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heavy tide breaking over a pebbly beach. And the place is filled with grey dust-clouds as the people pass and repass, moving from the fountain to make way for new-comers. The blackness of their bare legs is hidden by the dirty grey dust. No matter how supple or glossy the skin may really be, two minutes’ walking in the courtyard gives bare legs the appearance of age, and suggests the existence of loathsome disease. The grey dust rises up and powders the women’s hair until the black curls are lightened to the colour of brown pepper. In fact the unpleasant dust envelopes everything under a cloud of unclean greyness. In the courtyard of the market-place the black people seem grey and diseased; the white folk never pass beyond the entrance gate.
It is on market days that one can see in the Kingston high roads, and in the suburban lanes, groups of country women walking beneath heavy head-loads of garden produce. In all the world there is nothing more graceful than the carriage of a negro woman swinging along, with free and easy motion, under a head-load which would be heavy to an ordinary white man. With head erect, straight neck, chest flung forward, and arms swinging with unconscious freedom, the women present perfect examples of graceful strength. Their stride is long, and easy, and very regular. They are the most graceful walkers in the world. I have never seen a lady in Europe with a carriage as perfect as that of the ordinary Jamaica negro market-woman.
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Atone time Jamaica was peopled by a race of red men whose beauty and timidity were the wonder and convenience of the little band of Europeans who were the first whites to tread the fragrant shores of the Pearl of the Antilles. To-day not a trace of these Caribs remains. Unfit for competition with the strenuous white or muscular black, the race, so far as Jamaica is concerned, has run its course. The red people are remembered only by the stone implements and rude pottery preserved in the Jamaican museum. Nowadays the island is peopled by whites—English, American, and those of Spanish blood; blacks—grandchildren of the slaves imported from West and West Central Africa; and half-breeds—yellow and brown people—the descendants of those intrigues of the white man and his black servant which, not many years back, were common among the people of the country.
The white man needs but little description; you can see him in England or in any colony: an Englishman who takes his cold bath, and considers himself not the leastimportant member of the most important race extant. His arrogance is undiminished by the tropic sun, though his habits of life may have become West Indianised. He rises at six and breakfasts at ten or eleven, lunches at two or three, and dines at seven. His food is as it is in England, save that fruit and vegetables are more plentiful. His house is built bungalow fashion, and his servants (with whom he has more trouble than his brethren in London) are blacker than the blackest hat. His complexion is either white with a yellowish tinge, or red mahogany. His women-folk dress in the latest Parisian creations, and suffer only from lack of exercise. It is not a climate for exertion, and the English lady goes to the length of taking none at all. She crosses the street in her buggy, and has a black maid to hand, so that she may never be called upon to make any unnecessary movement. The man has his polo, and tennis, and pigeon-shooting, his saddle-horse, and golf. If he is very brave and a great enthusiast, there is the cricket field. The lady always prefers the unhealthy luxury of repose. So her face is milk-coloured; she is whiter than her husband.
The society of the island is divided into three sections—the military, the civil officials, and the others. The three sets meet occasionally when one matches itself against another at sport, or when there is a great reception at Government House. These foregatherings are of interest to those who deal in scandal. In the clubs the men mix more frequently, but it is not the men who make the social life of Jamaica. The life of the Englishman
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differs from that of the Anglo-Indian at a hill station; it is not the same as the life in a provincial town. But somehow it is a strange mixture of these two, except that in the social life the bachelor plays but a puny part. Not many mothers take their daughters to Jamaica, so, in the capital, the bachelor lives in one of the hotels and plays billiards in the evenings. It would be a blessing to the single men if a few enterprising mothers with many daughters would take up their abode in some of the charming villa residences a few miles out of Kingston.
The life of the Jamaica negro is almost ideal. As a rule he either entirely ignores the little work he ought to do, or leaves it to the exhaustless energy of his indefatigable wife. He spends his life in shady parts of the market-place, or lolls in the sun outside the place of his abode. Nothing worries him. He is imperturbable; glorious in his idleness, happy in a blissful ignorance which takes no account of yesterday or to-morrow. His only grievance, if he has one, is the limited working power of one woman. Happy is the man who is the father of many able-bodied youngsters. If by some mischance—the accident of domestic misfortune, or the promptings ofennuiborn of inaction—he is forced to work, he works with cheerfulness, and with a happy grin complains through the day, and then spends his night in revelry. When you have questioned one black man as to the extent and remuneration of his labour, you have interviewed the island. The temperament of the negro is inborn; it never varies; all negroes areblood brethren. Ask any man if he works hard and you will hear—
“Yes, me work very hard, sah.”
