States. I ’aven’t done that yet. Don’t know why we come up ’ere;
there ain’t no fever nowhere now....” It was a long and interesting
description he gave us. I gathered that in spite of the parade-ground
and kicking the goal; in spite of the reading-room, with its platform
and soldier-painted scenery; in spite even of the tiny billiard-table
and the picturesque cemetery, the life of Tommy in garrison at Newcastle
is not a jolly one. Tired of doing the things he is allowed to do, and
without the means to appreciate expensive joys of the canteen, the
youthful, full-blooded soldier sallies forth on mischief bent. Then he
experiences a salutary change of scenery in the confines of the cells.
Sometimes, as our friend remarked, he deserts.

Every year for many weary months a few hundred Tommies do these things
in Newcastle. Kingston and the plains are peopled by tourists in search
of health and pleasure; the climate of the island is entirely
salubrious; Jamaica is a recognised sanatorium; but the Government says
that the British soldier must live in the Hill station so many months of
the year. It is a ridiculous story, something in the nature of a
repetition of the blunders of fifty years ago. Then the British
regiments were sent to garrison Fort Augusta, a camp delightfully
situated in the midst of a deadly swamp. From Fort Augusta the military
authorities jumped to Newcastle. Fifty years hence these gentlemen may
realise that the plains of Jamaica are perfectly healthy, and that
Newcastle is really a little dull; until then--poor Tommy.

Newcastle is not unhealthy: it is merely a little damp and a little
dull. From the point of view of the tourist it is magnificent. The
romantic grandeur of the giant mountain chains stretching east and west;
the wonderful view of town and harbour; the marvellous colour effects;
the cathedral-like solemnity of the place--all these things are
delightful in the extreme. But I turned my back on the place without
regret. For I remembered that far below the valleys were bathed in light
and warmth and colour. I knew that halfway down the mountain I should
find the orange, the passion flower, and the scented air of the tropics.
And I was glad when the horses bumped us along the path which zigzagged
downwards through the clouds to the land of sunshine.

[Illustration: GOING TO WORK, BARBADOES]




THE RECREATIONS OF THE BLACK MAN




CHAPTER XII

THE RECREATIONS OF THE BLACK MAN


Foremost in the list of a negro’s recreations should be placed the game
of love. The black man makes love with the persistency of a Don Juan and
with the fervour of a Mexican. He learns his first lessons in courtship
long before the school-day age is over. Every boy of twelve has his
honey girl, just as every coloured man of sixteen has his wife. There is
an Arcadian touch in their love meetings--a fascinating rhythm of
sensuous art in their songs of passion. The concert platforms and music
halls of London have reflected, not incorrectly, many negro love
stories; and the large straw hats and white pants and extravagant
phraseology may be counted as roughly typical of the costume and poetry
of Jamaica. The negro makes love with the natural freedom of a savage,
but the Jamaican negro tempers his love-making with poetic entreaty. I
can imagine that the Jamaican loves to hear the sonorous doggerel of his
own ecstatic wooing--that he pleads with his mistress as much for his
own pleasure as for hers. The black lady listens, and loves to listen,
because his extravagant praise appeals to her vanity, and the black
lady is as vain as any white daughter of a rich “buccra.” It may come as
a shock and surprise to most of my readers to learn that the love-sick
black man sometimes declares his love by letter. Whether this is always
due to bashfulness or to the accident of geographical distance, I know
not. But I have been privileged to read one or two impassioned missives
duly authenticated as being the love letters of coloured men to dusky
belles. They are interesting enough for reproduction here. I obtained
them from a copy of a Christmas number of a Jamaican paper--the
_Gleaner_ of Kingston.

The first is written by a love-sick native to a Creole widow. It is
addressed in full to

     “MRS. AGOSTISS R---- .

     “I hope you know Valintine is now in season. I will take the
     pleasure to write you this; my hearth is yours and you are mine,
     but do you know it. I love you as the bee love the flower. The
     flower may fade, but true love shall never. My love for you is a
     love that cannot be fade. You shall be my love here as in heaven
     for ever. The Rose in June is not so sweet as when two lovers’
     kisses meet. Kiss me quick and be my honey. I still remain true
     lover,

                                                “JAMES.”



James is an honest and prosperous black man in the mountains of Jamaica.
It is pleasant to know that “Mrs. Agostiss” listened to his simple
appeal and became “his honey.”

The second epistle has a religious flavour. King Solomon is artfully
brought forward as a sort of “backer” of the ardent writer’s suit:--

     “MY DEAR LOVE--At present my love for you is so strong that I
     cannot express. So I even write that you may see it. It is every
     man deauty to write a formil letter.

     “My pen is bad and my ink is pale, but my love will never fail.
     King Solomon say that Love is strong as death, and Jealousy is
     cruel than the grave. Love me little, bear me longer; hasty love is
     not love at all. This is the first time I sat down to write you
     about it.

     “I love my Dove. Your love is black and ruby--the chefer of ten
     thousand. You head is much fine gold. You lock are bushy and black
     as a raven. Your eyes was the eyes in the river, by the rivers of
     water. Your cheeks as a bead (_i.e._ bed) of spices as sweet
     flowers. Your lips is like lilies. You hand as gold wring. Your
     legs as a pillar of marble set upon sockets of fine gold. Your
     countenance as a Lebanon. Your mouth look to be more sweet. Your
     sweet altogether.

     “I have no more time to write as I am so tired and full time to go
     to bead. I will now close my letter with love.”

Poor “Garg Plummer” is in a desperate plight indeed. It is to be hoped
that his “dear lov” listened to his strong entreaty. But it could not be
otherwise. What human woman could resist the following:--

     “DEAR LOV--I is wrote you a letter to beg of you to make me your
     lover, but you is not wrote me again. I is dead of love every day
     wen you look so hansom I cane (_i.e._ cannot) sleep, cane eat. I
     dun no how I feel. I beg you to accep af me as your lover. The rose
     is not sweet as a kiss from you, my lov.

     “Do meet me to-night at the bottom gate an give me you love. Miss
     Lucy toots (_i.e._ teeth) so green I is like one ear of earn, an
     her eye dem is so pretty. Lard! I wish I never been born. Poor me,
     Garg (_i.e._ George), I lov Miss Lucy to distraction. Yours truly,

                                                “GARG PLUMMER.

     “Answer me sone lov.”

The fourth letter I reprint simply to show how a little greed may kill
all the romance of a negro’s love. We trace an artificiality in his love
passages. It is hoped that his note produced nothing but a silent
contempt:--

     “I writ to hear from you wether you intend to make me a fool. I is
     not a puppy show that you think you find any better than me. i
     witch (wish) to send the yam bed for plantin in your garden, but i
     do not know wether i will reap the benefit of it.”

Number five is honest but unhappy. He is filled with forebodings of
evil. The green-eyed monster has claimed him as his very own:--

     “MY DEAR JEMIMA--I has not heard from you for dis 2 weeks gorn. Has
     you forgot de day wen

[Illustration: ROSIE, A JAMAICAN NEGRESS]

     you mek me promise to be my true luv? You must know dat I has heard
     a lot of tings about you which has been sorely disappoint me in
     you.

     “I have heard dat you stan at your gate and talk to a fine dress
     coachman. I have heard dat you go to church wid him. I have heard
     dat you am promise to me but you luv him.

                                                GEORGE.

     “Many kisses me sweet luv.”

The sixth, and last, is a jumble of incomprehensible passion. No doubt
the writer knew what he meant, and perhaps the lady was able to
interpret the author’s meaning. But I do not know whether the average
reader will gain much by reading:--

     “DEAR ELIZA--I take the liberty of myself to inform you this few
     lines, hoping you may not offend (_i.e._ be offended), as often is.
     I had often seen you in my hearts. There are myriads of loveliness
     in my hearts toward you. My loving intentions were really unto
     another female, but now the love between I and she are very out now
     entirely.

     “And now his the excepted time I find to explain to my lovely
     appearance, but whether if their be any love in your hearts or mind
     towards me it is hard for I to know, but his I take this liberty to
     inform you this kind, loving, and affectionate letter.

     “I hope when it received into your hand you receive with peace and
     all goodwill, pleasure, and comforts, and hoping that you might
     ansure me from this letter with a loving appearance, that in due
     time Boath of us might be able to join together in the holy state
     of matremony.

     “I hoping that the answer which you are to send to me it may unto
     good intention to me from you that when I always goine to write you
     again I may be able to write saying, my dear, lovely Eliza.

     “Your affectionate lover, affraied (_i.e._ afraid), J.S.

     “Dear Eliza, wether if you are willing or not, Please to sent me an
     ansure back. Do my dear.”

So much for the black man’s love letters.

For an accurate picture of the love scenes you must visit the island of
rivers and take your place in one of those quiet corners of the banana
field, and wait for George and Jemima, or James and Mrs. Agostiss R----.
I cannot describe the scene. Go to Jamaica and see it for yourself. It
is enough that I have made public the love letters of six men I have
never seen; I will not attempt to deal with the meeting and courting of
a black man and his sweetheart, lest, unconsciously, I should travesty a
fine poem.

The scenes of the love meetings of the natives of Jamaica are always
framed in a rich setting of tropical moonlight, or waving palm trees and
flashing fire-flies.

If a negro lover could not be eloquent in the midst of such rare beauty
he would be unworthy of the name of man.

Next to love-making, eating and drinking, and then dancing may be
counted the recreations of the Jamaican coloured gentleman. Though it
cannot with justice be stated that the negro is an excessively large
eater, the manner in which he takes his food evidences the keen
enjoyment he gets from every meal. There is no question of lack of
appetite in a negro when feeding time arrives. Whether the dish before
him be fruit or salt fish, or mashed vegetables cooked with fat, the
diner attacks his food with the utmost relish. There is great licking of
lips, rolling of eyes and heavy munching by strong jaws. Give a negro a
meat bone, and when he has done with it the fragments that remain would
not be of the slightest service to the hungriest dog. When the native
has finished his dish of vegetables he cleans the plate with his fingers
and tongue. There is no food wasted in the land of eternal sunshine.
Give a black child a dozen mangoes and then watch from a safe distance.
Before you have seen the child’s manner of eating, you have not realised
how juicy a mango really is. With the negro, eating is not an art, but a
sensation of concentrated joy. It is very much the same with drinking.
He can go an extraordinary length of time without needing any liquid,
but when a negro gets the bottle to his lips, quarts disappear at every
gulp. No matter whether the drink be water or cokernut juice or rum, the
true black man cannot sip. He drinks as much as he can swallow without
stopping to take breath, and then he has finished.

A social gathering is never a success in any Jamaican hut or
drawing-room unless the assembled guests are given leave to indulge in
the pastime of the dance. Dancing is to the black lady what small talk
is to her white sister. Indeed, it is infinitely more even than that.
Dancing is everything. They dance when they are merry and full of joy,
and they dance when they mourn their dead; they dance when they are
hungry and when they have feasted. They dance when they are carrying
their fruits to the market-place, and they dance as they return with the
spoils of their trading. In moments of religious ecstasy their limbs
twitch for the relief found in treading the graceful measure, and when
great sorrow has fallen on a household, the members dance slowly to
express their woe.

Curiously enough their dancing lacks precision; they have not set
pieces; no master teaches them “left foot forward, right foot up,
twist”; there is no “one two three, hop, one two three, hop” about the
coloured dance, yet it is always perfectly graceful. If there is music
so much the better, but if there is no music the dancing goes on just
the same. The Jamaicans dance with their legs and bodies and heads; all
their limbs are brought into play. The arms wave in sympathy with the
active legs, the body bends, the head is thrust forwards and backwards.
The whole business is snake-like and fascinating.

Sometimes when a large party is collected, a dance will be arranged to
represent some story or history. Biblical pictures are the most popular,
and the unrehearsed effect of fifty perspiring negroes, seeking to
represent in a ballet the story of Jonah and the Whale,

[Illustration: COUNTRYWOMAN GOING TO MARKET, BARBADOES]

is not without a certain weird and extravagant humour. When the story is
of a more bellicose kind--when, for instance, the tableau is that of
David and Goliath, the David sometimes overdoes the punishment of the
vanquished giant, and there is a little riot caused by the indignation
of a too severely-handled artist, who had been persuaded with difficulty
to enact the unpopular part. To the black people acting ceases to be
make-believe as soon as the dancing begins; David is David, and Goliath
is in fact the unhappy giant. So it can be imagined that difficulties
frequently arise though there has been no malicious intent, and though
the violence may have been born of pure unconscious art.

Sometimes the coloured dancers break into song, and then the bizarre
effect is heightened and intensified. The soft, melodious chants of the
happy darkies are in perfect keeping with the languorous climate and
romantic scenery of the tropical island. The songs are of love and
passion. “Ma honey and ma little bird, ma sweet lips and true love” are
the usual descriptions of the black man for his mistress. Most of these
songs can be heard in the High Street of Kingston, in the early hours of
market days when the villagers come down from the country to sell their
garden-produce. But the real recreation of the negro is love-making; and
all these things, with the exception of the eating and drinking, are
simply parts of the game.

[Illustration: A MARTINIQUE LADY]




THE DANDY AND THE COQUETTE




CHAPTER XIII

THE DANDY AND THE COQUETTE


You can see him in the market-place or in the drinking-shops. Sometimes
he lolls about with his thin cigarette on the Kingston tram cars, but
more frequently he is to be found leaning on his walking-stick at the
corners of mean streets. As a rule his straw hat is tilted in the
fashion affected by the London office-boy when taking his lady-love for
a Sunday stroll on Peckham Rye. His coat is cut in the tight American
style, which may be admirable for the comfort of people who live in
climates colder than that of Kingston, Jamaica. His trousering is vivid
and lacking in style, and his yellow boots are cut with the easy grace
of a working cobbler who also deals in pictures. The glory of his get-up
is his collar. It may be that our Dandy is not rich enough to afford a
frequent laundry bill, so that his collar is worn to the bitter end of
its condition of starchiness. Nevertheless it is always there, encasing
the neck, and twisting each discordant ear in a manner painful to
behold. He walks with a curious strut--for all the world like a
half-lame peacock; and when he meets any member of the fair sex he
curls back his heavy lips and displays two rows of the whitest teeth.
When he winks one is irresistibly reminded of the famous drill-sergeant
who instructed his troop of country yeoman to “draw swords and twist
your eyes round with a loud click.” The negro’s wink is a serious
matter; it suggests a wealth of fearful possibilities. It is repellent,
but alluring--frightfully attractive.

As a rule it is a youth who mixes much with the tourists that ventures
in this unseemly manner to ogle the women and decorate the promenades.
In his working hours the true Dandy is usually a call-boy at one of the
hotels, or an assistant waiter. It is not at all certain that he is a
single man; probably he has a young wife who takes in washing, or cleans
the boots at some boarding-house. But his better half is never to be
seen at his side when he dons his yellow boots and crimson necktie and
goes for his Sunday stroll. He feels that it would be foolish to permit
the dowdy rags of his working spouse to discount the glory of his rich
attire. So he twists his cigarette (he cannot afford to light it since
he has not got another) in his brass ringed fingers, and struts and
grins in solitary grandeur.

It is his earnest hope that he may find some chance acquaintance, who,
having more money but less magnificent attire, may invite him to drink
in order that he may gain a sort of reflected splendour. So every friend
he meets is hailed with a great gusto; even the working busmen in their
shabby driving clothes are not beneath his notice, and he would be
proud to clasp the hand of a coloured scavenger provided there was the
remotest chance of finding such a person with a few Jamaican pennies.
Your true Dandy is never exclusive; he is an adventurer pure and simple;
and he dresses in the highest height of fashion, partly from great
vanity and partly because he will not advertise his poverty. Sometimes
he meets one of his own tribe, and then Dandy walks with Dandy and there
is a heavy music of negro laughter. Together they are bold as half-tamed
lions. They accost a white man and ask for a match or a cigarette; they
will even raise their tiny hats to the wives of high officials. Then
they make a tour round the rum shops and enter each, hoping to find a
friend or make a new acquaintance. If they pass the ancient market-women
selling sweet stuffs, they will exercise their wit at her expense, and
the ends of their slender canes will disturb her fly-blown dainties; if
she is not extremely quick of sight, they will thieve a sugar stick or
two, and munch them in the open street; they exhibit a profound contempt
for the law of petty larceny. Though the sticky stuffs will not improve
the condition of their lips and fingers, the dirty face smudges will
exhibit to an admiring world the fact that they have eaten luxuriously.

When our pair of gallants meet a lady whose acquaintance they desire,
they introduce themselves with a playful prod with their walking-canes;
if the damsel should resent this undue familiarity, she must endure a
long and loud chorus of personalities. For the Dude is lacking in the
elements of chivalrous refinement. But as a rule the lady is proud to be
conquered by such a duet of splendour. She submits to the playful
gallantries of the couple, and takes her full part in the round of
boisterous persiflage.

