WHERE THE TWAIN MEET
By Mary Gaunt
Author of “Alone in West Africa,”
“A Woman in China,”
“A Broken Journey,”
“The Uncounted Cost,” etc.
London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, W. 1
1922
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TO
MY FRIEND
MRS LANG
I gratefully dedicate this book.
My Dear Elsie,
I wonder if you remember as vividly as I do the very drastic criticism
of a book of mine that first introduced us to each other. My publisher
showed it to me with some hesitation because it was so scathing, but it
went right to the point. Most of the book was scrapped there and then,
and my literary education was begun under your care. It was you indeed
who taught me that I needed educating in my art. That is twelve years
ago, and I have never since let a book go into the world till it has
received your approval. I am afraid I have sometimes tried you severely,
but it has always been my ambition to be your prize pupil. I owe more
than I can say to my sympathetic teacher.
It is a small thing to offer my latest book to you, but I hope you will
accept it with my love and warmest thanks.
Affectionately yours,
MARY GAUNT.
Sainte Agnes, France. 8th September 1921.
PREFACE
Spain first set foot in the Western World, and if the discovery brought
great wealth it brought also much individual suffering and bitter
hardship. In Jamaica, she found no people living in barbaric splendour,
no stores of gold and silver and precious stones, only a lovely land,
fruitful and fertile, valuable only to her because she did not dare let
another nation settle so close to the rich possessions of which she
was mistress. But the other nations of Europe were naturally anxious
to share in the rich spoil of the West, and if Britain took Jamaica
and held her, it was only I think because she could not take Cuba and
Hispaniola. The Spaniards fought for every inch of the island before
they lost it, and now for remembrance of them there remains but a few
place names and legends of the treasure they left stored there.
If colonisation was difficult for the Spaniards it was still more
difficult for the British, coming from the cold North. No one was eager
to brave the dangers of the tropics, and like the king in the parable,
desiring to fill his tables for the feast, Government sought in the
highways and byways for a population, and they imported white bondsmen
and women, virtually a slave population, the first shadow that was to
impede the progress of the land. Labour was branded. The men worked--and
died--in the fields, and the women became the mistresses of the young
planters, so that marriage went out of fashion, and the free women were
neglected and forlorn.
And when they ceased to send the white bondsmen, they sought a
substitute in the black man from Africa.
The man who comes out to a new land is apt always to see the land he
leaves behind through a softening veil that enhances its desirability.
He sees only its good points. And naturally this emphasises the
drawbacks of the new land. He speaks disparagingly of it, he writes home
disparagingly, dwelling on his many hardships. Jamaica was no exception
to the almost universal rule. Most men went there to make their
fortunes, with every intention of returning to spend them. Only Hans
Sloane, a wise and far-seeing man, saw the glory of the land, and left
behind him a record of its wealth and its beauty and fertility. Lady
Nugent, writing more than one hundred years later, was much more swayed
by public opinion, and saw what she was told she would see, a deadly
climate where men died like flies, though even she does arrive at the
poignant fact that the women who lived with less licence, bore this
climate far better than their mates.
From her pen, too, we first have some pity for the unfortunates the
British imported from the Guinea Coast to work in their plantations.
Terrible are the stories told of the sufferings of this alien people
from the moment they fell into the hands of the slavers till they stood
in the slave markets at Kingston or Montego Bay, told calmly, told
coldly, told simply as facts by men who saw only the difficulties of
the trade, and of dealing with men and women who “wilfully” drowned
themselves to escape their fate. On arrival, the stronger like cattle
were sold in the open market, but only here and there do we get awful
glimpses of the fate that befell the weaker.
Life was no bed of roses for the planter and his white assistants,
working to provide funds to be spent in the old country, but it was
simply a hell at first for the savages they worked.
On the plantations no white woman was welcome. As the masters had taken
the white bondswoman for their temporary companions, so now they took
the black while they were young and comely. At first it was savages
and white masters, and the little coloured children who were but their
fathers' chattels.
So slowly the people progressed, we hardly realise there was any
progress, till we see the men and women of dark complexion clothed and
ardent church members, even though they are slaves, and we remember how
short a while before they started here as naked savages. Two generations
were worlds apart. Cruel rebellion there was, crueller retaliation, but
still white and black advanced to better things in the land that was
becoming the loved home.
The years rolled on. First the trade was forbidden, then the slave was
freed, then the black man was given equal rights with the white,
and now---- Now there are still difficulties, difficulties born of
ignorance, of poverty, but so there are in the upward march of every
people under the sun. Sometimes they make great strides onwards,
sometimes they seem to pause and fall back, but really always the march
is upwards, though we can only see the progress by looking back.
An enchanting tale, a tale of rare adventure and romance is the past of
Jamaica, and before her lies a glorious future, for the Empire is slowly
awakening to the value of the tropical possessions that are within the
borders, and this fruitful island of wood and mountain and water, set in
a summer sea, must surely play a great part in the future development of
one of the great nations of the earth.
WHERE THE TWAIN MEET
CHAPTER I--BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY
When first I took passage to Jamaica it seemed as if purest chance
were sending me there. But I begin to believe there is no such thing
as chance, for when I remembered that Jamaica was an old slave colony I
realised that this last coincidence was but the culmination of a curious
series that have guided my steps through long years.
No one in my youth that I ever heard of wanted to go to West Africa, and
yet from the time I was twelve years old I had an intense desire to go
there, without the faintest hope of its being gratified.
As a young girl I came home to England and stayed with friends in
Liverpool, shipowners, whose people had been African traders for
hundreds of years, and African traders one hundred and twenty years ago
certainly meant slave traders, for the slave trade was a “very genteel
trade.” I pored over the models of the factories they had on the West
Coast of Africa, and the pictures of their ships in the Oil Rivers, and
voiced my great desire to go there, a desire that amused them very much,
for they who could have gone any day would not have dreamt of taking the
trouble. They had estates in Jamaica too, had had them for many years,
and I found on a shelf an old slave account book from that island which
meant so little to them that they jotted down on the blank pages the
number of eggs their hens laid. How I wished I could see the place
whither those slaves from Africa had gone, but Africa and Jamaica were
far away in those days.
