CHAPTER XVIIAFRICAN JAMAICA

Trinidad has many Hindu temples

Very much of a lodge

At the “Asphalt Lake”

There is water, too, in the crevices of the asphalt field

We landed with misgiving, having often heard of “that terrible walk” from the pier to the “lake.” No doubt it seems so to many a tourist, being nearly ten minutes long up a very gentle slope by a perfect macadam highway. Beside it buckets are constantly roaring past on elevated cables, carrying pitch to the ship or returning for a new load with an almost human air of preoccupation. The highway leads to the gate of a yard with a mine-like reduction plant peopled with tar-smeared negroes, immediately behind which opens out the “lake.”

The far-famed deposit is not much to look at. It is a slightly concave, black patch of a hundred acres, with as definite shores as a lake of water, surrounded by a Venezuelan landscape of scanty brush and low, thirsty palms. To the left the black towers of half a dozen oil-wells break the otherwise featureless horizon. About the surface of the hollow several groups of negroes work leisurely. One in each group turns up with every blow of his pick a black, porous lump of pitch averaging the size of a market-basket; the others bear these away on their heads to small cars on narrow tracks, along which they are pushed by hand to the “factory.” That is all there is to it; an easier job for all concerned would be hard to find. A trade wind sweeps almost constantly across the field, the pitch is so light that the largest lump is hardly a burden, from the nature of the case the pace is not fast, and the workers are so constantly in sight that an overseer is hardly needed, nor piece-work required. The men are paid eighty cents a day of ten hours, which seems much to them and little to their employers, producing mutual satisfaction. The work calls for no skill whatever; it is carried on in the open air, with women venders of food and drink free to come and go; on the side of the concessionists the deposit offers not even the difficulty of transportation, being barely a mile from the ship, furnishing its own material for the necessary roads, and virtually inexhaustible. The holes dug during the day fill imperceptibly and are gone by morning, the deepest one ever excavated having disappeared in three days. Only a small fraction of the field is exploited, it could easily keep all the ships of the world busy. Should it ever be exhausted, there is a still larger deposit just across the bay in Venezuela. In the slang of financial circles, “it is like finding it.”

The lake is soft underfoot, like a tar sidewalk in midsummer, the heels sinking out of sight in a minute or two, and has a faint smell ofsulphur. In a few places it is not solid enough to sustain a man’s weight, though children and the barefooted workmen scamper across it anywhere at sight of a white visitor for the inevitable British West Indian purpose of demanding “a penny, please, sir.” A crease remains around each hole as it refills, some of these rolling under like the edge of a rising mass of dough, and in these crevices, the rain gathers in puddles of clear, though black-looking, water in which the surrounding families do their washing. Only negroes are employed as laborers; the twenty-five white men in the higher positions are nearly all Americans, those with families housed in company bungalows on the slope above the gulf, the bachelors in a company hotel. Most of the pitch goes directly to the steamer, but as it is one-third water, and royalties, duties, and transportation are paid by weight, a certain proportion is boiled in vats in the “factory” and shipped in barrels constructed on the spot. From the vat-platforms spreads out a vast panorama, with San Fernando at the base of its lonely hill, Port of Spain on its gently sloping plain, the entire Gulf of Paria, the Bocas Islands, and the mountains of eastern Venezuela all in plain sight.

The pitch lake was known even in the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, who “payed” his vessels here during lulls in buccaneering, but it has been exploited only during the last few decades. Three hundred thousands tons have been shipped during a single year, the revenue to the Government of Trinidad in 1912 being £63,453. Indeed, one of the main reasons why the island has a much more prosperous air than its neighbors is that millions have been paid into its treasury in royalties and duties from its only “lake.” When a steamer is loading, buckets and negroes toil all through the night in the glare of electric-lights. The barrels of the refined product were first stowed on their sides, but as they flattened out into a four hundred pound cube that could neither be rolled nor lifted, they are now stood on end, tier after tier. The crude pitch becomes a solid mass during the journey north, and must be dug up again with picks when it reaches Perth Amboy.

CHAPTER XVIIAFRICAN JAMAICA

It may be that our affection for Jamaica is tempered by the difficulties we had in reaching it. Lying well inside the curve described by the other West Indies, the scarcity of shipping caused by the World War has left it almost unattainable from any of the other islands and hardly to be reached, except directly from New York or Panama. We first attempted to visit it from Santiago de Cuba, early in our journey. But as this would have meant spending an interminable twenty-four hours, and perhaps much more, on a little coasting-steamer not even fit for the “slave traffic” in which it is chiefly engaged, at a fare equal to that from St. Thomas to Barbados in an ocean liner, the depositing of an equal amount to pay the expenses of a very probable quarantine of a week because of a few scattered cases of smallpox in Cuba, and the unwinding of a formidable mesh of red tape, we decided to defer our call and pick up the island on the way home. That surely would be easy, we concluded, for traffic certainly should be frequent between the two largest of the British West Indies. Arrived in Trinidad, however, we found that island as completely cut off from Jamaica as if they belonged to two enemy powers. We at length succeeded in coaxing the captain of a British freighter—the most pleasant craft, by the way, of all our journey—touching at every port on the north coast of South America and spending three weeks on the way, to carry us to Panama, whence another steamer bore us back again to several Columbian ports and eventually landed us in Jamaica seven weeks after leaving Trinidad. Had we not set our hearts on making our tour of the West Indies complete, we should have long since invited the principal British island to withdraw to a sphere where the temperature is reputed to be more than tropical.

The first view of Jamaica and of its capital is pleasing. A mountainous mass, gradually developing on the horizon, grows into a series of ranges which promise to rival the beauty of Porto Rico. Beyond a long, low, narrow, sand-reef lies an immense harbor, on the further shore of which Kingston is suspected, rather than seen, only a few wharves and one domed building rising above the wooded plain onwhich the low city stands. The hills behind it tumble into a disordered heap culminating in the cloud-swathed peak of what are most fittingly called the Blue Mountains. On this strip of sand, known as the Palisadoes, lies buried the famous buccaneer, Sir Henry Morgan, once governor of Jamaica, and at the extreme end of it stands the remnant of the old capital, Port Royal. In the good old days of pirates, who made it their headquarters, the depository of their loot, and the scene of their debauchery, this was the most important town in the West Indies, some say the richest and most wicked spot on earth. One must be chary, however, of too hastily granting such superlatives. An earthquake befell it one day, sinking all but a fragment of the town beneath the sea, and a new capital, named Kingston, was founded on what promised to be safer ground across the bay. A later century brought regret that a still more distant site had not been chosen. To-day Port Royal consists of a quarantine station and a small village so isolated from the mainland that servant women brought from it to the capital have been known to shriek with dismay at sight of their first cow. Ships circling the reef on their way in or out of the harbor sail over the very spot where pirates once held their revels, and negro boatmen still assert that on stormy evenings one may hear the tolling of Port Royal’s cathedral bell, lying fathoms deep beneath the waves.

One’s first impression of the Jamaicans, as they lounge about the wharf eyeing each trunk or bundle several minutes before summoning up the energy to tackle it, is that they are far less courageous in the face of work than their cousins, the Barbadians. This is closely followed by the discovery that Kingston is the most disappointing town in the West Indies. With the exception of a few bright yellow public buildings and a scattered block or two of new business houses, it is a negro slum, spreading for miles over a dusty plain. Scarcely a street has even the pretense of a pavement; the few sidewalks that exist are blocked by stairways, posts, and the trash of a disorderly population, or degenerate every few yards into stretches of loose stones and earth. The only building worth crossing the street to see is that domed structure sighted from the bay, the Catholic cathedral. To be sure, the earthquake wrought great havoc, but that was thirteen years ago, time enough, surely, in which to have made a much farther advance toward recovery.