“You look well on it.”
“No, me no well, sah; me not fit for work; too sick.”
“But you get well paid.”
“No well paid, sah. Plenty work; very little money, sah.”
All this with a satisfied grin except when he describes the weakness of his health; then his eyes roll and his face clouds in a manner almost convincing to new arrivals.
With the women it is different. They have no time for conversation with idle strangers; they work with unceasing energy. If they pause, it is only to stare with an air of half-timid wonder, or to break into long peals of boisterous laughter. If it were not for the women folk, Jamaica would indeed be hard put to it for workers.
In character the Jamaican negroes are a mixture of good and bad; of Africa and Europe, with the vices of both the blacks and the whites, and only some of the virtues of the people of Europe. They are civilised with a sort of quasi-civilisation, which somehow suggests an indifferently humorous burlesque performed by irresponsible amateurs. It takes many months to educate a new-comer into treating the black Jamaicans with becoming seriousness. As a rule they are well-meaning people, full of curious mannerisms, with which
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it is difficult for the white man to be in entire sympathy. The ideas of a black man are different from those of white. He sees things from a different point of view, and cannot really be happy with a white, who, legally his equal, is actually in many ways infinitely his superior. In many ways the Jamaican native resembles his coloured brother of the American States; he is just as arrogant—even more so—but he is not quite so really independent, and by no means so energetic. It is certainly a fact that the Jamaican negroes are the happiest, relatively the richest, and quite the most comfortable inhabitants of the globe. Though there may be poverty among them, there is no unsatisfied hunger. The fields and the hedges, as well as the market-places, afford food and comfort for the dweller in this land of perpetual sun. Clothes they have in too great an abundance. It is only for the purposes of pride and vainglory that clothes are worn at all. The climate is warm enough to justify nudity, and although this happy condition of freedom is not compatible with the canons of modern society, it is easily possible for a native to be clad and outwardly furnished for a very few shillings per annum. Overcoats are unknown. Coals are only associated with the steamships in Kingston Harbour, and the railway. Meat is an unnecessary luxury—almost an unhealthy one. The people live on fruit and vegetables, with an occasional dish of salt fish caught in the rivers or from the waters of the Caribbean Sea, and cured with a total disregard for delicate sweetness. At the first and the twenty-first glance, theEuropean would pronounce the dried fish of the Jamaican nigger bad, if not entirely putrid. The popularity of this form of diet among the people is evidence of the over-sensitiveness of the civilised nose. The West Indian soldier of the line receives full rations as well as his shilling a day. The meat he receives from a beneficent Government is the same as that served out to his English brother-in-arms, and it is from this source that the old English settler draws the supply of fresh meat for his own table. It is better to go among the West Indian messrooms and buy the soldiers’ meat rations than it is to chance the tenderness of the joints on the market butcher’s slabs. By a little enterprise and a good deal of bargaining with a coal-black mess sergeant, you are certain of obtaining the juiciest steak to be found on the island; and in doing so you materially add to the popularity of the army among possible recruits by enlarging the pocket-money of the black soldiers of the line. Our West Indian Tommies prefer the saltest of stale salt-fish to the juiciest of fresh juicy-steaks, and as a rule the officer of the day is quite prepared to wink at a little irregularity which makes for the happiness of his men and the comfort of the island. Besides, it is probable that the same officer of the day is occasionally invited to dine out in the bungalows of older inhabitants. The readiness with which the soldier is prepared to part with meat rations is proof that flesh foods are an unnecessary luxury for the West Indian native.
The negroes of the island are sharply divided into
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two classes: those who live in the towns, and the country labourers. The two classes differ as much as do English agriculturists and Londoners. In Jamaica the country people are superior to the town-bred class. The influences of town life are not good for emotional people whose fathers’ fathers hunted men in the forest lands of Western Africa. They receive impressions too easily. They are impressed by the bad as well as by the good. A black servant is always his own idea of his white master. A black man must imitate; his race has only just come in contact with civilisation. Instinctively he imitates because he has not yet reached that state which some day may enable him to initiate. If he is to appear in the guise of a civilised man he must follow; his experience is not great enough to enable him to lead; his instincts are still African and barbarian. So the town man, subject to the influences of a city in which live types of every class of every European race, is necessarily at a disadvantage compared with the man who lives with nature among people of his own colour and only one or two white men of one race.