I went back to Australia, married and settled down, and then being
widowed came to England again to make my way in the literary world,
and the first spare money I had, it was £225, I remember, I realised my
childish dreams and took passage for the West Coast of Africa. I was so
interested, found it so well worth while, that I went again to the land
to which no man wanted to go, the land that was known as the “White
Man's Grave.” Why I should have taken so keen an interest in the land
where the slave trade was born, why I should later have gone to a slave
colony, I cannot imagine, but I did, and the result has been a curious
light on past and present, a linking up of those old days with the
future that lies ahead of Jamaica.
Perhaps in a former life I too was a slave, or perhaps I was one of
those careless folk who lived in one of the death-traps they called
Castles on the Guinea Coast, and something in me made me wish to see
them again, and having seen them, something certainly stronger than
myself made me finish with Jamaica, the lovely island where Britain
though she does not seem to know it, is experimenting in negro rule.
Yes, surely, some haunting memory of a past life has shaped my career.
And this is how it came about. I was ill and had to go to a warm
climate, and as the War had disturbed shipping I could get passage
nowhere except to Jamaica. And safe on board the _Camito_, steaming down
the Welsh Coast with the tang of the salt sea breeze in my nostrils, it
flashed across me that here at last when I least expected it had come my
great chance. Into my hands had been put the opportunity, if I could but
use it, to complete a half-finished task. I was indeed going to find
out the end of the story that had thrilled my childish years, for this
island set in a tropical sea is indissolubly bound up with the Castles
on the Guinea Coast. From the swamps at the mouths of the Niger and the
Gambia, from the surf-beaten Gold and Ivory and Slave Coasts had come
the lumbering little square ships that took to the New World the dark
people of the Old, hundreds and thousands of them, and in Jamaica there
had grown up under the British Crown a people apart. Call it coincidence
if you like, but to me it will always seem that a Greater Power guided
my unwilling feet into the ways that brought me in touch with the things
I most wanted to know.
And sailing west on that comfortable ship, where ice, beef-tea, fruit,
cakes, or any other desired luxury came at a word to the steward, where
a question to the captain or one of the officers discovered for me in
exactly what part of the world we were, it was impossible not to think
of the first man who had dared those seas. The Genoese navigator had
come sailing west under the Spanish flag, and he had come slowly,
slowly, where we steamed fast. They were only just beginning to believe
the world was round in those days, and doubtless many of the sailors
shipped for the voyage were ignorant men, not knowing whither they
were bound. And their leader felt his way dubiously where we were quite
certain of our going. On and on they went into the unknown. How unknown
we can hardly conceive nowadays, any more than we can conceive of the
dangers they faced. Think of it. There were fish which could swallow a
ship, crew and all, there was the “Flying Dutchman,” portent of death,
there were mermaids and syrens to lure them to destruction, there were
enchantments of all sorts, in addition to the ordinary perils of the
sea, and then of course--supposing the world wasn't round! Suppose they
arrived at the place where the water gathered itself together and poured
in one mighty waterfall right off the earth into space and nothingness!
I am sure as the days went on the crews must have discussed the matter,
have talked among themselves of the terrible dangers they were facing,
have gone every night and morning to pray before the Virgin and Child on
the poop, and at last they came to declare how worse than foolish was
Columbus not to turn back when day after day showed still only a blue
waste of waters.
And if they had gone over that tremendous waterfall I am sure there
would have been those among the crew who would have declared at the
supreme moment that they knew it would be so, they had always known it
would be so. Had Pedro not met a pig on the way to the ship, had the
black cat not died before they reached Madeira, and surely the Admiral
should have turned back when the wind shifted so that he saw the new
moon for the first time through the glass of the cabin port!
But at last--what a long last it must have seemed to those first
voyagers who had dared to leave the coasts--they saw sea-weed and land
birds, and at last, at last--not the terrible waterfall they had feared
but land, land, land such as they had left behind them. What a moment it
must have been for the great mariner! We passed that land, that island.
There must linger round it still, I think, some of the wild delight that
filled the hearts of the explorers, for still men point it out, “The
first land Columbus saw!”
We came into sight of Jamaica in the late afternoon and sailed along the
south coast as the shadows were falling. A well-wooded country we saw,
as its first discoverer must have seen more than four hundred years
before, a land of steep mountains and deep valleys, with here and there
patches of vivid green that, those who knew, told us were the sugar
plantations that were the gold mines of Jamaica in the sugar boom. And
the mists rose up from the valleys, and the shadows grew deeper and the
day died in a glory of red and gold, a sight so common that no one
takes note of it; and the night with a sky of velvet, embroidered
with diamonds, crystal clear, came sweeping down upon us--a cloak of
darkness--as we steamed into Kingston Harbour.
Columbus did not land in Jamaica on his first voyage, but he undoubtedly
saw it, as we saw it, many and many a time. The memory of him was with
me still as we landed. What to me were the comforts of the Myrtle Bank
Hotel set right in Kingston, or of the Constant Spring out at the foot
of the mountains? No, that is ungrateful. As an old traveller, no one
can appreciate better than I the comforts of a good hotel. But as I
dreamt on a comfortable steamer, so I dreamt more vividly of the past
on the verandah of the Myrtle Bank, looking down the palm avenue to
the sea. The night air was heavy with spicy scents, and the fireflies
wheeled and danced, living lights in the dark shadows under the
greenery, all the voluptuousness of the tropics was here in this land
of romance which Columbus found for Spain, and that later was the first
great tropical possession of Britain. But Jamaica has been an unlucky
land, and I doubt whether Britain has yet realised its value. It might
be called the land of lost opportunities, so often have those who
governed it let its good things pass by. I doubt whether Spain herself
got any great good from this new possession; certainly Columbus found
small peace here. With “his people dismayed and downhearted, almost all
his anchors lost and his vessels bored as full of holes as a honeycomb,
driven by opposing winds and currents, he put into Puerto Bueno, in
the parish of Saint Ann's. But not finding sufficient food or water”
(probably water, as it is now known as Dry Harbour), “he sailed east
again and put into a cove since known as Don Cristopher's Cove.” His
ships were mere wrecks, those brave “castled” ships that had sailed from
Spain with such high hopes, and it was very certain that whatever might
happen to them, back to Spain they could not go. It was a terrible
situation, an awful strait in which those brave mariners found
themselves over four hundred years ago.