The insolence of nearly all the British West Indies reaches its zenith in Kingston. Even in the main street clamoring black urchins and no small number of adults trail the white visitor, heaping upon himfoul-mouthed taunts, all but snatching his possessions out of his hands in broad daylight; diseased beggars plod beside him in bare feet that seem never to have known the luxury of a scrubbing, scattering their germs in a fine gray limestone dust that swirls in blinding clouds which envelop everything in a yellowish veil whenever a breath of wind stirs or a street-car sweeps past. Loose-mannered black females ply their trade with perfect impunity, shrieking worse than indecencies at unresponsive passers-by; assaults and robbery are frequent even by day. One must be vaccinated and often quarantined before entering Jamaica, yet it is doubtful whether any island of the West Indies has more evidence of disease than Kingston itself. Those who carry firearms must deposit them at the custom house, yet with the possible exception of Hispaniola, a revolver is more often needed in the Jamaican capital than anywhere in the Caribbean, as several harmless Chinese merchants learned to their sorrow during our brief stay there. The town is dismal, disagreeable, and unsafe for self-respecting white women at any hour; by night it is virtually abandoned to the lawless black hordes that infest it. Weak gas-lights give it scarcely a suggestion of illumination; swarms of negroes shuffle through the hot dust, cackling their silly laughter, shouting their obscenity, heckling, if not attacking, the rare white men who venture abroad, love-making in perfect indifference to the proximity of other human beings, while the pompous black policemen look on without the slightest attempt to quell the disorder.

The white residents of Kingston seem to live in fear of the black multitude that make up the great bulk of the population. When hoodlums and rowdies jostle them on the street, they shift aside with a slinking air; even when black hooligans cling to the outside of street-cars pouring out obscene language, the white men do not shield their wives and daughters beside them by so much as raising their voices in protest. When cursing, filthy market women pile their baskets and unwashed produce in upon them and crowd their own women out of their places, they bear it all with humble resignation, as if they were the last survivors of the civilized race wholly disheartened by an invasion of barbarian tribes. The visitor who flees all this and retires is lucky to catch half an hour of unbroken sleep amid the endless uproar of shouting negroes, the barking of innumerable dogs, and the crowing of more cocks than even a Latin-American city can muster. It would be difficult, indeed, to say anything bad enough of Kingston to give the full, hot, dusty, insolent, half-ruined picture. The traveler will see all he wants and more of the capital in the time he is forced to remain thereon the way to or from his ship without including a stay in his itinerary. Port au Prince is clean and gentlemanly in comparison.

The electric street-cars, manned by ill-mannered crews and rocking like ships in a storm over the earthquake-undulated ground, run far out of town. They must, in order to reach anywhere worth going. Beyond Half Way Tree the sloping Liguanea plain grows green and the rain that seems never to descend to Kingston gives the vegetation a fresher coat, yet the way is still lined for a long distance by negro shacks. Only when one reaches the open meadows of Constant Spring or the residence section served by another branch of the line does anything approaching comfort, cleanliness, and peace appear. Yet even the boasted Hope Gardens, set far back at the base of the Blue Mountain range, have little of the open, breezy beauty of the Queen’s Park in Trinidad. Until he has drifted farther afield, the stranger will not cease to wonder what charms bring Jamaica its large colony of winter tourists. Even then he must conclude that the prevalence of a tongue closely enough resembling English to be sometimes comprehensible and the legal existence of John Barleycorn give the island its handicap over Porto Rico.

Unlike the other British West Indies, Jamaica clings to the English monetary system. The two colonial banks issue pound notes and higher, which are easily mistaken for those in dollars from the other islands, as more than one new cashier has discovered too late to rescue his first month’s salary. The word “dollar” is frequently heard, but it is merely a popular euphonism for four shillings. Then there are local pennies and half-pennies of nickel alloy that are not readily distinguished from the English shilling and two-shilling pieces. Jamaica belongs to the postal union, but, unlike the other colonies of the empire, she does not subscribe to the British postal convention with the United States, with the result that visitors commonly find their letters taxed three pence extra postage, to the continual advantage of the local government.

This latter gives the impression of being both backward and clumsy. A governor and a privy council of not more than eight members are appointed by the crown. The legislative body is presided over by the former and consists of five of the latter, ten other crown appointees, and acustos, elected by the people, from each of the fourteen parishes. British male subjects of twenty-one who occupy house property and pay taxes of thirty shillings, or who receive a nominal salary of fiftyshillings a year, are qualified voters. A recent enactment gives the few women possessing certain qualifications a limited right to vote. Parish boards can recommend legislation, but only the high colonial officials can actually make laws or pay out money. No bills involving questions of finance are passed if opposed by nine elective members, yet those samecustodescannot initiate legislation. Moreover, the king may disallow any law within two years of its passing. The result is a division of responsibility from power and frequent deadlocks that make the apparent autonomy of the island a continual process of “standing pat.”

The few white officials are slow, antiquated, precedence-ridden, in striking contrast to the young and bustling, if sometimes poorly informed rulers of our own dependencies. Indeed, a journey to the West Indies is apt to cause the American to rearrange his notions of the relative efficiency of the English, and the French or ourselves, as colonizers. We are sadly in need of a Colonial Office and a corps of trained officials to administer what we dislike to call our colonies, but even our deserving Democrats, or Republicans, as the case may be, scarcely hamper the development of our dependencies as thoroughly as do its medieval-minded rulers that of Jamaica. An example or two will suffice to illustrate the point. The government railway was lifted out of its slough of despond and rehabilitated by an experienced administrator. When he found, however, that his £1000 a year did not suffice to keep him in shoes, the insular powers let him go rather than increase his pittance. Back in the Middle Ages that was a generous stipend for railway managers. By a recent law the Government of Jamaica has decided to take over the making, and later the distribution, of rum. At the time of our departure it was advertising for “an experienced superintendent” at the breath-taking salary of £2000 a year! No doubt there was a rush of managers of Cuban sugarcentralscontending for this noble prize.

It may be of interest to know that Jamaica is livid with fear that she, too, may be struck by prohibition, and is hastily erecting all manner of protective lightning-rods. Her newspapers carry columns of arguments pro and con, most of them clinched with quotations from the Bible, as if that had anything to do with the case. Reading the impassioned utterances of the “wets,” one might suppose that the United States is in the act of organizing a great army of grape-juicers to descend upon Jamaica and wrest from her all bottled joy in life, while the casual observer gets the impression that the great majority of theislanders would rather die at the doors of their rum distilleries and liquor shops than suffer that ignominious fate.

