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are going to be assisted by new British immigrants. I wish you would tell your people that it would pay them a good deal better to come to the West Indies than to go chasing gold mines and diamonds in South Africa and the Transvaal.”
“How much capital would a settler want?”
“The more the better of course, but a thousand pounds at least. A good man with a thousand pounds would suit us better than a waster with ten thousand. We don’t want any remittance men. Good, solid, hard-working, level-headed business men are the sort for us. People who will send for their wives and settle on their plantations, without wanting to race over to England every year.”
“My coloured friend suggested that the tendency on part of the planters to go to England every year was a bad thing for the island.”
“And there he was right, of course. We want absolute settlers—men who will adopt the country and call it their home, and count it as their children’s homeland too. We want a solid population of solid white men—not a migratory people who look for fortunes in ten years and then a suburban home near London. I guarantee that any man of the right sort who comes here in the right spirit will never regret his coming.”
“And when he comes, what must he do first of all?”
“Hire himself out as a book-keeper or overseer on some plantation for a year or so, until he has got the hang of the country. After that he can decide mattersfor himself. There are plenty of openings and plenty of land. With the new settlers we can work out our own commercial salvation. Without them we shall find it difficult. Labour difficulties will disappear as soon as we find more good masters. Even to-day efficient and sensible planters have very little bother with their workmen. A black man is very much what his white employer makes him. The servant of a discontented, slovenly master is discontented and slovenly also. A good master makes a good servant. Yes, put all that nonsense about a free Jamaica, and the Government of Jamaica by Jamaicans, out of your head. It won’t come off. We are going to grow; we are going to be prosperous. And we have no time to discuss absurd impossibilities, or to have sympathy with the impossible ambitions of scheming gentlemen of the coloured class. The black men have, and always will have, their proper place in the island, and they will have a proper part to play in the commerce and government of the island. And that is all. Jamaica is a British Colony governed by white men, and so it will remain for ever.”
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InJamaica there is a railway which carries passengers of the first and second class in carriages that would not necessarily disgrace even the London, Chatham, and Dover line in England. The upholstery of the carriages is of heavy stuffed leather; the fitments are of polished yellow wood; and the result infinitely more suitable for an Arctic clime than for merry sweltering Jamaica. There are, as I have stated, two classes; to these I must add the soda-water compartment, which is a sort of betwixt and between of both classes. A place where the men (sometimes the ladies also) foregather to sit on empty soda water boxes and consume mineral waters and eat fruit. This is the saloon of the railway—the drawing-room of travelling Jamaica. Here the guard sits always, and with him the coloured lady who sells the mineral water at a truly reasonable rate. The carriages are reserved for the uninitiated, or the respectable, of both classes. The soda-water room is always full of scandal talk; a half hour’s ride in this compartment of any train will teach any tourist the innerhistory of Jamaican society in a manner quite incapable of repetition or reproduction. The lady who sells the ginger beer is conversant with the character, the salary, the peculiarities and home life, of every person living in the island. She is the natural historian of the country. In three sentences she can destroy the reputation of a mansion; half an hour suffices for the moral destruction of a town. One day, even half a day, among the empty ginger-beer boxes kills every desire, no matter how ambitious one may have been, to enter the ranks of the upper ten of the society in the Queen of the Antilles. The reason for all this is the heat and discomfort of railway travelling in the tropics. The dust and sweat of travel jaundice a man’s outlook on life; and in the railway train a white face looks dull yellow. So it is with the cleanest reputation. And fortunately the soda-water gossip is forgotten even before one’s hair has ceased to smell of cinders.
The journey inland over the steel rails should only be undertaken at great provocation. It is not a desirable thing to do, although it is the quickest, the cheapest, and the most usual way of covering long distances. For perhaps eight hours you sitvis-à-viswith a person whom you have not met before, and whom you wish never to meet again,—for eight hours or twenty minutes, just according to the distance you desire to travel. You pass the time of day with the stranger, read all the printed matter available, and then solemnly gaze through the grimy window, and heavy cloud of dust, at the fields and rivers and fair plantations
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rushing towards the place you have just left behind.