The dwellers in the Jamaican cities look down upon the country folk as unsophisticated nonentities. The country people imagine the townsmen to be priests of iniquity, cunning, and steeped in wickedness. Just as it is in England, only more so. In the country all the coloured people are, approximately, of one class; they all belong to one station. In towns the buggyman looks down upon the costermonger as an inferior, just as the wives of shopkeepers ignore the existence of Mrs.Buggyman. In imitation of the English, foolish class distinction has given birth to a form of snobbishness which is entirely ludicrous. In Kingston the outward and visible sign of prosperity or social superiority is shown in the costume of the women-folk, and in the simpering accent of the maidens. The more uncomfortable a woman looks when she goes on church parade, the more diffidence she shows before opening her mouth to answer a simple question, the higher she is in the social scale, as it is understood by native Jamaicans. This is as it is among the shopkeepers and the proprietors of buggy horses and worn-out four-wheel tourist conveyances. With the workers it is altogether different. The aged lady, who sits for twelve hours of every day selling gingerbread beneath the half-shade of a decaying arch fronting an important shop in the main street, thinks little of costume and nothing of accent. She is persuaded to talk with great difficulty, though her story would be really interesting. An old black lady lacks that venerable appearance peculiar to the aged dames of England. She does not appear too clean, her hair is reduced to mangy patches of dusty black curls, showing here and there on the top of her smooth black pate. The forehead is furrowed and her cheeks sunken, the chin protrudes, and is the heaviest and most noticeable of all the features. Her lips have vanished, and the eyes peer through dull-red rims from behind a half-screen of fallen skin. She is bent double by age and the infirmities born of rough work. There, all day long, she sits selling gingerbreadcake beneath the half-shade of decaying archways. No one ever seems to buy her dainties, but there she sits all day long staring vacantly into nothing. Occasionally she fingers her cakes, and the movement of her hands disturbs a cloud of flies who claim her cookies as their own. She is listless and entirely dumb; there is no crowd of chattering loafers round her stall, no group of children playing hide-and-seek under the shadow of her protection. She is alone—a picture of desolation. She will sit there gazing at nothing, heeding nothing, until she finds the consolation of the sleep of death. As a conversationalist she is quite impossible. If a white man stops to give her greeting, she replies not by word of mouth, but with an out-thrust hand. She has money greed. Half her day is spent in silent pleading for alms. Altogether she is not picturesque; she lacks the elements of cleanliness, and her cookies are not wholesome. She is something to pass by with a shudder—a human being of the lowest species undergoing a very slow process of decay. If she has intelligence, it is hidden with her life-story behind the shrunken eyes half-hidden by the dull-red rims and hanging skin.
The most obvious inhabitants of Kingston are the drivers of the buggies. A Jamaican buggy is a spider-like species of the four-wheeled vehicle, known in England as the country fly. It is drawn by one horse, which is neither a horse, nor a pony, nor a mule, but something remotely resembling all these things, and raising sentiments of deep pity in the hearts of all beholders. Thedriver of the buggy, the buggyman, supplies the necessary enthusiasm to the horse and buggy alike. One instinctively feels that but for the elevating spirit of sublime optimism which the buggyman possesses to the fullest degree, the poor horse would drop dead and the vehicle would fall to bits. The buggyman ignores everything in life save possible customers. If you hire a buggy you are the life and soul of the driver until you enter his crazy carriage; then you become as less than nothing, and the driver shamelessly bargains with pedestrians for the use of his coach when the time comes for you to leave. The buggymen know Kingston as well as the London cabby knows his London, and that is saying much. He drives with a rattling carelessness which is entirely good for weakly nerves. He ignores the protests of his nervous fare, and smiles in derision of the warning hand of an outraged police. He cannons other buggies as though they were billiard balls, and finally lands his victim, in a condition entirely demoralised and feverish, at a place where he has no desire to go. Then the driver blames the passenger for not giving correct directions, and explains that to drive on will be another sixpenny fare. The law in Jamaica reads, “Sixpence per passenger to any place in town,” so the driver gallops to an unfrequented corner of the place and demands an extra sixpence. The fare must pay, or walk back in the sun through the stench of poorer Kingston. It is really better for tourists to buy a buggy and a horse and to hire a driver if they intend to stay in the island for
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more than three weeks. These can be as easily sold as they can be purchased, and the possession of them saves the waste of much precious energy, and it is better for the language and morals of a vigorous person.