“You must see the parish of St Ann,” said a Jamaican lady to me; “it is
all green grass and white Indian cattle, and dark green pimento trees.”
In those days there was probably not much green grass, natural grasses
grow roughly and in tufts, and there were no Indian cattle; but the
dark green pimento trees were there, their fragrance and that of many
a tropical flower and tree must have been brought by the land breeze
to the sailors in the ships. For Columbus sank his unseaworthy,
worm-riddled ships in the harbour, sank them till the water came right
up to their decks, a sign of the desperateness of his position, for no
leader if he had any hope of redeeming the situation would have sunk the
only means he had of returning to his own land.
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In a Cove like this Columbus beached his ship a bow-shot of the shore.
I don't know how far that is, but certainly too far to swim easily in a
tropical sea, they were sunk side by side and were placed in the “best
possible state of defence,” which probably means that every cooling
current of air, the pleasant pungent sea breeze in the morning, and the
aromatic land breeze in the evening were shut out. It must have had its
effect upon the crews this lack of fresh air, though probably they were
not greatly concerned about it. They very likely considered as men did
long after their time that the land breeze was dangerous and that
the sea breeze gave them ague, and I expect they looked out over the
shimmering sea and hated it with a bitter hatred and blamed pitilessly
the man who brought them there.
And yet in all the world I have not seen a more lovely sea than the sea
that rings Jamaica. Sometimes the wind blows it into ripples, sometimes
a stronger wind beats it into white foam, the clouds gather, it grows
dark, inky black, and the rain comes beating down, rain that must
have swirled across the decks and threatened to swamp out the little
ships--their prison. But oftenest, I know, that sea was still, lovely,
with the shallows like great jewelled opals of tenderest translucent
green in a setting of sparkling sapphires and pearls, and entrancing
little coves fringed by mangroves where the coconut palms stand up tall
and stately as near the water as they can get, and all this against a
background of mountains wooded to their very peaks, makes a scene never
to be forgotten. There were no coconut palms in the time of Columbus.
They came from the mainland, a right royal gift of the Spaniards to
the island they made their own, but there were the sea grapes, great
straggling bushes with big round leaves and bunches of purple berries
so like grapes that it is not till you taste them you find by their
slightly acrid savour and the big stone in the middle that they are not.
Still, to men after a voyage at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
in the days of our King Henry VII., those sea grapes must have been a
godsend, they and the luscious naseberries, which are sweet and sickly,
but good to counteract scurvy.
I can't like the naseberry. The tree it grows on is large and handsome,
but the fruit itself, which is about the size of a russet apple, cannot
be eaten ripe from the tree because it is full of a whitish astringent
juice, but must be kept like the medlar till it is well on its way to
rottenness and then it may be eaten with a spoon. Probably Columbus's
men ate hundreds of them, grumbling that they had come out to find gold
and silver, and their leader had brought them to a watery prison where
they had to subsist on fish which they grew to loathe, cassava bread and
naseberries, occasionally traded by the Indians, sea grapes gathered
by themselves--poor substitutes for the wheaten bread and peaches and
grapes of their own land.
Day after day, day after day, they looked out on that sea where there
was never a sail. They were apparently cut off from all hopes of home,
and their leader lay in his cabin crippled with gout. And then the
despised food began to give out.
In his despair Columbus sent out the first exploring expedition into
Jamaica. Diego Mendez, one of the best and bravest of his officers,
and three men, started to walk through Trelawny, St James, and Hanover,
visiting the villages and interviewing the native chiefs and making
treaties with them by which the forlorn company were to receive regular
supplies of food in exchange for fish hooks, knives, beads, combs, and
such trifles as all the world over have taken the fancy of primitive
man.
I have been through these parishes--in a motor car. There are coconut
walks there now, the tall and graceful palms standing out against the
sky, sugar plantations, patches of vivid green, pimento groves with
trees like great myrtles clothed in glossy dark green, and rows of
broad-leaved bananas and plantains, and the air is fragrant with the
scent of orange and lemon blossom and hundreds of other growing things.
On the hill tops are the Great Houses of the pen keepers and planters
set in gardens, with the overseers' and book-keepers' houses lower down,
and as near the road as they can get, the shacks of the negro helpers
and independent cultivators. Strangely enough, in a little island that
has been settled by Europeans for over four hundred years, the roads
that wander along the entrancing sea shore and by the mountain side
often look into gullies, at the bottom of which it seems as if we might
find the villages where Diego Mendez made treaties. I should hardly have
been surprised if in one of the little lonely coves we had come across
the sunken ships of Columbus fastened close together for safety and
with little houses thatched over in bow and stern. There are wild places
still in this island which, after all, is only 4207 square miles--of
hillside--not much larger than a good sized station in Australia, and
gullies waiting for man to come and turn to good account their wealth.
Here is room, and more than room, for the dwellers in the great cities
who have never seen a glorious sunset and know not the scent of a
pimento grove.
That meant for Columbus a weary time of waiting among dissatisfied
men, for what adventurer, who had come out seeking gold and silver and
precious stones, would be content to lie sweltering--rotting, I expect
they called it--even in the most beautiful cove in the world. Presently
the story went round that Columbus had been banished, his prestige was
gone, and two brothers named Porras rose as leaders of the mutineers.
Even the life of the veteran was in danger. As I write this on my
verandah, looking out over the blue Caribbean, with a little pauperised
tingting bird sitting on the rail calling aloud that I have always
provided his breakfast and that even little slim black birds with bright
yellow eyes can be led astray by too much ease and comfort, I seem to
realise with what bitterness the iron entered into the soul of the
old man. There was no actual danger, they had enough to eat, and could
sleep, sheltered and in peace, and sooner or later he thought help would
come. Patience, he preached, patience. But the mutineers would have
their way. They built or stole ten canoes and went out along the coast,
ravaging and pillaging. The first of the pirates who ravaged the coasts
of Jamaica and their victims, were not the white people but the gentle
brown folk whom Columbus had designed to make peacefully their slaves.
“They wandered from village to village,” says his chronicler, “a
dissolute and lawless gang, supporting themselves by fair means or foul,
according as they met with kindness or hostility, and passing like a
pestilence through the land.”
I can almost understand it and forgive. Almost anything was better than
sitting still watching the sun climb over the mountain in the morning
and sink into the sea in the evening, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the
relief that was so long in coming.