Great joy fills the heart of Dandy when a cynical busman sarcastically
hails them with “Want a bus, sah?” No matter how fascinating the lady
who at that particular moment may be engaging his attention, he steps in
the roadway and loudly asks the fare to the swellest hotel he can think
of. The grinning busman replies, and then there is much bargaining done
in the loudest tones in the public highroad. It is a game of
make-believe. The busman pretends that he has found a possible fare, the
Dandy pretends that he wanted to be driven to a certain place for a
certain sum. Such a scene does not suggest amusement to the Englishman,
but it is rare sport to the penniless Dude and superior busman. The end
comes only when the busman sees a really possible customer and whips his
horse along; then the Dude assumes an air of offended dignity and
resumes his conversation with the lady. It is truly a brainless,
exquisite Dandy.

With similar characteristics but employing very different methods is the
coloured lady of extreme fashion. She dresses as extravagantly as the
dandiest Dandy; she wears vivid colours in cheap silks or heavy brocades
or velvets; she affects coloured picture-hats of huge dimensions, and
her foot-wear is always made in brilliant patent-leather; but she is not
so poor or

[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO MARKET, JAMAICA]

so adventurous as the Dandy. She is careful in her conversation. A
polite accent is her chief ambition. She simpers and lisps and uses
pigeon English, and when she is forced to laugh she screens her face
with a scented cambric handkerchief. She is a coloured lady, and not the
richest, boldest busman dare claim her friendship, though it may be that
one of them is her husband. Her friends are among the chapel people; the
preachers, the deacons, and the gentleman of the choir. She will
condescend to notice West Indian non-commissioned officers, but in doing
this she is reaching to her lowest limit. Her ambition is to be counted
rich and beautiful. She is a lady of colour and fashion. Call her a
negress and she will faint with indignant shame. Her husband is a
citizen with a vote, and she is his lady. Though she parades the High
Streets her object is simply to be admired. Though she is an absolute
coquette, her desire is not to make chance acquaintance with the
unimportant natives on the side walks. If a white man, or a rich man who
is nearly white, looks and looks again--well that of course is a
different matter.

Harmless types, both of them. Both the Dandy and the coloured lady of
extreme fashion are amusing, picturesque, and harmless. They have
elected to play droll parts in the game of life; it may be that they
lack perspective, but certainly they possess great imagination. Their’s
is a part of make-believe, and they play it with great seriousness.

[Illustration: A HOUSE NEAR THE BOG WALK, JAMAICA]




BOG WALK




CHAPTER XIV

BOG WALK


Jamaica, the land of wood and water, is rich in the possession of
countless streams of clear, rushing water. Each of its mountains and
rocky hills contains at least one or two fine waterfalls; each of its
peaceful valleys is streaked with a silver band of river-water flashing
in the sun. To say which of all the rivers might be counted the most
beautiful would be to offend a thousand streams, and all the Jamaican
districts save one. But this at least can be said. No stream in Jamaica
is more beautiful than that part of the Rio Cobra River that flows from
Spanish Town, seawards, through the country called by the islanders, Bog
Walk.

I know a man who was sent by his English doctor to Jamaica for rest and
change. He landed in Kingston and, falling in love with the island,
determined to stop for many weeks. After three days he left Kingston for
Spanish Town, and there he saw Bog Walk.

His intention had been to stop in Spanish Town one night and then
journey farther inland in order to thoroughly explore the country.
Spanish Town delighted him; Bog Walk fascinated him. He bought a
fishing-rod and sat in a punt, anchored in the centre of the Rio Cobra
River at Bog Walk, smoking his pipe and catching fish for five weeks. He
could not tear himself away. And that was all the Jamaica he ever saw.
He had seen Kingston and Spanish Town and Bog Walk, and that he counted
quite enough. And who, knowing these places, knowing the Rio Cobra River
at Bog Walk especially, would be foolish enough to count my friend
foolish. At any rate he saw enough to enable him to say that Jamaica is
the most beautiful country in the world. That is his unqualified
opinion. To him Jamaica is a white city filled to overflowing with
bungalows and coloured people; and a glorious golden valley rich in
tropical trees and fairy flowers which shelter a clear river alive with
fish and brilliant weed. For five weeks he lived in Paradise, at peace
with all the world. His Jamaica is the memory of that time. For our part
we saw the rich Cobra River and drifted down along the shores of Bog
Walk in a flat punt, listening to the music of the birds and the melody
of the insects; watching the shadows of heavy trees flirting with the
river ripples; shivering along the dark stretches where the sky was
blackened by the heavy bamboo clumps, and listening, awe-stricken, to
the noise of their clicking stems. The beauty of the bamboo is a
melancholy beauty; the high canes, fluttering with wavy foliage at their
heads, look cold and miserable along their stems. Our sporting friend,
Large, said they reminded him of those unpleasant

[Illustration: DRY HARBOUR, JAMAICA]

moments in his school days when he chose corporal punishment in
preference to Latin lines. Forrest would not paint them. They were too
foolishly ugly. And I will leave them alone and remember only the rich
river glades of sunlit water studded with white lilies and aflame with
brilliant weeds. I will call to mind the banks filled with palm trees,
thin bush-topped giants, straight as arrows or curved like the archer’s
bow. The palm groves, planted by the mysterious hand of nature in the
form of army corps in battle formation; the front-rank trees on either
side of the stream engaged in bowing in accordance with the chivalry of
romantic forests. The bent trees form a graceful arbour, miles long. The
sun, filtering through the palm-tree roof, spangles the river with
flashing gems of light. And both banks are cool and soft and filled with
scented plants and gaudy blossoms. Occasionally a dragon fly, pursued by
twittering birds, flashes ahead, twisting and doubling like tropical
lightning. Our punt makes no noise as it floats down stream, guided from
the stern by a negro with a bamboo pole. I sit in the bow and watch the
little brown, river-tortoise, the water-rats and gleaming fish.

In the water of the Rio Cobra River there is only one thing that is not
really beautiful, and that is the tortoise. Made into ornaments for my
lady’s hair, the shell of the tortoise is full of subtle fascination.
But on the back of its mother reptile the shell is coloured like the mud
of the Thames at Lambeth; and in the scum that hides the beauty of the
shell weeds of the darkest, dreariest kind grow, like seaweed on an old
wooden sailing-ship. When the tortoise swims the weeds trail from his
back like a cluster of rats’ tails.

Animal life is not in evidence. The most remarkable thing in connection
with Jamaica is the fact that, practically, it cannot boast the
possession of a single indigenous animal larger than the rat species.
The island should be filled with deer. The high bush-covered mountain
slopes would give cover to the greatest of the antlered tribe, and here
among the trees of the valleys and the water of the clear rivers one can
imagine that the quiet pools are the drinking-places of herds of
elephants. But Jamaica is barren so far as animals are concerned. Not
even a monkey scrambles among the leafy vastness of the heaviest
forests, and even in the thickest undergrowth a man may tread with
safety.

Large, who in England is a squire and a sportsman, frequently bemoaned
this lack of animal life. “Put a herd of deer in each of the forests of
Jamaica, and in five years the island will be the sportsman’s paradise,”
he said. And I have no doubt his estimate was correct. I put his opinion
on record for the benefit of those who run the island for profit.

Our boat floated along a stream so narrow that one’s arm, stretched
horizontally at full length, would have measured the exact width; the
attitude would have enabled our fingers to brush through thick beds of
flowering orchids. We passed a native ruthlessly cutting away fragrant
weeds with a murderous machette; we swept beneath a bridge of solid
masonry, and in a little time emerged into a great pool of silent water
which made our little craft pause, and enabled us to dream in peace. It
would be a horrible thing to travel at more than one knot speed down
this river of scented beauty.

We remained quietly still and gazed at a scene as glorious as a young
child’s dream-fairyland. A dream of wood and rock and water, shaded and
shrouded by the wildest mass of luxuriant tropical foliage.

This Jamaica is indeed the Queen of the Antilles, the fairest jewel in
the golden Caribbean, the land of perpetual music and light and beauty.
As I have already written, its name should be God’s island. Its beauty
cannot be translated by art or word or music. It is a dreamland and a
land of dreams.

People talk of its industrial backwardness, its commercial weakness,--of
the impossibility of its finances. I myself have written of its
commercial future. As well discuss the poverty of the convolvulus or the
nakedness of the lily. Jamaica was created by Providence to show mankind
something of the meaning of beauty. It was to stand as an explanation of
Eden--a glimpse of Paradise. Nature never intended that it should become
a rum garden, or even a field for speculative agriculture. It is just a
place that should be allowed to stand for ever as the garden of the
world; the vigorous yet languorous Hesperian reflection of all the
beauty of the east and west and north and south; the heart and soul of
terrestrial beauty. We drifted along, but I know not what else we saw.
I remember the place in a hazy manner; my memory serves me as though it
were a kaleidoscope whose every piece of broken glass was a glimpse of a
new world fitted with joyous life and beauty.

I know that we slipped anchor at last and drank the milk from green
cocoanuts. I know that we got into a buggy and drove along a white dusty
road and reached a place where a meal was served and eaten. But most of
all I remember that across the pools and streams of the Bog Walk gorge
of the Rio Cobra River is to be heard the music of the stars and the
rich lullaby of the rustling of angels’ wings. And Large said it would
have been better had there been a few deer about; Forrest had put down
his sketch-book with a sigh.

For the rest any Jamaica guide-book will tell you that the flat-bottomed
river-boat cost you only a few silver coins.




THE POLITICS OF A JAMAICAN NEGRO

[Illustration: SUNSET, NORTH COAST, JAMAICA]




CHAPTER XV

THE POLITICS OF A JAMAICAN NEGRO


I met him in a country road a few miles out of Spanish Town. He was a
well-dressed black, and had that air of sanctity about him which
immediately suggests the church of Nonconformity. He wished me good
morning with cheerful superiority, and I engaged him in conversation. He
was not a parson, but he prayed to God that he was a good Christian and
a deacon of His holy Church. He would have discussed every dogma known
to Christendom had I been in the philosophic mood. But I led the way to
politics, and my friend found congenial ground.

He was an Imperialist and a Protectionist, and withal, he added, a
staunch democrat. He believed in God and Jamaica and the negro race.
Jamaica for the Jamaicans. It must be a government for the people by the
people. Not a fantastical caricature of law-making and liberty which
always could be vetoed by a despotic Governor and his clique. He hoped
he was loyal to the Crown and to the King of Britain, but his heart bled
for his own country and his own race. He was prepared to make Jamaica
the horizon of his political outlook. His duty to God was to attend to
the needs of the people of his own race and blood settled in the country
of their birth. “We black people outnumber you whites by at least forty
to one; is it rational that we should always submit to your despotic
government? Though the British Government is the cleanest and the most
enlightened in the world, neither Imperial Parliament nor a Governor
four or five years resident in the colony, properly understands the
needs of Jamaica. Since the population is black let the Government be
black. The British gave their slaves unconditioned freedom; that was an
act for which no negro owes any thanks to Britain. Freedom is the
natural right of every individual, whether he is white or black; so the
black man owes no thanks to the white for having been permitted to claim
his natural heritage of freedom. Rather do the whites owe a great debt
to the black for the gross injustice of the slave days.” That was a
matter he did not wish to press. To-day he and the people of his race
are, as individuals, entirely free. His complaint was that politically
they were still bound. They are not permitted to govern themselves as
they would like to do. The Governor of Jamaica has never been a black
man. Yet, for all practical purposes, the population of Jamaica is
entirely black.

My friend had scathing criticisms to offer on the questions of the
Jamaican Representative Government. The minority--by law it is a
permanent minority--of the members of the legislative assembly are
elected by the people. The elected members were returned after having
pledged themselves to certain measures. These measures were, in the
majority of cases, thrown out by the Governors’ permanent legal
majority. Government under such conditions was characterised by my
friend as being little better than a farce. He repeated his phrase
“fantastical caricature of law-making.”

“What would you have?” I asked.

The verbosity of his reply was only equalled by its vehemence.

“I would have Jamaica governed as England is governed. The people of
this island have every moral right to govern themselves, to frame their
own laws and to administer those laws. We are no longer barbarians; we
are an educated people with ambitions, and the strength to attain our
ambitions. We recognise that it is a fine thing to be a part of the
great Empire of Britain, but we recognise, even more clearly, that it is
a finer thing to be a free, unfettered nation. England will always have
our heartiest support and affection. When we have become a nation and
ceased to be a crown colony, Jamaica will always feel that really she is
the child of Britain.”

“So you anticipate that one day Jamaica will be entirely independent of
England?” I asked.

“It is inevitable,” he replied. “Already the more educated coloured
people feel the bitterness of their semi-dependence. Already the
smouldering embers of the fire of absolute freedom are in evidence
throughout the land. We are not without our politicians. We are not
without our leaders; perhaps we have not yet found one quite strong
enough to lead us on to political victory. We have not found our
Cromwell. But, some day, soon, a strong man will appear, and Jamaica
will become an independent nation.”

“And what about the white men?”

“They will be unaffected. They will always be made welcome in our
country; law and order will prevail under the new system just as it
prevails to-day. You English have taught us how to become a great
people; you have given us the immeasurable benefit of your religion; you
have given us a framework for our laws and constitution. When the time
comes for us to make full use of that knowledge, you will find that your
wisdom was not thrown to waste.”

“But the freedom you aspire to can only come by revolution.”

“Political revolution--yes; armed revolution--no. We natives of Jamaica
think we frequently see indications in your English Parliament that your
Liberal party would not be averse to granting us that freedom which, one
day, we shall be strong enough to demand. I believe that in the end
justice must prevail. I know that our independence must come because I
know that it is just that it should come.”

“And,” I suggested, “if you cannot obtain it by peaceful methods you
will take it by armed force?”

“I do not think, when we are ready, that armed force will be necessary.
Jamaica is no longer of great value to England.”

[Illustration: ON THE BEACH, BARBADOES]

“But England guards the interests of her children, and nearly all the
land of Jamaica belongs to English planters.”

“The land of Jamaica belongs by natural right to the people of Jamaica.”

“You believe in the doctrine of land nationalisation?”

“I believe in the doctrine of justice.”

“Would you propose to compensate the planters when you despoil them of
their land?”

“That I cannot say. Compensation such as that would be a simple act of
grace. Morally it would not be necessary.”

I mentioned to him that I had heard much about the annexation of Jamaica
by the United States.

“That will never come about,” he said. “Jamaicans would not stand it,
America does not desire it. But it would be better for America if we
were entirely independent.”

“Why?” I asked.

“When the Panama Canal is completed Jamaica will be a place of some
strategical importance,” he replied.

The conversation drifted to the condition of the people. I mentioned
that the intelligence of the majority of the coloured people was not
equal to the standard of the white.

“There I disagree,” he said. “So far we have not produced one great man.
We have no great statesmen or warriors or divines. But in the mass our
people compare favourably with the agricultural labourers of England,
Germany or France. They are a clean-living, quiet people, easily led and
easily governed.”

“You know Europe?” I asked.

“I lived in England ten years,” he replied. “I have been to many of the
continental capitals. But my heart has always been in Jamaica. I like my
own people best. We live a happier life than any European people, and we
are cleaner in our mode of living.”

“Yet,” I ventured, “the majority of the children born on the island are
illegitimate.”

“True,” he admitted, “but have you seen in Kingston, or anywhere else in
the island, any traces of an immorality to equal the wickedness of
London, Paris, or Berlin?”

I took refuge in the remark. “If you are so happy why change your
condition; why attempt to alter your system of Government, why attempt
to become an independent nation?”

“Because we have ambition, and because it is good for any nation that
its children shall be eligible for the highest honours the nation can
give. As a people we cannot be perfectly happy while we know that
another race has drawn a chalk circle, as it were, round us, and has
said, Thus far you may go, but not beyond. The possibility of
maintaining a permanent minority in the legislative council is the chalk
mark.”

“How long will it be,” I ventured, “before the chalk mark is erased?”

“That I cannot say and do not care to guess.

[Illustration: OFF TRINIDAD]

Perhaps five years, perhaps less than five years, or perhaps it will be
a quarter of a century. Your Liberal party may rub out the chalk for us,
or----”

“Or,” I insisted.

“America may suggest to England that it would be a graceful thing to
do.”

We walked along together and for some time there was a silence. Then my
friend began: “It is the only thing. The only possible solution of the
many Jamaican problems. The weakness of the English rule in Jamaica is
that the island is governed by those who are paid to govern. The
ambition of the majority of the English officials seems to be to earn
their money and begone. Jamaica is not their home. Just as I in England
always thought of this island as home, and worked in England so that I
might return here, so do the English people think of England while
living here. It would be foolish to expect anything else. The more
ambitious servants of the British Government work hard here, not so much
for the good of the place as for the good of themselves. They want to
make a noise and distinguish themselves. Their hearts are set on
promotion, not on the well-being of the people of the Government. The
same applies to some extent to the planters. English planters who have
settled in the island feel that they are living in exile. If they cannot
make money enough to afford long holidays in England,--if they cannot
send their wives to England every year and their children to English
schools,--they complain of their poverty. Economically that is wrong; it
is not fair to the country that so much money made in Jamaica should be
spent in England. I am a planter--a very successful planter. I make
quite enough money to live here in the greatest comfort, but I could not
afford prolonged holidays in England, neither could I afford to send my
wife and children there. If I were an Englishman I should bewail my fate
and call myself a pauper. As it is I count myself rich. I want no more
than I have.”