Jamaica is proud of its railway. The people of the country, remembering the difficulties of its building, and the frequent weaknesses of its finances, are glad the line is complete, and that it is possible to travel at good speed from one end of the island to another. In truth the history of the line from its beginning in 1845 to the present day is not lacking in interest. Parts of the track have been built by official and parts by private enterprise. The Government, I believe, started the building, and an American syndicate carried it forward. The American syndicate failed, and so the railway fell into the hands of the Government again, and there it has remained ever since. The carriages are miniature editions of the American saloons, and, in my opinion, are capable of vast improvement. Otherwise the stock is excellent, and the lines and curves and bridges everything that could be desired.
Starting from Kingston, you can travel over a hundred miles of looped, single-track line to Montego Bay, or over thirty miles to Ewarton or seventy miles to Port Antonio. These are the three routes; the track to either of the places named is, of course, strewed with wayside stations. No matter which way you travel you will pass through most marvellous country. You will rattle across iron bridges, spanning rushing streams or wide romantic rivers. You will skirt great lagoons, half overgrown with mangrove and other swamp-land trees. You will steam across great yellow-greenguinea-grass pastures, and then, by way of wonderful gradients, you will climb mountain chains and, from the dizzy height of your carriage window, look down at distant valleys half-screened by the green foliage of impenetrable forests. You will pass smoothly through delightfully cool forests, and wonder at the prodigality of nature when you cut through prairie land ablaze with the blooms of rare plants. You will in addition smell all the smells of the Indies, and you will be half-choked by the smoke and dust of the engine.
Natives will grin at you from the hedgerows, and labourers will cease work in the plantations to stare open-mouthed at the incomprehensible railway train. You will pass homesteads and sugar mills, fruit farms and stockyards. Large-hatted planters will ride along roads skirting the railway track, and they will play with their ponies and give exhibitions of their horsemanship for the sake of any lady passenger who may or may not be your companion. The black guard, or conductor, will come and examine your ticket at every other station; and at most stopping places a little crowd of negroes will stare at you through the carriage window.
The railway journey will enable you to see agricultural Jamaica. The plantations, great and small, skirt the railway track, and the traveller can note the varied beauties and interests of the fruits of the Indies. He will see full-grown banana clumps, heavy with fruit; and he will also see newly-planted banana striplings. The fields of pine-apples, which resemble fields of English bulrushes tinted dull red and gold,will charm him, and the pimento groves will remind him of English orchards. When the bamboo forests and the straggling palms come in view, he will remember with great contentment that he is in the tropics indeed. The birds and the butterflies are shy of the noise and mess of the locomotive, but still the traveller may see enough of the beauty of the fluttering insects to teach him something of the loveliness which is born beneath the shelter of tropical foliage. If he is fortunate enough to see a tiny humming bird sipping from the cup of a scented blossom, he will have seen that which will persuade him to sit in a flower-spangled hedgerow for hours in order that he may witness the picture again.
It is said, and I have put it on record, that Columbus crumpled a piece of paper in order to give his patron a correct impression of the appearance of the island. It is the crumpled, irregular, casual Jamaica that the railroad traveller sees. The valleys, the plateaus, the hills, the mountains, rivers and ravines, pass along the carriage window in bewildering succession; the views one sees are beautiful and mystical beyond comprehension—like the tints in a stormy sunset.
One thing at least the intelligent traveller will learn on his railway journey; he will realise that the beauty of the tropics can never be comprehended by the finite mind of man. He will thank God for the beauty he has seen, and if he is a wise man, there he will allow the matter to rest. To attempt to catalogue the beauties of Jamaica is a task too infinitely foolish: as well essay an analysis of a moonbeam.
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ALLIGATOR SHOOTING IN A WEST INDIAN SWAMP
Jamaicais a land of perpetual peace and sunshine. The hills and valleys of this, the most beautiful of all the fair islands of the West Indies, are always clothed in a great profusion of the richest greenery; its soil gives birth to almost every luscious fruit the world contains; the sweet scents of its myriad blossoms give to the land an atmosphere of the wildest loveliness; yet it is a country almost entirely barren of native animal life. Birds there are in great numbers, and insects too; fish of many kinds swarm in the rivers and mountain torrents, but the languorous climate of the Queen of the Antilles gives shelter to no four-footed game of the plains or forest lands. The place has no claim on the hearts of sportsmen.