For Mendez having got to Hispaniola had then to make his way to Spain,
and it was not till the 28th June 1504 that relief ships came sailing in
and Columbus was able to leave Jamaica. He died in 1506, and by way of
recompense, I suppose, in 1508 his son Diego was appointed Governor of
the Indies, and in 1509 went out to San Domingo, taking with him his
wife, who was a cousin of King Ferdinand.
In _Jamaica under the Spaniards_, a translation by Frank Cundall and
Joseph Pieterez of documents found in the archives of Seville in Spain,
the curious may read the slow story of the Spanish settling of Jamaica
and its gradual evacuation. They did not come in with a rush, for there
was no fabulous wealth of gold and silver here. Again and again the
Spanish King urges the Governors to seek for gold, but though doubtless,
they sought diligently, for the finding would have been the making of
them, they found none, and we cannot but feel that the Spanish colonists
were poor and of but little account. If you read Hans Sloane on the
remains he found round about the old city of Seville, your sense of
romance is satisfied, but the cold facts taken from the archives of
Seville in Spain speak of a little handful of poor people struggling
with an exuberant nature. Here, as I write, there comes to me the smell
of very poor tobacco, only fragrant in the open air, and looking up I
see a negro woman in leisurely fashion digging up the weeds among the
grass of what will, some day I hope, be a lawn under the coconut palms.
How leisurely is that fashion I can hardly describe, save by mentioning
she only gets 3s. 6d. a week, boards and lodges herself and works
accordingly. She has bare feet, a nondescript, drab-coloured garment
that calls itself a dress, and a ragged hat made out of a banana trash
and bound with a string of bright red. She is of African descent, but
not unlike her probably were the Indians who worked in the fields for
those first Jamaican colonists. Yes, she is content, fairly content I
should say, almost too content, or she would strive a little to better
herself.
I should like to have seen the beginnings of the Spanish occupation of
Jamaica. How they slowly set up their _hatos_ round the island, choosing
out the fertile river bottoms and fencing in their lands lightly, so
lightly that soon the lonely parts of the island were overrun with wild
cattle and pigs descended from those that escaped. They planted coconut
palms and brought over oranges and lemons and limes from their native
land which took root and flourished, so that Hans Sloane, writing thirty
years after the Spaniards had been driven out, talks of the orange and
lime walks, and nowadays if you want orange trees on your land you have
only to throw out one or two rotten oranges to have a crop of young
seedlings.
“The buildings of the Spaniards,” says Hans Sloane, “on this island were
usually one Story high, having a Porch, a Parlour, and at each end a
Room with small ones behind for Closets etc. They built with Posts put
deep into the ground, on the sides their Houses were plaistered up with
Clay on Reeds, or made of the split Truncs of Cabbage Trees nail'd close
to one another and covered with Tiles or Palmetto Thatch. The Lowness as
well as the fixing the Posts deep in the Earth was for fear their Houses
should be ruin'd by Earthquakes, as well as for Coolness.”
Immediately they settled, the Spaniards rounded-up the luckless Indians.
Their lot was hard enough, though possibly not as hard as that of those
driven to work in the mines, and as labourers on the _hatos_ they soon
began to fail their masters. Perhaps that is not to be wondered at.
Las Casas, the benevolent bishop, who is responsible for the first
introduction of negro slaves into the New World says, “they hanged the
unfortunates by thirteens in honour of the thirteen apostles. I have
beheld them throw the Indian infants to their dogs; I have seen five
caciques burnt alive; I have heard the Spaniards borrow the limb of
an human being to feed their dogs and next day return a quarter to the
lender.”
It seems a gruesome enough story, and where the mercy came in from Las
Casas' point of view in substituting negroes for the Indians I do not
know, especially as they say the negroes were infinitely inferior to
the Indians, and as long as the Spaniards could get the latter they
preferred them.
But that the Spaniards destroyed all the Indians there is no doubt. They
were a mild and indolent brown people, very like those now to be seen in
British Guiana, but historians differ as to their numbers: one man says
that “in Jamaica and the adjacent islands within less than twenty years
the Spaniards destroyed more than 1,200,000,” but later researches have
brought the figure in Jamaica down to about 60,000, a much more likely
number, and after all quite enough to destroy in twenty years.
They lived, these Spanish conquerors, on the island for over one hundred
and fifty years, a poor little company, or so I gather, but rich in the
fruits of the earth. And the people at home took a fatherly interest in
them. If an emigrant left his wife at home, he had to have her written
consent to his going and give security that he would return for her
within three years. And this security was evidently very necessary, for
among the archives at Seville there is a note touching a lady of Ciudad
Rodrigo complaining to the Queen in 1538 that her husband had deserted
her twenty-five years before to go to the Indies and had married another
lady in Jamaica, where he was settled. But though the Queen ordered that
the matter should be looked into and justice done, there is no end to
the story.
Though we talk about the Spanish towns in Jamaica, they were really
very small. In July 1534 there were but eighty citizens in the town of
Seville, and of these soon after only twenty remained, the others having
died of “diseases and pestilences”! And we are told that in twenty years
they had not reared ten infants, a pitiful return. In the first record
we get of Spanish Town, it had only one hundred inhabitants. In 1597 a
Governor named Fernando Melgarejo de Cordova came out for six years. He
brought with him by permission four servants, jewels to the value of 200
ducats (roughly worth £40), a black slave, four swords, four daggers,
and four of each kind of other arms, and his salary was 300,000
maravedis, which sounds a great deal, but as a maravedi was equal to
half a farthing he only had £156 a year, surely a small sum even for
those times when money was worth so much more, and Jamaica, too, as
his advisers were never tired of impressing on the King of Spain, was
a valuable colony, and if it fell into the hands of the King's enemies
none of the other colonies would be safe.
When Melgarejo arrived, he found the Englishman Sir Anthony Shirley had
sacked and held to ransom the Villa de la Vega, the city of the plains,
the capital, guided thereto by a native Indian, and proud as we are of
our old-time mariners, still the times were rough and merciless, their
ways matched the times, and we may pity the people who waked up that hot
August morning in 1597 to find that their hereditary enemies the English
were upon them. Sir Anthony Shirley claimed that while he was in
Jamaica he was “absolute master of the whole,” and he seems to have
made arrangements for his return with the comfortable conviction that
he could certainly provision his ships with beef and cassava, to say
nothing of the cooling fruits which by this time were plentiful and must
have been of inestimable value to these wanderers upon the seas.
