DRIVES AND COUNTRY LIFE AT MANDEVILLE—NEGROES AND FUNERAL CUSTOMS
It was on Boxing Day 1902, that I returned to Jamaica, the _Trent_
arriving at Kingston at 7 A.M. enabled me to catch the morning train for
Mandeville.
I breakfasted with friends at Myrtle Bank Hotel, was delighted to find a
number of letters awaiting me at the post-office. I then betook myself at
ten o’clock that morning to the railway station. These are, naturally,
somewhat primitive; the trains, too, are not noted for their punctuality,
they are known to break down occasionally, which is rather trying to the
temper. I speak from sad experience. Still one remembers, if things are
not up to date, that one is not in the most flourishing of the British
Colonies.
In view of the late depression of trade, it strikes me, as it does
nearly everybody I have met who considers the subject at all, that a
large proportion of the island revenue goes to support a very expensive
gubernatorial machinery which constitutes the government of this country.
When sugar was £70 instead of £5 a ton, when 100 lbs. of coffee fetched
80s. instead of 20s., when the wealth of the West Indian planter was
proverbial, the salaries of the officials were not disproportionate.
The prosperity of those days will never probably revisit this island, but
the salaries are likely to remain at their present high figure. One hears
much animadversion and grumbling on this subject from the better-class
inhabitants of Jamaica. The Colonial Secretary, say they, might well have
another thousand per annum in addition to his present stipend, if that
would ensure so efficient and capable a man for that post as the present
occupant; but it is apparent to many that £5000 a year, with a fine house
to live in, wines and spirits free of duty, does not guarantee to the
island either acceptable or fitting representatives of royalty.
At the same time, the stability and justice of the present government is
fully appreciated by the inhabitants as well as by those Americans who
have large financial interests, such as the Fruit Companies in Jamaica.
Justice is administered to the black very differently by the present
legislature than formerly. In the country districts the overseers who
had to send to the absentee landlords annual sums from their estates
invariably mulcted the negro of his pay to make up the deficit.
The information which Whittaker’s Almanac supplies, under the head of
Jamaica, will give to the reader an idea of how large and how expensive
is the staff of officials who are employed in the government. The
Government Handbook of Jamaica will give details as to the expenditure of
the yearly revenue.
[Illustration: ROAD NEAR KINGSTON.
_To face p. 109._]
In 1900-1901 this amounted to £760,387. The expenditure of the same year
was £763,902. I have heard it said that if you cut down the official
incomes you won’t get the right men, and that the Jamaicans would not
like to be considered, or to rate themselves, a third-rate colony. If
that be so, all one can say is, that they must pay for their pride. A
government official, who worked hard for something under £400 a year,
told me he thought that Englishmen would not live year after year in such
an enervating climate unless the pay was good. He had been six years out
here; his work was hard and unremitting, and he had not even left the
island for a holiday in all that time. When he came to Jamaica he was an
athlete, now he could scarcely run a quarter of a mile. Thus there are
two sides to every question!
Soon after leaving Kingston we passed through swamps covered with
mangroves, then through a thousand acres of level land quite recently
irrigated and brought into cultivation. The climate here is hot, and
specially suited to the growth of bananas. Since the days of sugar
failure this has been a remunerative industry. Eleven years ago, about
thirty bunches of bananas were imported into England. In 1901, 3,000,000
came from the Canaries and 450,000 from Jamaica. The revenue of the
island for the first five months of the financial year 1902, exceeded
by £40,000 the receipts for the same period in the year previous, and,
owing to the extension of the fruit trade, the financial outlook is more
hopeful than it has been for years. Canada, so the local papers say, is
looking forward to consignments of Jamaican bananas.