With the exception of Barbados, where special conditions exist, Jamaica has remained a possession of the British crown longer than any other land, and the influence of the English on the African race can perhaps nowhere be better studied. It is not particularly flattering. The Jamaican has all the faults of his rulers and his own negro delinquencies to boot. He is slow-witted, inhospitable, arrogant when he dares to be, cringing when he feels that to be to his advantage. The illegitimate birth-rate is exceedingly high, sexual morality extremely shaky among the masses. Though the country people are sometimes pleasing in their simplicity, they quickly take on the unpleasant characteristics of the town dwellers when they come in contact with them, the most conspicuous being an unbridled insolence and a constant desire to annoy what may quite justly be called their betters. Part of this rudeness is due, no doubt, to the same cause as that of our laboring classes—a misguided attempt to prove their equality by scorning the amenities of social intercourse. A large percentage of it, however, is easily recognizable as native African barbarism, which increases by leaps and bounds as the suppression of former days weakens. If he is working for you or selling you something, the Jamaican can be softly courteous; when he has no such reasons to repress his natural brutality his impudence is colossal.

Even more than in the other British islands the masses of Jamaica have been “spoiled” by the war. Official reports credit the “B. W. I.” regiments with “excelling in many acts of bravery”; private information, even from some of the very men who dictated the official reports, has a different tenor. According to this they were useless in actual warfare, not a man of them having died facing the enemy; even as labor battalions they were not worth their keep, and their conduct was such that both the French and the Italians protested against their being stationed within reach of the civil population. Whichever of these reports is more trustworthy, there is no doubt that the hospitality shown these crude-minded blacks by a certain class of European women, and the fuss made over them upon their return, have given their rulers a problem which will scarcely be solved during the present generation.

Those who have spent their lives with the Jamaica negro—and to a certain extent he is typical of his race in all the British West Indies—agree in the main with the casual observer in the summing up of his characteristics. He is apt to take little pride in his work and to meetany criticism with “Cho, too much boderation; can’t do better.” He sees little immorality in lying, and the man who expects truth from him according to the Anglo-Saxon standard will be grievously disappointed. Exactness in such matters as age, distance, names, and the like means nothing to him. His answer to a roadside inquiry is almost certain to be “not too far,” and his age may change by ten years or more within the space of two sentences. He has the child’s tendency to exaggeration and the building up of stories out of whole cloth, yet he can scarcely plead the same excuse as the child, for his imagination is, at best, in a comatose state. Gratitude seems to have been completely left out of his make-up. He dearly loves a bargain or a dispute; the shop-keeper who has only one price arouses his hostility, and to appear in court either as plaintiff, defendant, or witness is one of his favorite forms of amusement.

“Like the Irish,” as one English Jamaican puts it, “he does himself more credit abroad than at home; like them he is quite ready to emigrate and goes where the dollar calls, rather than aping the Englishman, who prefers a competency under the Union Jack to possible riches under another flag. If there is one thing he dislikes more than another,” continues this authority, “it is sarcasm. He will stand any amount of ‘cussing,’ but he keenly resents ridicule of any kind.” What this critic does not add is that the sarcasm must be extremely broad if the average Jamaican is to recognize it as such.

The lower classes are much given to “teefing” small articles, particularly food. One might almost say that the chief curse of the island is “praedial larceny,” as they still spell it in Jamaica, which means the stealing of growing crops. Newspapers, public reports, and private conversations contain constant references to this crime, prosecutions for which nearly doubled in the year following the war. Many people no longer take the trouble to plant a crop of ground provisions, knowing that they will almost certainly be stolen by black loafers before the owners themselves can gather them. The main faults of the masses,—insolence, lying, illegitimacy, slackness in work, and thieving,—can scarcely be laid to drink; for though Jamaica rum is famous and drunkenness is on the increase, the women, who drink comparatively little, are as bad as the men in all these matters.

Prisons and penal institutions are more in evidence in Jamaica than schools. While the latter are small and inconspicuous, the prison in Kingston is larger than Sing Sing, in Spanish Town there is another almost as large, and many more scattered throughout the island. Thepolice, who are virtually all jet black, are poorly disciplined and much inclined to look misdemeanors, indecency, and even crime in the face without being moved to action. Pompously proud and inclined to insolence, also, they seldom fail to take advantage of their power over white men whenever it seems safe to do so. For there is little color-line in legal matters, and not only can whites be arrested by black officers, but they run a splendid chance of being tried by colored magistrates. The tendency to give the higher positions of responsibility in the police force to young Englishmen who have been decorated in the war or who have influential friends, yet who are more noted for their card playing and dancing than for ability or diligence in their new calling, has enhanced a situation which the better class of Jamaicans view with alarm. There are one hundred and sixteen constabulary stations on the island and a force of a thousand regular constables, supplemented by almost as many district deputies, yet Jamaica is by no means so well policed as Porto Rico with its insular force of scarcely eight hundred.

Even the friendly critic already quoted finds little to praise in the Jamaican except his cheerfulness, his loyalty, within limits, to those he serves, and his kindness to his own people, and he admits that the first of these qualities is often based on lack of ambition, “though it is nevertheless pleasant to live with.” On the other hand, lack of equal opportunity is not without its effect on the negro character. Jamaica suffers from the same big estate and primogeniture troubles that hamper the masses in England. Slightly larger than Porto Rico, with five hundred thousand acres still held by the crown and with only half of the remainder under cultivation, the rest being wooded or “ruinate,” as they call it in Jamaica, the island is principally in the hands of the whites. These strive to keep their estates intact and hold the negro in economic subjection.

“Negroes who come back from Panama or Cuba with in some cases hundreds of pounds are seldom able to buy property,” complained one of their sponsors. “It is only when the white man becomes very poor or the negro very rich that he can get a chunk of some big estate. The big owners too often pasture, rather than plant, their best land and rent out the worst to the small peasants, at one pound an acre a year. If the rented land turns out to be too stony or otherwise useless, that is the peasant’s loss and the owner’s gain.” One difficulty in bettering this condition, however, is the disinclination of the peasantry to pay regularly. On the whole, the planters show little generosity toward their laborers, thereby increasing the feeling between the two races.

Though it is the most populous of the British West Indies, and the largest, unless one follows the English habit of including British Guiana, Jamaica is much less densely inhabited than Porto Rico, for it is natural that two islands so nearly alike in size, situation, and formation should constantly suggest comparison. When the British took Jamaica from the Spaniards in 1655, it had but 4200 inhabitants. Half a century later the population was more than two thirds negro. In 1842, four years after the abolition of slavery, the first shipload of indentured East Indians arrived, but this practice had almost ceased long before the Indian Government recently put a legal end to it. The Chinese coolies were tried for a time, but only in small numbers, and their descendants now confine themselves almost entirely to keeping what we would call “grocery stores.” Both the Hindus and the Chinese, and for that matter the native whites, speak the slovenly Jamaican dialect, and there remains little of the Oriental garb and racial mixture so conspicuous in Trinidad.

“On my arrival in Jamaica in 1795,” says one of its governors, “I found a vast assembly of French emigrants of all ranks, qualities and colors, who had fled from the horrors of Santo Domingo”—by which, of course, he meant Haiti. Many Cubans came also when their island was under Spanish rule. But all these elements scarcely moderate Jamaica’s distinctly African complexion. The visitor is apt to be astounded by the blackness of the great bulk of the population. The percentage of full blacks is in striking contrast to the mulatto majority in the French islands, where the mixture of races is not very sternly frowned upon, and still more so to the Spanish-American tropics, where miscegenation is so common that nearly everyone is a “colored person.” By her last census, which is nearly ten years old, Jamaica claims 831,383 inhabitants, of whom 15,605 were white, 17,380 Hindus, and 2,111 Chinese. The fact that she has barely two hundred to the square mile, as compared to twelve hundred in Barbados, is probably not without its bearing in the visible difference of energy between the two islands.