It is stated that there are a few wild pigs still roaming at large in one or two of the forests in the north of the island, and certainly there are a few alligators to be found among the swamps at the mouth of the Rio Cobra River in Kingston Bay. But the prospect of finding a boar or two, and the certainty ofhaving a shot at a savage alligator, mark the beginning and the end of the possibilities of the island so far as exciting sport is concerned.
Of the two, the alligator gives more trouble and excitement to the sportsman bent on slaughter; for though the West India alligator never grows to the size of the African crocodile, he is easily large enough to do an ordinary man to death.
Alligator shooting is one of the most unhealthy pleasures it is possible to imagine. The beasts choose such unhealthy resting-places that the sportsman has to run the risk of many fevers for every reptile he may chance to kill.
A sluggish stream, or silent, deep lagoon, heavy with weeds and creeping plants, alive with the buzz of insects, and half hidden by a deadly steam of malarious vapour, is the sort of place dear to the hearts of alligators. There it is that they are to be found, floating, log-like, with half-closed eyes, or lying on the marshy bank with wide-open jaws, basking in the yellow glare of a fearful sun. Wise men are content to leave the beasts alone; but once we essayed the task of hunting them.
We started from Kingston Harbour in an open whaler, and ran before a spanking breeze towards the murky creeks which run beyond the half-deserted Fort Augustine. It was Fort Augustine most of all that, in the days of old, gave to Jamaica its reputation as a country of death. In the time of our fathers’ fathers, the British regiments were sent from England to this same Augustine Fort, where they were destroyed in
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companies, even battalions, by the malarious exhalations of those swamps in which to-day we went to shoot the alligator. Seen from our little boat, Kingston, just missing the deep shadow of the great mountain range which overhangs the town, lay green, and gold, and white in the pale glare of the sun. Fronting Kingston, Port Royal, a tiny strip of sand, be-palmed and dotted with houses, lay symbolic of the Caribbean coral reef. In line with Port Royal, but towards the lagoon, Fort Augustine lay enshrouded in gloom, as though brooding over the tragedy of its own sad history. And beyond the Fort, a great half-circle of the giant harbour, we saw the swamp land—Hunts Bay and the mouth of the Rio Cobra—a flat stretch of sand, yellow deepening into mud colour as it left the sea, and then breaking into scrub, and low grass, and spikey bush. Among the grass and the bush, and even through gaps of the high tree-land beyond, one caught glimpses of dull water, silent and murky and very still.
We anchored the boat and waded ashore, the clean water reaching our arm-pits. In this manner we reached the fever-hole of Jamaica; the home of every insect pest the West Indies can produce, the place in which the Jamaican alligator still lives and moves and has its being. Not a pleasant spot either to linger in or look upon, just evil swamp-land, with the evil stench of damp vegetation and rotting wood. You step from the sand of the seashore into brittle stubble, through which the water surges as you pass. You squelch to the river-bank over rotting weed, ankle-deep in slime,half smothered by a cloud of gnats, and mosquitoes, and buzzing flies. It is the Jamaica Avernus—the white man’s grave.
The Rio Cobra River at its mouth is emptied by a dozen twisting streams, just as the trunk of a cotton tree is supported by many twisted roots. Sometimes these twisted streams join together, sometimes they flow apart; so if progress is to be made inland, much wading must be done. It is in these little streams that alligators love to lie, so you must walk warily, with your rifle ready. We waded many streams, and trudged ankle-deep through long stretches of oily slime; we stumbled over logs half hidden, and our stretched hands disturbed the nests of scores of creeping things. The black guide, a famous sportsman of the swamp land, grinned his joy at being really chief, the indisputable and indispensable head of a party of white men. He forgot to tincture his commands with respect, and though clad in nothing save a decayed merino undershirt, looked and played the man.
“De beast there,” pointing a joyful finger to a heap of filth, green and brown. Rifles were raised, and the explosions of three Winchesters reverberated round those sickening pools. The green mass surged heavily, and a streak of dark water showing in the centre of the thick slime marked the place where the alligator had dived. “Him gone; never see him more,” said our happy chieftain, and we trudged through more slime, waded across more streams, some deep as our waist-belts, others with water only ankle high. Once the youngestof us stealthily massacred a floating tree stump, mistaking a twisted root for an opened jaw, and then dropped to the rear under the glance of a contemptuous native.