Sir Anthony Shirley was only one of many. For these corsairs who soon
came to Jamaica regularly were drawn from all the nations of Europe and
“they rob and they trade,” wrote the worried Governor.
And when they didn't trade and they didn't rob they helped themselves
not only to wood and water but to beef and pork, that was running wild
it is true, but naturally the Spaniards considered it theirs, and then
sometimes, when they had raided a little too often, the tables were
turned and they left their bones there.
Don Fernando goes at length into his prowess in going out in a boat to
defend a frigate--a frigate was a very small ship in those days--that
two English launches had boarded and he says he retook that frigate and
made them retire. More, he sent Captain Sebastian Gonzalez--there is
a swagger in his name--with troops by land to Port Negrillo, there “to
wait till the Captain of the English corsair should go to obtain water
and capture him; and they lay in wait for him and killed those who
landed and brought back their ears, broke the jars to pieces and burnt
the boat.”
And so the story of Jamaica goes on in the Seville archives, a tale of
a small people with stocks of horses and cattle and pigs, a tale of
struggles to build churches, and to hold the island, because though no
gold or silver had been found, it was yet too central to allow any other
nation to settle there.
But it rose in value, for the next Governor, Alonzo de Miranda, had
his salary increased to close on £400 a year. He was much worried by a
Portuguese corsair named Mota, who “with two launches and a tender
was going along the whole coast sacking and plundering the ranches and
seizing the inhabitants and doing many other injuries, to remedy which
I was obliged to assemble a fleet by sea, and go myself by land with
soldiers to defeat the design of the enemies and they went away from the
coast. With all that, I have had information that in the remote cattle
hunting places they land, and with some of the cow catchers who have
run away from Espanola, whom they bring, they dress hides and supply
themselves with meat.” This, he goes on to say, “cannot be remedied
without much cost and expense.”
When first I went to Jamaica, a friend, Mr Clarence Lopez, with kindness
I can never forget, lent me a house in the northern part of the island
in the parish of Trelawny. It was the Great House on the Hyde, a pen
about eight miles as the crow flies from the sea. Jamaica is 144 miles
long at the longest portion and 49 miles broad at the broadest, it is
little more than half the size of Wales, but when I went to that house
set on the side of a mountain with a glorious view of hill and valley,
coco-palm and banana, I went to the very loneliest place I have ever
lived in in my life, and I have been in many lands. It is one of the
loveliest too. Behind are the mountains, clothed to their peaks in
woodland, bound together with all manner of creeping vines and the
mountains fling their arms round, so that they seem to guard the old
house from the winds of the south, and all in the ground grow pimento
and orange and lemon trees, handsome, broad-leaved bread-fruit and tall
naseberry trees, while the little garden on a plateau just behind the
house is a wilderness of roses, pink and white, and red and yellow,
and fragrant as the first roses that ever grew in a Persian garden. The
house is two storied, and though it has many annexes the main building
stands by itself. Much money has been expended upon it. Two great
flights of stone steps lead up to the porch at the front door, the floor
of which is tessellated as carefully as if it had been done in Italy;
all the handles of the doors are of heavy cut glass and so are the door
plates, while gilded beading decorates what they call in Jamaica the two
great halls, that is the dining room downstairs and its fellow upstairs.
The floors are of polished mahogany and so is the staircase; but no one
had lived in it for years and “Ichabod” was written over everything.
It had been built with a view to defence, there was no doubt about
it. On the porch a couple of men with guns could hold the front of the
house, in the hall there is a trap-door leading to the storey below,
cellars half underground, and in the walls in front are loop-holes
through which a man might easily shoot. The second storey overhangs the
first a little and there is not a corner but could easily be held by a
man with a gun. Yes, decidedly it was built for defence, such defence
as might be needed in the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the
nineteenth centuries. The first night we spent there, my companion, Eva
Parsons, and I alone with the weird black servants who had seen but
very few white people and whose ways were strange to us, we felt the
loneliness keenly. Eva was ill, and she was a Londoner born and bred.
There were rats racing about downstairs, there were bats making
curious sounds in the roof, and when a potoo bird gave vent to its long
drawn-out uncanny cry, Eva abandoned courage and came flying into my
room. And she was no coward. I comforted her to the best of my ability,
and we decided that until we got the house a little more habitable one
bedroom was quite big enough for the two of us.
But what must it have been like on those ranches in the old days when
the Spaniards were few and scattered, and the corsairs, English and
Portuguese and French and Dutch, and a nondescript crowd that were worse
than any, came cruising along the coasts and landed and attacked the
lonely houses? Think of the women who lay still shivering or crept to
each other's rooms and wondered was that the pirates or was it only a
rat, or possibly a bat in the roof? Or that weird sound?--Was it a potoo
bird killing rats? or was it an English sailor calling to his mate in
his harsh, unknown tongue?
“Except in the principal one, Caguya,” says Sedeno de Albornoz, speaking
of the corsairs, “they anchor in the ports without being disturbed by
anyone, and refit and careen their ships with perfect ease as if in
their country. I can certify that, while a prisoner of theirs, I have
heard with much concern many conversations with regard to colonising
this island and fortifying two ports, one on the north side and one on
the south. I always told them that there was a garrison of ten companies
of infantry stationed by the King our master, besides three in the town,
and two of mounted mulattoes and free negroes armed with hocking knives
and half moons, of whom they are much afraid. They did not like that
reply, and though doubtful contradicted me, saying they knew very well
what was in the island. It is very certain that it is more important to
them than any other, as it is better and more fertile and abundant than
all those they have settled in the Indies; nor is there another like it
in the Indies. Cuba and Espanola are indeed much larger, but Jamaica in
its entirety is more plentiful than these, for it has much horned
stock, and herds of tame swine, and wild ones in great numbers, from the
hunting of which every year is obtained a quantity of lard that serves
instead of oil for cooking.” So much lard that there are people who
declare that Montego Bay, from which much lard was exported, took its
name from a corruption of the Spanish word for lard.