When he is not pursuing possible customers, the buggyman is asleep inside his carriage. His battered hat is carelessly balanced on the tip of his little nose, his feet are resting on the cushion of the front seat, his hands hanging limp, and he slumbers deeply, exhibiting the deep caverns of his mighty jaw. Flies settle and nest in his open mouth, children swarm round his buggy and tickle him with half-chewed sweetstuffs, women chaff him from the side walks, but he stirs not, not an eyelid moves. But let a tourist or a white man come within one hundred yards of him and he is alive again and in pursuit. He discovers a possible fare by the sense of smell. He is all eyes and ears and nose for white men. When he sleeps, his horse sleeps also. It is in many cases all the rest the poor beast hopes to get. It is usual for the poor beast to be dragged from his resting-place (it is neither stable, nor nest, nor open field) and harnessed at 8A.M.He retires when the night is far spent, and the last straggler has settled beneath the mosquito netting of his bungalow bedroom. During the day he is driven to the full extent of his capabilities. He must always run his quickest. There are no words spoken to him: he is driven with the whip, and with the whip only. His food is coarse guinea-grass, and he is lucky if he finds much of that; his water comes should his journeying carry himpast a water tank. For all that, he has the heart and soul of a carriage horse, and he is as keen in his master’s hunt for fares as a trained polo pony is in following the ball. In colour he is usually a bright yellowy red, with mane and tail of light yellow. He always shows his ribs, and the whip is pleasant to him because the lash disturbs the flies. He never falls or stumbles; he has learned to be sure of his feet by carrying tourists up high mountains by way of narrow winding paths. If he has one vice it is sleepiness, but in that matter he is well under the control of his driver.
When the buggy driver has finished his work he lolls about the drinking shops—an important man. He is the hardest drinker in Kingston. He mixes more with white men than do most of the other natives, and his calling puts him in touch with the doings of men of all types. He calls for his rum, and chaffs the barmaid, for all the world like a city clerk; and his conversation is of horse-racing and betting odds, and worse. He is well-to-do, and proud that the Government has sufficient confidence in his personal character and in his prowess as a coachman to entrust him with a license to drive a hackney coach. This license is to the Jamaica buggyman exactly what his commission is to a newly-joined young officer. It gives the black man status. It is a link between him and the Government. It shows him and all Jamaica that he, buggy-driver, with a license and a number, is not an unknown man, but an official with a position recognised by officialdom.
When a buggyman marries he usually chooses his wife from among the yellow women. The negress is beneath him. He likes to have as his wife a woman who may call herself white when she receives his guests or attends his chapel on the Sabbath. He will tell you that he married white, and you will wonder how he managed it, until you see his lady. If you are so inclined, you may abuse the driver and his wife and his children, his horse and his buggy, his incapacity and everything that is his. He will only laugh and crack his whip and sway about in his seat with merriment. He will do anything to please you, on the chance of your dealing generously with him when the time comes for payment. He is a thick-skinned black man. He has no delicacy, and no false pride, and little shame. This you will find out when you hand him your silver and tell him to be gone. Compared with him the London four-wheel cabby is an angel of mercy. The buggyman will abandon his horse and his buggy, and follow you down side streets, shouting that you have paid him too little. He will fling your silver to the ground and stamp on it. Then, picking it up, he will follow you shouting that you owe him money. No one heeds him. It is a common scene, and not worthy the attention of Jamaicans.
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Inthe day-time it is good to sit on one of the jutting piers which fringe the bay of Kingston, and, lolling under the deep shade of a heavy roof, give the sea breeze free play with your hair. It is a touch of health, a vision of sweet coolness, a sensation of rare joy. You are in the atmosphere of Southern Europe. Round you spread the tropics. Shorewards the palm bends languidly as it feels the breath of the sea’s vigour; the sun, seen through an ocean breeze, is dulled into purple haze; the moving boats and rocking masts give life and motion to a dead world. At midday the West Indies present the picture of death. There is no movement, no life current. It is as though the island of Jamaica were scorched dead. The birds float like ragged strips of paper on the edge of the breeze which dies on its journey inland. Here, by the sea, the senses are lulled to sweet indifference to all things save the noise and coolness of the breeze. Jamaicans call this breeze the doctor; it is the doctor that makes Jamaica a place fit for the homes of the white men. Without it, the placewould be a fever-ridden land of pestilence. With it, and not even the sun is more regular, the land is called a health resort.
As I sit here musing, the strip of land on which are planted the forts and military cantonments of Port Royal, swings seaward, a thin line of deep green, a false horizon for a sea of richest blue. Parts of the place are blotted out by sailing ships with canvas spread, or steamers, painted white, and little fishing craft. Above Port Royal a single strip of cloud rises from behind the land in a dull haze of grey; where the cloud-chain touches the light blue of the sky it bellies out white to the sun. The broad domes of this cloud-range are whiter than the snowy caps of the ocean rollers.