The color-line in Jamaica, and it is more or less typical of that in all the British West Indies, falls somewhere between our own and the rather hazy one in vogue in the French islands.

“I think the English individually,” said a Jamaicansambo, that is a three fourths negro, who had worked on the Canal Zone, “like usblack people still less than you Americans do; but governmentally they treat us as equals, and you do not. Yet in some ways I prefer the American system. An Englishman says you are his equal, but you had better not act as if you were. The American says, ‘You’re a damned nigger and you know it,’ and there is no hypocrisy in the matter.”

Strictly speaking, there are two color-lines in the British West Indies. Unlike the United States, where “black” and “colored” are synonymous terms when applied to the negro race, there is a middle class of “colored people,” as there are Eurasians in India, though actual membership in it implies a certain degree of education, culture, wealth, or influence. There are “colored” men who rank themselves and are ranked as negroes, working shoulder to shoulder with them in the fields; there are others who sit side by side with their white brethren on the judicial bench and reach high rank in church, politics, medicine, law, and commerce. Color may almost be said to be no bar to promotion in official life, within limits. This middle set is extremely assertive in its pride and, on the whole, is more disliked by the negroes than are the whites themselves.

On a Jamaican train one day I fell into conversation with an octoroon school-teacher. He was a forcible fellow who had evidently retained most of the qualities of his white ancestors. For some time I avoided any reference to the matter of human complexions, having no desire to offend him. Before long, however, he began to expatiate on the necessity of keeping the “niggers” in their place.

“Hoho,” said I to myself, “so you consider yourself a white man?”

But he did not, for soon he began to explain the position of “us colored people.” He often met fellow-teachers who were negroes, he said, but no negro ever entered his house, nor had he ever introduced his daughter to one of them.

“The nigger,” he went on, “always gets cocky when he is given either authority or encouragement. If I invite a negro to my house, the next thing I know he is proposing to my daughter and I have to kick him out, for in Jamaica the colored girl forever loses caste by marrying a black man. I would rather die than marry a negro woman, yet I would no sooner marry a white woman, because it would be hell in a few years. At the same time I know that a white man would have the same fear, if I were his guest. So I do not go to his house, even if I am asked, for he would be patronizing; and I do not invitea white man to my house because I know he would feel he was doing me a favor and an honor.

“By the way,” he asked later, “how would I get on in the United States? How did you know I am colored? My hair is pretty good.” He smiled rather pathetically, passing a hand over it.

It was straight as my own, and his skin was no darker than that of many a Spaniard. Yet, though he might not have been suspected in Paris, or possibly even in London, any American would have recognized him as a negro at a glance. I told him so frankly, and he accepted the statement with consummate good sense. Thanks to the point of view he had expressed, there is little further mixture of races going on in the British West Indies, with the possible exception of Trinidad, and the three castes will probably remain intact and will each have to work out its own destiny.

Included in the government of Jamaica are the Turks and Caicos Islands, which belong geographically to the Bahamas, as they once did officially. Transportation between them and the mother island is worse than uncertain, and they depend chiefly on their salt beds and emigration for their livelihood. There are a few small islands scattered close along the coast of Jamaica, but none of them is of any importance.

The Jamaica Government Railway is one of the oldest in the world, having been first opened to traffic in 1845. It is almost two hundred miles long, running diagonally across the island from Kingston to Montego Bay, and north and eastward to Port Antonio, with two small branches. The fares are high, being about seven cents a mile first-class and half as much for second. The latter is really third-class in all but name, with hard wooden benches and scanty accommodations, and carries virtually all the traveling population. In it one will find the poorer whites, such as ministers with their thin, hungry-looking wives, and other poverty-stricken mortals, contrasting strongly with the “husky,” broad-shouldered negroes with their velvety black skins, beautiful as mere types of the animal kingdom. Here and there, perhaps, sits a young Chinaman, inscrutable, seeing and thinking of it all, no doubt, yet never giving a hint of his thoughts, a Celestial still though born on the island. Then there is a scattering of all grades of yellow, some of them so much so that they try to smile one into the belief that they are white. In a corner of one of these coaches is a negro in a wire cage, the railway post-office. First-class consists of a little eight-seat compartment in the end of one, or at most two,coaches, stiff-backed, hot, dusty, commonly filled with tobacco-smoke and scarcely a fit place for a white woman. Occasionally it is crowded with Chinese shopkeepers and the bundles of wares they would not find room for in the other class, but more often it, too, is distinctly African in tinge. For like the island, the “J. G. R.” is overwhelmingly negro. All the trainmen are full blacks, as are virtually all the passengers. The “trainboy” is a haughty negro woman in near-silk garb, enormous earrings, and a white, nurse-like cap, who sells chiefly beer and never calls out her wares. In the island dialect a local train is a “walkin’ train,” and all Jamaican trains fall into this category, as do all those in the West Indies except in Cuba and, to a slight degree, Trinidad. There are no train manners. In a Spanish country if you put so much as a cane in a seat your possession of it is assured and respected to the end of the journey. Put all your baggage, and your coat and hat in addition, into a Jamaican train-seat and you will probably come back to find your possessions tossed on the floor and some impudent black wench occupying your place. Why the “J. G. R.” is so ungodly as to run Sunday trains on its Port Antonio branch, I do not know. They are about the only things that do move in the British West Indies on the Sabbath.

From Kingston the train jolts away through the swirling dust across a flat, Arizona-like plain studded with cactus, though moderately green. Soon come broad stretches of banana fields, bananas planted in endless rows down which one can look as through archways, many of the plants heavy with their bunches nearing maturity, others showing little more than the big purple flower shaped like a swollen, unhusked ear of corn, along the stem of which a miniature bunch is just starting. Between these are other fields, with trees girdled and blackened where some forest is being killed to make way for more bananas. Negro women with oval market baskets on their heads tramp energetically along the white highway; now and then the refined features of a Hindu break the monotony of brutal negro faces, though he has lost his distinctive garb. Then comes the prison farm of St. Catherine’s Parish, with its green gardens, its irrigation ditches filled with clear water, and its horde of prison laborers. But the train is already coming to a screeching halt in the former capital of the island, twelve miles from Kingston.

As in Trinidad the Spaniards preferred an inland site for their principal city, and this Villa de la Vega was founded by Columbus’s son Diego after they had abandoned their first capital of Sevilla Nuevaon the north coast. The English, being a maritime people before all else, first set up their government in Port Royal, but even they could not endure a capital that had sunk beneath the sea, and returned to the old Spanish headquarters. This had come to be called St. Jago de la Vega, a name still to be found on ancient mile-posts along the roads of the vicinity, but that was too much of an effort for the thick negro tongues and the place was rechristened Spanish Town. It remained the capital of the island until 1870, and still retains the records’ office. Set in a flat plain half covered with bushy trees, it is but a very trifle cooler and not much more pleasant than Kingston. There are still many Spanish names and features in Spanish Town, but only one family which speaks that language, and very few Catholics. An old red brick cathedral recently restored is said to be the oldest in the British colonies, Anglican now, of course, and open only during services. Spanish Town has scarcely ten thousand inhabitants, though it disputes with Montego Bay and Port Antonio the second place among towns of the island. In its center is still a kind of Spanish plaza, with only its grass and trees left, and surrounded by old yellow brick government buildings—all of which, one learns with surprise, were built by the English. Under the portico of one of these is a statue of Rodney, who raised the Union Jack over the French in the West Indies, dressed in that glorified undershirt or incomplete Roman toga worn no doubt by all British admirals in those heated days. The old capital has an open market which is a trifle better dressed, though more bestial and insolent than those of Haiti, and its only hotel is a negro joint overrun with plate-licking cats and setting hens, which masquerades under the name of “Marble Hall.”