“Likewise,” goes on Sedeno, “there is a large number of good horses,
donkeys, and mules, fisheries of turtle and dainty fish, and a very fine
climate from its healthy airs and waters.” Indeed he cannot say enough
for the island. He finishes, “there are now a little over 300 colonists,
mostly poor people. Nearly 450 men bear arms,” so I suppose he only
counts those as colonists who actually settled on the land, “including
the hunters and country folks, all of whom are labouring people, strong
and suitable for war by reason of their courageous spirits if indeed
lacking military discipline.”
And even as he wrote the enemy was within the gates, and the Governor
of Jamaica writes despairingly to the King of Spain. He says 53 ships
of war--there were really 38--came in sight of the island, and they bore
15,000 seamen and soldiers, while the invaders claim they conquered with
7000 soldiers and a sea regiment of 1000. But he probably is right when
he says “there are 8000 souls scattered about the mountains, children,
women, and slaves, without any hope of protection except from God, with
the enemy's knife every hour at their throats.” We hear so little about
the women and children in these wars of conquest and yet on them most
heavily of all must have pressed the difficulties and the dangers.
And the Governor died a prisoner of war, and finally this Governorship
which never seems to have been much sought after and was worth nothing,
now descended upon Christ oval Arnaldo Ysassi, who was not even a
trained soldier.
The rest of the pitiful story is one of flight, flight, flight, the
Spaniards always pressed northward, always begging and praying help from
Cuba, begging for bread and getting a stone.
For we say Jamaica was conquered in 1655, but it takes a long while for
a people who are holding a land by guerilla warfare to understand that
they are beaten, and it was evident that Ysassi was heartened by many a
skirmish that seemed to him a success. Towards the end of October 1656,
however, we find the King of Spain writing--“The English have a foothold
in Jamaica, obstructing the commerce of all the islands to windward with
the coasts of the mainland and of New Spain. The fleets and galleons run
great risk in passing by Jamaica.”
But even in March of the next year the Viceroy of Mexico writes to
Ysassi congratulating him on his appointment to the Government of
Jamaica, though he himself was beginning to realise what a hollow farce
it was.
However he made it unpleasant for the arrogant invaders. “I now send
a smart English sergeant,” he writes, “who will give your Excellency
lengthy news of the whole state of the island.” Poor English sergeant,
smart even in his captivity! I hope they did not make things very hard
for him in Mexico. That is the worst of history. The ultimate fate of
the pawns is never told, only in these state papers there is that one
entry that pictures for us the upright young figure with the keen blue
eyes and firm set mouth, firm even in misfortune. God rest his soul! and
God bless him for keeping up the honour of the English nation.
Even when reliefs did come, they brought little comfort to the harassed
Governor. In August 1657, two captains landed at Ochos Rios, not far
from where Columbus spent his weary year. They were supposed to help
the Spanish Governor but, as soldiers, they pointed out to him the
hopelessness of the situation. They said he could not succeed in the
interior, that “it will cost some trouble to capture any horses from the
enemy, and with infantry the risk is manifest.” I have seen the country
and I can't imagine how they thought to use horses.
But in spite of these Job's comforters, Ysassi kept writing bravely to
the Viceroy that he was harrying the enemy, that still they could not
get any good from the _hatos_ that they held.
“Those who come to get beef, die without anyone being left to carry the
news...” What a picture of bloodthirsty, merciless war it gives us!
When the great golden moon sends her light streaming through the coconut
walks, and the glorious night is heavy with the scent of the orange
flowers and the pimento groves, I cannot but think of those bloody days
in the seventeenth century when the English drove the Spaniards to the
remote corners of the island, and the Spaniards in their turn killed
remorselessly, so that none should go back to tell the tale.
Again he reports in the middle of September,
“I sallied out upon the road to encounter them with the few troops I
had, which were about 80 men” (Oh, for the might of Spain!) “because the
others are without shoes and not accustomed to the discomforts of the
open country.”
He descants on their ragged condition. “The few soldiers I have are
naked and barefoot and cannot stand the mosquitoes” (I sympathise with
them)--“Please help them.” He has not even paper to write his reports
and the whole history is punctuated with prayers for provisions, “for
soldiers will fight badly if they have nothing to eat and are badly
clothed. I assure your Excellency that some die reduced to sticks.”
It was evidently a prolonged series of skirmishes, with sometimes one
party conquering, sometimes the other, but the Spaniards seem to have
thought their re-establishment was merely a matter of time. Once they
gave their minds to the matter they must win, and meanwhile Ysassi was
doing useful work holding the place till the good time came. They could
not believe they had lost Jamaica.
“For the love of God,” he prays the Governor of Cuba, “I again ask you
to send me not linen, or a new shirt, because I do not make use of it”
(a gallant of Spain!) “but some old cloth.”
But brave Ysassi was nearing the end. In July 1658 he had reinforcements
from Mexico but is obliged to write sadly--“In fine, sir, on this 26th
June the enemy defeated me with the loss of 300 men although his loss,
so far as troops are concerned, was greater.” (The pitiful pride!) “If
they beat me,” he says in effect, “me starving, short of ammunition,
provisions, everything that might enable me to make good, at least I
have given them something better than they gave me.”
And so he sends the remnant of his army into the mountains to forage for
themselves and he speaks of the negro slaves, the first mention we have
of the Maroons that have figured so largely in Jamaican history.
“The negroes, Sir,” he writes to his King, “who have remained fugitives
from their masters who have abandoned the island and your Majesty's
arms, are more than two hundred, but many have died, and I inform your
Majesty so that you may command what is most suitable to your Royal
Service to whoever may come to govern the island. I have not done a
small thing in conserving them, keeping them under my obedience, when
they have been sought after with papers from the enemy. I have promised
their Chiefs freedom in your Majesty's name but have not given it
until I receive an order for it.” As if his gift of freedom could have
mattered very much to the negroes, who already had the freedom of the
hills and the hunted Spaniards much at their mercy.
And here again we are faced with contradictions that make me glad it is
not my business to write history.
“The Spaniards in their authority over their slaves,” writes the very
verbose Bridges, “appear to have been restrained by no law whatever; but
were sanctioned in every act which could extort their labour or secure
their obedience, so long however as the strength of the native Indians
withstood the execrable cruelties of their Castilian taskmasters, the
negroes were considered as very inferior workmen. Ovando complained of
their continued importation to Hispaniola, where he found them but idle
labourers, who took every opportunity of escaping into the woods, and
assisting the natives in their feeble attempts to throw off the Spanish
yoke. But as Indian life wasted, negro labour became necessary to supply
its place.”