The fact of Elder, Dempster & Co. having combined with the United Fruit
Company means a continual market open to the banana trade, both in
Britain and in the United States. The latter is an American enterprise,
having steamers running between the West Indies, Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Sir Alfred Jones, who is the moving
spirit of the Direct Line, is most generous in his dealings with this
poverty-stricken island. He announced, some months ago, that the Line he
represents (Elder, Dempster) would take, free of freight from Bristol,
English stallions, bulls, and rams, for breeding purposes, the object
being to improve the breeds of cattle, there being splendid grazing land
in some parts of the island.
At a dinner given by the West Indian Club in London, 1st October 1902,
Sir Alfred Jones, in referring to the position of the West Indies, said
he thought there “had been too much complaining, the people should
do what they could themselves to develop the island. There were many
possibilities before them. The tourist traffic might be developed, and
there were splendid opportunities for breeding horses and cattle. Mineral
also afforded a possible field for expansion. The great thing for West
Indians was not to sit down and think they had a grievance, but to get up
and put their shoulders to the wheel.” He also referred to the prosperous
olden time when activity reigned in the cotton industry, and trusted to
see a revival of it some day. He believed in the future of the island,
deploring the ignorance still reigning in England regarding the West
Indies.
One is somewhat amused here at the newspaper revelations. Great
confidence in Mr Chamberlain is felt over the difficulties connected
with the Sugar Convention, etc. One paragraph states that a good deal
of literature is being circulated just now concerning the injustice of
depriving the working man at home of his cheap sugar. “The best answer,”
says the paper to this, “is that the Trades Unions are dead against
bounties, and ask that bounty-fed sugar should be denied access to this
country altogether.”
Rumours of discontent are also to be heard in this land to the effect
that the chief trade goes to America and not to Britain. Local economists
talk of the mother-country giving preferential tariffs to her colonies
and dependencies, having learnt their lesson from no less a person
than Mr Seddon, of New Zealand fame. They should have heard Judge
Shaw’s paper, read last September in the Section of Economics, at the
British Association, Belfast, in which he strove to show how the law of
commercial development meant the natural and inevitable selection of
the nearest market, whatever code of tariffs prevailed, and instanced
Canada’s trade with the United States as an example of this. If the
mother-country were to give to her colonies preferential trading
facilities, it would disorganise all existing fiscal agreements with
every Continental power, he said, and the price she would pay would be
financial and commercial suicide. Since we are a nation of shopkeepers
and traders, our teeming millions of workers must be fed as cheaply as
possible.
After passing through the level lands of St Catherine’s parish, the line
gradually ascends, until at Williamsfield, the station for Mandeville,
it is 1000 feet above sea-level. The scenery becomes broken and wild
as you get among the hills; dry river beds in the rainy season are
roaring torrents. There are in the island upwards of 114 streams finding
their way to the sea, besides numerous tributaries, some streams being
navigable. When I glanced around at the different stations we stopped at,
I never saw a white face. Porus is about 10 miles from Mandeville, and a
quaint, busy little town. J. A. Froude says no explanation is given in
any handbook of this singular name, but he found that a Porus figured
amongst the companions of Columbus! From this place the train crawled,
squeaked, and groaned up to Williamsfield.
A drive of 5 miles brought me to The Grove, Mandeville, a very
comfortable private hotel, where I spent some happy weeks, and from
whence I took pen in hand to relate my experiences. The drive from
the station was lovely; the ground here is red and the foliage very
green, which makes the country most picturesque. It is one continual
ascent through roads bordered and sheltered with waving bamboos, palms,
orange-trees, cedars, and mangoes. Sometimes one caught sight of
magnificent silk-cotton trees standing in lonely grandeur in the midst
of a pasture. At last, turning a sharp corner, the horses clattered up
a steep, stony hill, rushed me across what looked like a village green,
my driver pulling them up with a jerk in front of Mrs England’s verandah.
Intending visitors to Mandeville cannot do better than trust themselves
to the above lady’s catering; the food is excellent, the house most
healthily situated, and everything is done with a view to the guest’s
comfort. Mrs England has not been long in the island, but she has managed
to learn how to deal with the black domestics very successfully.