Though it was for a century and a half under Spanish rule, Jamaica shows few signs of Iberian influence, except in its geographical names. Some of these remain pure, but the majority of them have been corrupted by the thick-tongued negroes into something only faintly resembling the original. Thus Managua has become Moneague, Agua Alta is now Wag Water, a place once noted for itsmanteca, or lard, is Montego Bay, and Boca del Agua has adopted the alias of Bog Walk. When England wrested Jamaica from Spain the property which the Spaniards could not take with them they largely destroyed, so that no real Spanish building has remained intact. Unlike Trinidad the Spanish tongue is almost never heard in Jamaica.

The train continues across the flat plain, everywhere thinly covered with big bushy trees. Indeed one of the stations is called BushyPark, where an old brick aqueduct which looks Spanish, though it probably is not, still carries water across the cane-fields. Muscular negro youths in rags, either without the possibility or the desire to earn better garments, swarm about the stations and into the cars, pouncing upon the luggage of any traveler who shows the slightest sign of descending. An hour and a half from Kingston, beyond the station for Old Harbour, the land begins slowly and gradually to rise, and one is soon overlooking a vast tree-bushy rather than forested country. Broad fields ofhenequen, jute sisal, or rope-cactus, as you choose to call it, are planted in rows on rather arid looking ground completely covered with high brown grass. The first suggestion of beauty in the landscape appears near May Pen. A “pen” in the Jamaica dialect means a grassy field or a pasture, and “pen keeping” is the local term for breeding and raising cattle. Here and there the inevitable old square brick chimneys of sugar-mills dot the ever descending plain, which at length begins to be hidden by low foothills. Sapling-like forests spring up along the way, and the logwood that grows in scattered quantities all over the island lies piled at the railway stations, the outer layer of wood roughly hacked away, leaving only the reddish heart. Schooners carry north many cargoes of these crooked logs and the still more awkward stumps, while several mills on the island turn it into an extract that is shipped in barrels to color our garments dark-blue or black. Jamaica produces also a certain amount of fustic, a smooth, straight tree which gives a khaki color.

Soon the soil, or “sile,” as they call it in Jamaica, turns reddish and clearings and habitations become rare. By this time we were the only white persons on the train and shortly after that the only passengers in the first-class coach. A larger engine took us in tow and we climbed 865 feet in the next six miles. Dense, almost unpopulated forests, like some sections of eastern Cuba, covered the ever more rugged landscape; but if the scenery flanking Jamaica’s railway is more striking than that visible from the trains in Porto Rico, it is because it passes through rather than around the island, for on the whole our own West Indian colony is more beautiful. The train continues to climb until it attains an altitude of 1680 feet at Green Vale, then descends steadily past several villages of no great importance, through numerous “tubes,” as Jamaicans call a tunnel, now and then past long stretches of bananas, otherwise through almost a wilderness broken only by tiny corn or cane-fields about the rare negro shacks. At Catadupa it breaks out upon a vast vista of wooded valley, and sinks at length into a square mile of sugar-cane beyond which lies Montego Bay on the northern coast.

As I passed this group on a Jamaican highway, the woman reading the Bible was saying, “So I ax de Lard what I shall do”

“Draw me portrait please, sir.” The load consists of school books and a pair of hobnail shoes

A very frequent sight along the roads of Jamaica

Our baggage following us ashore in one of the French islands

But we had long since left it, to drive by “buggy”—our American term for a country carriage has somehow become acclimated in Jamaica—into the Manchester hills. The trip from Kingston to Mandeville, 2200 feet above the sea, is like one from downtown New York to the Berkshires in July. Indeed the visitor to Manchester Parish might almost fancy himself in Connecticut, in spite of the prevalence of negroes. The gray stone fences, with big horses ankle-deep in the grassy pastures behind them, the rolling stretches of corn, the very birds bear out the illusion. Even the clumps of bamboo seem to be growing on Connecticut hillsides; the orchids and tree-ferns contrast strangely with a weather and landscape of the temperate zone; Mandeville itself, long famous as a health resort for the residents of the sweltering coast lands, has that air of calm repose of some old New England village.

Carriage driving has more nearly survived modern invention in Jamaica than in any other of the West Indies, perhaps for the double reason of the high price of “gas” and the existence of good horses. The Jamaican horses are famed throughout the Caribbean for their size and endurance—also for their hard gait as riding animals. They are not handsome, being usually lank and goose-rumped, but they are so docile they may sometimes be driven without being broken and they retain the size of their English ancestors instead of degenerating into the runts of most tropical America, and they are unusually free from disease. Breeders claim that they remain so sound in spite of the enervating climate largely because of the limestone formation of the island and the recuperative effects of its high altitudes. At any rate there are few places where a negro-driven buggy and pair cannot be had on short notice. Many splendid draft mules are also bred on the island.

I preferred, however, to set out on foot from Mandeville for a jaunt diagonally across the island. Walking is not a favorite recreation among either the white or the “colored” castes, though there is no good reason other than inertia why it should not be in the temperate highlands. Jamaica has more than two thousand miles of good roads, far outdoing those of Porto Rico in extent, though they are narrower and sometimes poorly kept, partly because many of them are parochial roads, unknown in the neighboring island. “Finger-boards” pointthe way everywhere. The high altitudes of Manchester, as of several other parishes, lack only the shade-grown tobacco fields and the variegated tints of intensive cultivation to rival in beauty our own West Indian colony. Birds are always singing, scattered little white houses speckle the immense green hillsides, the road banks are often carpeted with “wandering Jew” enough to make the fortune of an American florist, or they are hung with tapestries of what look like daisies, while other flowers bloom on every hand. In a climate pleasant even at noonday one would scarcely recognize the Berkshire landscape as tropical but for a banana, a giant fern, or a palm tree here and there in the foreground.

Little stone and brick coffee floors, called “barbecues” in Jamaica, frequently flank the roadway. Manchester parish grows much coffee, though it rarely reaches the American market, for England consumes all the island produces. Here the bushes are usually unshaded, protecting trees being unnecessary, if not harmful, at such an altitude. Instead of the little toy donkey-carts of Barbados there are big rattling mule wagons. Donkeys are sometimes ridden, occasionally used as pack-animals. The peasants have little of the insolence of the towns, but greet the traveler with a kind of military salute and a gentle “Good day, sah.” Most of them wear caps, as in Barbados, though the similar headgear of the women in that island is here replaced by bandannas, usually red and never topped off with a hat as in Haiti. The men, and many of the women, smoke home-made pipes with long curved stems, buying their tobacco in long coils called “jackass rope,” which the war forced to the painful price of a shilling a yard, though it was once but two pence. Fully developed girls of twelve eye the passer-by with crudely coquettish airs. Information as to distance is given in “chains” if at all, the customary answer being a non-committal “not too far, sah.” The great bulk of the country population is jet black, though in the towns there are all grades of yellow, from the impudent slight-cast down to mulattoes.