As I sit, breathing in the sweet coolness of the breeze, a flash of warm brown shoots from the blue of the sea, and a diving boy shimmers in the laughing sun. He will dive for pennies he says. Better sit here and cool I suggest, and in this manner I first get to know something of the inner life of Timothy Dorias, gamin and diving boy, as good a young rogue as you will find anywhere. Vicious and happy as the sun, joyous as the sparkling wavelet, he is thirteen, and, apparently, already deeply experienced in the vice of the world. Yes he goes to school—that is to say, he has been to school; really on second thoughts he intended to convey the fact that he is going to school—next month.
He is thirteen and has a wife—not really a wife, you know—there is no suggestion of wedlock—but a wife nevertheless.
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No he does not go to church—there are no boots. His father is a fisherman, and he is of a family of eight. His two sisters stay at home and help their mother, who sees to the children and the grandchildren; the grandchildren are offsprings of the two sisters. “No, sah, they be not married yet—some day perhaps.” He wishes to show us strange places in the town of Kingston—a merry enough guide, but one lacking in restraint. His accent is mellow and he is not black. A rich, dark brown colour he is, with curly hair, white teeth, and deep black eyes. His stories of Jamaica are of intrigue, dancing eyes, and sunlight; green-shuttered windows and soft glances. He is a born Romeo, a West Indian Don Juan.
The history of Jamaica he knows not, he says, neither can he tell us why some people are black and some white. Best of all is to be brown, “like me,” he says; then one is black to the black people, and white to the white. Really it is a wise thirteen-year-old, witness the postscript. “I should pass as white in England, but not here. Too many nearly white here, sah.” He likes the black people best because they are “plenty more happier,” but the money is in the hands of the whites. When he is old he will catch fish and live alone in a house with his wife and children. If ever he should tire of fishing, Jamaica is “plenty full of fruit.” A little work would be necessary, perhaps, but he does not mind work. Witness the time he spends in practising diving in the Kingston bay, he says. Women will do his housework and attend to his fruit patch; his wife willsee to the clothes of his children. Yes, perhaps it would be good to go out to the sea in big ships, and find adventure in lands beyond the colour line of the setting sun. But in the big ships there is little fruit, and women are not at hand to wait on men. No, it is better to remain where people are safe. Sometimes the big ships go away and never return. The reason is that some one on board has sinned in the eyes of God. Yes, everyone sins plenty often, but God is kind and shuts His eye, otherwise every living man and woman would be blasted dead. Women are not so important as men. We tell them they are, because it pleases them, and so they do more work. But really it is better to be a man. Women are weak and little in their minds, they are too much afraid, and too little given to thinking of big things. You must be kind, but not too kind, to a woman. If you are too kind, she will think you weak and foolish, and she will do no work for you. Yes, he loved his mother and his sisters, but he loved his father most of all, because he was big and strong, and fished in the bay even when the weather was very rough. His father only laughed and cuffed him when he stole the bananas from the cart in the market-place, but his mother talked of it for days, and told all the neighbours that he was a thief and a bad boy; and she told the parson man, who at any moment might tell God. Then he would be sent to hell, all for one or two bananas. His father was angry with his mother for telling the people, and his mother cuffed him still, because his father had beaten her for telling people his son was a thief.
His own people were better than the blacks, because they were whiter, and God himself is white. He was not certain whether black people would go to heaven, but he was certain that white and brown folk could go there and live in the skies in the same great house. When he went there he should want to dive plenty much, and fish in the river with a rod with a wheel on it. No, he was not afraid to die, except that if he died now he would find none of his friends in heaven. He never thought of sharks when he dived in the bay, but his friend had only one leg left, because a shark took the other one off when he was diving for pennies flung from an American fruit-boat. He guessed he made too much noise himself to please the sharks; anyway he could dive under one if it tried to bite him.
He was telling us of his passion for the English and of his love of truth and justice, when suddenly he flung himself from our jetty and splashed into the bay to reappear well out of reach of land. A policeman appeared at my elbow and grinned quietly; he assured us that he would have given much had the boy not caught sight of him as he crept towards us. The rascal was a thief and a blackguard, and he would be arrested, sure as eggs sah, and then birched or sent to gaol. This he assured us was true and unvarnished fact, on his word as a constable of justice. So much for Jamaican youth.