This district of the Manchester Hills in which Mandeville lies, is the
heart of the orange industry; unfortunately, the beautiful tangerine
which abounds, as well as the other kinds, will not keep long enough
for packing. These grow wild in the hills, and negro children sell them
at the station, six for a _quatty_, _i.e._ 1½ d. I saw large wooden
buildings at Williamsfield owned by fruit shippers, where fruit bought
locally is sorted as to size, wrapped in paper, and packed in barrels or
boxes. Some enterprising person might well start a marmalade factory with
the thousands of rejected ones thrown away.
The climate of this little township is eminently cool and recuperative.
In August, residents come from Kingston to escape the excessive heat.
After Christmas, Americans visit the island to avoid the rigorous cold of
New York and the northern states. As I write, there is no representative
of the British flag but myself amongst the guests.
Across the green, or parade, as it is called, stands a fine County Court
House. Opposite, at a distance of two hundred yards or so, the parish
church is to be seen. Irregularly placed around this central patch of
grass are several stores where most things are to be purchased, also a
chemist’s shop, and a room where a dentist and a lawyer seem to hold
appointments with their clients on alternate days. The place boasts
of an hotel and a club, but its chief attraction to me is its large
market, which on Saturdays is quite interesting. I have visited it with
Mrs England and her cook on two occasions, and am beginning to know the
look of the numerous island vegetables before they are cooked. Small
cultivators come many miles to this market, and the blacks strike one as
being more prosperous and more respectful than those at Kingston. The
women carrying their stock-in-trade in large baskets on their heads,
with a fine hat generally perched on the top of that, step like “young
panthers,” and often walk 5 miles an hour. The men or boys bring the
goods to sell in baskets on donkeys, and sleep in the market shelters,
I have often seen pigs sitting quite comfortably in these baskets, and
looking as if they enjoyed their ride. Besides vegetables, chickens and
native tobacco, twined into rope at 3d. a yard, are sold here. Dark,
mysterious-looking pats of sugar, made in the negro’s pot, also find
customers. I hear the blacks make a drink of the latter. There is a shed
for those who sell meat, but the rest of them just squat on the pavement,
chattering together like magpies.
The majority of the parishioners are small growers, renting five, ten,
or twenty acres at £1 an acre. Oranges nearly always pay the rent. Where
science and method prevail in knowing how best to fertilise the trees,
the grower gets a better crop and larger fruit; he can pack his own
oranges and get 50 per cent. more for them.
Mandeville strikes one as thoroughly English; there are lovely walks and
drives in the neighbourhood. Several families have properties not far
from the town; in fact there seems quite a pleasant society for miles
round. There is a tennis-club, to which people drive in their buggies.
One of the ladies makes tea, and although these people have lost much
of late years over the decline of the sugar trade, they are certainly
hospitable, courteous, and refined. This is a charming spot to recruit in
after the heat of the lowlands. One can walk in the moonlight for miles
without the smallest fear of anything unpleasant. I have done so with
Mrs England’s daughters, and nothing is more enjoyable. One can see the
foliage against the sky so much clearer, and the shapes of the different
trees thus become impressed upon one’s memory.
After nine o’clock, except just in Mandeville itself, not a soul is to
be seen in the lanes. I fancy the negro goes to roost betimes like the
feathered tribe. Perhaps this is because of his hereditary and ingrained
fear of the supernatural. He calls all ghostly visitants “duppies,” and
tells you he sees them sitting on the trees where your own visual organ
fails to inform you of any living thing, or otherwise.
One night three or four of us had emerged from deep shadow into bright
moonlight: our dresses were white. Wheels were heard behind us, and
immediately after, a one-horsed conveyance with two people sitting in it
appeared. As it approached out of the gloom, the figure nearest us sat
huddled up holding a huge umbrella close over its head. My companions
recognised the chaise as belonging to an old black proprietor. We thought
he had taken us for “duppies,” and returned to the hotel much amused;
but we were informed that the umbrella was not to protect its owner from
ghostly visitants, but to keep him from getting moon-struck.