“But,” I said, “you have your tourists here. Surely more money comes
into the island from the pockets of English and American tourists than
goes out by reason of the holidays of the planters.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “But the tourist money goes to the hotel-keepers and
retail dealers in the towns. The money the planters take out is taken
from the agricultural districts; money which should have been invested
in agriculture, spent in improving the sugar plantations and the fruit
fields. We cannot hope to become rich because we have rich hotels and
flourishing tradesmen. We can hope to become rich if our agricultural
resources are developed, if our plantations are improved, and more
machinery is imported. The English planters treat the island as though
it were a gold mine to be sucked dry and then abandoned. The coloured
people know that Jamaica is not that. The three quarters of a million of
a people can only be supported in comfort by the commercial advancement
of the country. Do not forget that our population is rapidly
increasing.”

“I see at least one insurmountable difficulty in your path,” I said.
“Even if your dream of freedom came true, how would you deal with the
half-breed population?”

“We should absorb them,” he replied. “They are at one with us in our
dream of freedom.”

“And you can trust them to be at one with you always?” I asked.

“They will be our Irish,” he replied.

[Illustration: STEAMERS UNLOADING, BARBADOES]




THE WHITE MAN’S POLITICS




CHAPTER XVI

THE WHITE MAN’S POLITICS


I have given at length a political conversation I had with an
intelligent and well-informed negro. May I add the record of the talk I
had with an important servant of the Government. Though he was not
concerned with the actual work of governing, he was a man who had a
voice in the affairs of the State, a friend and servant of the
Government, a man who could well remember the Jamaica of twenty years
ago.

I dined with him in a bungalow pleasantly situated in a Kingston suburb.
And I retailed to him the opinions of my friend the coloured reformer.

“Bosh,” he said; “stuff and nonsense. Your glib acquaintance was engaged
in the delicate art of pulling your leg.”

Remembering the earnestness of my companion of Spanish Town country
road--remembering his deep seriousness--I disagreed.

“But, my dear fellow, if they tried on that sort of business we should
go for them. Eyre strung up Gordon for that sort of thing, and the black
fellows have not forgotten the lesson they were taught then. The black
Tommies--who are not all Jamaicans--in Up-Park Camp, and the white
troops at Newcastle and Port Royal, would have something to say in the
matter of Jamaican freedom.”

“How about the intervention of America?”

“So much rubbish. The Yankees have pretty well cornered the trade of the
island; the natives count their money in dollars and American notes
instead of English sovereigns, and that is about all America wants.”

“But what’s the good of Jamaica to England if America controls the
trade?”

“Give it up my boy. England’s got Jamaica and she will have to keep it.
Even dear old arrogant Britain cannot do what she likes with her
Colonies. There would be a terrible kick-up if we started turning our
possessions adrift because they had ceased to be remunerative. Besides,
there is still a good trade done with England, and lately fresh British
enterprise has done something in the way of increasing the Briton’s
share.”

“But suppose the coloured people were to properly organise, and, under
the leadership of a strong man, demand absolute home rule?”

“Then we should have to tell them to go to the devil.”

“And if they refused?”

“Well, then, I suppose, there would be a bit of shooting.”

“With a Liberal Government in power at home?”

“Give it up again, my boy. You know as much about home politics and the
colonial policy of the Liberal party as I do.”

“Perhaps the Americans would openly side with the blacks?”

“Then not all the Liberal Governments in the world could prevent the
shooting.”

“You think there is no possibility then of the introduction of home rule
for Jamaica?”

“I am sure that if the black people were the absolute governors of the
country, not one white man would remain in the country. It would be
impossible; look at Hayti! The blacks are utterly incapable of
self-government; ten years of independence would reduce a black Jamaica
to the level of an inland Gold Coast village. With Jamaica a lawless
republic, as well as Hayti, the West Indies would be impossible. America
knows that; the Yankees would be the first to cry out against it. No,
Jamaica is bound fast to England, and neither England nor Jamaica can
undo the binding.”

“You think that Jamaica will again become as rich and prosperous as she
was in the early days?”

“Why not? The place is rich enough, the climate is good enough. Do you
realise what a tremendous upheaval the emancipation of the slaves meant
to this little island? The whole economic system was put out of joint.
That was only seventy years ago. The old planters who had made great
fortunes by means of slave labour were heavily compensated. They saw
labour difficulties ahead and sold up their plantations and cleared out
of the island. The consequence was that the country found itself in a
pretty mess. Can you wonder that its finances got a bit deranged, and
that the Jamaican problem loomed large in the London parliament? The
island was in a pretty bad way. The negroes felt the pinch as well, but
not so much as the white people. Consequently the negroes began to have
grievances, and one or two of them started in business as political
agitators. It was about the best-paying business in the island in those
days. But as things began to brighten up a bit the negro grievance
became less acute, and though the agitators did their best to earn a
decent living, they began to become less popular. That is about the size
of the affair. Of course the negroes are not all content. As your friend
said, they have ambition--at least some of them have. But you can be
sure that three quarters of a million black men are not going to
seriously upset the British constitution. Yes, I am certain that Jamaica
has a most prosperous future. We lack capital and we lack good men.
There is room in Jamaica for thousands of good, educated Britons with a
bit of capital. And these will turn up some day. Fortunes are being made
in Jamaica to-day. And as soon as Englishmen get wind of that sort of
thing they will find their way to Kingston quickly enough. We have not
done with the sugar trade yet, and there is plenty of money in fruit,
timber and coffee. We can grow anything, and land is cheap enough. The
railway is going to help the country along, and so is the Panama Canal.
But most of all we

[Illustration: AN EVENING PARTY, ST. THOMAS]

are going to be assisted by new British immigrants. I wish you would
tell your people that it would pay them a good deal better to come to
the West Indies than to go chasing gold mines and diamonds in South
Africa and the Transvaal.”

“How much capital would a settler want?”

“The more the better of course, but a thousand pounds at least. A good
man with a thousand pounds would suit us better than a waster with ten
thousand. We don’t want any remittance men. Good, solid, hard-working,
level-headed business men are the sort for us. People who will send for
their wives and settle on their plantations, without wanting to race
over to England every year.”

“My coloured friend suggested that the tendency on part of the planters
to go to England every year was a bad thing for the island.”

“And there he was right, of course. We want absolute settlers--men who
will adopt the country and call it their home, and count it as their
children’s homeland too. We want a solid population of solid white
men--not a migratory people who look for fortunes in ten years and then
a suburban home near London. I guarantee that any man of the right sort
who comes here in the right spirit will never regret his coming.”

“And when he comes, what must he do first of all?”

“Hire himself out as a book-keeper or overseer on some plantation for a
year or so, until he has got the hang of the country. After that he can
decide matters for himself. There are plenty of openings and plenty of
land. With the new settlers we can work out our own commercial
salvation. Without them we shall find it difficult. Labour difficulties
will disappear as soon as we find more good masters. Even to-day
efficient and sensible planters have very little bother with their
workmen. A black man is very much what his white employer makes him. The
servant of a discontented, slovenly master is discontented and slovenly
also. A good master makes a good servant. Yes, put all that nonsense
about a free Jamaica, and the Government of Jamaica by Jamaicans, out of
your head. It won’t come off. We are going to grow; we are going to be
prosperous. And we have no time to discuss absurd impossibilities, or to
have sympathy with the impossible ambitions of scheming gentlemen of the
coloured class. The black men have, and always will have, their proper
place in the island, and they will have a proper part to play in the
commerce and government of the island. And that is all. Jamaica is a
British Colony governed by white men, and so it will remain for ever.”

[Illustration: A ROADSIDE MARKET, JAMAICA]




THE RAILWAY IN JAMAICA




CHAPTER XVII

THE RAILWAY IN JAMAICA


In Jamaica there is a railway which carries passengers of the first and
second class in carriages that would not necessarily disgrace even the
London, Chatham, and Dover line in England. The upholstery of the
carriages is of heavy stuffed leather; the fitments are of polished
yellow wood; and the result infinitely more suitable for an Arctic clime
than for merry sweltering Jamaica. There are, as I have stated, two
classes; to these I must add the soda-water compartment, which is a sort
of betwixt and between of both classes. A place where the men (sometimes
the ladies also) foregather to sit on empty soda water boxes and consume
mineral waters and eat fruit. This is the saloon of the railway--the
drawing-room of travelling Jamaica. Here the guard sits always, and with
him the coloured lady who sells the mineral water at a truly reasonable
rate. The carriages are reserved for the uninitiated, or the
respectable, of both classes. The soda-water room is always full of
scandal talk; a half hour’s ride in this compartment of any train will
teach any tourist the inner history of Jamaican society in a manner
quite incapable of repetition or reproduction. The lady who sells the
ginger beer is conversant with the character, the salary, the
peculiarities and home life, of every person living in the island. She
is the natural historian of the country. In three sentences she can
destroy the reputation of a mansion; half an hour suffices for the moral
destruction of a town. One day, even half a day, among the empty
ginger-beer boxes kills every desire, no matter how ambitious one may
have been, to enter the ranks of the upper ten of the society in the
Queen of the Antilles. The reason for all this is the heat and
discomfort of railway travelling in the tropics. The dust and sweat of
travel jaundice a man’s outlook on life; and in the railway train a
white face looks dull yellow. So it is with the cleanest reputation. And
fortunately the soda-water gossip is forgotten even before one’s hair
has ceased to smell of cinders.

The journey inland over the steel rails should only be undertaken at
great provocation. It is not a desirable thing to do, although it is the
quickest, the cheapest, and the most usual way of covering long
distances. For perhaps eight hours you sit _vis-à-vis_ with a person
whom you have not met before, and whom you wish never to meet
again,--for eight hours or twenty minutes, just according to the
distance you desire to travel. You pass the time of day with the
stranger, read all the printed matter available, and then solemnly gaze
through the grimy window, and heavy cloud of dust, at the fields and
rivers and fair plantations

[Illustration: THE ARRIVAL OF THE ROYAL MAIL STEAMER, DOMINICA]

rushing towards the place you have just left behind.

Jamaica is proud of its railway. The people of the country, remembering
the difficulties of its building, and the frequent weaknesses of its
finances, are glad the line is complete, and that it is possible to
travel at good speed from one end of the island to another. In truth the
history of the line from its beginning in 1845 to the present day is not
lacking in interest. Parts of the track have been built by official and
parts by private enterprise. The Government, I believe, started the
building, and an American syndicate carried it forward. The American
syndicate failed, and so the railway fell into the hands of the
Government again, and there it has remained ever since. The carriages
are miniature editions of the American saloons, and, in my opinion, are
capable of vast improvement. Otherwise the stock is excellent, and the
lines and curves and bridges everything that could be desired.

Starting from Kingston, you can travel over a hundred miles of looped,
single-track line to Montego Bay, or over thirty miles to Ewarton or
seventy miles to Port Antonio. These are the three routes; the track to
either of the places named is, of course, strewed with wayside stations.
No matter which way you travel you will pass through most marvellous
country. You will rattle across iron bridges, spanning rushing streams
or wide romantic rivers. You will skirt great lagoons, half overgrown
with mangrove and other swamp-land trees. You will steam across great
yellow-green guinea-grass pastures, and then, by way of wonderful
gradients, you will climb mountain chains and, from the dizzy height of
your carriage window, look down at distant valleys half-screened by the
green foliage of impenetrable forests. You will pass smoothly through
delightfully cool forests, and wonder at the prodigality of nature when
you cut through prairie land ablaze with the blooms of rare plants. You
will in addition smell all the smells of the Indies, and you will be
half-choked by the smoke and dust of the engine.

Natives will grin at you from the hedgerows, and labourers will cease
work in the plantations to stare open-mouthed at the incomprehensible
railway train. You will pass homesteads and sugar mills, fruit farms and
stockyards. Large-hatted planters will ride along roads skirting the
railway track, and they will play with their ponies and give exhibitions
of their horsemanship for the sake of any lady passenger who may or may
not be your companion. The black guard, or conductor, will come and
examine your ticket at every other station; and at most stopping places
a little crowd of negroes will stare at you through the carriage window.

The railway journey will enable you to see agricultural Jamaica. The
plantations, great and small, skirt the railway track, and the traveller
can note the varied beauties and interests of the fruits of the Indies.
He will see full-grown banana clumps, heavy with fruit; and he will also
see newly-planted banana striplings. The fields of pine-apples, which
resemble fields of English bulrushes tinted dull red and gold, will
charm him, and the pimento groves will remind him of English orchards.
When the bamboo forests and the straggling palms come in view, he will
remember with great contentment that he is in the tropics indeed. The
birds and the butterflies are shy of the noise and mess of the
locomotive, but still the traveller may see enough of the beauty of the
fluttering insects to teach him something of the loveliness which is
born beneath the shelter of tropical foliage. If he is fortunate enough
to see a tiny humming bird sipping from the cup of a scented blossom, he
will have seen that which will persuade him to sit in a flower-spangled
hedgerow for hours in order that he may witness the picture again.

It is said, and I have put it on record, that Columbus crumpled a piece
of paper in order to give his patron a correct impression of the
appearance of the island. It is the crumpled, irregular, casual Jamaica
that the railroad traveller sees. The valleys, the plateaus, the hills,
the mountains, rivers and ravines, pass along the carriage window in
bewildering succession; the views one sees are beautiful and mystical
beyond comprehension--like the tints in a stormy sunset.

One thing at least the intelligent traveller will learn on his railway
journey; he will realise that the beauty of the tropics can never be
comprehended by the finite mind of man. He will thank God for the beauty
he has seen, and if he is a wise man, there he will allow the matter to
rest. To attempt to catalogue the beauties of Jamaica is a task too
infinitely foolish: as well essay an analysis of a moonbeam.

[Illustration: A QUAY, ST. ANN’S BAY, JAMAICA]




ALLIGATOR SHOOTING IN A WEST INDIAN SWAMP




CHAPTER XVIII

ALLIGATOR SHOOTING IN A WEST INDIAN SWAMP


Jamaica is a land of perpetual peace and sunshine. The hills and valleys
of this, the most beautiful of all the fair islands of the West Indies,
are always clothed in a great profusion of the richest greenery; its
soil gives birth to almost every luscious fruit the world contains; the
sweet scents of its myriad blossoms give to the land an atmosphere of
the wildest loveliness; yet it is a country almost entirely barren of
native animal life. Birds there are in great numbers, and insects too;
fish of many kinds swarm in the rivers and mountain torrents, but the
languorous climate of the Queen of the Antilles gives shelter to no
four-footed game of the plains or forest lands. The place has no claim
on the hearts of sportsmen.

It is stated that there are a few wild pigs still roaming at large in
one or two of the forests in the north of the island, and certainly
there are a few alligators to be found among the swamps at the mouth of
the Rio Cobra River in Kingston Bay. But the prospect of finding a boar
or two, and the certainty of having a shot at a savage alligator, mark
the beginning and the end of the possibilities of the island so far as
exciting sport is concerned.

Of the two, the alligator gives more trouble and excitement to the
sportsman bent on slaughter; for though the West India alligator never
grows to the size of the African crocodile, he is easily large enough to
do an ordinary man to death.

Alligator shooting is one of the most unhealthy pleasures it is possible
to imagine. The beasts choose such unhealthy resting-places that the
sportsman has to run the risk of many fevers for every reptile he may
chance to kill.

A sluggish stream, or silent, deep lagoon, heavy with weeds and creeping
plants, alive with the buzz of insects, and half hidden by a deadly
steam of malarious vapour, is the sort of place dear to the hearts of
alligators. There it is that they are to be found, floating, log-like,
with half-closed eyes, or lying on the marshy bank with wide-open jaws,
basking in the yellow glare of a fearful sun. Wise men are content to
leave the beasts alone; but once we essayed the task of hunting them.

We started from Kingston Harbour in an open whaler, and ran before a
spanking breeze towards the murky creeks which run beyond the
half-deserted Fort Augustine. It was Fort Augustine most of all that, in
the days of old, gave to Jamaica its reputation as a country of death.
In the time of our fathers’ fathers, the British regiments were sent
from England to this same Augustine Fort, where they were destroyed in

[Illustration: OUTHOUSES ON A PLANTATION, JAMAICA]

companies, even battalions, by the malarious exhalations of those swamps
in which to-day we went to shoot the alligator. Seen from our little
boat, Kingston, just missing the deep shadow of the great mountain range
which overhangs the town, lay green, and gold, and white in the pale
glare of the sun. Fronting Kingston, Port Royal, a tiny strip of sand,
be-palmed and dotted with houses, lay symbolic of the Caribbean coral
reef. In line with Port Royal, but towards the lagoon, Fort Augustine
lay enshrouded in gloom, as though brooding over the tragedy of its own
sad history. And beyond the Fort, a great half-circle of the giant
harbour, we saw the swamp land--Hunts Bay and the mouth of the Rio
Cobra--a flat stretch of sand, yellow deepening into mud colour as it
left the sea, and then breaking into scrub, and low grass, and spikey
bush. Among the grass and the bush, and even through gaps of the high
tree-land beyond, one caught glimpses of dull water, silent and murky
and very still.