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Thenative of Jamaica flies to religion as an ant creeps to the honey-pot. Give a nigger a few catch-words and a ritual in which he can take a leading part, and there is no more religious man on the face of the earth. I never met a native man or woman who was not either Baptist or Methodist, Catholic or Church of England, or member of some other sect to which he or she clung with the strength of pious madness. There is no tolerance in the really religious Black. Every member of every other sect is a member of the eternally damned. In the opinion of the Catholic there is no hope for his Plymouth Brother. The Baptist cannot hope for the salvation of the Free Methodist. Every Sunday every religious nigger goes to church in the morning, in the afternoon if possible, and then again at night. After evensong there are open-air services where crowds of souls are saved, with great regularity, week by week. They tell each other that they have been plucked like a brand from the burning, and they dance and shout and sing; sometimes, in moments of great exaltation, theygrovel on the ground and clutch at the earth for inspiration and spiritual comfort. It is impossible for a saved soul to be cool. The idea of having so narrowly escaped from the burning brimstone inflames the hearts of the newly saved at each weekly performance. A revivalist ceremony closely resembles a fetich dance in an African forest. The ritual is similar, though the cause and effect are happily different. I do not wish it to be supposed that I venture to scoff at the religion of the natives of Jamaica. My desire is simply to attempt a description of the outward and visible effect of the religious services. At heart every negro is most painfully emotional. After undergoing the deepest sensation of salvation the negro wanders homeward satisfied, relieved, and very merry. There is no evidence of deep impression; no outward suggestion that the man is spiritually affected to any great degree. The impression I gathered was that Jamaicans are religious with their lips and voices; that salvation was a thing to be regularly sought and experienced once a week—just as among certain people in other more civilised countries. This capacity for the endurance of great spirituality gives birth in Jamaica to many lamentable exhibitions of religious humbug. Prophets arrive; new sects are called into being by unscrupulous adventurers who claim to be in direct contact with the Deity.
The story goes that a very little while ago a negro arrived in Kingston from one of the Southern American States. He brought with him a second-hand uniform of a captain of the British Navy, sword included. Hepurchased a donkey in the market place and quietly attired himself in all the glory of the blue and gold of the British Navy. He mounted the donkey and loosely slung his sword so that the scabbard rattled along the cobbles of the rough Kingston roadways. Then, slowly he rode through the town. Men, women, and children followed him in mighty astonishment. He rode slowly, with bent head, his arms folded across his breast. By the time he reached the outskirts of the town the following crowd numbered many hundreds. He led them to a great field, and halted his sorry steed, and for several moments sat solemnly staring at his donkey’s ears, making no movement. Suddenly he drew the sword from out the scabbard and flung himself upright in his stirrups, waving the sword aloft. Thrice he did this in silence. Then he turned to the wondering crowd and shouted—“Kneel to the might of God. Bow down to His servant. I am come to save you from sin.”
Then he preached to them for an hour. He remained in that field for several days, and made many converts and found a multitude of followers. These he marched in procession to the side of a river in which he baptised them all. Part of his creed was that all people should bathe every day in water which he had blessed with his all powerful sword. He dispensed the blessed river water to many hundreds of people every day, making a money charge for every gallon. When he had amassed a small fortune he quietly disappeared, and left his flock leaderless and disconsolate. There appears to be many such chapters in the religious lifeof Jamaica. The people are at the mercy of any adventurer who has sufficient intelligence and enough audacity to prey upon their credulity, and play his own hand with unfaltering boldness.
It would not be fair to suggest that all the inhabitants of Jamaica could be influenced by a jackanapes in a naval uniform and sword, riding on a donkey. There are of course a large number, a large majority, of really intelligent men and women who are properly religious. I mention extreme cases in order that it may be possible for you to gain some insight into the extraordinary character of the Black man. It is easy for any educated man to make great crowds of Jamaicans profess and call themselves Christians. To really imbue the people with a knowledge of the elementary duties of Christian people is a task of great difficulty. Sunday is their day of rest. The old people smoke their pipes and gossip in the shade of their doorways, the youngsters parade the town in all the glory of their gaudy finery. On Sunday the natural idleness of the coloured man is as it were legalised. Once a week their besetting sin of indolence becomes a real virtue. So the day is enjoyed to the full. It is never necessary to drive home to a nigger the fact that it is wicked to labour on the seventh day. The difficulty is to persuade him to work on the other six.