One day I took a drive to a property some miles from here, where the
family owned a good old Norman name, well known in some parts of England.
They had been settled in their estate for one hundred and fifty years,
had seen both good times and bad. The house in which I sat was really
a beautiful two-storied building with verandahs both downstairs and
upstairs; the drawing-room was of noble proportions, and Mrs G—— told
me that the wood employed in the construction had all been cleared from
their own estate, and consisted principally of mahogany, bullet-wood,
and cedar. They were several miles from a town or a market, and nearly
everything that came to table was produced on the property.
The negro shanties about here are not very large for the accommodation
of the numerous members of a family. The Keswick delegate, Mr Meyer,
drew attention to the narrow limits of these. It seems the blacks will
not build additional buildings or better accommodation since they would
be liable to increased taxation. Each little home is mostly provided
with yams, a few banana-trees, and several orange-trees planted anywhere
without any method.
I have only so far summoned up courage to enter one of them belonging
to a coloured woman who takes in washing. She informed me she had four
children, “two young gentlemen and two young ladies.” It is amusing
to hear the negresses say to each other, “Yes, ma’am,” and a negro in
the wordiest altercation never fails to address his opponent as “Sah!”
The greatest contempt which a woman feels for another is expressed in
the words, “You black niggah!” They only call each other black niggahs
when further words fail to express their disgust. A negro proverb says,
“Choose wife Saturday on Sunday.” This means if she works well on
Saturday—and that is the great market day here—she can be asked to marry
on Sunday, their leisure day and time for “walking out.”
I was curious as to the burial-place of the black population, for the
few churchyards I had seen with their scattered graves seemed out of all
proportion to the population of the island. One day when I was out for a
drive I learnt from a very loquacious driver that his elderly relatives
were buried in the backyard of the little home he called his own, “under
de shadder, missus, of a big cedar-tree, dar dey lie buried.”
This I found to be true; that owing to hot climate and the distance at
which some of these dwellings lie, it is deemed expedient to allow them
to bury their dead in their own little properties. Of course they have to
duly notify the fact. I could not help thinking that this custom would
facilitate any nefarious proceedings on the part of those who might be
benefited by the death of an aged relative, but I was assured on good
authority that very rarely has anything of the kind come to light.
The peasantry have a great horror of prison, and have a wholesome terror
of the officers of the law. At the same time, they are very litigious,
and amongst themselves are much given to argument.
For a person desirous of spending a quiet winter in a warm climate, where
they would be able to get out-of-doors every day for a certainty, I can
think of no better place than Mandeville for them to come to. The drives
are really exquisite; I have been most of them, which are generally
about 6 miles away, returning by different routes. Thus, Fairview is the
home of the widow of a Moravian minister who lived fifty years here; the
house is built on a commanding situation on a spur of the Manchester
Hills, from which one sees the sea at Alligator Pond on the south coast
of the island, 17 miles away, whilst stretching far off on the right, an
extended vista of the Santa Cruz Mountains is to be obtained. Here on the
horizon, 30 miles away, a large palm-tree is pointed out, and Malvern
House, 30 miles from Mandeville, is known far and wide as a comfortable
hotel. The salubrious air of the Santa Cruz Mountains is much recommended
for lung complaints by the medical faculty. Another very popular drive
is to a spot called Bel Retiro; this is in exactly the opposite direction
and is also on the summit of a hill, where a house is in course of
erection on the ruins of an old sugar mill. A grand view over Old Harbour
in the distance, and the white houses of Porus below one’s feet, dotted
amongst the green trees with the Manchester Hills in the background,
constitutes another very lovely scene.