“You want him log for rifle butt?” The youthful sportsman attempted no defence.
Again we fired, this time at a sleepy family of two—a father and a son. The son was hit, but the father had twisted and dived with the speed of a springing snake. We could not reach the wounded one, which, lashing his tail and snapping his jaws in the death agony, rolled into the river to die.
We paused to drink tepid water drawn from a scorched barrel, and talked and listened to stories of mighty bags; of beasts thirty feet long, shot after fearful battles, of mauled natives, and of all the dangers of the sport. Our thoughts and words were all of slaughter.
After the water—just enough to create a thirst—we trudged along, and forgot everything save the hunting. The sun blazed down and scorched us right through the thin stuff of our shirts. Blisters came on our hands and arms, and our skins tingled as though we had rolled in countless beds of nettles. But these things we only remembered afterwards; then we strained our eyes and ears, waded into streams, and pushed through rotten scrub in search of prey.
“We make much too plenty noise,” said our guide after a fruitless two hours’ search. “We must sit down and wait.”
So our party divided, and I went with the black man and squatted against the stump of a rotting tree overhanging the river and waited. Fortunately the hunter did not object to my pipe, and the smoke did something towards relieving me of the clouds of insect pests. Conversation was not permitted. My companion knelt motionless, his eyes straining riverwards; and I, inspired by his eagerness as well as by my own curiosity, watched also.
The spit of mud that separated us from the river was covered by a surface crust of grey-black sediment, hardened by the sun; from where we sat a double line of little pools filled with soft inky slime stretched to the water, and showed the direction of our coming. I examined the surface of mud bay, and noticed that ours was not the only spoor. Ten yards to my right I saw a place where very recently a heavy body had rested—a mark which might have been left if a tree trunk had been removed. I touched the black man on the shoulder and pointed to the spot. He grinned and nodded. Evidently the marks were familiar to him.
I placed my rifle across my knees and waited. The still water of the river showed a slight ripple here and there, and occasionally a splash would mark the place where a fish had risen to a fly. The glare and the strained attention tired my eyes, and I saw things through a slight mist. Once I saw the water dividing as something passed towards the shore, and I jerked my rifle to the shoulder. Then the moving strings of
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water turned and ceased. And my companion scowled. The noise of a distant rifle-shot came like the muffled noise of a pop-gun, and then a green-black snout lifted itself above the water in midstream a few yards to our right. Behind the snout a long black body appeared, only partly submerged, and I made out the head and tail of an alligator. Slowly it drifted towards the mud patch on which we were waiting. Presently a long snout and a mud-encrusted head reached out of the water and rested on the bank, and our gruesome enemy was within easy reach of our guns. Not fifteen yards divided us. His little eyelids flickered like those of a nervous lizard, and his sinister jaws were open just wide enough to show the long line of white teeth. I brought my rifle round very slowly, and fired from where I sat. The alligator twisted with the swiftness of a cat and dived. I stood still and waited. The troubled water showed that he had been hit; I could mark the direction of his flight by the fury of his struggle. Once he lifted himself half out of the stream, and I fired again. The result was a mad plunge towards the shore on which we stood. I started back, but ere the beast found land, the water swirled again, and I knew that he had turned aside. I followed him with my eyes, and in midstream saw him churning the water with his tail and then plunging round in circles; then he dived to the right, and I saw him no more.
“Him gone now,” said my guide. “You should have waited until him come right up to the shore.”
I relit my pipe, and we retraced our steps.
In the fever swamps of Jamaica there are a few alligators, but I fear that most of the sport of the place is to be found in the imagination of the sportsmen and the tales of the native guides. Danger there is, but that is the danger of the sun and the risk of fever; and in daring these things there is little sport.