We anchored the boat and waded ashore, the clean water reaching our
arm-pits. In this manner we reached the fever-hole of Jamaica; the home
of every insect pest the West Indies can produce, the place in which the
Jamaican alligator still lives and moves and has its being. Not a
pleasant spot either to linger in or look upon, just evil swamp-land,
with the evil stench of damp vegetation and rotting wood. You step from
the sand of the seashore into brittle stubble, through which the water
surges as you pass. You squelch to the river-bank over rotting weed,
ankle-deep in slime, half smothered by a cloud of gnats, and
mosquitoes, and buzzing flies. It is the Jamaica Avernus--the white
man’s grave.

The Rio Cobra River at its mouth is emptied by a dozen twisting streams,
just as the trunk of a cotton tree is supported by many twisted roots.
Sometimes these twisted streams join together, sometimes they flow
apart; so if progress is to be made inland, much wading must be done. It
is in these little streams that alligators love to lie, so you must walk
warily, with your rifle ready. We waded many streams, and trudged
ankle-deep through long stretches of oily slime; we stumbled over logs
half hidden, and our stretched hands disturbed the nests of scores of
creeping things. The black guide, a famous sportsman of the swamp land,
grinned his joy at being really chief, the indisputable and
indispensable head of a party of white men. He forgot to tincture his
commands with respect, and though clad in nothing save a decayed merino
undershirt, looked and played the man.

“De beast there,” pointing a joyful finger to a heap of filth, green and
brown. Rifles were raised, and the explosions of three Winchesters
reverberated round those sickening pools. The green mass surged heavily,
and a streak of dark water showing in the centre of the thick slime
marked the place where the alligator had dived. “Him gone; never see him
more,” said our happy chieftain, and we trudged through more slime,
waded across more streams, some deep as our waist-belts, others with
water only ankle high. Once the youngest of us stealthily massacred a
floating tree stump, mistaking a twisted root for an opened jaw, and
then dropped to the rear under the glance of a contemptuous native.

“You want him log for rifle butt?” The youthful sportsman attempted no
defence.

Again we fired, this time at a sleepy family of two--a father and a son.
The son was hit, but the father had twisted and dived with the speed of
a springing snake. We could not reach the wounded one, which, lashing
his tail and snapping his jaws in the death agony, rolled into the river
to die.

We paused to drink tepid water drawn from a scorched barrel, and talked
and listened to stories of mighty bags; of beasts thirty feet long, shot
after fearful battles, of mauled natives, and of all the dangers of the
sport. Our thoughts and words were all of slaughter.

After the water--just enough to create a thirst--we trudged along, and
forgot everything save the hunting. The sun blazed down and scorched us
right through the thin stuff of our shirts. Blisters came on our hands
and arms, and our skins tingled as though we had rolled in countless
beds of nettles. But these things we only remembered afterwards; then we
strained our eyes and ears, waded into streams, and pushed through
rotten scrub in search of prey.

“We make much too plenty noise,” said our guide after a fruitless two
hours’ search. “We must sit down and wait.”

So our party divided, and I went with the black man and squatted against
the stump of a rotting tree overhanging the river and waited.
Fortunately the hunter did not object to my pipe, and the smoke did
something towards relieving me of the clouds of insect pests.
Conversation was not permitted. My companion knelt motionless, his eyes
straining riverwards; and I, inspired by his eagerness as well as by my
own curiosity, watched also.

The spit of mud that separated us from the river was covered by a
surface crust of grey-black sediment, hardened by the sun; from where we
sat a double line of little pools filled with soft inky slime stretched
to the water, and showed the direction of our coming. I examined the
surface of mud bay, and noticed that ours was not the only spoor. Ten
yards to my right I saw a place where very recently a heavy body had
rested--a mark which might have been left if a tree trunk had been
removed. I touched the black man on the shoulder and pointed to the
spot. He grinned and nodded. Evidently the marks were familiar to him.

I placed my rifle across my knees and waited. The still water of the
river showed a slight ripple here and there, and occasionally a splash
would mark the place where a fish had risen to a fly. The glare and the
strained attention tired my eyes, and I saw things through a slight
mist. Once I saw the water dividing as something passed towards the
shore, and I jerked my rifle to the shoulder. Then the moving strings
of

[Illustration: MID-DAY HEAT, JAMAICA]

water turned and ceased. And my companion scowled. The noise of a
distant rifle-shot came like the muffled noise of a pop-gun, and then a
green-black snout lifted itself above the water in midstream a few yards
to our right. Behind the snout a long black body appeared, only partly
submerged, and I made out the head and tail of an alligator. Slowly it
drifted towards the mud patch on which we were waiting. Presently a long
snout and a mud-encrusted head reached out of the water and rested on
the bank, and our gruesome enemy was within easy reach of our guns. Not
fifteen yards divided us. His little eyelids flickered like those of a
nervous lizard, and his sinister jaws were open just wide enough to show
the long line of white teeth. I brought my rifle round very slowly, and
fired from where I sat. The alligator twisted with the swiftness of a
cat and dived. I stood still and waited. The troubled water showed that
he had been hit; I could mark the direction of his flight by the fury of
his struggle. Once he lifted himself half out of the stream, and I fired
again. The result was a mad plunge towards the shore on which we stood.
I started back, but ere the beast found land, the water swirled again,
and I knew that he had turned aside. I followed him with my eyes, and in
midstream saw him churning the water with his tail and then plunging
round in circles; then he dived to the right, and I saw him no more.

“Him gone now,” said my guide. “You should have waited until him come
right up to the shore.”

I relit my pipe, and we retraced our steps.

In the fever swamps of Jamaica there are a few alligators, but I fear
that most of the sport of the place is to be found in the imagination of
the sportsmen and the tales of the native guides. Danger there is, but
that is the danger of the sun and the risk of fever; and in daring these
things there is little sport.

So we tramped back again and regained the sweet-scented water of the
bay. We waded to the boat, and the sensation of the clear sea-water
washing clean our sun-dried, muddy bodies gave us a few moments of
ecstasy. But we could not linger for fear of the dread cousin of the
alligator, the West Indian shark. We swam aboard, and hoisted our sail,
and sailed homewards. The boat was bare of awning, and the strong,
pitiless sun completed its burning work, so well begun in the swamp
lands. The charred barrel had exhausted its cargo of tepid water, and
there was no food. But the few hours’ sail was not unpleasant. We were
enveloped in the sweet breezes of God’s fair ocean, and soothed by the
fresh sea-scent. There were no miasmic exhalations, and no clouds of
winged insects. The mosquito was gone, and our scorched eyes might now
be closed or held half opened towards the cool breeze.

[Illustration: A FRUIT-SELLER, BARBADOES]




COMMERCIAL JAMAICA




CHAPTER XIX

COMMERCIAL JAMAICA


Those sanguine friends of the West Indies who think that the abolition
of the beet bounties necessarily means the industrial salvation of
Jamaica, forget that the beet bounties did not destroy West Indian sugar
industry, but only accentuated and accelerated a decay which had already
commenced long before their institution. Even before a beneficent home
Government allowed those European countries concerned in the cultivation
of the beet to create bounties which have helped to send the British
West Indies staggering to ignominious bankruptcy, the dry rot had
already attacked West Indian sugar.

At the time of Jamaica’s prosperity, foreign sugars were admitted into
English markets only on payment of a duty of something like £60 per ton;
even the produce of other British sugar colonies was taxed to enrich the
West Indian planter. The Jamaican planters felt aggrieved when, in 1836,
the East and West Indian sugar duties were assimilated; but when England
imported foreign sugar on the same terms as that produced in British
colonies the planters were filled with despair. On top of this grievance
came the decree of emancipation, and the total disorganisation of the
West Indian labour market.

For centuries Jamaica had waxed rich. In addition to a magnificent soil,
the planters had enjoyed “free” labour, ready markets, protection, and
high prices. Within a period of twenty or thirty years, with one
exception, all these advantages were swept away. The wonderful qualities
of the soil alone remained to encourage the despondent planter to work
on in hope of better times. From being the “protected” he became the
outcast; in place of being the absolute master of his workmen, he found
himself entangled in endless labour disputes; and his markets, once so
wonderfully capacious, dwindled almost to vanishing point.

Previous to the year 1836, the period of the beginning of the
“equalisation” of the sugar duties, the industrial condition of the
island was excellent, and the Jamaican planter was apparently entirely
prosperous. I say “apparently” purposely, for if we examine Gardner’s
_History of Jamaica_, published in 1873, we find that the actual
position of the proprietors of many of the Jamaican sugar estates in the
latter part of the eighteenth century was less satisfactory than one
would have supposed. In the year 1791 there were 769 sugar plantations
in the island; of these, “457 were in the hands of the men, or their
descendants, who possessed them in 1772. Since that date 177 have been
sold in payment of debts, 22 remain in the hands

[Illustration: A WAITER]

of the mortgagees or receivers, and 55 have been abandoned, though 47
have been newly established during the same period. The returns of the
Provost-Marshal from 1772 to 1791 showed great pecuniary embarrassment
among vast numbers in the colony. Astounding as it may appear, 80,021
judgments, amounting to £22,563,786, had, during that period, been
lodged at his office....” So much for the condition of the planters
during the period of Jamaica’s greatest prosperity.

The reason for the gradual decay of Jamaica may be read between the
lines of this report. In spite of prolific soil and wide markets, in
spite of inexpensive labour and the inflated prices obtained for his
produce, the Jamaican planter was constantly in difficulties--I had
almost written because of these things, and it will easily be seen that
the very things which made the country rich helped to impoverish the
character of the man. Life was too easy for the planter; he encountered
few difficulties; his business conducted itself. If a crop happened to
be poor, prices were increased to make up the difference, and the
planter did not suffer. His plantation produced sugar which was sold at
a fabulous figure; his slaves did the work his overseers ordered them to
do; for the rest, he was the most generous, the most hospitable, and the
most indolent of mortals. This was the type of man called upon to face a
situation of extraordinary difficulty. No wonder he allowed himself and
his country to slip down to despair and desolation.

Since the beginning of its distress, Jamaica has lost between 500 and
600 of its sugar plantations. The industry, once so rich and prosperous,
has become crippled and starved, and for many years Jamaica lay half
derelict, half forgotten.

The Jamaicans made no serious effort to stem the tide of their ebbing
fortunes. They talked a lot, petitioned a lot, and grumbled a lot, and
then they failed. There is no doubt that a little energy and enterprise
would have materially altered the commercial history of the island.
To-day, even though the majority of the sugar estates of Jamaica waste
over 30 per cent of sugar by their antiquated system of crushing, the
planters still manage to make both ends meet and keep a balance on the
profit side.

Sugar bounties, Free Trade, labour troubles, antiquated machinery and 30
per cent loss notwithstanding, sugar planters still manage to eke out an
existence. If the new methods of manufacture that some of the more
enterprising of the planters are now beginning to try had been
introduced fifty years ago, the history of the island would not be one
of failure and famine.

The problem representing the most serious difficulties to the Jamaican
planter has been the labour question. When we remember that the island
has a population of something like 700,000 coloured people and only
about 15,000 whites--the whites representing capital and the coloured
people the labour--we are at the beginning of the difficulty. First, how
shall the island be governed? When all the blacks were slaves and the
whites their masters, things worked smoothly enough; crimes were
committed, hundreds of thousands of people were abased and downtrodden,
but still the island of Jamaica was free from labour troubles. Then came
the Liberation Act. The slaves were released, and the majority of them
threw away their industry with their bondage, and sat in the sunshine
thanking their gods all day long. No doubt the primary cause of the
unsatisfactory condition of the labour market which prevailed for many
years was the action of the planters themselves. Enraged at their loss
of authority, for the most part they turned the full measure of their
anger on the wretched freed slaves.

When the Act came into force, meetings were held by planters at which
rates of wages were fixed,--needless to remark, on the lowest possible
scale,--and masters who had been humane, even kind, to their slaves
became overbearing and impossible employers. Enormous rents were charged
for labourers’ cottages, heavy fines were levied, and frequently the
poor negro found that he had no wage to draw for his week’s work.
Naturally enough, the natives became impatient of labouring under such
conditions, and many of them refused to work. The planters then resorted
to forcible ejectment. The discontented worker was flung into the open
road, destitute and helpless, to get his living when and how he could.
This was the beginning of the alienation of the labourers from the
estates. The negro found it easy to live on the produce of a patch of
land, and it became increasingly difficult to persuade him to work on a
plantation. Slavery was impossible--it could not last; and inconvenient
as the abolition has been to Jamaica, its chief evils have happily
already vanished. There is to-day little difficulty in obtaining plenty
of labourers for the plantations, and if he is treated fairly the free
negro makes at least as good a servant as he did in the days of slavery.

Because of the injudicious action of the planters at the time of the
slave liberation, much money has been spent by Jamaica in assisting
coolie immigration. It is difficult for one who has recently visited the
West Indies to imagine that it was ever necessary for Jamaica to import
coolie labourers. The negro to-day is willing to work for any man who
will treat him decently and pay him fairly and regularly. But necessary
it was a few years back, and in Jamaica are to be found to-day many East
Indians who thrive in the island, and do much useful labour in a
characteristically unostentatious manner.

The commercial salvation of Jamaica rests entirely with the people of
Jamaica. The abolition of sugar bounties, even the institution by this
country of a system of preferential tariffs founded on protection, would
mean much less to Jamaica than would the landing of 2000 British
colonists.

Jamaica wants men--men of the best type that Britain can send. The
infusion of new blood in her industries would effect a far greater
improvement in the industrial condition of the island than would the
introduction of the most enlightened system of fiscal

[Illustration: THE MARKET-PLACE, BARBADOES]

policy ever imagined. If there were more intelligent, unprejudiced
Englishmen to employ and direct the natives, labour difficulties would
quickly cease to exist. The great need of Jamaica is men--strong, young,
intelligent, enterprising Britishers. There is room for them in their
thousands.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the first impressions one gathers on landing in the colony is
that, though British in name, the place is really quite American as it
is British. This is a condition of affairs to be expected, since the
United States take about four-fifths of the total exports of the island,
and supply more than 50 per cent of her imports. It may be worth
repeating that the well-worn story of the agitation in Jamaica favouring
the annexation of the island by the United States is now entirely played
out. Even if the majority of the people of Jamaica demanded annexation,
England would not permit it, and even if England favoured the scheme,
the United States would not countenance it. The wily Yankee is content
to find in Jamaica a profitable market; it pays better to leave her
politics and domestic difficulties severely alone. The American has
already grasped the fact that there are dollars in Jamaica. The fruit
trade, now probably the most important in the island, has been built up
almost entirely by American enterprise and American capital. It is only
within the last year or two that English capital has been invested to
any great extent in this direction, though the trade has been of
growing importance to the island for many years. The establishment of
the Imperial line of steamers between Avonmouth and Jamaica was the
first effort made by this country to participate in an industry which
America had already found full of profit.

The Imperial direct steamer put Jamaica in direct mail communication
with Bristol. All the boats belonging to the line are specially arranged
for carrying bananas, and already the fruit trade of the island has been
enormously improved by the influence of the English market. For the
establishment of the line, Jamaica owes a deep debt of gratitude to Mr.
Chamberlain and Sir Alfred Jones.

The Jamaican fruit-grower is in the happy position of having a market
for his produce far larger than he can comfortably supply. America and
England are eager to purchase more bananas than the island now produces,
and the demand, already in excess of the supply, is still on the
increase. There are many dollars in bananas, and in this trade alone
there is room for more than 1000 Englishmen. The cultivation of the
banana is simplicity itself; the fruit can be gathered every month in
the year; the profits are large; the life of the planter is healthy,
pleasant, and free from loneliness.

Jamaica will become increasingly prosperous by the intelligent
development of her fruit, coffee and tobacco trades. Bananas,
pine-apples, oranges, grapes, mangoes and cocoanuts, properly cultivated
and exported, will help to bring the island to an extremely favourable
condition. The sugar trade will not be neglected now that the beet
bounties have been removed, and the island’s sugar and rum exports are
bound to increase by leaps and bounds. The exportation of pimento,
logwood, cocoa and tobacco is already steadily on the increase, and when
we remember that at the end of last year--after such a long period of
depression and deficits--the finances of the island showed a small
balance on the right side, the commercial future of Jamaica assumes an
extremely roseate hue. The fruit trade is still in its infancy, and the
cultivation of tobacco is in an even younger stage of development; these
two trades will grow in value by millions. The cultivation of cocoa is
already an important and lucrative Jamaican industry, and there are
still large areas of land admirably adapted for extension in this
direction; and new industries will arise.

Already there is a small company in process of formation for the
manufacture of starch from the cassava. Cassava starch is superior to
that made from corn or potatoes, and the ordinary varieties of Jamaica
cassava yield more starch to the acre than either corn or potatoes. It
is claimed, with every appearance of justice, that starch can be
manufactured from cassava at less than one quarter of the cost of the
starch made from other materials. Here is a new and extremely promising
industry.

Jamaica offers unequalled prospects to intelligent Britons who have
sufficient capital to enable them to embark in one or other of her
industries.

