But it would never do to leave Jamaica without getting a “close-up” of her banana industry, and to do this to best advantage one should go to Port Antonio. Above Bog Walk on the way there is Natural Bridge, where the river cuts a great archway through the rocky hills, the highway crossing it far above, recalling famous Rumichaca on the boundary of Colombia and Ecuador, to say nothing of one of our own scenic beauties. Here is a splendid place to end a Sunday stroll, for there is a magnificent bath awaiting one amid the boulders over which the river pours with a constant subway roar and, if one can elude the gaping negroes who are otherwise sure to follow, no other observers than the hundreds of little swallows always flitting in and out of their nests in the rock cliffs. Then when the sun has lost its youthful ardor one may climb again to the village and catch the afternoon train over the mountains to the north coast. The region about Highgate almost rivals the beauty of Porto Rico. Cacao, cocoanuts, clumps of bamboo, the spreading breadfruit-trees, whole valleys full of bananas, some of which climb far up the surrounding slopes, decorate the rugged landscape. One looks almost in vain, however, as in all Jamaica, for the queen of tropical vegetation, the royal—or, as the English unimaginatively call it, the cabbage-palm. Then the train descends quickly through tunnels and across lofty viaducts to Anotta Bay, a large collection of wooden shanties noted for its mosquitoes, but with the blue Caribbean stretching away beyond it to the horizon.
Along the edge of this the railway squirms through a wide fringe of cocoanuts for two hours more. The frequent stations swarm with female negro food-venders. Hindus are somewhat more numerous and though even the women nearly all wear Jamaican dress their Aryan features and unobtrusive manner distinguish them as quickly as their nose-rings and massive necklaces from the African bulk of the population.At length comes Port Antonio, with its twin harbors, embowered in hills half wooded with cocoanuts, an unexpectedly delightful place to the traveler who has known other Jamaican coast towns. Here the trade wind, unknown in Kingston, blows unceasingly, and that alone doubles the worth of any West Indian spot. Irregular and more compact than the two rivals it has probably outdistanced since the last census, Port Antonio has a more thriving, sanitary, comfort-loving air, thanks perhaps to the American influence of its banana trade.
Jamaica claims advantages over all the rest of the world for banana cultivation. The vast tracts of virgin land in Central America and Colombia are two days farther from the principal market. Costa Rica is hampered by frequent droughts at the very season when the fruit most needs rain; for the great game in banana growing is to have them ready to cut at the time when other fruit is scarce in the north. Cuba is a trifle too near the north pole, it is wedded to its sugar industry, and its labor is several times more expensive than that of Jamaica. Bananas demand heat, moisture, and a good fat soil, and all these may be had in the largest of the British West Indies, particularly in the northeastern parish of Portland, for the Blue Mountains which deny Kingston and its vicinity the rainfall it needs precipitate most of it here. What was then a little known fruit in American markets was first planted on a large scale in this very parish a half century ago. By 1894 it had become the most important export of the island, out-distancing both products of the sugarcane, and twenty years later it constituted sixty per cent. of Jamaica’s contribution to the world’s larder. The war, abetted by three consecutive hurricanes, the banana’s greatest enemy, reversed this condition, but the sugar-men themselves do not long hope to hold their new lead.
I chanced to reach Port Antonio at the very height of a banana war. The two powerful older companies had determined to annihilate a new one by that simple little method of starving it to death. Before the World War a bunch of bananas seldom sold for more than two shillings and six pence in Jamaica, but the competition of the newcomers had gradually forced this up to four shillings. In the single day of my visit it advanced hourly by leaps and bounds,—five shillings, five shillings and three pence commission, six shillings, six and six, seven shillings, with a six pence commission if need be, and free transportation to the port—as often as the interlopers covered their bids the imperturbable managers of the powerful companies sent out new inducements over their private telephone system, until the joyful planters ofsome sections were pocketing eleven shillings for every bunch of bananas they could lay down at the roadside bordering their fields. The fruit poured into Port Antonio in an endless stream, by motor-truck, by wagon, pack-donkey, on the heads of men and women, for even the negroes who had but a single bunch worth cutting hastened to part with it at this unprecedented price.