So we tramped back again and regained the sweet-scented water of the bay. We waded to the boat, and the sensation of the clear sea-water washing clean our sun-dried, muddy bodies gave us a few moments of ecstasy. But we could not linger for fear of the dread cousin of the alligator, the West Indian shark. We swam aboard, and hoisted our sail, and sailed homewards. The boat was bare of awning, and the strong, pitiless sun completed its burning work, so well begun in the swamp lands. The charred barrel had exhausted its cargo of tepid water, and there was no food. But the few hours’ sail was not unpleasant. We were enveloped in the sweet breezes of God’s fair ocean, and soothed by the fresh sea-scent. There were no miasmic exhalations, and no clouds of winged insects. The mosquito was gone, and our scorched eyes might now be closed or held half opened towards the cool breeze.
Image unavailable: A FRUIT-SELLER, BARBADOESA FRUIT-SELLER, BARBADOES
Thosesanguine friends of the West Indies who think that the abolition of the beet bounties necessarily means the industrial salvation of Jamaica, forget that the beet bounties did not destroy West Indian sugar industry, but only accentuated and accelerated a decay which had already commenced long before their institution. Even before a beneficent home Government allowed those European countries concerned in the cultivation of the beet to create bounties which have helped to send the British West Indies staggering to ignominious bankruptcy, the dry rot had already attacked West Indian sugar.
At the time of Jamaica’s prosperity, foreign sugars were admitted into English markets only on payment of a duty of something like £60 per ton; even the produce of other British sugar colonies was taxed to enrich the West Indian planter. The Jamaican planters felt aggrieved when, in 1836, the East and West Indian sugar duties were assimilated; but when England imported foreign sugar on the same terms asthat produced in British colonies the planters were filled with despair. On top of this grievance came the decree of emancipation, and the total disorganisation of the West Indian labour market.
For centuries Jamaica had waxed rich. In addition to a magnificent soil, the planters had enjoyed “free” labour, ready markets, protection, and high prices. Within a period of twenty or thirty years, with one exception, all these advantages were swept away. The wonderful qualities of the soil alone remained to encourage the despondent planter to work on in hope of better times. From being the “protected” he became the outcast; in place of being the absolute master of his workmen, he found himself entangled in endless labour disputes; and his markets, once so wonderfully capacious, dwindled almost to vanishing point.
Previous to the year 1836, the period of the beginning of the “equalisation” of the sugar duties, the industrial condition of the island was excellent, and the Jamaican planter was apparently entirely prosperous. I say “apparently” purposely, for if we examine Gardner’sHistory of Jamaica, published in 1873, we find that the actual position of the proprietors of many of the Jamaican sugar estates in the latter part of the eighteenth century was less satisfactory than one would have supposed. In the year 1791 there were 769 sugar plantations in the island; of these, “457 were in the hands of the men, or their descendants, who possessed them in 1772. Since that date 177 have been sold in payment of debts, 22 remain in the hands
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of the mortgagees or receivers, and 55 have been abandoned, though 47 have been newly established during the same period. The returns of the Provost-Marshal from 1772 to 1791 showed great pecuniary embarrassment among vast numbers in the colony. Astounding as it may appear, 80,021 judgments, amounting to £22,563,786, had, during that period, been lodged at his office....” So much for the condition of the planters during the period of Jamaica’s greatest prosperity.
The reason for the gradual decay of Jamaica may be read between the lines of this report. In spite of prolific soil and wide markets, in spite of inexpensive labour and the inflated prices obtained for his produce, the Jamaican planter was constantly in difficulties—I had almost written because of these things, and it will easily be seen that the very things which made the country rich helped to impoverish the character of the man. Life was too easy for the planter; he encountered few difficulties; his business conducted itself. If a crop happened to be poor, prices were increased to make up the difference, and the planter did not suffer. His plantation produced sugar which was sold at a fabulous figure; his slaves did the work his overseers ordered them to do; for the rest, he was the most generous, the most hospitable, and the most indolent of mortals. This was the type of man called upon to face a situation of extraordinary difficulty. No wonder he allowed himself and his country to slip down to despair and desolation.
Since the beginning of its distress, Jamaica has lost between 500 and 600 of its sugar plantations. The industry, once so rich and prosperous, has become crippled and starved, and for many years Jamaica lay half derelict, half forgotten.
The Jamaicans made no serious effort to stem the tide of their ebbing fortunes. They talked a lot, petitioned a lot, and grumbled a lot, and then they failed. There is no doubt that a little energy and enterprise would have materially altered the commercial history of the island. To-day, even though the majority of the sugar estates of Jamaica waste over 30 per cent of sugar by their antiquated system of crushing, the planters still manage to make both ends meet and keep a balance on the profit side.