[Illustration: A TERRACE GARDEN ON THE HILLS, JAMAICA]




THE FLORA OF JAMAICA




CHAPTER XX

THE FLORA OF JAMAICA


Because Jamaica is famous for its woods and plants and scented blossoms,
one may be pardoned for roughly cataloguing a few of the three or four
thousand different species of flowering plants, ferns and forest trees.
Little is known of the lichens, mosses and fungi of the island. The
casual explorer will notice the beauty of the mosses, and he will
observe many varieties of the lichen, and there, unless he happens to be
an expert botanist, his interest in these smaller plants will end. But
with the flowering plants, the shrubs, and the gorgeous trees it is
different. No matter whether one is a botanist or a heathen, frequently
the wild luxuriance of a lovely bush forces us to ask its name. And the
name frequently cements one’s first affection for a wild plant’s
loveliness. The _Hibiscus_, the blue and white _lignum vitae_ flower,
the yellow _Kill Buckra weed_, the evening primrose and the passion
flower, the wild convolvulus, the iris and the orchid. All these are
fascinating names representing fascinating plants and blossoms. In
Jamaica, one drives through wild jungleland, and mistakes it for a
cultivated garden. Green bushes are spangled with flowers of flaming
scarlet; yellow bands of dense scrub are patched with fragrant blooms of
the most exquisite blue. The wild passion flower, gawdy yet dignified,
is to be seen everywhere, and in many places, especially on the lower
slopes of the blue mountains, we find a rich profusion of the mysterious
orchids--_Arpophyllum spicatum_, _Phaius grandifolius_, _Dendrophylax
funalis_, and a hundred other species. The forty varieties of the
convolvulus deserve a chapter to themselves. What could be more
beautiful than a field smothered by these graceful flowers, showing
every tint from scarlet to rose colour, violet, crimson, blue and
yellow? Then there are the poppies, the Mexican thistle and John Crow
bush; the buttercups, the wild pansies, sweet-william, the scented
furze, the acres of white clover and the dandelion. We could go through
a list of thousands. I think there is no bush, certainly there is no
acre of rural Jamaica, that does not contain its floral decorations, its
dozen brilliant blossoms.

Of the trees, the first that thrusts itself upon the notice of the
English traveller is the cocoanut palm, which Mark Twain or some one
else once described as an inverted feather dusting-brush. Besides the
cocoa palm there are a dozen other species--the groo groo, silver
thatch, mountain cabbage, oil palm, and the rest. In the Savannahs, near
the coast, we notice the French cotton-tree, and among the malarial
swamps the long-rooted mangrove--a tree which is a certain indication of
the unhealthiness of its neighbourhood. Inland, we

[Illustration: HUT ON A PLANTATION, JAMAICA]

find the _lignum vitae_, hod-wood, calabash, locust, raintree, the West
Indian birch, coccus-wood, the sidis-tree (called woman’s tongue), the
Spanish elm, mahogany, cedar, and the crooked divi-divi. These are
mostly timber trees. Among the fruits we find the mango, plum,
nazeberry, star-apple, the banana and the orange. These are but names,
and though I have not mentioned one tenth of the whole, I will spare you
the rest. Jamaica is the land of wood and water, of rich forests and
richer plains. You drive along a road which forms a natural arbour miles
long, decked at every yard with clusters of flowers, and scented with
all the sweetest perfumes of the universe. Then you break into flat
plain land, and the fields on either side are a blaze of coloured ground
plants; you find the mountain slope and drive along a narrow,
precipitous road, and look down from an eerie height on to a deep valley
clothed in greenery of the most luxuriant beauty. Fruit-trees are
everywhere, oranges green or gold, bananas green or yellow, brown
nazeberries, golden grape-fruit, custard apples, mangoes and plums. Then
you pass a plantation of pine-apples, and come to the coffee district.
It is the richest country in the world, par excellence--the flower and
fruit gardens of the West. If you burn a patch of jungle and leave a
charred acre of black earth, in two months you will return and find no
trace of your destruction. Mother Earth quickly clothes her nakedness in
this land of sunshine. If you plant a banana sprig and leave it alone
for eight or nine months, you then find a seven or eight foot tree, and
a heavy bunch of fruit ready for gathering. In West Africa they say
that if you plant a rotten stick, a barren tree will grow to the height
of twenty feet in twenty months, but if you plant a grain of corn
nothing will appear. They might with justice say in Jamaica, that the
grain of corn would produce a loaf, and the barren stick a lotus tree.

Not only does this wealth of vegetation give to the island a most
picturesque appearance, but also it constitutes a natural wealth which
hitherto has been hardly sampled. The fruit-trees are beginning to be
exploited, and already they support fleets of swift steamers between
Port Antonio and America, and between Kingston and Bristol, and bring
large profits to intelligent planters. But the exploitation of the
timber forest has scarcely begun.

The mahogany is exported in a small way, and valuable logwood finds its
way into the holds of ocean-going steamers. Satin-wood is exported in a
very small way, and there are large fortunes awaiting men who will
develop this trade. Bamboo is valuable, and one occasionally sees a
single negro despoiling a mighty clump of giant trees with a light hand
chopper, but the trade in Jamaican timber is in its infancy.

In the Kingston bazaars you can purchase walking-sticks for a shilling
which in England would cost six times that sum, and the Kingston
merchants make a profit on the transaction of more than five hundred per
cent. Mr. Frank Bullen, whom I met in one of the Kingston hotels, told
me that in the days when he was a seaman on a sailing ship, before he
took to the trade of writing books, he once carried a cargo of
walking-sticks from Kingston to England. I could not find any trace of
the industry in the island to-day. But it should be a most profitable
one. The Jamaican ebony or caccu-wood is one of the most beautiful woods
one can imagine--a dark-coloured, close-grained heavy stick, which,
common enough in Jamaica, is rare and valuable in England. And so it is
with many other species.

I have not mentioned the Jamaican ferns, yet the island contains almost
every species known to the collector, from the tiny, dainty maidenhair
to the giant tree-fern forty feet high. There is a deep ravine in the
island so crowded with the refreshing greenness of a thousand varieties
of the species of the cryptogram that the natives have named it Fern
Gully. Here, and in the shadow of the mountain peaks, the fern collector
can find every variety of his favoured plant. He can spend months in
gathering and cataloguing, but he can never exhaust the resources of the
island.

[Illustration: A JOCKEY AT CUMBERLAND PEN, JAMAICA]




A WEST INDIAN RACE-COURSE




CHAPTER XXI

A WEST INDIAN RACE-COURSE


We drove to the race-course through a tropical heat haze. The narrow
Jamaica lanes and the wider roads were stunned into reverberating
silence by the power of the heavy sun. We drove through crazy scents,
and the wild music of a million insects,--past banana clumps and patches
and plantations, giant cotton-trees and creeping hedge flowers. We
forded rivers and rattled across bridges, covering the parched beds of
narrow streams. Often, from amidst the yellow greenery, the noise of our
horses started a cloud of gaudy moths and painted butterflies. The John
crows showed their ragged heads, red and blue, like raw meat baking
slowly in the sun, above the dusty grey-black of their faded plumage.
Even they found the sun too strong for exercise. So they slept after the
manner of their kind, with one eye every watchful for prey or danger. We
rattled along under long avenues of bamboo-trees, ungainly giants with
feathered heads, unable even in the great heat to prevent the clicking
of their hundred knees. The noise of bamboo clumps suggests the
rattling of the bones of a shivering skeleton. The native people grinned
us a holiday welcome as we drove along, and the animal life--draft oxen,
decaying horses, cheery donkeys and saucy hogs--wondered at the
foolishness of our hurry. We reached the paddock gate, and paid our
entrance silver to a supercilious half-breed whose status was betokened
by the brilliance of his necktie. Then through a green, well-timbered
park, we reached the course.

The measured mile was well-fenced and police-guarded; we flourished
across its quietest part and entered the inner circle of the ring, the
heart of the race-course. The turf was half hidden by a multitude of
sportsmen and their attendant females. Black, and yellow, and brown, and
copper, and red, and white people; patriarchs, and children in arms;
giant negroes and dwarf half-formed half-breeds; programme sellers and
vendors of the refreshing juice of the green cokernut. Buck niggers in
white riding costumes, and shabby country folk in decayed khaki. Racing
touts in militia blazers, and respectable tradesmen in neckties of red,
white, and blue, and black bowler hats. Other things they wore of
course, but their appearance was mainly Union Jack neckties and bowler
hats. The black policemen in dark blue trousers, white tunics and
snow-white helmets, looked impassively nervous and very conscious of
dangerous power. Grinning blackies invited all and sundry to win their
racing losings back by the old system of the three-card trick, but their
customers consisted mainly of their decoy friends. In

[Illustration: A COLOURED LADY ON A RACE-COURSE, JAMAICA]

vain did the wily ones lose many dollars to their weary accomplices; the
negro proper preferred the excitement of the race.

We saw tables for the dice game, but no gamblers accepted the invitation
of the greasy bankers. Groups of women and children sat under the shade
of giant trees and made the day a perpetual picnic. The children were
very happy, and their buxom mothers slept away the brief minutes in
which they could not eat. The young black bucks ogled the young black
maidens, but there were no ticklers, and the penny squirt was
conspicuous only by its absence. By the weighing shed, and in the centre
of the circle of interest, the grand stand, white painted and decked in
royal purple, supported the weight of Government and officialdom. Some
of those who live in King’s House whispered weighty small talk with the
bloods of the army or the seniors of the hospital staff. In contrast
with the brilliant blackness of the crowd of natives, the grand stand
presented a tableau of white dresses and Paris hats and gay parasols.
Field-glasses were raised, and waves of humour swept the grand stand
crowd in Jamaica just as it happens in happy England. The racing horses
and dwarf black jockeys paraded to the official box, and the white
ladies flung their generous applause to the winners, just as it was in
the days of old, and will be ever more. False starts were made by too
eager jockeys who could not hope to win, and a discordant trumpet
regularly screeched return as often as half the line of horses sprang
forward before the starter’s flag had really dropped. These things
happen everywhere; they are the gin and bitters of every race, the
sportsman’s appetiser, the shower bath to prepare for the cold plunge.
When the horses really got away, the heat vanished and pandemonium
reigned to the tune of risen Africa. Jamaica vanished, and in its place
we saw and heard wild, discordant Africa. We heard the echoes of the war
cries of half the tribes that fight in the savage belt of country
stretching from Tanganyika to Sierra Leone. The sportsman and the
gambler threw off the thin veneer of a chaste and modest civilisation,
and became their fathers’ fathers’ true descendants. The half-breeds
shouted and then were much ashamed. The blacks tore the air with their
eager hands and flung themselves prostrate, biting the grass in the
frenzy of the savage African. And when the race was won, only the
winning blacks admitted the fairness of the race. The losing horses had
been “bridle pulled” or “kicked” or unfairly dealt with, and the loser
paid his debts with great reluctance, conscious of a great grievance.
The winner, on the other hand, presented the appearance of fierce,
overbearing rectitude. The race was fair, the test supreme, the winner,
the fastest horse in the country. The women of the dusky whites were hot
and dusty in their finery, but they sometimes forgot to assume the
appearance of calm indifference peculiar to their quite white sisters,
and shouted with the rest. Then they sulked because they knew that they
had forgotten that they were white. Your true half-breed lady knows
that she is pure white, and seeks to prove it to the world by English
accent, simpering manners, and the exhibition of a large contempt for
black men. Sometimes, it is supposed, she succeeds in impressing
dependant country folk. She talks of the England she has never seen as
“home,” and thinks that heaven is built for white people only. “The sun
is not too hot, but the weather is warm,” she suggests to her buggy man
with fine condescension. The driver agrees and says that he has ventured
to take a drink from the water-bottle.

“You done perfectly right,” says the white lady graciously.

Since white men are near, and she wishes to display her accent, she
adds, “You ’ave my permission to refresh you’self from the bottle as
frequent as you desire.”

A black man resplendent in a red coat, white riding breeches and yellow
gaiters, frankly admits his inferiority to the white man by begging for
a penny, a holiday penny. Refused this trifle, he immediately assumes an
attitude of equality. Patronisingly he sweeps the ground and the grand
stand with his riding switch (his leggings are incorrectly strapped),
and asks whether we agree with him that, “These be ver’ funny peoples,
eh? Too much dirt. Too little money.” He sees Forrest making sketches
and suggests that we might do infinitely worse than take him as a
subject. He switches his leather boots with the riding cane (it is only
a hedge switch), and shouts to his brother black dude a hundred yards
away, that he will join him as soon as he has finished with his “pals.”
He adds a P.S. that he is quite prepared to introduce his friend, if
that gentleman is so inclined. We are his “pals.” Then he cocks his hat
and chuckles at two passing girls, who respond with great enthusiasm.
“Nice girls, eh? But not good enough for me, eh? Like to know them, eh?”
But it should be admitted that the worst of the black men is not vainer
than some of the whites. Before the people of the grand stand, some of
the junior officers of the army and the hospital and the medical
service, even the civil service, are engaged in a ceaseless parade--the
strut of self-conscious vanity. It is these jackanapes that the black
men imitate, and it may be that it is the caricature that shows the
fatuity of the picture. Black vanity is not worse than white. Just as
the buck nigger struts for the edification of the black damsel and her
parents, so does the white officer or official. The effect in each case
is equally ludicrous. One white official drove to the course wearing a
hunting rig-out, spurs, a single eye-glass, and coloured cammer band. He
wore an air of perfect self-satisfaction. In Jamaica, single eye-glasses
are as common as orchids.

Horse-racing has become a most popular sport with white Jamaicans. It is
easy for any one to enter a horse or a pony and enjoy the sensation of
being an owner. A twenty-guinea polo-pony race is just as good as a mile
handicap for thoroughbreds, and, truth to tell, the winning owner gets
even greater praise. It may be that this is as it should be. But the
pity is that

[Illustration: A BUNGALOW ON THE HILLS, JAMAICA]

subalterns enter ponies bought on credit, and lose money in order to
impress a pitying crowd of nonentities. When a race-horse costs but
twenty pounds, and the entrance fee for a run costs only two or three
pounds more, no junior officer can afford not to run. The youths of the
regiments expect it. So officers under the rank of senior captains must
run their ponies as well as attend the meetings. Then they must “back
their gees” (as it is said in the vernacular), and lose more money in
one day than they should have spent in six weeks.

The seamy side of life is not so well represented on a Jamaican
race-course as it is at the average English meeting. Sharpers are not
numerous; the three-card experts and die manipulators are few in number
and faded and dejected in appearance.

The coloured jockey is a type by himself. In his amber and gold, or pink
and yellow, or green and red, and with his bent legs and humped back, he
would delight the heart of any disciple of Darwin. On his horse, he
looks for all the world like a clothed monkey on a London barrel-organ.
He rides with an air of bravado, and a most cruel switch. He gets
excited, but seldom loses nerve or head. It is probable that the race is
more to him than it ever is to his English prototype, because the heart
of a black man is full of jealousy and love of praise. A black jockey
never looks a part of his horse. The two are separate and distinct; a
comparison between the two would be to the advantage of the horse.

The race-horses and the unharnessed buggy ponies save the Jamaican
race-course from absolute vulgarity. Without them the place would have
been impossible, quite apart from a racing point of view. The heart of a
race-horse is clean, and his nature is superior to that of a half-breed
three-card sharper, or a whisky-soaking junior army man of great
vanity.

[Illustration: THE MARKET, MANDEVILLE]




THE HILL STATIONS




CHAPTER XXII

THE HILL STATIONS


The white inhabitants of Jamaica swear by the hill stations: Newcastle,
Mandeville, Malvern, Belle Vue and the rest. The description of the
journey to Newcastle will stand as an example of the manner in which one
travels to each, except that, in some cases, the railway as well as the
double-horse buggy is necessary for the journeying. The tourist should
remember that what appeals to the sun-dried Jamaican Englishman does not
of necessity appeal with the same force to a tourist in love with the
tropics. For my part I found the hill stations all a little dull, as
well as very cold and damp. Mandeville resembles a little English
country village on a warm, wet day in autumn. Malvern is also very
English, and though Belle Vue is more picturesque, it is not worth
travelling four thousand miles to see. Kingston and the little towns of
the plains repay even a bad sailor the two weeks spent in mid-ocean; the
hill stations do not. They are a snare and a delusion and a hollow sham.

Nevertheless we went to them all in the manner of docile sightseers.

Mandeville is famous for its donkey market and cool breeze. I did not
see the donkey selling in full swing, but from what I saw of the
market-place and the little donkeys I can appreciate the picturesque
possibilities of the affair. The cool breeze is far too cold; the cold,
damp rain and rain-mist far too penetrating. No, I disagree with the
Jamaicans in their estimate of their hill stations. No doubt they are
picturesque--all of them. Little villages built on steppes of giant
mountains, or small towns scattered over a high plateau. One experiences
many climates in climbing to them, and the beauty of the country which
separates them from the hot plains is magnificent beyond description.
One passes forest land and dense scrub, rushing rivulets and the dry
beds of larger rivers. One experiences every colour the imagination can
conceive, and sees all the fruits, and flowers, and timber trees to be
found in all the world. Yes, they have magnificent approaches these hill
stations, and for that reason they are places to visit. It is only their
climate one can object to, and that is wonderful too. The English
climate gives an English influence to the growing shrubs, and in
Mandeville one finds a village green and English trees fenced round by
groves of tall pines, and feather bamboos, and wavy banana
clumps,--England growing calmly with a green freshness in the midst of
the yellow tropics. Perhaps I have done the places an injustice; they
are really beautiful. It was the rain I disliked so much. You can stand
on the edge of Mandeville and watch the sun setting in the

[Illustration: STALLS OUTSIDE THE MARKET, MANDEVILLE]

midst of great valleys of wondrous beauty. Or in the morning you can
gaze through the damp mountain mist and see the yellow sun rising softly
from amidst the forest of palm-trees. You can listen to the
full-throated song of birds thanking God for the beauty of life, or see
lizards all green and gold, playing along the boughs of giant forest
trees. It is a good place, but somehow it lacks the airy-fairy lightness
of the hot plains. The natives do not laugh so much, and they are more
European in their dress and manners. There are white invalids in the
place and you cannot forget that it is a sanatorium.

