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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 sincethat 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 withheavy 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; theyfight 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
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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 tocrush 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.
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Sittingunder 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 niggersslaughtered 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 ashistory. 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.
Image unavailable: KINGSTON HARBOUR AND PORT HENDERSONKINGSTON 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 neverforgave 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
Image unavailable: CONSTANT SPRING, JAMAICACONSTANT 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 makehis 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.
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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. Clothesand 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.
Image unavailable: A STREET IN KINGSTON, JAMAICAA STREET IN KINGSTON, JAMAICA
Thetown 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 vastresponsibility. 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
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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 passengerboats, 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 muchwalking. 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 athing 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
Image unavailable: A FRUIT-SELLER ON A SIDE-WALK, KINGSTONA 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 whatreason 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 conversationto 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