Sugar bounties, Free Trade, labour troubles, antiquated machinery and 30 per cent loss notwithstanding, sugar planters still manage to eke out an existence. If the new methods of manufacture that some of the more enterprising of the planters are now beginning to try had been introduced fifty years ago, the history of the island would not be one of failure and famine.
The problem representing the most serious difficulties to the Jamaican planter has been the labour question. When we remember that the island has a population of something like 700,000 coloured people and only about 15,000 whites—the whites representing capital and the coloured people the labour—we are at the beginning of the difficulty. First, how shall the island be governed? When all the blacks were slaves and the whites theirmasters, things worked smoothly enough; crimes were committed, hundreds of thousands of people were abased and downtrodden, but still the island of Jamaica was free from labour troubles. Then came the Liberation Act. The slaves were released, and the majority of them threw away their industry with their bondage, and sat in the sunshine thanking their gods all day long. No doubt the primary cause of the unsatisfactory condition of the labour market which prevailed for many years was the action of the planters themselves. Enraged at their loss of authority, for the most part they turned the full measure of their anger on the wretched freed slaves.
When the Act came into force, meetings were held by planters at which rates of wages were fixed,—needless to remark, on the lowest possible scale,—and masters who had been humane, even kind, to their slaves became overbearing and impossible employers. Enormous rents were charged for labourers’ cottages, heavy fines were levied, and frequently the poor negro found that he had no wage to draw for his week’s work. Naturally enough, the natives became impatient of labouring under such conditions, and many of them refused to work. The planters then resorted to forcible ejectment. The discontented worker was flung into the open road, destitute and helpless, to get his living when and how he could. This was the beginning of the alienation of the labourers from the estates. The negro found it easy to live on the produce of a patch of land, and it became increasingly difficult to persuade him towork on a plantation. Slavery was impossible—it could not last; and inconvenient as the abolition has been to Jamaica, its chief evils have happily already vanished. There is to-day little difficulty in obtaining plenty of labourers for the plantations, and if he is treated fairly the free negro makes at least as good a servant as he did in the days of slavery.
Because of the injudicious action of the planters at the time of the slave liberation, much money has been spent by Jamaica in assisting coolie immigration. It is difficult for one who has recently visited the West Indies to imagine that it was ever necessary for Jamaica to import coolie labourers. The negro to-day is willing to work for any man who will treat him decently and pay him fairly and regularly. But necessary it was a few years back, and in Jamaica are to be found to-day many East Indians who thrive in the island, and do much useful labour in a characteristically unostentatious manner.
The commercial salvation of Jamaica rests entirely with the people of Jamaica. The abolition of sugar bounties, even the institution by this country of a system of preferential tariffs founded on protection, would mean much less to Jamaica than would the landing of 2000 British colonists.
Jamaica wants men—men of the best type that Britain can send. The infusion of new blood in her industries would effect a far greater improvement in the industrial condition of the island than would the introduction of the most enlightened system of fiscal
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policy ever imagined. If there were more intelligent, unprejudiced Englishmen to employ and direct the natives, labour difficulties would quickly cease to exist. The great need of Jamaica is men—strong, young, intelligent, enterprising Britishers. There is room for them in their thousands.
One of the first impressions one gathers on landing in the colony is that, though British in name, the place is really quite American as it is British. This is a condition of affairs to be expected, since the United States take about four-fifths of the total exports of the island, and supply more than 50 per cent of her imports. It may be worth repeating that the well-worn story of the agitation in Jamaica favouring the annexation of the island by the United States is now entirely played out. Even if the majority of the people of Jamaica demanded annexation, England would not permit it, and even if England favoured the scheme, the United States would not countenance it. The wily Yankee is content to find in Jamaica a profitable market; it pays better to leave her politics and domestic difficulties severely alone. The American has already grasped the fact that there are dollars in Jamaica. The fruit trade, now probably the most important in the island, has been built up almost entirely by American enterprise and American capital. It is only within the last year or two that English capital has been invested to any great extent in this direction, though the trade has been of growingimportance to the island for many years. The establishment of the Imperial line of steamers between Avonmouth and Jamaica was the first effort made by this country to participate in an industry which America had already found full of profit.