Belle Vue is rather better and more picturesque and not so good. These
contradictions are permissable when one is writing of Jamaica. Belle Vue
is better because it is less civilised and less damp. It is more
picturesque because the only white man’s bungalow was built more than a
hundred years ago, and because the natives are less intimately
associated with the white people. It is not so good because it is not so
beautiful.

Still the view there from the edge of the mountain shelf, which
comprises the settlement, gives you a picture of Kingston and eight
miles of its northern suburbs, and beyond Kingston the wonderful bay,
Port Royal, the palisadoes and the ships at anchor and by the wharf
side. This view is compensation for the fatigues of the journey upwards.
The house too, the white man’s bungalow, is unique and full of history.
People say that it is older than two centuries, and its appearance gives
colour to the report. Heavy, arched doorways, great high rooms, solid
fittings and small windows. The woodwork is hand-carved and very
beautiful; the outbuildings are flimsy and very decrepid. Behind the
bungalow is a farmyard built on the model of those to be found in
England. There is a large water pool for the cattle, and an extensive
yard for the convenience of the farm hands. Here we can see the
dairy-work and watch the poultry strutting about in search of toothsome
morsels. An occasional dog lies gasping in the sun, and now and then a
little pig thrusts his nose into the gateway and gazes longingly at the
place so cruelly denied him. The un-English parts are the sheds devoted
to coffee-cooking and the place for the storing of cocoa and cinchona.

About the yard, among the coffee and cinchona huts, the cattle stand
listlessly gazing earthward, and the mountain goats flick their tails in
endless endeavour to disturb offending insects. It is rural--Arcadian in
its simplicity and great beauty. The bungalow and farmyard are
surrounded by a forest of pimento--an all-spice whose foliage is more
fragrant than the spice which makes the cultivation prosperous. Some
day, when Jamaicans awaken to the significance of the richness of their
island, some one will distil the perfume from the pimento leaf, and in
England we shall be able smell the wild fragrance of a Jamaican forest.
Where the forests end the banana plantations commence, and dotted about
the fields we find the native settlements.

Native settlements are all unique; they are all strange villages erected
according to an architecture

[Illustration: A ROAD IN MANDEVILLE]

peculiar to the minds of say fifty people. Each man builds his hut
according to his own idea of what a hut should be like, and he digs the
foundations with no regard for juxtaposition or the symmetry of the
whole village. The result is always purely picturesque. Some huts are of
heavy grass thatched with banana leaves; others are mud-thatched with
cobbled floors. The richer natives build wood houses out of disused
packing cases, and live under stencilled letterings which once directed
a package out of England. One house was built with box-wood drawn from
cases that had contained sugar, biscuits, marmalade, jam, cube-sugar and
cigarettes. The result fanned one’s pride in the might of England’s
commerce, since all these things were plainly marked London or Liverpool
or Dundee.

About the huts, and amidst the plantations round the village, the black
children played their Jamaican games with open-mouthed enthusiasm. The
children of the country villages are not overburdened with unnecessary
clothing and they are very strong and happy. By mixing with the little
children one loses faith in the old belief that it is impossible to
really civilise a coal-black nigger. The little ones differ from the
white children only in the colour of their skins and the superiority of
their physique. A negro child of two runs and laughs and plays as
sturdily as does a London child of four. They have a little school of
their own and a little church as well. Their one teacher is a lady of
colour who lives well away from the village, but the parson is as black
as the blackest among them. The teacher, who is a lady, wears
eye-glasses; the parson affects spectacles heavily rimmed with yellow
metal. On week days the people of the village, old and young, are very
simple; on Sundays they are very religious. The women do more work than
the men, though the men are not entirely given up to idleness. The women
attend to the home life, the housework, and the nursing, and they tend
the cultivation of the little family garden patch which supplies the
family with yams and banana, and occasionally a little crop of luscious
mangoes as well. The husband hires out his labour to the nearest planter
and receives his wage of a shilling a day. He hoes the fields, sees to
hedges, carries the water, drives the horses, or donkeys, or mules, or
bullocks; gathers the ripened fruit, packs it for the market, and, when
neither the planter nor the overseer is within eyeshot, idles away the
time to his heart’s delight. The women are careful about their own
adornment only on Sundays or those rare occasions when it is necessary
for them to make the long journey into Kingston market. On week days
they seem to wear whatever happened to come handiest when they were
engaged in the act of dressing. The men wear long cotton drawers or the
remains of heavy trousering, a very shady shirt, a battered yippo-yappo
hat, and occasionally, an affair which undoubtedly at some remote period
resembled a coat of the style affected by Europeans.

[Illustration: SUNSET OVER THE HILLS]




A FRAGMENT




CHAPTER XXIII

A FRAGMENT


I went to tea with some people who were neither white, nor black, nor
yellow. They were not half castes, not even quadroons. Octoroons they
would be called if they were very poor. White they pass as, in the great
house they live in. White they are to the few negro workmen they employ.

I give the conversation, not because it is of interest, but to show the
vernacular as voiced by the cultured octoroon. They were pleased to see
us, and I had the impression that I was undergoing the pleasant
sensation of being lionised--such was the warmth of my welcome.

“You take sugar and milk?” I took milk.

“Oh we always take sugar in Jamaica. It grows here you know, and a few
years back it was the most perfectly important product of the country,”
explained the lady, and her husband confirmed her statement with--

“Yes, the English have killed that branch of our commerce by the
introduction of free trade in sugar. My grandfather grew very very rich
on sugar; most of the money he and my father left I am spending in
trying to improve the condition of the island. I cannot hope to make
money. I do it for the good of my country; I am what you call a
philanthropist!”

He played with the fine jewelled ring on his left hand and smiled at me,
showing a perfect set of large white teeth. His eyes were larger than is
common among Englishmen, and his dark hair contained just the suggestion
of a curl. His wife was whiter than he, but her eyes were blacker than
those of any Englishwoman. Her lips were brown-red, and her hair a wavy
black. She spoiled what might have been a strikingly pretty appearance
by wearing pince-nez, for which she had no real use. They had plain
glasses heavily framed in gold, and they hung from her blouse by a
twisted chain of gold and platinum.

“Yes,” she said, “we are philanthropists!”

“I am perfectly conscious that not many of us white men cultivate our
plantations as we ought to do. But I know I work unselfishly. I take my
country seriously.”

The lady added--“That is what the Governor said to him the other day.
The Governor said, ‘My dear friend, you take your country seriously.’
And so he does--perfectly. And so do I.”

“Well, I was smoking with some gentlemen the other day, and they agreed
with me that we Englishmen are very unselfish in not going home and
leaving the country to rack and ruination.”

[Illustration: HUTS, ST. ANN’S BAY, JAMAICA]

“Ah, what would I give to go home,” exclaimed my hostess.

“To England?” I asked, nervously.

“Of course,” she replied tartly.

“Do you come from London?” I ventured.

“From near London.”

The spirit of enterprise entered my soul, and I determined to ascertain
whether the good lady had ever seen our little homeland, so I put
questions to her which were distinctly not those a guest should play
with at an afternoon dinner-table. I entrapped her into many foolish
mistakes, but she would never admit that she had never seen England. Her
knowledge of places and things, gathered from reading guide-books and
London newspapers, was certainly astonishing. But it was not difficult
to pierce through the surface crust of her knowledge. She had been
introduced to the King of course, but she knew the late Queen better.
She didn’t care much for the Princess of Wales though the Prince himself
was a very interesting man.

They told us of the losses they had sustained through the hurricanes,
and the lady explained that because they had lost so many many thousand
pounds she was forced to be very very economical with her “money for
pins.”

But with all their negro-pigeon-English they were hospitable enough, and
nothing would have delighted the worthy couple more than our acceptance
of their proffered entertainment for many weeks.

“Yes, stop here; we will make you perfectly happy and at home; the house
is yours and all the servants, my horses and buggies (he had one of
each), and my fishing rods are at your disposal if only you will
remain.”

We could not stop, since we were more than seventy miles from the
capital and were due to catch a boat in two days. The hostess bewailed
the poverty of the household.

“In the period of my grandfather you would not have been permitted to
depart in this manner. Then we should have been able to place at your
convenience many horses and buggies, so that you could have travelled to
Kingston by road, and not in a railway train with negroes. If only we
had slaves again and protection also, then you would be able to stop in
Jamaica in comfort and luxury.”

“But, my dear,” remonstrated the husband, “slavery is a thing not to be
desired by us cultured gentlemen and ladies. We must protect the weak
and fallen; it is our _juty_ to heaven to _succure_ the black heathen of
the negroid race. Never say words in praise of slavery. Our _juty_ is to
helevate the trampled negroid to our condition of education and
refinement.”

The lady, so heavily admonished, wept copiously and the man frowned
heavily to emphasise the weight of his admonitory disquisition. We moved
uneasily in our chairs and I fingered my watch; it is unusual to be
confronted by a lady’s tears at an afternoon tea function. “Pray do not
go,” said the lady. “Pardon these weakly tears. I feel for my husband. I
think of the many thousands of pounds sterling he has been wasted of by
the loss of slavery and the sugar duty. I weep for the nobleness he
shows in speaking like that.” The frown on the husband’s face became
intensified and he gave evidence of the possibility of a new outburst.
But I boldly intervened with--“But after all what is a nigger compared
with the comfort of white men?”

“That’s just it,” replied our host; “you’ve just hit it. What is a
nigger? He is our unequal in every manner. He is but little better than
the animals and beasts of the fields. But just to study him the British
Government has spread ruination throughout Jamaica. That is just what I
say. What is a nigger that he should have dispoiled me of my wealth?”

While he was delivering himself of this vehement contradiction of his
former chastened sentiments it was quite obvious that the nigger he so
much despised was in reality his natural grandmother. Our hostess flung
aside her eye-glasses and the effect was similar to opening of the
lock-gates on the upper reaches of the Thames. The tears poured forth in
a copious stream of weeping.

“But, Algey,” she sobbed--“Algey you must not forget that you are the
nation’s protector of the weak, and poor, and coloured. Do not forget
that you do your best. The lowest of the low niggers have wives and
children.”

“True, true,” mumbled the husband; “sometimes I forget myself and the
words flow out like boiling lava from Vesuvius. But I will continue in
the way I have gone for many years, and I will be a help and protector
to the poor and down-trodden. The humble of the earth are my
brothers--that is what I must decline to forget.”

Before we took our leave the couple had regained their cheerfulness, and
the lady had made us promise always to think kindly of Jamaica. “After
all,” she lisped, “I must regard Jamaica as my home country since here I
saw the light of the first day; England is home, of course, always, but
Jamaica is my place of birth.”

[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL AT SPANISH TOWN, JAMAICA]




MATTERS OF INTEREST TO TOURISTS




CHAPTER XXIV

MATTERS OF INTEREST TO TOURISTS


If I have not mentioned all the names of the places in Jamaica dear to
the hearts of tourists, and of towns which are the pride and glory of
Jamaicans, it is because I do not think such a catalogue would be of
general interest. The description of Kingston may stand as a description
of Jamaican cities; Port Antonio, Montego Bay, Spanish Town and the rest
differ from Kingston in a less degree than Fleet Street differs from the
Strand. It would be wearisome to attempt to give a chapter to each.

Port Antonio is the northerly port and the centre of the island’s trade
with America; Montego Bay is a thriving commercial centre; Spanish Town
is the ancient seat of Government. At one time Spanish Town was the
island’s capital, and there we find a fine monument erected to
commemorate the victory of Rodney over the French fleet under de Grasse,
and the old cathedral. The cathedral is the oldest building in the
island. It links the Jamaica of to-day with the Jamaica of four
centuries ago, since it was built by the original conquerors in 1523.
In the West Indies only the cathedrals of Carthagena and Havana can
equal it in point of antiquity. After much renovation and reconstruction
the structure now stands as the centre of the Anglican Church in
Jamaica. Its floor is paved with gravestones and memorial tablets, on
which are carved the names of many of those who played a large part in
the island’s history. Monuments bearing the names of the Earl and
Countess of Effingham, Sir Basil Keith, General Selwyn, and the Countess
of Elgin, may be seen. And on an ancient grave bearing a date early in
the seventeenth century we read:

    Here lies Sir Thomas Lynch at ease and blest;
    Would you know more ye world will speak ye rest.

In the body of the building one can read the epitaphs of many of the
officers sent by Cromwell to conquer the island. The altar-plate and
vessels are most ancient and valuable, particularly so are a fine flagon
and chalice which were brought to the cathedral from the plunder of San
Domingo in 1685. In proper cathedral fashion the war-stained flags of
the West India Regiment are hung in the chancel, and the verger will
tell you that the coloured regiment brought them to this house of prayer
when they returned from Ashantee.

Near Montego Bay there is another romantic building; though only a
private house, it stands as one of the landmarks of the island. Rose
Hall, a fine old West Indian mansion, rich in carvings and ancient
woodwork, remains as a monument of the Jamaica of

[Illustration: A GARDEN TERRACE, JAMAICA]

the days of the millionaire planter. Rose Hall is typical of what the
majority of the old West Indian mansions were before the island fell
into the clutches of poverty. It is a house with a history. One, Mrs.
Rose Palmer, lived there in the days of old, and it is recorded that
there she poisoned three husbands in rapid succession. If tradition does
not err, this lady must have been of curiously abandoned habits. Under
her régime Rose Hall and the surrounding plantations became a famous
centre of dissipation and vicious cruelty. At times her slaves were
pampered and encouraged into all kinds of most vicious excess; at others
she would flog her whole retinue, and sometimes barbarously murder a few
of them, simply for the pleasure she found in the killing. She died at
last, and report said she had been strangled by her negro paramour.
However, she left sufficient money to pay for the erection of a marble
monument in the Parish Church; a memorial which was to contain a list of
her virtues, and hand her name and fame down to posterity. Tradition has
it that shortly after the clean white marble was set up in the church a
crimson band grew out of the sculptured throat, permanently discolouring
the neck and proving that the lady died of strangulation.

Another excellent show place in Jamaica is the Hope Garden, a few miles
out of Kingston. This is the headquarters of the Jamaican botanical
department, and it undoubtedly contains one of the most magnificent
botanical collections in existence. Here can be found a most extensive
and representative collection of tropical plants, and the botanist will
have little difficulty in discovering a specimen of anything and
everything that grows in any part of the world. But quite apart from its
scientific value the Hope Garden is well worth a long visit. The gardens
are carefully cultivated and the smooth green lawns and gravelled paths
offer a fine contrast to the rugged wildness of the Jamaican lanes.
Except for the difference of the climate, and the greater variety of
rich out-door plants, one might imagine oneself in the trim gardens at
Kew. We find carpet beddings and ornamental borders, lily-covered water
tanks and banks of flowering orchids. Considerably more than an acre is
given over to the cultivation of roses, and an intelligent attendant
will tell you that Jamaica is not a good place for growing most species
of the rose. The soil is too rich, the climate too warm. The poor rose
gets no rest--it must flower continuously throughout the year, and so at
the end of the fourth or fifth year, the poor plant, prematurely old,
worn out by the constant exertion of producing its scented bloom, droops
and dies. You will discover little forests of every tree to be found in
Jamaica, and pass by clumps of fruit-trees bending beneath the weight of
their heavy harvest. Yes, the Hope Garden is well worth seeing,
especially so if one has an interest in or a love for beautiful flowers.

One of the great charms of Jamaica as a tourists’ resort is the
multiplicity of the places every one really ought to see. People arrive
from Europe or America, and the first friendly Jamaican they meet
provides them with a programme of the places they really ought to
visit. The friendly native gives them a list of excursions which will
fill every minute of their time from the moment of their arrival to the
projected time of their departure. When the newcomer meets a second
friendly native he criticises the list prepared by his predecessor, and
suggests many alterations. Substitute “Belle View” for “Mandeville” on
such a day, or go to “Castleton” and leave out “Hope Gardens,” so that
the bewildered tourist knows not what to do.