It was in the cabin of one of the latter that I took shelter from the afternoon shower, in a region rejoicing in the name of Split Virgin. He was perhaps two thirds Irish and one third negro, but always referred to his black neighbors as “niggers.” On the walls of his unpainted board parlor hung framed chromo portraits of his white ancestors. The inevitable topic of conversation of course was the high cost of living—where can one escape it? A “head” of sugar had advanced from a “gill” (three farthings) to six pence; corn costmore than the chickens to which it was fed increased in worth; wild nuts were more expensive than the flesh they added to his hogs. Calico, put in his wife, all cloth in fact, was getting impossible. Soon they would have to go naked—which reminded me that one never sees naked children in Jamaica, unlike most of the Caribbean islands. A man could not even grow his own food any more; three fourths of his yam holes were robbed at night by the thieving “niggers.” The war and the travel and experience that went with it had debauched even the better class of them, until they were slothful, proud, insolent, and wasteful.

I stopped that night in a mulatto house that took in lodgers, the only point of interest being the dug-out log that served as bath-tub. The invariable Jamaican question in making new acquaintances is “Please, sah, who you is; y’u’ name, please sah?” Once they know your name they seem to feel that everything is all right. But you must have a name, with a mister in front of it. You never say your name is Smith. Your name isMr.Smith. I tremble to think what might befall a stranger in rural Jamaica who did not happen to have a name, and a mister to prefix to it.

Over the top of the island range at Coleyville, with its wireless station, I passed a Jamaica sugar-mill with a daily capacity of one gross “heads.” It consisted of two upright wooden rollers turned by a donkey, an oval iron kettle set into the top of a mud furnace, and a score of little tin cups in which are hardened the one-pound dark-brown lumps of crude sugar that are called “heads” and which form a principal article of diet among the country people. Long-tailed humming-birds shimmered among the flowers at the roadside. Broad green vistas of banana plants, their broad leaves whipped to ribbons by the trade wind, filled many a valley, sometimes climbing part way up the surrounding slopes. Road gangs, usually of two men, were frequent; negro women young and old, sometimes in long groups, sometimes quite alone, were to be found in every mile, sitting on stone piles and wielding their hammers. They are paid a shilling a “box” for breaking up the stones, which they must hunt for in the fields and carry to the roadside, earning an average, if they told the truth, of nine pence a day. It was planting time for ginger, which grows in little patches on the steep red hillsides. The plant, which is pulled in February or March, somewhat resembles a currant-bush and only the root is valuable, the bushes being broken up and used in the following May or June as seed. With good luck a Jamaica peasant may get 2000pounds of cured ginger to the acre. Wages varied in this region from “one and six” to “two and six,” one of the workmen told me, adding regretfully “de cultivators in de hills can’t afford de dollar” (four shillings) “dat am payin’ now de sugar estates.” Shingle and wood houses were the rule here, and they were better than the rural hovels of Porto Rico, perhaps because the material is more plentiful.

Each morning I met flocks of black children, carrying their slates and their few books on their heads, hurrying to school, usually in the church, from which a chorus of hymns invariably arose as soon as the pupils were gathered. In the early days the government of Jamaica did little toward educating the populace, but left it to the denominational schools. Only a few years ago was the penny a week, still required of pupils in most of the British West Indies, abolished, and though there are public schools now in every parish, the Moravians, Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, the Church of Scotland, the Baptists, the Wesleyans, and the Church of Jamaica get government subsidies for educational purposes. England’s school record in Jamaica is as low as our own in Porto Rico. Slightly more than half the children of school age are enrolled, and the attendance of these is fitful. There is compulsory attendance only in Kingston and two or three other towns. Only three out of every hundred pupils reach the sixth grade, and in all the island fewer than three thousand continue in school after the age of fourteen. School inspectors play an important part in the social life, each having about seventy schools in his charge, which he must visit twice a year. The Jamaica government has often been warned against the danger of teaching her democracy to read unless she also taught it to think, but the warning has never been taken very seriously.

The country churches of Jamaica are small and unimposing compared with those of Barbados, though they are more numerous and often conspicuous in their prominent settings on the green hillsides. The sects seem to run in streaks. In this ginger region—most fittingly perhaps—the Church of Scotland holds sway, the ministers receiving their stipends and their instructions from the land of heather. Farther on the Baptists prevailed, and every little negro urchin I questioned announced himself a faithful follower of that sect. On a high hilltop they had built a stone church as high as the eaves, then suddenly abandoned it, apparently because it had occurred to them that there was no water available at that height. The Jamaicans are much given to religious expression. It is nothing rareto hear them “callin’ on de Lawd” as they tramp along the roads, and their antics sometimes reach the height of religious insanity. Such seemed to be the case of a ragged old woman I passed during my second day’s tramp, or else she was pretending the power of prophecy for the benefit of the score of wide-eyed negroes squatting on the ground about her as she marched back and forth preaching with all the inflections of a negro minister and ending each exhortation with a “Bless de Lawd, Oh, mah soul!” which echoed back from the neighboring hills. Tombstones are less numerous in Jamaican churchyards than one would expect, perhaps because of the custom of burying people on their own property. One often comes upon a little cluster of graves in a lonely bit of woods, or beside a country hut, some of them dating from the slave days. Most of them are covered by a mound of stone and cement, without crosses or other upright monument, some are large vaults, all are well kept and usually freshly whitewashed. Strangely enough the negroes do not seem to be in any way superstitious about them.

Annotto and pimento are two important products of the Jamaican hills that are sure to draw the pedestrian’s attention. The former is a reddish berry in a kind of chestnut-burr pod, which grows on a spreading bush and, being boiled, gives an oily extract that is used as a dye. Pimento is what we know as allspice, and is the only Jamaican export indigenous to the island. The tree grows some thirty feet high and its greenish-gray bark and glossy green leaves cause it to stand out conspicuously from the surrounding forest. When crushed in the hand the leaves emit a strong aromatic odor, but they have no commercial value. The berry, of the size of a currant, grows in clusters, is glossy black when ripe and very pleasant to the taste. But it must be gathered before that, and has then a peppery, astringent quality. They are picked by sending a small boy up the tree to break off the ends of all the branches he can reach and throw them to the ground, where the berries are gathered by women and children and carried to the “barbecues,” where they are dried like coffee.

Irish potatoes can be grown in the highlands of Jamaica; there are some nutmegs; the oranges are green in color and of poor quality; there aresapotes(which are here called naseberries, a corruption of the West Indian Spanishníspero), grapefruit, shadducks (a pear-shaped grapefruit with a reddish pulp), thechocho, and a dozen other purely tropical fruits and vegetables. But with the single exception of the pimento all these products have been imported, though many ofthem have fervently adopted their new home. In 1793, for instance, when a famine was ravaging the island, William Bligh brought the breadfruit tree from the South Seas, and to-day it is as familiar a sight as African faces.