The Imperial direct steamer put Jamaica in direct mail communication with Bristol. All the boats belonging to the line are specially arranged for carrying bananas, and already the fruit trade of the island has been enormously improved by the influence of the English market. For the establishment of the line, Jamaica owes a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Alfred Jones.
The Jamaican fruit-grower is in the happy position of having a market for his produce far larger than he can comfortably supply. America and England are eager to purchase more bananas than the island now produces, and the demand, already in excess of the supply, is still on the increase. There are many dollars in bananas, and in this trade alone there is room for more than 1000 Englishmen. The cultivation of the banana is simplicity itself; the fruit can be gathered every month in the year; the profits are large; the life of the planter is healthy, pleasant, and free from loneliness.
Jamaica will become increasingly prosperous by the intelligent development of her fruit, coffee and tobacco trades. Bananas, pine-apples, oranges, grapes, mangoes and cocoanuts, properly cultivated and exported, will help to bring the island to an extremely favourable condition.The sugar trade will not be neglected now that the beet bounties have been removed, and the island’s sugar and rum exports are bound to increase by leaps and bounds. The exportation of pimento, logwood, cocoa and tobacco is already steadily on the increase, and when we remember that at the end of last year—after such a long period of depression and deficits—the finances of the island showed a small balance on the right side, the commercial future of Jamaica assumes an extremely roseate hue. The fruit trade is still in its infancy, and the cultivation of tobacco is in an even younger stage of development; these two trades will grow in value by millions. The cultivation of cocoa is already an important and lucrative Jamaican industry, and there are still large areas of land admirably adapted for extension in this direction; and new industries will arise.
Already there is a small company in process of formation for the manufacture of starch from the cassava. Cassava starch is superior to that made from corn or potatoes, and the ordinary varieties of Jamaica cassava yield more starch to the acre than either corn or potatoes. It is claimed, with every appearance of justice, that starch can be manufactured from cassava at less than one quarter of the cost of the starch made from other materials. Here is a new and extremely promising industry.
Jamaica offers unequalled prospects to intelligent Britons who have sufficient capital to enable them to embark in one or other of her industries.
Image unavailable: A TERRACE GARDEN ON THE HILLS, JAMAICAA TERRACE GARDEN ON THE HILLS, JAMAICA
BecauseJamaica is famous for its woods and plants and scented blossoms, one may be pardoned for roughly cataloguing a few of the three or four thousand different species of flowering plants, ferns and forest trees. Little is known of the lichens, mosses and fungi of the island. The casual explorer will notice the beauty of the mosses, and he will observe many varieties of the lichen, and there, unless he happens to be an expert botanist, his interest in these smaller plants will end. But with the flowering plants, the shrubs, and the gorgeous trees it is different. No matter whether one is a botanist or a heathen, frequently the wild luxuriance of a lovely bush forces us to ask its name. And the name frequently cements one’s first affection for a wild plant’s loveliness. TheHibiscus, the blue and whitelignum vitaeflower, the yellowKill Buckra weed, the evening primrose and the passion flower, the wild convolvulus, the iris and the orchid. All these are fascinating names representing fascinating plants and blossoms. In Jamaica, one drives through wild jungleland,and mistakes it for a cultivated garden. Green bushes are spangled with flowers of flaming scarlet; yellow bands of dense scrub are patched with fragrant blooms of the most exquisite blue. The wild passion flower, gawdy yet dignified, is to be seen everywhere, and in many places, especially on the lower slopes of the blue mountains, we find a rich profusion of the mysterious orchids—Arpophyllum spicatum,Phaius grandifolius,Dendrophylax funalis, and a hundred other species. The forty varieties of the convolvulus deserve a chapter to themselves. What could be more beautiful than a field smothered by these graceful flowers, showing every tint from scarlet to rose colour, violet, crimson, blue and yellow? Then there are the poppies, the Mexican thistle and John Crow bush; the buttercups, the wild pansies, sweet-william, the scented furze, the acres of white clover and the dandelion. We could go through a list of thousands. I think there is no bush, certainly there is no acre of rural Jamaica, that does not contain its floral decorations, its dozen brilliant blossoms.