I am utterly incapable of giving advice in the matter. I invariably
arrange such things particularly badly myself. My plan is always to have
no plans. I do in the morning what seems most interesting. In this
manner it is probable that I waste much precious time. I have wasted
many mornings in the streets of Kingston when I might have been
sight-seeing in the hills. But that is my rule. I prefer to have no
plans, and I like to avoid the beaten track of the tourist. It is better
to lounge always, especially so in the tropics. On a former visit to the
island I was with a party who insisted on “doing” everything. We used to
get up in the morning at six and go to bed at night at twelve. We lived
in buggies and trains and tram-cars. At every point of interest we were
stopped and invited to admire something which was eloquently described
in the local guide-books. The natives we met were all unnatural. I
remember that I expressed a desire to see a native village, and we were
driven to a collection of trim huts, and a dozen well-dressed negroes
appeared for our inspection. And the fee that was paid to the negroes
for having been examined was placed in our bill of expenses. That, I
venture to think, is not the best way to see a new country. It is always
better to walk than to take a buggy, but if a buggy must be used then it
is well to hire it by the hour or day and tell the driver to drive
on--to drive in any direction that leads to no particular place. If you
take a ride in the tram-cars it is better to sit in the seats used by
the natives, the market-women and the labourers, than to loll in the
front benches among the white people. If you want to see the
market-place don’t take a policeman with you as if you expected to mix
with the most abandoned criminals, and if you want an iced Kola go to
one of the negro rum-shops for it, and avoid the beautifully-furnished
European hotels. The people who “do places” and “see everything” usually
mix only with tourists and never get to know the natives. True, they see
the scenery and many of the places of interest, but they don’t get to
know the life of the place, and they can have no knowledge of its
people.

If the visitor wants to go to service on Sunday he would find it more
interesting to go to a negro meeting-house than to the most popular of
the fashionable churches. He would find out more about the inner life of
the Jamaican army by ten minutes’ talk with any soldier of the line than
by an hour’s interview with the smartest captain or most courteous
commanding-officer. It is better to talk with the market women and the
black men who deal in native tobacco, with the

[Illustration: RESTING BY THE WAY, JAMAICA]

water-side porters and the black constables, than it is to attend
lectures, or read books, or interview politicians, if you want to know
anything about the Jamaican labour problem. And all these things are
more or less impossible if you explore Jamaica along the lines of a
crowded time-table.

That is my opinion. So I am reluctant to suggest that tourists should
make a point of seeing this thing or that. I would rather advise a
newcomer to buy a buggy and a couple of horses and engage the services
of an honest driver. Having secured these he should pack a bag with a
couple of flannel suits, a tooth-brush and some under-linen, and then
explore the island, practically giving his horses their heads all the
way. The only instruction he need give his driver would be, Avoid the
railroad track and go through as many villages as possible.

After this the tourist may go home knowing that he has seen something of
the island even though he has not visited Spanish Town, Castleton,
Gordon Town, Mandeville or Port Antonio. These places are but the names
of important centres; Jamaica is the land of wood and water. The
plantations and the banana fields, the forests and the rivers, and
hedges, and the native villages are more interesting and far more
fascinating than marble monuments or anglicised native houses.

[Illustration: OUTHOUSES NEAR KINGSTON, JAMAICA]




CERTAIN THINGS THE WEST INDIAN TOURIST MUST NOT DO




CHAPTER XXV

CERTAIN THINGS THE WEST INDIAN TOURIST MUST NOT DO


Do not believe every story you hear which makes against the character of
the Governor or his wife. It is difficult for a high official, for the
direct representative of H.M. the King, to always please every
half-white woman and her husband. The jealousy of the half-white for the
pure white is very bitter. Do not utterly believe in the alligator
stories as told by the junior subalterns of West Indian regiments, or
yet the shooting yarns of medical officers of health. All white
Jamaicans do not spend all their time in following the festive alligator
or in spearing frisky sharks in Kingston Harbour. Do not trouble to
drive in any hackney-carriage if your destination is within easy walking
distance. The argument with the buggy driver is more exhausting work
even than a walk of two hundred yards. Do not go out in the sun without
a hat or with only a small cap. Do not drink too much either of the
cool, iced lemon squash, or the more-alluring whisky and mineral water.
Gin is not a particularly wholesome stimulant, but it is better for the
white man in Jamaica than the finest whisky. Water that is not filtered
should be avoided, and it is well always to sleep beneath your mosquito
covering. Iced drinks taken in large quantities are the best means of
securing a really bad digestion, especially if they are taken when one
is very hot. India-rubber shoes are easy to put on, but in the tropics
they are occasionally very difficult to discard. A qualified chemist
should be requisitioned to remove any half-melted rubber that may have
stuck to the soles of your inflamed feet. Panama hats which are loosely
plaited are excellent things for wearing on the suburban parades of cool
countries; in the tropics head-gear made of felt or pith is better. It
is not a good thing to wear heavy clothes, neither is it good to wear
too little. The wise man does not plunge into a cold bath when he is
very hot, neither does he bathe in the harbour among hungry sharks.
Inquiries should be made into the habits and customs of alligators
before the tourist takes a dip in some of the up-country rivers, and he
should avoid hunting the gaudy butterfly in malarious swamps noted for
the propagation of high fevers. It is never a good thing for a new
arrival to take risks, but if he insists, let him leave a written
document exonerating the climate from all blame of causing his death.

A Jamaican nigger should not be treated as though he were a dangerous
wild beast, and the tourist should remember that the blackest negro
tries to live up to a code of morals common to white men. All the blacks
who come in contact with you will be strongly

[Illustration: THE CAPITAL OF ST. THOMAS]

influenced by your conduct; you should treat a native just as you would
treat a white boy whose respect and affection you desired to retain,
always remembering that a black man holds his women folk in great
respect.

It is unnecessary that you should remind every coloured person that he
or she is coloured. Half-breeds prefer to pass as whites. On the other
hand be chary of believing that a person is pure white solely because
you have his assurance that such is his condition. It may be that it is
a matter of no moment to you whether he is black or white or yellow, in
which case give him the benefit and call him the colour of his choice.
Jamaican plantations are not waste lands, and should not receive the
treatment meted out to virgin territories. All fruit trees are not
planted for the convenience of curious tourists. It is not a polite
thing to pull down a banana-tree in order to discover the secrets of its
growth, nor is it kind to shake a ripe orange-tree in order to see how
many fruit will fall. Even the most luxuriant pine-apple field should
not be trampled through with a golf club, and that place which looks
like a private garden may really be one in fact. In such a case it is
not the thing for a stranger to pluck flowers or uproot rare ferns. A
country planter does not regard his private bungalow as a public museum
for the use of tourists, and as a rule he will resent any question as to
his ancestry. It is not good for a new arrival to accept all the
spirituous liqueurs proffered him, and Jamaicans will not admire a man
merely because he is a dissolute, dissipated dog. Do not offer emphatic
judgment on the qualities of a Jamaican horse until you have been on his
back for more than seven hours, and do not gamble at the three-card
trick on Jamaican race-courses.

Chasten your feeling of ultra superiority and do not put down every
untidy-looking white man you meet in remote country districts for a
tramp bent on gaining possession of your valuables. Important planters
in country districts, away from busy centres, sometimes pay but little
attention to outward appearances. Individual planters tire of much
reiteration of advice from young and enthusiastic tourists; likewise
they are not pleased to hear that you cannot understand how it is that
in such a wonderful climate all the planters are not the richest men in
the world. The Jamaican does not like the Englishman who imagines that
Britain keeps Jamaica going by charitable bequests; it is not pleasant
for a hard-working man to come across an individual who tells him to his
face that he is little better than a pauper. Above all, let it be
remembered that the inhabitants of Jamaica did not brew their 1903
cyclone with the idea of giving Englishmen a little shock in order that
British philanthropists might send cheques to the West Indies. Everyday
ideas on the politics of the island, on means by which the island’s
finances might be put on a better plane, on new industries, and better
conditions of labour, will occur to the bright young tripper. It is
better for a young man not to give emphasis to these ideas until he has
been in the country for several weeks.

[Illustration: BLACK RIVER, JAMAICA]




THE CARIBBEAN GROUP




CHAPTER XXVI

THE CARIBBEAN GROUP


Because I have exhausted so much space on a description of Jamaica, and
the people of Jamaica, it must not be imagined that the shadow of the
Queen of the Antilles clouds all the other West Indian islands into
insignificance. Trinidad, St. Lucia, Dominica, and the rest of the
Caribbean group, have much to say in the history of the West Indies. The
Jamaica I have described, the Jamaicans I have mentioned, may be taken
as being typical of West India. The natives of the other islands are the
brothers and sisters of Jamaicans; the roads, and plantations, and
mountains of the other islands differ from those of Jamaica only in the
matter of proper names. In the West Indies there are many Rio Cobra
rivers, though only one of them is known by that name. The bamboos, the
pine-trees, and the banana clumps are of the same species in all the
different islands. So for the purposes of this book I thought it more
convenient to describe Jamaica and mention the other places.

Barbadoes, the most windward of the group, is a densely populated
island only twenty-one miles long. It is an important place and does a
good trade in sugar. The West Indian Imperial Department of Agriculture
has its headquarters in Bridgetown, the Barbadian capital, and the
climate of the island is most salubrious. Barbadoes has been under the
unbroken rule of the British for three centuries. Its history, in common
with most West Indian histories, opens with long chapters containing the
records of great prosperity, of a little island overflowing with riches;
of millionaire planters, West Indian luxury, sumptuous mansions filled
with gold and silver plate, rare carvings, European art treasures, and
the choicest wines. Until very recently Barbadoes was the central market
of all the West Indian islands. It was the shipping centre of the West.
All the wealth of the Indies had to be landed on the Barbadian quays for
transhipment to England, and much of the dust of the wealth remained.
Sugar plantations flourished in the island; the planters had no
grievances. Even when the decree of emancipation came, and all the
slaves were freed, Barbadoes did not suffer. The country was too small
to allow any of the freed negroes to cultivate food-plots on their own
account; every acre of the island was tenanted and firmly held. So there
was no industrial upheaval. The negro had to work or starve, and
naturally he chose the former alternative. The prosperity of the
planters continued, and the blacks easily settled down to their new
condition of free labour. But the introduction of bounty-fed beet sugar
completely altered the

[Illustration: ROSEAU, THE CAPITAL OF DOMINICA]

story. Ruin swept over the island like a tainted wind. The planters,
always improvident, fell one by one, and Barbadoes sank to the bankrupt
condition of Jamaica.

Nowadays it has recovered somewhat; the introduction of efficient
machinery and modern methods of cultivation have resuscitated the
industry to some extent. But even to-day Barbadoes does not present the
gilded appearance of sumptuous wealth that it must have had less than a
century back.

Barbadoes is an island of coral formation, and its dusty roads are
always of a blinding whiteness. Some of the buildings in and about
Bridgetown are remarkably handsome, and, as in Kingston, Jamaica, a
tramway system connects the capital with its suburbs.

Seen from the sea Barbadoes presents a remarkably flat appearance; there
are no great mountains or wooded heights in this little isle of rest.
One sees nothing but a flat stretch of luxuriant greenery dotted with
white hamlets, and streaked with snow-white roads. The harbour of the
capital is always crowded with shipping, the quays and dockyards are
filled with merchandise, and among the wharf sheds a brilliant crowd of
natives cheerfully assumes an air of indolent exertion.

St. Lucia is larger than Barbadoes, and its thickly-wooded hills and
sugar-loaf mountains offer greater attraction to the artistic visitor.
But commercially it has not the value of its smaller neighbour. Though
much larger, the population of St. Lucia is only about one quarter that
of Barbadoes. The revenue and the imports and exports are considerably
less valuable. Castries, the capital, is the principal coaling station
for the English in the West Indies. The island has a romantic history.
More frequently than any other West Indian isle has its nationality been
changed. First French, then British, French again, and then, finally won
from France by Abercromby, it has remained British ever since. It was in
the harbour of Castries that Rodney collected the scattered British
Fleet before attacking De Grasse, and establishing the absolute
supremacy of Britain in the Indies.

The island is of volcanic and not coral formation, and it is famous for
its sulphur springs at Souffriere. The French King Louis XVI. caused
several fine baths to be erected at these springs for the use of his
troops when the island was part of his domain; though the baths are now
in ruins, they remain as one of the showplaces of the island--one of the
links of the romantic chain of West Indian history.

The French island of Martinique is mainly associated with its famous
volcano, Mont Pelee, which gave fearful evidence of its activity two
years ago by destroying the prosperous town of St. Pierre. Before the
annihilation of this city, which was one of the largest and richest
ports in the West Indies, Martinique was counted one of the fairest and
richest islands in the West. Coffee, sugar, and the richest fruits were
largely cultivated, and the colony was generally in a most prosperous
condition. But the disaster has cast a gloom over the colony; many of
the planters and merchants have left its

[Illustration: MONT PELÉE, MARTINIQUE]

shores and found new homes in places less obviously treacherous.
Probably many years will elapse before Martinique once more regains the
prosperity which was buried beneath the lava streams of Mont Pelee.

The appearance of the place to-day is not attractive. The blackened ruin
of a rich city lies on the surface of the land like an unwholesome scar.
The people have not yet recovered from the shock of that terrible
visitation. And at the summit of the dread volcano the gathering mists
always suggest new disaster. The colonists have lost faith in a land in
which life is held at the mercy of a live volcano. They seem to feel
that they are sitting at the feet of a fearful death. Martinique is a
land of high mountains; it is a rugged, picturesque, wild country,
menacing rather than alluring--a fit resting-place for the giant Mont
Pelee. So the island appears to-day, as you view it from the deck of an
ocean liner. Two years ago the place was a laughing, wooded, sunlit
isle; St. Pierre was the capital of West Indian gaiety. The French
trained natives, gayer and more brilliant than the British blacks,
laughed in the little shaded paths about the foot of Pelee. And the
reflection of the twinkling lights of St. Pierre danced on the surface
of the captive waters of the bay.

It should not be understood that I suggest that Pelee’s lava-cascade
destroyed the whole of Martinique. Pierre was but a corner of the
island. Fort de France and the other towns remain. The few thousand
souls that perished left behind a population which still numbers over
one hundred and fifty thousand people. The fruit trees and the
plantations, the factories and nutmeg groves, remain. But the ashes of
St. Pierre remain also, and above the ashes the giant crater of Mont
Pelee still frowns beneath her crown of lowering mists.

Dominica is British. Though of volcanic formation the island is not
possessed of a Mont Pelee. A marvellously productive country is
Dominica, happy in the possession of plantations richly productive of
limes, cocoa, sugar, and coffee.

It is another land of wood and water. Hundreds of tiny, rushing streams
flow down from the mountains through the rich valleys into the sea. And
all the mountain sides and deep ravines are clothed in verdant forest
trees.

Roseau is the capital--a picturesque if somewhat dilapidated city
bearing unmistakable evidence of its French foundation. The roofed
market-place is near the sea-shore, and the cool sea breeze makes the
place endurable even in the hottest hour of a crowded day. Among the
bush-land of the interior a few Carib families still remain--shy,
inoffensive people, who do not readily mix with the more vigorous
negroes.

The climate of the island is rather humid but most salubrious. If there
is one island in the rich West Indian group of fertile countries whose
soil is worthy of the title richest, that isle is Dominica. As a
fruit-producing country the little land of high mountains and hot
springs is destined to become pre-eminent.

[Illustration: AN OLD MAN, ST. THOMAS]

Even Barbadoes in its palmiest days was not richer than Dominica is
certain some day to be. Acres of the most fertile country in the world
lie fallow within the confines of this island, whose name is written
large in Britain’s naval history. Virgin forests of wild fruit trees
still cover vast tracts of a country which one day will be claimed by
English husbandmen. Like Jamaica, Dominica cries out for men--new men,
new energy, new enterprise. In England we associate our West Indian
islands with only a dead prosperity. In the West Indies one encounters
ample evidence of present wealth and great promise of future riches.

Antigua is a British sugar island--a hundred square miles of gently
undulating country, which in appearance is more English than West
Indian. From a tourist standpoint it is famous for the beauty of its
white-sanded bays, and for the old naval dockyards at Elizabeth Harbour.

St. Kitts, or St. Christopher, to give the oldest West Indian Colony its
full and dignified title, is an island of an area of only sixty-eight
square miles. Almost every acre of the land is well planted with
flourishing sugar cane. Adjoining St. Kitts is its sister colony, Nevis.
Only a strait three miles in width separates the two islands. Nevis is
chiefly interesting by reason of the fact that in a once-stately mansion
known as Montpelier, Nelson was married to a rich widow of the island.

Trinidad, the most southernly and the second largest island of the
British group is, in a way, the most remarkable of all. Port of Spain,
the capital, ranks with Kingstown, Jamaica, as an extraordinary example
of the actual wealth of the Indies. Only a few cities on the mainland,
capitals of gigantic South American States, exceed Port of Spain in size
and importance and wealth. Yet this chief town of Trinidad is the
capital of an island only fifty-five miles in length--the capital of a
sea-girt country which might easily be pocketed by many of the Southern
republics. In many ways Port of Spain is vastly superior to all the
towns of its neighbouring continent. Life there is safer; in Port of
Spain there are no cut-throats--no quick-fingered rascals of the
revolver-shooting fraternity. The climate of Trinidad is more salubrious
than that of any of the inland countries; and in its towns more
attention is paid to the comfort, health, and convenience of residents
and visitors. Yet, for our purpose, Trinidad may be counted as a South
America in miniature.