But let us watch the process from the ground up, for the benefit of those who know the banana only as it appears on the fruit-seller’s stand. We have only to catch one of the mammoth trucks thundering away empty into the hills in the direction of Mooretown, once a settlement of Maroons. Every little while along the way, jolly, muscular negro laborers swing up over the tail-board until by the time we have reached Golden Vale, said to be the oldest export banana farm in the world, there are enough of them to load the truck in a bare twenty minutes. It is scarcely necessary to say, I suppose, that bananas grow on a species of mammoth weed rather than a tree, that each produces a single bunch, that this grows “upside down” from our fruit-stand point of view, and that they must be cut before they are ripe. Golden Vale looks like an immense green lake surrounded by mountains, up the lower slopes of which the bananas climb for a considerable distance. Close overhead sits Blue Mountain Peak, coiffed in blue-black clouds. Hindu men, whom the overseers invariably address as “Babu,” do most of the cutting, while the more powerful but less careful negroes do the handling. The “Babus” wander in and out through the green archways, giving a glance at each hanging bunch. When they see one which has reached the proper stage of development, they grasp it by the protruding stem, to which the big blue flower usually still clings, and pull down “tree” and all with a savage jerk. A machete, called a cutlass in Jamaica, flashes, a negro catches the bunch as it falls, another slash severs the flower-bearing stem a few inches from the topmost bananas, a third leaves the “tree” a mere stump, shoulder-high, and the cutters continue their search. Days later, when its sap has run back into the roots, the stump is cut off at the ground and a new shoot springs up to produce next year’s bunch. The bunches that have been gathered are wrapped in dry brown banana leaves, and carried to the roadside, along which other brown heaps lie everywhere as we hurry down to the port, the loaders dropping off one by one at their shanties or the frequent rum-shops along the way. Quick handling is an absolute requisite in the banana business, and many a planter has come to grief by not giving sufficient attention to the question of transportation.
Arrived at the wharves the truck is as quickly unloaded, and an endless chain of negroes, nearly all women, take up the task of distribution, according to size and destination. For there are “English” and “American” bananas, grown in the same field and differing not at all in species but by about ten days in their cutting time, so that the former are lean and the latter fat. Moreover, a bunch is not by any means always a bunch in the language of the banana companies. In the first place they are more often called “stems,” and a “stem” must have at least nine “hands” of fruit (the latter average a dozen bananas each) if it is to be paid for as a full bunch. If it has more than that well and good; that is the company’s gain and no one’s loss. But if there are but eight “hands” it is rated two thirds of a “stem,” if seven, one half, if six, one fourth, if less than that the planter might better have fed it to his hogs or his laborers, for the buyers will have none of it. This rating is less unjust than it appears, for the fewer the “hands” the smaller and fewer are the bananas.
The slouching negroes who make up the endless chain, are not required to tax their minds with these problems of size and nationality. They use their heads, to be sure, but only in the manner that seems best fitted to the race—as common carriers. Two men snatch up the bunches one by one, casting aside the brown leaf wrappers, and lay each one flat on a passing head, the owner of which shuffles away as if it were burdened with nothing but a hat instead of an average weight of eighty pounds. At the edge of the shed in which the bananas are piled to await prompt shipment stands a high desk with three men, usually quadroons or lighter, standing about it. The oldest, most intelligent, and most experienced looking of these casts what seems to be a careless glance at each “stem” and mumbles in a weary monotone, “English, eight,” “American, nine,” “English, seven,” or some other of the combinations; his most youthful companion makes a pencil mark on the ledger before him, the least lively looking of the trio hands a metal or cardboard disk to the carrier, who drops it into a pocket and slouches on to the particular pile to which her burden has been assigned. On the way she passes a negro armed with a cutlass, who lops off the protruding ends of the stem in front of her nose and behind her ears as she walks without so much as arousing a flicker of her drowsy, black eyelids.
Private graveyards are to be found all over Jamaica
Private graveyards are to be found all over Jamaica
Private graveyards are to be found all over Jamaica
A street of Basse Terre, capital of Guadeloupe
A street of Basse Terre, capital of Guadeloupe
A street of Basse Terre, capital of Guadeloupe
A woman of Guadeloupe
A woman of Guadeloupe
A woman of Guadeloupe
The town criers of Pointe à Pitre
The town criers of Pointe à Pitre
The town criers of Pointe à Pitre
When the ship comes in, which must be that night or at latest next day, a similar endless chain of negroes, more nearly male in sex, carry the bananas on board, a tally-clerk ringing the bell of an automatic counter in his hand as each “stem” passes. In some ports a wide leather belt takes the place of this human chain. But a large gang is required for all that, and when the last pile has disappeared from the wharf the carriers strew themselves about it and sleep soundly on the hard planks until the next load arrives. Its quota supplied, the steamer’s hatches are quickly battened down, icy air is turned in upon the perishable cargo, and the vessel rushes full speed ahead for the United States or England, where the fruit begins to rattle away in other trucks before the mere human passengers have leave to descend the gangway. Not until it has reached the retailer does it take on that golden yellow hue that is familiar to the ultimate consumer.