And yet after that he goes on to say: “The British conquerors profited
but little by the negroes whom they found in the island of Jamaica, and
whose services were inseparable from the hard fate of their expatriated
owners.... Not five hundred slaves were employed in the cultivation
containing more than two million acres of the richest land. The
degeneracy of their masters had reduced all classes to nearly an
equality; so that in fact slavery hardly existed in Jamaica. Poverty had
for a series of years forbidden a further importation of Africans; the
negro race had rapidly decayed, and the few that were left were employed
to supply the wants of the indolent Spaniards in Saint Jago, by the
cultivation of their hatos in the country, and were preserved with the
greatest care and cherished as their own children.... The easy condition
of the slaves was manifested in their attachment to the fallen fortunes
of their masters; and they were confidently left by them to retain
possession of an island which they could no longer keep themselves.”
Surely a curious way to end a paragraph which began by declaiming
against the unbridled cruelty of the Spaniards. So they were not all
cruel, and even troubled Ysassi felt sure that the runaway negroes would
prefer the Spanish rule to the English. Perhaps there was something in
the devil they knew.
In Spain the enquiries into the state of the country appear to have been
endless. It was easier to hold the north side of the island, the fleeing
Spaniards wrote them, and one man tells how his hunting slaves were
enabled to help the unfortunates who had abandoned their _hatos_ on the
south and fled into the mountains in the north. I see those frightened
women and children, toiling along through the mountain passes, perhaps
taking it in turns to ride a mule or donkey, afraid of the hunting
slaves, savage men with little clothing and yet thankful for the meat
and wild fruits they gave them. And they said that in the first three
years they had killed nearly 2500 of the enemy's men, “while on our side
very few were lost. The enemy also suffered from a pestilence from which
more than 6000 died.” And so they buoyed themselves up with false hopes.
But whether they were killed or wounded or died of pestilence these
persistent English came on and pushed them farther and farther towards
the north. Even the mountains were no refuge, and we read how sick men,
women and children, Spanish colonists and slaves, “embarked in one of
his Majesty's smacks,” that made several trips by order of the Governor
of Cuba who charged (the wretch! to take such advantage of their
desperate straits) “for each person removed from Jamaica, even infants,
at the rate of ten and twelve pesos” (about thirty shillings). One
family even paid him more than three times that, so evidently there were
pickings attached to a Spanish Governorship.
And at last in February 1660 even brave Ysassi must have seen, and
seen thankfully, I should think, that the end was approaching. He was
defeated at Manegua (Moneague)--it is a pleasure resort up among the
hills nowadays, where the tourists come from England and America--and at
a Council of War the abandonment of the island was recommended.
Slowly, slowly, it had come to that, after all the hopes, all the
sacrifices, all the fighting, all the long, long struggle and suffering,
after nearly five years of it they must go. The English offered terms,
but the Spanish were proud and haggled, and though the English seem to
have been more than kindly and courteous the Spaniards were loth to give
in, and finally we find D'Oyley, the English Governor, writing “the time
for capitulating has expired.” The English would have sent them to Cuba,
sent them with all honour, but the Spanish Governor, who had never been
more than the shadow of a Governor of Jamaica, could not give in. He
complains that the English only undertook to send away the Spaniards
to Cuba, “as the greater part of the force were Indians, Negroes, and
Mulattos, without counting Slaves and Coloured domestic servants.... I
determined to die sooner than abandon or leave the meanest of those who
had been with me... the troops,” he goes on pathetically, he had advised
the Governor of Cuba, “were very dejected and weak from want of food and
eaten up with lice, for not even the Captains had more clothes than what
they wore.” So he decided to build two canoes and in fifteen days they
were finished and provided with sails, “from some sheets belonging to
the hunters who had escaped.” We can see those canoes building, the
careful watch that had to be kept lest the English should catch them,
the subdued triumph when they were all complete, the despair when it
was found they would only hold seventy-six people, and so, after all his
protestations, “I was obliged to leave in the island thirty-six under
the charge of one of the Captains who was assisting me.”
And they call the cove where he embarked Runaway Bay. It is a misnomer,
and a slur on the memory of a brave man. Surely no man ever turned his
back on the enemy more reluctantly.
They came in safety to Cuba and no mention is ever made of the
thirty-six left behind and the captain who stayed with them. I like to
think that Ysassi sent for them when he could.
The road that runs right round the island passes close to that little
bay now, and the waters of the blue Caribbean, calm and still, mirror
the blue skies above as they did on that long ago May day when the last
Spanish Governor of Jamaica embarked in a frail canoe and waving his
hand to those he left behind set sail for Cuba to the north. This was
the end of the high adventure. The very end! The Spanish rule was over,
the valued island that lay right in the fairway of commerce--it lies so
still--was lost for ever to the Spanish Crown and its last Governor was
going away a broken and discredited man.
And bitterly the Spaniards regretted the loss. Pedro de Bayoha,
“Governor of the City of Cuba,” wrote to the King setting forth its many
advantages, “any fleet however large can lie and careen its ships, and
any army can march, as food is very plentiful and the island abounding
in tame and wild cattle as well as swine, the quantity of which is so
great that every year twenty thousand head are killed for the lard and
fat and no use is made of the meat.” So we gather that Ysassi was not
very good at the commissariat. Perhaps the English harried him too much.
It has been said with some surprise that there are few relics of the
Spaniards in the island. For me, I marvel that there is after all these
years still so much. The oranges and the limes, the pomegranates and the
coconut palms are a monument to them, and still at Montego Bay is to be
seen the outlines of a dark stone fort that overlooked the beautiful
bay and guarded the town. And though Indian corn has been sown in the
courtyards for many a long day, some of the old cannon that belonged to
his Spanish Majesty still lie about. The climate of Jamaica is against
the preservation of relics of the past. “Tis a very strange thing,” says
Hans Sloane, accustomed to the slow growth of Northern climes, “to see
in how short a time a plantation formerly clear of trees and shrubs
will grow foul, which comes from two causes; the one not stubbing up the
roots, whence arise young sprouts, and the other the fertility of the
soil. The settlements and plantations of not only the Indians but even
the Spaniards being quite overgrown with tall trees, so that there is
no footsteps of such a thing left were it not for the old palisadoes,
buildings, orange walks, etc., which show plainly the formerly cleared
places where plantations have been.” And Sloane, who was physician to
the Duke of Albemarle, the Governor, writes of 1688, not thirty years
after the last Spanish Governor had fled.