One notices, in the tangled undergrowth in the forests, in the
ever-brilliant foliage of the wooded heights and green valleys, a
something that one had not noticed in the other islands. The place is
indescribably foreign. It is not like the countries we have already
seen, yet it is not unlike them. Trinidad is a West Indian island, but
in appearance it more closely resembles the South American mainland than
any of its sister-lands in the Caribbean group. Naturally so, since the
salt-water isthmus that separates the land from Venezuela at one point
only measures seven miles. Save for that seven miles of blue sea,
Trinidad would be a part of the romantic continent whose imprint and

[Illustration: NEVIS]

nature is written in vivid colours throughout the island’s tangled
forests and deep, still lakes.

The enchanting island has a history brimming with romance. Its story
contains the names of Columbus, its discoverer; Raleigh, who visited the
place in search of a gold mine, and many of our famous old British
sea-dogs. Trinidad started of course by being annexed to Spain; then
France took the place and held it until just over one hundred years ago,
when England claimed it as her own. The white inhabitants to-day are
members of these three European races. The coloured people are pure
negroes, Indian coolies, and Spanish, French and English half-breeds.
The latter element is particularly strong. Consequently, in Trinidad
there are many political agitators.

Visitors will land from their mail steamer at Port of Spain and find
themselves in a foreign-looking British West Indian capital, in an
atmosphere of tramways, telephones, suffocating heat, negroes, and
spasmodic bustle and noise. It is a town containing buildings
reminiscent of its Spanish, French, and British periods of Government.
Houses in all the styles of each nationality will be found on every
side. Each particular style of architecture has of course been
West-Indianised--altered for comfort’s sake, and so stage-managed, as it
were, that it is converted into style suitable for a living place in the
fearful heat of the hottest island in the Indies. The tourist will find
the market-place and a few interesting churches. He will feel that he
has been landed into a hothouse. The atmosphere of Trinidad is like
that of an English hothouse on a scorching summer-day. The brilliant
foliage and the constant banks of gaudy blossoms will help to support
the illusion. He will pant for breath and speedily seek the cool shelter
of a heavy verandah. It may be that at first he will wish that he had
not landed. But after an hour or two he will have become accustomed to
the curiously-suffocating heat, and the beauty of the place will
evidence to him the wisdom of his coming.

He will remain for a day or two in Port of Spain, and then in the course
of many excursions he will visit the chief places of interest. The pitch
lake is an inexhaustible sea of most valuable asphalt. Nearly two
hundred thousand tons of this asphalt were exported last year: it is a
most valuable commercial commodity, and one of the wonders of the
island. Though it cannot be described as being beautiful, or even
picturesque, this hundred-and-ten acre patch of fathomless bitumen is
worth seeing. Commercially it is of the utmost value to the island,
since the annual value of the pitch exported is something like one
hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The waterfall at blue basin should be
seen by all who land in Trinidad. Nothing could be more fascinating than
the heavy fall of this mass of water, which, emerging from a wooded
tunnel, tumbles into a pool filled with rocks and walled by the heavy
foliage of the greenest trees. It is a fairy glen filled with the
gorgeous beauty of wildest tropical loveliness, and always echoing the
strong music of falling water. You find the place by way of winding
slippery paths; you approach it through a light haze of tinted mists,
and when you stand face to face with the broad white streak of falling
water you are half stunned by the noise and the heavy splashing. The
beauty of the place is overpowering. The heavy noise of falling water is
so out of place in that brilliant valley of languorous silence that it
produces something in the nature of a discord--an entrancing,
intoxicating discord.

There are other towns beside Port of Spain to visit. San Fernando,
Arima, and Princestown should be seen if one’s visit is likely to be a
long one. True, they are typical of all other little West Indian towns,
but each contains an individuality--a something not held in common with
other towns, so, if you can spare the time, see them all. Then there are
the Maraval Reservoirs and the Five Islands.

Tobago is a little island attached to the Government of Trinidad. It is
a healthy West Indian colony supporting a population of 20,000 souls,
only about one hundred of whom are white. The industries of Tobago are
purely agricultural: coffee, cocoa, and india-rubber are extensively
cultivated. From the tourist’s point of view the little place is chiefly
famous for its beautiful birds and butterflies. The angler can find many
varieties of fish in its rushing streams, and fruits and vegetables grow
in the richest profusion all the year round.

[Illustration: A GUADELOUPE LADY]




HAYTI




CHAPTER XXVII

HAYTI


Hayti is a black republic--a place where the negro race is predominant.
No white man may claim any plantation or even an acre of land in the
Haytian republic as his own. The negroes refuse to grant land tenures to
any “white trash.” Europeans exist in the island only on sufferance, and
they are subjected to much the same treatment as in the days of old was
meted out to negro slaves. It is the least desirable country in the
world for the white man to select as his home.

The republic spreads about halfway across the island of San Domingo,
whose history is rich in tales of bloodshed, piracy, and worse. The
first of the West Indian islands to be annexed by Europe, San Domingo,
or Española as Columbus named it, was the earliest Spanish settlement in
the western world. As in Jamaica the Spaniards introduced religion so
effectually that the original inhabitants, the gentle Caribs, were
crushed out of existence. The Africans were introduced to do the work of
the plantations. The Haytian portion of the island was afterwards
wrested from Spain by the French buccaneers, who presented it without
reserve to the Crown of France. The French did much to improve the
island; plantations were established, cities were formed, churches were
built, and the planters found that their country was, naturally, the
richest of all the Caribbean group.

When the revolution broke out in France the new Government decided
against the slave labour, and so the negroes obtained their freedom. The
freed slaves promptly turned against their late masters, slaughtered
every white man, woman, and child in the island, and proclaimed the
independence of Hayti as a black republic. Napoleon despatched an army
corps to avenge their murdered countrymen, but yellow fever made the
ultimate conquest of the island impossible. And so, mainly because of
the insalubrity of its climate, Hayti remains a free republic. The
language and religion, and some of the customs, of France remain. But
the Government is practically under the sway of a despotic President,
who exercises all the power of an Emperor, while pandering to the vanity
of his people by calling them free, and his government representative.
Though nominally elected by a popular assembly he really governs by
right of might, and he is as a rule dethroned after much bloodshed by a
rival Haytian giant. The President sees to it that he secures the
affection and loyalty of the trained soldiery, and all his friends and
most powerful supporters are given gaudy uniforms and high-faluting
titles in the Haytian army. It is a Gilbertian style of government and
might be

[Illustration: HUTS ON A COUNTRY ROAD, JAMAICA]

counted entirely humorous were it not for the constant bloodshed.

Morally the Haytians are impossible people. Snake worship and
cannibalism, and all the old superstitions of barbaric Africa, still
prevail in the gilded republic. Their religion is frequently but a thin
veneer of polish, worn to cover the arts of fetish worship and human
sacrifice. The lives of the citizens are not respected so much by the
prevailing government as are the political rights of the electorate. The
whole republic is one festering mass of corruption. The officials are as
a rule entirely corrupt, the European church has practically no real
existence, sober “home life” is almost unknown. The men of the place are
as a rule entirely vicious, unlicensed and unprincipled; the women are
unmoral and entirely without culture.

It is a curious place to look upon, this Hayti; but it is a most unsafe
place to travel in. The people of the capital, Port-au-Prince, live in
the midst of a city of fine buildings and garbage-littered streets; the
women parade the white squares in European costumes of Parisian silks
and high-heeled, patent-leather shoes. The men swagger in gaudy,
tinselled uniforms of extravagant design and indifferent workmanship,
trailing tailor-made swords, and jingling heavy South American spurs.
Their manners are entirely without polish, though they swagger with the
air of a crack German cavalry colonel mixed with the braggadocio of a
half-bred Spanish Mexican. The children of the reigning officials and
the sons of the richest merchants are sent to Paris to be educated.
These young people return to Hayti with a deep knowledge of all the
vices of the gay capital, and many trunks filled with gaudy finery
which, probably, have been obtained on credit. The condition of the
people of the black republic is similar to that of any Gold Coast tribe
of negroes with a rich country and a knowledge of the vices of
Europe,--similar, except that whereas the Haytians are all powerful and
independent, the Gold Coast tribe is watched by a strong white
government and kept within the bounds of decency.

It will be gathered that Hayti is not a pretty place. I would not have
troubled to mention it at all had it not been that the black republic
has a profound significance to all British people who take their Empire
seriously. Hayti is the world’s object lesson of what a country must
become so soon as the negro obtains fairly within his grasp the reins of
government. In discussing the West Indian problems it would be well if
Britain always kept in mind the condition of this one black republic in
the west. Why? Because it is estimated that Jamaica has a population of
seven hundred and fifty thousand people, ninety-five per cent of whom
are coloured. Education is spreading rapidly among the people of our
largest West Indian colony, and in the market-places and among the huts
of the native villages one constantly hears the phrase “political
freedom” and “Government of Jamaica by Jamaicans.” In a government
elected entirely by the people of the island, Jamaica will be ruled by
black men--just as Hayti is. And the real nature of a negro can never
be discovered until he is placed in a position of unfettered power.
Hayti is a very few hours sailing distance from Jamaica, and Kingston is
the resting-place and recruiting-ground for all the deposed or
temporarily overshadowed Haytian presidents. President Salomon, one of
the most powerful rulers Hayti ever had, was at one period a refugee of
Jamaica, and there he became the intimate friend of Gordon. The Gordon
riot was crushed by the Jamaican Government (though the strong man who
dealt summarily with the rioters was disgraced in consequence), and
Salomon returned to rule in Port-au-Prince. But in Jamaica to-day there
is evidence that intrigue and disaffection have not been entirely
banished from the hearts of all her coloured citizens.

[Illustration: PASSENGERS EMBARKING FROM A QUAY, ST. ANN’S BAY,
JAMAICA]




IN CONCLUSION




CHAPTER XXVIII

IN CONCLUSION


It may be that I am entirely unfitted to deal at any great length with
that most complicated, most difficult of all problems, the negro
question. The problem is a matter which must be left to the
consideration of statesmen who, guided by the experience of years of
personal contact with black men, are entitled to be considered as
experts. But the negro question is one which forces itself upon the
notice of all people who visit any country where, numerically, the black
man is predominant. The British West Indian islands each and all are at
once both British Colonies and black man’s countries. Where black people
are so pre-eminently strong, it is impossible for the white men, no
matter what their race, to undertake the work of government unless by
the express desire of the black men, or because of the crass ignorance
and weakness of the negro race. How comes it that less than twenty
thousand white men rule three quarters of a million coloured people in
Jamaica? That is the question--pregnant with possibilities--that
confronts one after a stay in that fascinating island of the west. The
cause must inevitably be found in the weakness, the ignorance, of the
blacks. The negro is not fit to govern--therefore he must not govern; so
say the English, and in accordance with the dictates of that creed have
the English framed their West Indian laws. And undoubtedly it is good
that it should be so. The negro is not fit to rule; he is not capable of
efficient self-government. But how long will the negro himself believe
that he is incompetent? Will he, or will he not, in the future--the near
or distant future--ever come to think that home rule is his birthright.
Already many negroes hold that opinion as individuals. Will the coloured
race ever think so collectively? Will the coloured class ever call for
freedom in tones of absolute, organised unison. If so, what will happen?

I have already recorded the opinions of a coloured man in this
direction; I have also shown the ideas on the subject common to the
majority of white men. The one, thoroughly representative of his class,
appealed for greater freedom. In cool argument he suggested that
absolute political freedom was the birthright of man, black or white. He
claimed Jamaica as his own country, the fatherland of his race. He was
convincingly in earnest. His country was as dear to him--just as much
his very own--as England ever was to Englishman. He was absolutely
serious. The other man, the Englishman, seemed more forceful, but less
convincing. The white man’s argument was more desperate. He even
suggested bayonets as a hedge for

[Illustration: EVENING AFTER RAIN, JAMAICA]

enclosing the ambition of a people whom we are, by religion and by
science and by common sentiment, taught to regard as our very equals. By
the law of the West Indies the black man is the equal of the white. Yet
my friend suggested that rifle-shots would be necessary should that race
demand a practical exhibition of that absolute liberty which is reckoned
by the English to be part of the heritage of all British-born subjects,
black or white.

Surely it is a curious condition of affairs? Under British rule, the
black man is, theoretically, the equal of the white. Practically he is
nothing of the sort. Practically it is not even admitted that he is. Or
why is it necessary to continue the West Indian system of Government by
the Crown?

Now this is all very well. No doubt it is a convenient thing for us and
for the peoples of all European countries to theorise about the
brotherhood of man. In England and in all countries where the negro
population is insignificant, such a question is only a matter of
abstract principle; it is a pleasant sop to one’s inherent quality of
benevolence to so decide,--to generously overlook obvious shortcomings
and proclaim it abroad that Britain accepts her black people as
equals--brothers in spirit and in fact. No doubt, in Britain, this is a
very comforting creed to absorb in its entirety, and then forget. But
not so in any West Indian island. There the fatuity, the impossibility,
the impracticability of the scheme is immediately obvious. The farce of
the whole thing is at once evident. The average white man cannot count
the average negro as being his absolute equal. By reason of the dictum
of the homeland he must pretend to do so. Officially he must, with his
lips, proclaim the actuality of this impossible equality, but he must do
it with his tongue in his cheek. He must see to it that the black man is
convinced of the honesty of his protestations--that the blacks believe.
And yet he must see that the black man does not attain any of the
natural results such a condition would inevitably bring into existence.
It is like the old tree in the garden of Eden. The tree of liberty is
put before the eyes of the black man who is told that the fruit and the
blossom is his very own--but that he must not touch it. That is the
condition of affairs. Nominally the equal, the black man is actually not
the equal. And this he is beginning to realise. The spread of education
among the coloured race in the West Indies is bringing into existence a
generation of dissatisfied agitators. The negro is becoming ambitious;
he is beginning to become ambitious for his race. As soon as the race
feels its strength it will use it for its own ends. It will demand
political freedom. The creed of my coloured friend of the Spanish Town
highroad may be allowed to stand as the creed of the present, or at any
rate the next, generation of the blacks in the British West Indies.

What will be its effect on the several islands? The present
unsatisfactory system of semi “make-believe” is impossible. It cannot
last for ever. The question Britain has to consider is, Shall it be a
black or a white government in the West Indies? If this country is
reconciled to the eventual existence of a black government then the
existing system is good enough. If not, something ought to be done
immediately,--though exactly what could be done I cannot pretend to
know. I leave that matter to the consideration of people more qualified
to make suggestions. I believe that the negro is, and at any rate for
many generations will continue to be, incapable of self-government; I
know that no white people could live in a country ruled by black men.
And I firmly believe our West Indian possessions are in danger of
falling under the government of their black people.

That, in my opinion, is the greatest of all the West Indian problems.
Commercial difficulties will solve themselves. The natural riches of the
beautiful islands of the West must sooner or later bring a great harvest
of gain to their owners. The sugar industry will revive, the West Indian
fruit trade is to-day only in its infancy. The Caribbean islands are
destined to become the fruit gardens of the world. And many smaller
industries will spring into existence. There can be no doubt as to the
richness of the industrial future of the Indies. The one difficulty is
this political difficulty: the inevitable struggle for supremacy between
the white man and the black.




Index


Alligator, West Indian, 174

America, intervention of, 158

Animal life, 140

Antigua, 251

Arima, 255


Barbadoes, 245

Beet bounties, 183

Belle Vue, 215

Blackbeard, 6

Black children, 217

Blue Mountains, 15

Bog Walk, 137

Buccaneers, 6


Caribs, 9

Cassava starch, 191

Cathedral, the old, 229

Chamberlain, Mr., 190

Children, black, 217

Cromwell, the Protector, 9

Cuba, 14


Dignity dance, 85

Dominica, 250


Emancipation Act, 21


Filibusters, 6

Fort Augustine, 174

Fruit trade, the, 189


Gordon, 263

Government, representative, 146

Grand Cayman, 76


Hayti, 259

Hope Garden, 231

Hunts Bay, 175


Imperial line of steamers, 190

Intervention of America, 158


Jamaica, gradual decay of, 185
  want of men in, 188

Jamaican buggy, 51
  freedom, 158
  police, 95
  revivalist meetings, 70

Jockey, the coloured, 209

Jones, Sir Alfred, 190


Kidd, 6

Kingston, the market-place, 34


Labour question, 186

Liberation Act, 187


Malarial fever, 24

Mandeville, 214

Martinique, 248

Montego Bay, 229

Mont Pelée, 248

Morant Point, 15

Morgan, 6


Nevis, 251

Newcastle, 109


Octoroon, the cultured, 221


Pitch lake, the, 254

Political agitators, 160

Political revolution, 148

Politics, 145

Port Antonio, 229
  Royal, 6, 15
  of Spain, 251, 253

Princestown, 255


Railway, 165

Revivalist meetings, Jamaican, 70

Rio Cobra, 137

Roseau, 250

Rose Hall, 230


St. Kitts, 251

St. Lucia, 247

Salomon, President, 263

San Domingo, 259

San Fernando, 255

Settlements, native, 216

Settlers, absolute, 161

Soda-water compartment, 165

Spanish Town, 137, 229


Tobago, 255

Tortoise, the, 139

Trinidad, 251

Turk’s Island, 13


West India alligator, 174

West Indian regiments, 91

West Indian sugar, 183


Yellow fever, 23


           _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.