A furzy, almost treeless, red soil region surrounded me on my second afternoon. I was flanking the famous cockpit country, made up of numerous basins in close proximity and densely wooded from top to bottom, wilder forms of what are known in Minnesota as “sink-holes.” In these the Maroons took refuge in their wars with the English. The Maroons (an abbreviation of cimaroon, said to be derived from the Spanishcima, or mountain top) were originally slaves of the Spanish, who took to the cockpit country after England captured Jamaica, where they were joined from time to time by runaway slaves of the newcomers. England won her title to the island almost without a struggle, but it took two regiments to keep the Maroons from recapturing it. For nearly two hundred years they lived in wild freedom in the mountain recesses, frequently descending to harry the lowlands and carry off the cattle. The government at length entered into a treaty with them, granting them 2500 acres of land, and getting in turn their assistance in quelling uprisings of the slaves or repelling foreign invasion. They were a bold, hardy lot of men, holding the servile peasant population in great contempt, knowing every inch of the hills and forests, and were great hunters, either of human or four-footed game. In warfare they dressed themselves in green leaves which caused them to blend invisibly into the landscape. It has always been the policy of the Government to keep the Maroons at odds with the rest of the population, England’s familiar old scheme for dominion, like the accentuation of caste lines in India. To-day, though there are several so-called Maroon towns in the cockpit country and another in the northeastern parish, there are said to be almost no “pure blooded” Maroons left. They still exist in name, however, and have their own chiefs, churches, and schools, and once a year they are paid an official visit by thecustosof the parish, when they “dress up in leaves and similar rubbish and go through a lot of childish hocuspocus.” In theory at least they are more independent than the other negroes—which is strong language indeed—but though every little while some black countryman bullies his neighbors by claiming to be a Maroon, there is nothing by which to distinguish thepresent descendants of the warlike slaves from those whose ancestors peacefully awaited emancipation.

Wayside shops are somewhat less numerous in Jamaica than in Barbados, and it is significant of a larger American influence here that they are called stores. The best of them, virtually all the provision shops in fact, are kept by Chinamen, unknown in “Little England.” Even in the most remote corners of the mountainous interior one comes upon Celestials plying their chosen trade, most of them of the younger generation, born in Jamaica and speaking the same slovenly tongue as their negro clients, yet retaining all their native attributes, sphinx-like, taciturn, unflaggingly diligent, apparently wholly devoid of curiosity, only rarely succumbing to the native influence to the extent of mumbling an indifferent “Where y’u go?” or “What y’u name?” In striking contrast to Barbados, too, are the stocks of imported canned and salt fish, even in stores on the edge of the sea. Every scattered collection of huts has its post office, always bearing the blue sign “Quinine for Sale.” Single pills of the febrifuge are sold in printed envelopes at a farthing each, though there are few coins of that size in circulation, and he who buys a penny-worth gets his four pills in as many separate envelopes. The favorite native occupation seems to be the patching of shoes. It is a rare mile that does not have at least one “shoemaker” seated in the door of his tiny shanty or single room, striving to make both ends meet with a few scraps of leather and a handful of nails. Almost the only native manufacture, however, is the weaving of “jippi jappa” hats, a very coarse, poor imitation of the Panama, though the country people make all shapes and sizes of baskets.

The language of Jamaica is at best curious; that spoken in the hills seems almost a foreign dialect, and the stranger must listen attentively and usually have phrases repeated before he understands them. He is unlikely to catch more than the general drift of a conversation between the natives. Yet few African words remain; what seem such to the stranger turn out upon inquiry to be mutilated forms of English. “No, please” and “Oh, yes, please, sah” are the habitual negative and affirmative of the rural districts when addressing white persons. Now and then the greeting of the older people is “Good mawnin’, dear massa,” or “I tell you good evenin’, mistress.” It is always “I couldn’t tell you,” never “I don’t know.” A white baby is a “bukra pickney” to the country people; smile at any of their childish anticsand they are flattered into confiding to one another “De bukra him laugh.” African languages consist largely of gesture. With the learning of English from the stolid Anglo-Saxon this has in great measure disappeared. It is much more prevalent in the country than in the towns, and much more marked when they are talking to one another than when addressing a white man. The negro-English of the masses is no more intelligible to the newcomer than real English is to the rural population, and most planters save themselves time and trouble by addressing their laborers in their own dialect. The Jamaican negro is much given to talking things over with himself, his brain evidently refusing to work silently, and it is the rule rather than the exception to hear those one meets along the roads engaged in a soliloquy. In slavery days queer terms were used for money and they are still heard in the rural districts and in town markets. I found a Chinaman spending his spare time between customers in wrapping up tiny packages of sugar and asked him if they were a penny-worth, which seemed small enough indeed at present prices. No, they are sold at a “gill,” or three farthings. Two “gills,” or three “ha’p’nnies,” is a “quattie.” A shilling used to be a “macaroni,” three pence was for some reason called “fippence,” and to this day one occasionally hears the equivalent of thirty West Indian cents referred to as “a mac an’ fippence.” The ejaculatory “I mean to say” is as frequent in the speech of even the peasants as it is in England.

What may be called proverbs for lack of a more exact name are numerous among the masses of Jamaica. Let me quote a few, leaving the reader to catch what meaning he can out of them:

“Better fe water trow ’way dan gourd fe bruck.”

“Black man tief, him tief half a bit; bukra tief, him tief whole a estate.”

“Cock crow ’trongest ’pon him own dung’ll.”

“Cedar board laugh after dead man.”

“Don’ cry oveh milk wha’ trow ’way a’ready.”

“Dog hab too much owner him sleep widout supper.”

“Ebery dog tink himself lion in him massa yard.”

“Ebery John Crow tink him pickney white.”

“Ebery man know where him house a leak.”

“Follow fashin mek monkey cut him tail.”

“Get a quattie better dan a kick.”

“Larn te dance a home befo’ y’u go outside.”

“Man no done grow mus’n laugh afteh short man.”

“Man get in trouble pickney breeches fit he.”

“Runnin’ ’bout too much de ruin ob woman an’ fowl.”

“Same ting sweet mout’ hu’t belly.”

“Sometime high standin’ collar stan’ top a empty belly.”

“Too much cousin broke shop.”

“When y’u hab bad husban’ don’ mek y’u sweethea’t ca’ y’u half way.”

“Man run too fast run two time.”

“Ebery jackass tink him pickney a race horse.”

Folk lore shows evidence of English and African mixture. Here is a story as it was told by our son’s Jamaican nursemaid, without the inimitable pronunciation:

“One day a gentleman and lady have two girl. And they sent them out to look for them granny. When them got in the thick wood and them meet with aorangootang. The orangootang axed them where are them going to. ‘I am going to look for my granny.’ And said, ‘Here is my granny.’ And them said, ‘No, you is not my granny. My granny got a mark right on her mout’.’ And he went in the thick wood took a knife scrape off his mout’ and come out and said, ‘Here is your granny now.’ And he took dem and carry dem in his house and just half cook de food dat carry for dem granny. And when night come him eat off de middle of de biggest one and lef’ only de hand and de head and de feet. And de little one said, ‘Granny, let I go outside.’ And he said go and de smallest one run home and can’t talk till three days. And de father get twelve men and gone look for de orangootang. And when he going six mont’ he catch de orangootang and put him into de cage and when six mont’ come he throw kerosene oil on him and light him a fire.”

Tenses mean nothing to the uneducated Jamaican, and the subjective and objective pronouns are more likely to be reversed than not. Between the plural and singular of either verb or noun he shows an engaging impartiality, while the double negative is to him a form of emphasis.