Everyone has heard of the Jamaican revivalist meetings, those weird religious orgies where men and women run riot in the name of great salvation. They are difficult services to witness; the people, especially
Image unavailable: A GINGERBREAD-SELLER, ST. LUCIAA GINGERBREAD-SELLER, ST. LUCIA
the parson people, are shy in the presence of the unbelieving. You can only enter a native synagogue by means of great cunning and an utter absence of self-restraint. The interiors of such synagogues are commonplace—you can see their furniture and fittings in any tiny bethel in poorer London. The difference lies in the people only; in Jamaica they are all utterly black and very happy. The preacher wears spectacles, and has a white beard and conventional clerical collar and white shirt. The congregation are attired in all the tints of a German Noah’s Ark, and show examples of half the costumes known to civilisation and Whitechapel. Of course there are more women than men, but still the males that appear are not less zealous than the most excitable of the ladies. When the service has half spent itself, order, and the souls of the people, have become really affected. The solemnity of the place entirely disappears, and pandemonium comes in like a rustling, choking tornado. Men and women dance and pray and sing and shout, and then fall backwards to the hard wood floor clutching the empty air in the agony of spiritual exaltation. The preacher abstains from flinging himself into the heat of the melée with infinite difficulty, and by exercising his power of self-restraint in a manner inspiring to behold. The congregation exhausts its frenzy and lies quiet and purified, in the manner of a snake that has exhausted its poison gland in attacking the sacking held by an experienced charmer. In this manner is a large proportion of the population of the island every week, withgreat regularity, saved from damnation. The parson is carried home to sup with the senior deacon, and the congregation disperses into little groups of devotees, each member anxious to examine the religious experience of his brother, or explain at great length his own sensations of salvation.
Image unavailable: THE TURTLE WHARF, KINGSTON, JAMAICATHE TURTLE WHARF, KINGSTON, JAMAICA
“Turtlesor tortoises constitute one of the orders of reptiles, theChelonia. They are characterised by having the trunk of the body incased in a more or less ossified carapace, which consists of a dorsal more or less convex portion, and of a flat ventral one, the so-called plastron.”
If you could see a turtle panting for breath, sighing in fat breathless agony, or swallowing nothing, in the manner of a nervous singer, you would conclude that this description should be wrapped in more sympathetic terms. I can imagine nothing more absolutely pitiable than the sight of a full hundred turtle overturned, belly upwards, in the full glare of a noon sun, awaiting shipment over the four thousand miles of rolling Atlantic weather, to meet a doom intimately associated with the beginning, the first course, of an Aldermanic dinner. The soulful eyes of a panting turtle express knowledge of impending doom, and only half conquer agony. It is a sight to turn away from—one which must always be remembered at the first reading of a rich menu. But, really, in his nativehaunts, the turtle is an elusive beast, a kind of marine De Wet, who wants a lot of catching, but who, once caught, proves himself or herself to be good all round. Good, that is, if belonging to the succulent green species, for the Hornbilled variety is of little use save for the production of tortoise-shell, and the Loggerhead is a truculent rascal who is best left alone. Strictly speaking, of course, the turtle is not a beast at all, but a reptile, dear to lovers of callipee and turtle eggs, and otherwise useful in a score of ways. Although this most succulent of all reptiles frequents all tropical oceans more or less, his true home may be said to be at the alligator-shaped island of Grand Cayman or Cairman, called by Columbus Las Tortugas because of the hosts of turtle that he found there. Grand Cayman is a dependency of Jamaica, and passed into the possession of the Crown soon after the conquest of the Queen of the West India islands.
Hunting the turtle is carried on in different ways according to the locality; the simplest plan, of course, is to waylay the female when she leaves the shore after depositing her eggs, and then just turn her on her back and wait until it is convenient to remove her to a kraal. There is no risk or sport about this proceeding, which, in nine cases out of ten, is successful; occasionally, however, a round-backed turtle will roll over and make tracks for the sea with unexpected swiftness. Another plan is to spear or harpoon the reptiles in open sea, and yet another to entangle them in nets when they come to the surface to breathe.
Image unavailable: BOATS OFF DOMINICABOATS OFF DOMINICA
The inhabitants of Grand Cayman are born seamen and turtle hunters, and they favour the last course. Their plan is to make large webbed fishing nets from the leaves of the thatch palm, first denuding the leaf of a certain membranous substance at the back, and then twisting into almost unbreakable cords and drying. This laborious task is all done by hand, and when the net is finished the strongest turtle vainly tries to release his head or fin from its meshes. The folks of Grand Cayman are their own boat-builders, and their custom is to sail in small fleets to the banks off the coast of Nicaragua, and cast their heavily-weighted nets in the direction the turtle is sure to take when intent upon an egg-laying expedition. Often enough the boats are out for weeks before enough turtle are captured to repay the boatmen for their labour. But, once caught, it is easy enough to hoist the net-entangled turtle into the schooners, where he is stored, shell downwards, in the hold, and fed on sea-grass and weed. At one time the trade suffered greatly because the Spaniards persistently destroyed the females before the eggs were deposited, simply for the sake of obtaining calipee. But nowadays the turtle is hunted with greater wisdom, and our civic fathers need not tremble for the future of their beloved delicacy.