One day we had a picnic to an untenanted house, from which there was a
beautiful view. The verandah from the upper storey was converted into a
dining-room for the occasion, and nothing more enjoyable can be imagined
than taking one’s lunch with such an exquisite picture to gaze upon.
Everywhere, so far as the eye could see, was undulating ground covered
with tropical foliage, lofty cotton-trees and stately palms waved over
coffee plantations, and negro huts here and there dotted the landscape.
The house where we lunched, with 100 acres, was to be sold; the owner
wanted £1200 for it.
Life in this quiet Jamaican country town passes pleasantly by,
notwithstanding its distance from the attractions of the “madding crowd.”
One day the shouts of joyous school-children announced the fact of a
Sunday School treat. Hundreds of children were entertained in the Rectory
fields, in much the same way as similar gatherings in England. Swings
and cricket seemed most popular amongst the small blacks, whilst the
little girls’ conscious grandeur in well-starched clean frocks was quite
apparent.
Another time the unusual ringing of the church bell awakened our
curiosity; we learnt that it was for service before the Parochial
Board of Manchester held its customary meetings. Mandeville also has
its tragedies; whilst I was there we were all shocked to hear that the
proprietor of the local hotel had shot himself, owing to embarrassed
circumstances. This establishment is very badly situated. The management
for some time past has been unsatisfactory, and few visitors have cared
to put up there, preferring the boarding-houses in the place. Perhaps it
is only in tropical countries that one realises what walking shadows we
are—this poor fellow had eaten his breakfast a little after seven o’clock
that morning—shot himself at eight, was taken to his grave at a little
after five the same afternoon. It happened on a Saturday—Mandeville
market day; crowds of people coming in from the country stayed over to
witness the funeral. All that afternoon the grave, which was being dug,
was surrounded by onlookers who, squatting round, watched the progress
with a curious expression of fascinated and morbid interest on their
dusky faces, reminding us forcibly of the way their ghoulish scavengers,
the John Crows, large black native buzzards, sit upon the house-tops
surveying from that elevated vantage-spot the ground below, where haply
some spicy breakfast awaits them in the garbage line.
Nothing appeals so much to the “duppy”-ridden imagination of the black as
everything connected with our transit from this world to the next. The
correct thing is to be _laid out_ in a suit of clean white ducks and
white gloves; whilst the women, if they have it, are similarly arrayed
in clean white attire, also with the needful gloves. I asked the reason
of this almost universal practice amongst them, and was told it was to
“rise up tidy on de reburrection mornin,” and also that they should
appear fitly dressed to “sit down at de marriage supper of de Lamb.”
They are quite familiar with this phraseology, which is current in the
chapels, which are numerous all over Jamaica; and as their mental powers
of assimilation and digestion scarcely touch the spiritual plane, the
crudity and grotesqueness of their ideas of another life, mixed up as
they are with their hereditary Obeah-worship and dread of “duppies,”
produces curious results. They mostly celebrate a death with a wake,
especially in the country parts. A clergyman’s wife living in the Blue
Mountains told me of a man who was ill, and expected quite confidently to
die. His wife bought provisions for the burial wake. The chickens, with
their legs tied together, were hung upon the bough of a tree, plenty of
yams were in readiness, and the savings of weeks past were represented
in the shape of a bottle of rum; the white duck clothes waved in the
breeze in the backyard, having been duly washed. Strange to say, the man
recovered. “It was in de middle of de night, missus,” he explained to the
lady. “I got hungry, and I felt under de bed wher dey put a box of sweet
biscuits; I eat one, and den I ate up de rest and got well.”
This was a box of Huntley & Palmer’s sweet biscuits, carefully stowed
away for the wake, which had resuscitated the invalid. “No man can dead
before his time,” they say in the country parts, and evidently this man’s
time had not yet come.
It was with feelings of regret that I turned my back on this pretty
English-looking spot, although I looked forward with interest to staying
a short time on a pen with friends not very far away from Mandeville.