Beyond Ulster Spring, a scattered town in a kind of cockpit so full of mist in the early morning as to seem a lake, my road dropped rapidly down a beautiful narrow valley, the high, ragged hills on both sides tree-clothed in all but the barest white sheer spots. Little woodenhouses were pitched on wooded knolls and jutting places that seemed almost inaccessible. Here and there the ancient stone road-parapet had fallen away, giving splendid opportunities for far swifter descent on a dark night. Through the canyon echoed the voice of a negro woman, singing hymns as she walked. Birds sang continually; from the inaccessible little houses came the occasional bleating of goats. Dry River Lake, evidently in the bottom of a prehistoric crater, shimmered far below me, surrounded by the densest vegetation, and utter silence. Jamaica has many rivers that disappear and reappear at random throughout their course. Negro men on their way to work on the jungled hillsides carried their machetes in one hand and a smouldering block of wood in the other, to smoke out the mosquitos. Some bore in addition a blackened five-gallon oil tin of water on their heads. The day did not grow unpleasantly warm until I had passed Sawyer’s Market and entered a long fertile plain, completely uncultivated, almost uninhabited, studded with great clumps of bamboo. Dolphin Head, the highest peak in western Jamaica, peered above the landscape to the left. Then bit by bit the negroes grew numerous and impudent again, and I knew that the sugar-bearing coastlands were at hand.

Negroes so black and ox-like that they seemed scarcely human plodded past, never giving greeting as in the hills, though sometimes shouting an obscene jest. Children ran at sight of me, as those of Italy, for instance, do at sight of a negro. Ragged old women were hoeing cane in the fields. They earned five shillings a week; the strongest men three a day, at “task-work,” laboring from Monday to Friday. Here and there was an old-fashioned rum-mill, recognizable by its stench as well as by its old brick chimney and the heaps of rotting cane-pulp about it. The cane-carts were hauled by three or four pairs of oxen, a dozen men shrieking about them to urge them up the slopes of the soft fields. Like most of those in Jamaica they were crosses between English and East Indian cattle, particularly the Mysore breed. Though inferior from the butcher’s point of view, these cross-breeds are noted for their quickness and endurance under the yoke, and they have a black, sun-resistant skin even when outwardly light-colored or white. Once I passed a ruined old windmill tower, capped with ivy, but they are rare in Jamaica. The thick, hot air hung motionless after the afternoon shower. Rocky, bush-grown hills intruded again where one expected flat, fertile coastlands, sugar-cane died out once more, and with it the negroes.

Then suddenly the Caribbean appeared through a break in the hills,so high and dark-blue that it seemed at first a new mountain range, and on the edge of it I caught a glimpse of Falmouth, not to be seen again until I was treading its very streets. Many old stone ruins, especially the foundations and steps of what had evidently been big plantation houses, peered forth from the bush. There were other signs that large estates had once flourished where all was not “ruinate.” Dreary, silent, dismal, swarming with mosquitoes, the last few miles led through an unbroken mangrove swamp. Myriads of land-crabs of all sizes and colors, some huge as small turtles, others no larger than flies, with green, red, cream-colored, and multi-colored backs, scuttled into their holes as I passed. Falmouth had little to recommend it, either as a place of abode or of sojourn. Sweltering even at midnight, its streets impudent with lounging negroes, it recalled by contrast the cool and simple little villages in the hills. I found lodging in a room strewn with the greasy paraphernalia of a negro dentist and which had not known the luxury of a broom or a dust-cloth in weeks, though the mulatto house-owner complained that she “can’t get no work to do.” A Salvation Army street meeting which erupted a few doors away was the nearest replica of a Central African tomtom dance, with clothes on and smeared with a thin English veneer, that it has ever been my luck to behold in an ostensibly civilized country.

I had not intended to walk the twenty-two miles along the coast from Falmouth to Montego Bay, but as the mail bus left at three in the morning and private automobiles demanded three shillings a mile, I changed my plans. Groups of ragged negro women came down out of the hills singing, their dinner in a rag or a pail on their heads, and fell to work in newly cleared cane-fields. Pedestrians were constantly beating off the mosquitoes with leafy branches. Once there had been big stone houses here also, now there were only miserable negro shacks scattered among the cocoanut groves. The sea breeze was nearly always cut off by these or mangrove jungles. The only noise except occasional shrieking negroes was the cry of mourning doves and the equally mournful “sough” of the slow breakers on the reefs far out from shore. Fishermen were rare. Now and then the swamps disappeared and the road plodded endlessly onward at the very edge of the unruffled inner lagoons. I passed only one shop on the journey, kept of course by a Jamaica-born Chinaman. Drinking water was not to be had; the June sun beat down like a red-hot ingot; the incredibly stupid watchmen, most of whom were females, could not be inducedto sell a single one of the green cocoanuts under their charge. I adopted the Jamaican custom of praedial larceny and, picking a plump green nut now and then from the low young trees, jabbed a hole in it on a sharp fencepost and quenched a raging thirst that returned again within a half mile. Noisome carrion crows, with red heads instead of black, unlike those of Trinidad, and called “johncrow” by the natives, moved lazily aside as I advanced.

Midway between the two towns I passed a three-story mansion set somewhat back from the sea on what was once one of the finest estates in Jamaica. To-day it is closed and abandoned, yet needs no watchman, for the negroes are convinced that it is haunted. Rose Hall it is called, and its story has long been familiar throughout Jamaica. Here, runs the yarn, lived a pretty Mrs. Palmer, who was so eccentric that she caused the house to be built according to the divisions of time,—365 windows, 52 doors, 24 rooms, 12 of this, 7 of that, and so on. But eccentricity seems to have been the least of her faults, for in this very house, the tale goes on, she killed four husbands and was on the point of sending the fifth to join them when he turned the tables.

At length the featureless road swung inland along the edge of an immense bay, across which stood forth the wooded hills of Hanover parish. Its waters were glass-smooth, but the sea-wall smashed for long distances recalled that the Caribbean does not always lie so peaceful and enticing. Cottages with bathing-suits hung over the veranda rails began to appear, then white men, of whom I had seen but one in three days, and he with a negro wife. Montego Bay aspires to be a tourists’ winter paradise, but unfortunately the town lies around behind a hill that cuts off that life-saving trade wind which Jamaicans call “the doctor” and in its place comes only the fitful land breeze known as “the undertaker.” Then, too, it is short of water. Most of Jamaica is, for unlike Barbados, which has not a tithe as many sources of supply, the island depends chiefly on what it can catch from the rains. The result is frequently to deprive the perspiring visitor of his bath. Tourist literature would have us believe that “the band of the Montego Bay Citizens’ Association performs in the Parade”—most Jamaican towns have a dusty central square known by that name—“in the evenings, and greatly adds to the pleasure of the visitor.” “Perform” it does indeed, and none can deny that it adds to the risibility of nations; but let no music lover be misled by this particular abuse of the maltreated word “pleasure.”

Of the many other beauties of Jamaica space precludes anything more than brief mention. There are the cane-fields of Westmoreland parish, for instance, the tobacco growing hills of St. Elizabeth, the journey up the gorge to Bog Walk, St. Ann’s parish with its newly born lake of Moneague, its many pimento trees, its beguiling Fern Gully, where are to be found innumerable species of the plants that give the ravine its name, from the maidenhair to the tree-fern, known locally as the “rattadrum.” Here, too, are Roaring River Falls and the scene of Columbus’ longest residence in the West Indies, for he lay a twelve-month with his worm-eaten vessels in what is now called Dry Harbor.

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