Of the trees, the first that thrusts itself upon the notice of the English traveller is the cocoanut palm, which Mark Twain or some one else once described as an inverted feather dusting-brush. Besides the cocoa palm there are a dozen other species—the groo groo, silver thatch, mountain cabbage, oil palm, and the rest. In the Savannahs, near the coast, we notice the French cotton-tree, and among the malarial swamps the long-rooted mangrove—a tree which is a certain indication of the unhealthiness of its neighbourhood. Inland, we
Image unavailable: HUT ON A PLANTATION, JAMAICAHUT ON A PLANTATION, JAMAICA
find thelignum vitae, hod-wood, calabash, locust, raintree, the West Indian birch, coccus-wood, the sidis-tree (called woman’s tongue), the Spanish elm, mahogany, cedar, and the crooked divi-divi. These are mostly timber trees. Among the fruits we find the mango, plum, nazeberry, star-apple, the banana and the orange. These are but names, and though I have not mentioned one tenth of the whole, I will spare you the rest. Jamaica is the land of wood and water, of rich forests and richer plains. You drive along a road which forms a natural arbour miles long, decked at every yard with clusters of flowers, and scented with all the sweetest perfumes of the universe. Then you break into flat plain land, and the fields on either side are a blaze of coloured ground plants; you find the mountain slope and drive along a narrow, precipitous road, and look down from an eerie height on to a deep valley clothed in greenery of the most luxuriant beauty. Fruit-trees are everywhere, oranges green or gold, bananas green or yellow, brown nazeberries, golden grape-fruit, custard apples, mangoes and plums. Then you pass a plantation of pine-apples, and come to the coffee district. It is the richest country in the world, par excellence—the flower and fruit gardens of the West. If you burn a patch of jungle and leave a charred acre of black earth, in two months you will return and find no trace of your destruction. Mother Earth quickly clothes her nakedness in this land of sunshine. If you plant a banana sprig and leave it alone for eight or nine months, you then find a seven or eight foot tree, and a heavybunch of fruit ready for gathering. In West Africa they say that if you plant a rotten stick, a barren tree will grow to the height of twenty feet in twenty months, but if you plant a grain of corn nothing will appear. They might with justice say in Jamaica, that the grain of corn would produce a loaf, and the barren stick a lotus tree.
Not only does this wealth of vegetation give to the island a most picturesque appearance, but also it constitutes a natural wealth which hitherto has been hardly sampled. The fruit-trees are beginning to be exploited, and already they support fleets of swift steamers between Port Antonio and America, and between Kingston and Bristol, and bring large profits to intelligent planters. But the exploitation of the timber forest has scarcely begun.
The mahogany is exported in a small way, and valuable logwood finds its way into the holds of ocean-going steamers. Satin-wood is exported in a very small way, and there are large fortunes awaiting men who will develop this trade. Bamboo is valuable, and one occasionally sees a single negro despoiling a mighty clump of giant trees with a light hand chopper, but the trade in Jamaican timber is in its infancy.
In the Kingston bazaars you can purchase walking-sticks for a shilling which in England would cost six times that sum, and the Kingston merchants make a profit on the transaction of more than five hundred per cent. Mr. Frank Bullen, whom I met in one of theKingston hotels, told me that in the days when he was a seaman on a sailing ship, before he took to the trade of writing books, he once carried a cargo of walking-sticks from Kingston to England. I could not find any trace of the industry in the island to-day. But it should be a most profitable one. The Jamaican ebony or caccu-wood is one of the most beautiful woods one can imagine—a dark-coloured, close-grained heavy stick, which, common enough in Jamaica, is rare and valuable in England. And so it is with many other species.
I have not mentioned the Jamaican ferns, yet the island contains almost every species known to the collector, from the tiny, dainty maidenhair to the giant tree-fern forty feet high. There is a deep ravine in the island so crowded with the refreshing greenness of a thousand varieties of the species of the cryptogram that the natives have named it Fern Gully. Here, and in the shadow of the mountain peaks, the fern collector can find every variety of his favoured plant. He can spend months in gathering and cataloguing, but he can never exhaust the resources of the island.