I dropped off at Buff Bay station on the return journey for a jaunt over the Blue Mountain range. The “finger-boards” announced the distance to Kingston as forty-three miles, but there are many shortcuts and an average pedestrian can make the journey in a single day. It is a pleasant walk despite the fact that the first sixteen miles impose a climb of 4080 feet to Hardware Gap. For the foothills begin at once, and the road, narrow and grass-grown from disuse except near the coast, climbs in almost constant shade along the bank of Buff Bay river, and the trade wind sweeps incessantly up the valley. Jamaica is noted for its birds, of which there are said to be more than forty varieties peculiar to the island, and the majority of them seem to make this region their chief rendezvous. Perpendicular banana fields cover the hillsides here and there as high as they can endure the altitude. Masses of bamboos lend a needed touch of daintiness to the dense greenery, as a red-brown tree now and then speckling the steep slopes adds contrast to what would be an almost monotonous color. Then there are the akee-trees, numerous throughout Jamaica, with their bright red, pear-shaped fruit, a favorite food among the negroes, though it is deadly poison except at certain stages of its growth, and even then is reputed the cause of the vomiting sickness that is prevalent among the masses.
Higher up every turn of the road brings to view a new waterfall, standing out against the greenery in flashing whiteness. No wonder the aborigines called the island Xamayca, the land of springs and water; and how one regrets that those same red men do not inhabit it still, if only to give relief from the monotony of black, brutal faces that in time grow almost intolerable to the traveler in the West Indies, until there come moments when he would give all he possesses to see thesegems of the Caribbean as they were before they became mere hives of African slovenliness. But the only Arawaks left in the Jamaica of to-day are those which uphold the arms of the colony on its shield. Here indeed the ancient saying that “every prospect pleases and only man is vile” reaches its full meaning.
I grew weary at length of the incessant negro impudence along the way, which ranged from foul-mouthed shouts to more or less innocent demands of “Heh, bukra, what you sell?” It is a ridiculous failing, no doubt, but I detest being taken for a peddler. I took to shouting back, “I am selling something to make niggers white. Want some?” But, alas, sarcasm seldom penetrates the African skull. Far from resenting my rudeness, the simple-minded souls greeted it with roars of laughter or took it seriously, more often the latter. Dozens called after me to know the price of this desirable remedy; several followed me up the road offering to purchase; one old woman pursued me for nearly half a mile; one group sent a boy running after me, clamoring to know the cost of my wares. “A thousand pounds,” I called back over my shoulder, which being duly reported in all solemnity to the group, brought forth a chorus of giggles and a regretful-toned, “Ah, him humbug we!”
The last two hours, from Jiggerfoot Market to the summit, was a laborious climb, but unlike many such it was lightened by frequent streams of clear, cold water. Then all at once I found myself at the gap, orabra, as the Spaniards would call it, and upon me burst a view worth many times the exertion. All the Liguanea plain from St. Thomas parish to Spanish Town and beyond, far beyond, into the farthermost hills of St. Catherine’s lay spread out like a colored map on a draughtsman’s table, Kingston in full sight from the scattered rocks far outside its harbor, with the sea breaking white upon them, to its last suburbs among the foothills, the sand reef called the Palisadoes curving like a fishhook about the harbor, the remnants of what once boasted itself the most wicked town on earth at its point, the water about it so clear that one might easily have fancied he saw the sunken city of the buccaneers. There is spring water at the very edge of the gap and if one has thought to bring a pocket lunch there is nothing to hinder a long contemplation of this marvelous panorama, except the gradually penetrating cold of the mountains, which seems indeed an anachronism within plain sight of sweltering Kingston.
This sent me striding downward again sooner than I had expected. A hill covered with an abandoned cluster of big barracks soon cut offKingston and most of the plain, and left the eyes to contemplate a nearer scene. Ahead, the road, leisurely and still grassy, had clawed itself a foothold in the rocky hillside, sheer and wooded with scrub growth everywhere except where landslides had scratched a white line down its face. Birds sang lustily, as if tuning up their voices for a later public appearance; human kind was pleasantly conspicuous by its absence. Beyond, on the steep flank of Catherine’s Peak, the soldier town of Newcastle, where British “Tommies” live in an agreeable climate and still keep an eye on Kingston, went down like a giant’s stairway into the gorge, an immense gorge always at my very feet, with little strings of roads winding in and out along its bottom as if in vain quest of an exit. And though the plain below had been faintly hazy and there were banks of clouds in the sky high above, the twin peaks of Blue Mountain range, 7360 higher than the sea, stood out as plainly as though one might have thrown a stone over them.
Five miles constantly downward by a mountain trail, though it is twice that by the highway, brings one from Newcastle to Gordontown, a somnolent hamlet closely shut in by high hills and noisy with the little river which furnishes Kingston its water. Down the bank of this I hurried on to the plain of Liguanea, where rocking street-cars carry one quickly into the insolent capital, for the mangoes were already ripening and it was high time we sailed away from the island Columbus called Santa Gloria.