With their cargo of turtles aboard the schooners make tracks for Jamaica, where their catch is deposited in kraals to await shipment to Europe.
It is a commonplace story when reduced to a bare description, but really the fishing is full of romance.The sailing amidst the golden islands of the west, the anchorage off the sandy coast of Nicaragua; the casting of the wide-meshed nets and the catching of heavy two or three hundred pound turtles, desperately savage. The turning of a half-exhausted turtle on to his shell-armoured back; the noise of the heavy flapping of over two hundred fins stronger than a strong man’s arm; the pathos of continual sighing, uncanny, half human, wholly unnerving. The journey to the Jamaica jetty. The flopping of the catch into a deep-sea pool, boarded off from the open bay; the feeding of the brutes with curious grass which, seemingly ignored, somehow disappears gradually, when no one is by to witness. Then the romantic drudgery of turtle fishing ends, and the dangerous part begins. The danger lies in the fishing from the pool, the turning on the hot wooden slab, the shipment, in a steamer homeward bound, and—the dinner table.
Of late there has been some excitement over Jamaica turtle fishing. The British fishers claim the right of fishing in places Nicaragua called her very own. Schooners were detained and a British ship of war journeyed to the fishing grounds to see that the game was played with fairness. The affair has blown over now, at least so the black Jamaican turtle fisherman told me. Not that he would care anyway; for his work is only that of fishing up the turtle from the pool. He does not bother about the troubles of schooners. His is pretty work, filled to overflowing with dangerous possibilities. Still there are compensations. Thefeeding of the turtle is employment entailing the expenditure of very little bodily exertion; the thrusting of a few heaps of weed through a loose board; and the fishing comes but seldom, once a week perhaps, or once in two weeks. And, after all, a little danger is a good thing for a man who must swagger before his women folk as one in authority over more than a hundred turtle.
He will invite you to the fishing with all the joy of a young child conscious of an audience before whom he knows he can carry himself with distinction. First he strips in the full glare of noonday, and glories in the exhibition of his nudity. “I go among all those savage fishes with no knife, no, not even a gun,” he will tell you. Though why a gun should be mentioned I cannot imagine, since his work is under water. He strides to the loose board with the air of an African chieftain in his village among his women and little children. And after all some weakness, if weakness it be, is permissible in a man who has to play a man’s part in the fullest meaning of the phrase.
With a single rope in his left hand he falls, feet first, into the pool, in which the turtle are jostling each other for room. He disappears absolutely; the surface of the pool is bare save for the half hidden shells of a group of the turtle. After two minutes, it may be a little less or perhaps a few seconds more, the man’s head reappears, and he shouts to his watching mates the order to pull. They haul at the rope the other end of which sank with the man, the fisher meanwhilefloating quietly and keeping a bright look out for the snapping heads of the beasts he could not avoid disturbing. The result of the hauling shows the white belly of a turtle as it is hoisted upwards, head first, out of the water. The noise of the heavy sighs, and the heavier noise of the sighing chorus in the pool, disturbs the whole jetty. Blood comes on the giant fins in the places where they touch the back shell. First the thrust head appears above the boarding, a head which at once resembles the face of a flat-nosed snake and the top of a mammoth branch of asparagus. The eyes roll like a drunken man to whom the shame of his drunkenness has suddenly become apparent. Then come the flapping fins, the broad white belly, and lastly the other fins. Then two hundred pounds of soup flesh is flung upwards and crashed on to its hard back shell; the rope which encircled its breast just below the fore fins is unloosed, and the poor beast is left to sigh and flap and shake in peace. It is almost impossible for a turtle to regain its legs once it has been turned fairly on its back. Then the fishing game begins afresh.
I saw just one hundred fish brought to light in this manner. One beast turned the scale at three hundred pounds. He was the giant of his tribe, and he showed his high breeding when the time came for his uplifting. All his fins flapped blood at each stroke and his sighing resembled the noise of a young cow who has lost her first calf.