Even now in Jamaica there are tales of buried treasure. In 1916 the
“Busha” or superintendent of an estate in Westmoreland was engaged in
pulling down a stout stone wall, evidently built in the old days by
slave labour. Each stone was well and truly laid, and tradition said the
wall was Spanish. One of the workmen said he had come to a hollow place.
And sure enough there was a large jar stuffed full of old Spanish gold
and silver coins, hidden I suppose when the Spanish owner of the _hato_
fled before the incoming of the English. Tradition says there are many
more, but within the last year or two the Crown, I hear, has insisted on
its right of treasure trove, so that it is exceedingly unlikely anyone
finding such will proclaim the fact aloud. The Spanish colonists it
is true were but a poor people, but even the poorest have need of some
little money, and in the days when banks were not much in vogue, cash
that would not go into the breeches pocket had to be kept somewhere.
Bridges tells how “a miniature figure of pure gold representing a
Spanish soldier with a matchlock in his hand was lately found in the
woods of the parish of Manchester. How it came there remains a mystery;
for those extensive forests bear no marks of having ever been opened, or
even penetrated until lately.” And Bridges wrote about 1828.
But gold is not to be lightly worn or washed away. I can imagine the
young Spanish wife who owned that little golden soldier and counted him
a very precious possession. And so, when she fled with her baby in her
arms and her little daughter clinging to her skirts, she carried it
with her. And then came the day when the English pressed them hard, and
perhaps her husband, perhaps the head slave, called to her to hurry,
they must get away, and the baby cried because she had so little to give
it, and the little maid whimpered when she fell among the leafy thorns
and rough stones on the steep mountain path, and her mother bending over
to comfort her dropped the little golden Spanish soldier that was her
treasure from her bundle and never knew of her loss till it was too late
to go back to look for it, and there he lay for close on one hundred
and sixty years till some Englishman found him and reported the find to
verbose, moralising, Bridges.
The author of _Old St James_ too tells a tale of Spanish treasure.
He says that sometime in the eighteenth century two Spaniards visited
“Success,” an estate in the north of the island not far from the
sea-shore. They showed a plan said to have been copied from one held by
a Spanish family locating the position of valuable documents buried upon
the estate. There were the remains of an old fort, and using the walls
as a starting-post the point fixed upon was the centre of the estate's
mill-house. Not unnaturally, the visitors wanted to take down the
mill-house, undertaking to rebuild it and leave everything as they
found it. But the owners objected, perhaps also not unnaturally, for the
mill-house was the most important part of the estate and an owner who
would live in any tumble-down makeshift himself would often spend large
sums upon his mill-house and machinery. Permission was refused, though
tradition was with the Spaniards. For all I know those papers may be
there still. The mill was one of the last to use cattle as power, and
when excavations were being made for the new steam mill, two wells were
found, one with water and the other in which water had obviously not
been found. It was filled with soil of a different character from that
surrounding it. “The water,” says the author, “was evidently that which
supplied the fort and it is natural to think that valuables or other
papers might have been buried in the other.”
There is still among the older people a certain faith in enchanted jars
buried in the earth or left in caves by the Spaniards when they fled
the country. In the Rio Cobre there is a table of gold which rises up at
noon every day, but though it has been seen by more than one person
no one yet has succeeded in getting it before it sinks back under the
waters. This, I am credibly informed--you may believe it or not as
you please--is because the Spaniards killed a slave to watch over the
treasure and no one has been quick enough to throw their hat, knife, or
handkerchief over it and so break the enchantment.
There was a poor slave woman once who was ill and unable to finish
her task, so the driver made her stay behind and do what she had left
undone. She worked all night, and weary and worn, the task was not yet
done when her hoe struck something that gave out a jingling sound.
She looked carefully and found a Spanish jar, and with such important
information dared even approach the high and mighty master himself. On
going to inspect, he found so large a jar it had to be pulled out by
oxen and was full to the top with golden doubloons. So he rewarded the
woman with her freedom and gave her enough to live on all her life. At
least that is the story that was told to me. It is a comfort to read
of Spanish Gold which for so long has stood in my mind for fanciful
treasure, really materialising to some one's advantage.
More especially in the north of the island is this faith in hidden
treasure strong. I was told seriously by a young man once that just
beyond Montego Bay some very handsome brass cannon were dug up and so
curiously wrought were they that they were polished and set up close to
where they were found on the shore. But they did not stay there long.
One night a Spanish sloop was seen off the coast, next morning she was
gone, so were the guns, and no one knows what has become of them.
They tell much the same story about a great jar of gold which was
supposed to have been buried in a cane piece in St Thomas. One night the
Spaniards came, gagged and bound the watchman--I did not know every cane
piece had a watchman, but so the story runs--and dug up the jar leaving
a sum of money for the watchman and the hole so that the owners of that
field might have some idea of what they had missed.
I am afraid these two last stories are purely apocryphal, but many
people believe in them and they serve to show how fixed in Jamaica is
the faith in Spanish Gold.
At Kempshot, on top of a high hill, Miss Maxwell Hall two or three
years ago was roused night after night by the tramping of feet along the
hillside. At first the noise was a mystery of the night then it ceased,
but a week or two later she found that some great caves on the estate
had been entered and extensive digging had gone on. It was impossible
that anything could have been found, for the Maxwell Halls themselves
had dug out those caves thoroughly searching not for Spanish treasure
but for Arawak remains. It was evident that a large company had gone
there nightly. The place had an evil reputation and she knew that not
two or three men would have lightly dared its dangers even for
promise of gold, and broken and discarded rum bottles showed how the
investigators had been bucked up with “Dutch courage.”
A little treasure will go a long way in making stories, and one jar of
coin found will supply material for a dozen. But it is interesting
to think that if you buy a plot of land in Jamaica, especially in the
north, you _may_ just chance to buy with it a jar of gold.