KINGSTON.
Having satisfied myself, by a sound night's rest, that the laws of my
physical constitution had undergone no essential revolution by a change
to the torrid zone, I began in the morning to look curiously around to
note what the differences might be in the outer world. The quaint old
lodging house itself first drew my attention, with its thick walls and
heavy brick arches on the ground floor, built to guard against
earthquakes, of which few years pass without several shocks, though none
especially memorable have taken place since the dreadful one of 1692.
Cracks in the walls here and there, however, show that it is not useless
to make provision against them.
While I was seated at a most comfortable breakfast of bread and butter
and the excellent fish which abound in Kingston harbor, flanked by huge
oranges of enticing sweetness, a shrivelled old negro woman, who was on
her knees giving the uncarpeted floor its morning application of wax,
and rubbing it into a polish with a cocoanut shell, suddenly rose to her
feet and kissed her hand to me with a grace worthy of a duchess.
Somewhat startled at this unexpected salutation from the fairer, or the
softer sex--I am in some doubt as to the proper adjective in this
case--I gazed rather blankly at her without replying; but she dropped on
her knees again and went on with her work, satisfied doubtless that she
at least knew the proprieties. It is this submissive respectfulness of
the blacks that makes it pleasant living among them, notwithstanding all
their faults and vices. At home we are no better than our neighbors, but
here, if we only have a white complexion, we belong to the undisputed
aristocracy, and carry our credentials in our faces. It is that which
has bewitched so many Northern people living at the South with slavery.
But what is wanted is not a community of slaves, but only a community of
blacks.
After fortifying myself against the sweltering heat of the December
morning by copious draughts from the unglazed earthen coolers, which
look so refreshing in this climate that you often see their coarse red
pottery on handsomely laid tables, looking quite as well entitled to a
place as anything else, I sallied out to see what daylight would show in
the chief city of Jamaica, a city of nearly 30,000 people. I must say
that for appearance' sake the best thing for Kingston would be to have
perpetual moonlight. Under the flood of silver light which the full moon
here pours down, even its forlorn shabbiness is softened into something
of romantic indistinctness. But daylight is dreadfully disenchanting.
The rows of tumble-down houses, the sandy, unpaved streets--through
which you flounder as in the deserts of Sahara, unless you choose to try
sidewalks that have as many ups and downs as a range of mountains, each
man building to the height that pleases himself--the large parade,
without armament or shade, a dreary common of sand, the crowds of noisy,
slouching, dirty negroes, the burnt districts, filled with the rubbish
of houses and with unwholesome vegetation growing up, do not combine to
form a very engaging whole. One would think it impossible to exaggerate
such a picture of comfortless neglect. Yet bad as it is in itself, Mr.
Sewell has mercilessly exaggerated it. One would think from his
description that there was not a decent house in the place, and that he
had never seen the rows of excellent dwellings on North street and East
street. Then he speaks of the inhabitants as being, 'taken _en masse_,
steeped to the eyelids in immorality.'
Now, if he meant that the great numerical majority of the inhabitants
bear this character, he spoke truly, inasmuch as the great numerical
majority of the inhabitants are negroes, among the most depraved in the
island. Kingston is like the slough of Despond, a place whither all the
scum and filth of the negro population in the east end of the island do
continually run, and make it a very sink of wickedness. But are the
white families and the large number of thoroughly respectable colored
families to be confounded with this mass of negro depravity, because
they are fewer in number? It is true they are fewer in number, but they
are so thoroughly distinct in standing and character that Mr. Sewell is
justly chargeable with cruel recklessness in confounding them together
as he does. It may concern the world little to distinguish among the
people of Kingston, but it does very vitally concern the morality of
authorship, that a traveller should not, by a careless and sweeping
sentence, leave a cruel sting in the minds of hundreds of refined and
virtuous women.
But I cannot vindicate Kingston society against the charge of surpassing
dulness. In an insular colony, under the enervating influence of a
tropical climate, the pulse of intellectual life beats very faintly, at
its strongest. Still, if whatever of education and refinement there is
in Kingston would cordially combine it might make a pleasant society.
But it is divided into little cliques, each mortally afraid of the rest,
and producing, in their division, a paradise of tediousness.
Kingston, however, resembles New York in one important particular--it is
one of the worst-governed cities in Christendom. The Jews and the
mulattoes divide municipal honors between them, and rival, not
unworthily on a small scale, the united talents of Mozart and Tammany
for misgovernment and jobbery.
The stores of Kingston are well supplied with excellent English goods at
reasonable prices, and are served by numbers of fresh and fine-looking
British clerks. But of these much the greater number, I fear, fall under
the temptations of the prevailing immorality, and habits of drinking,
not to be indulged with impunity in such a climate, hurry multitudes of
them to speedy graves. What little sobriety and desire of improvement
exists among the young men is chiefly confined, I am told, to the
browns.
With the decline of exportations, the once flourishing trade of Kingston
has, of course, decreased. But it marks the eagerness of some to turn
everything to the discredit of emancipation, that this decline is
commonly attributed entirely to that event, no notice being taken of the
fact that Kingston was once the entrepot of a flourishing trade between
Europe and the Spanish Main, which, having, in 1816, shipping to the
amount of 199,894 tons, and having risen in 1828 to 254,290 tons, had in
1830, four years before the abolition of slavery, sunk to 130,747 tons.
The growing use of steam, making direct shipment to Europe more
convenient than transhipment, and changes in commercial relations, may
account for this falling off; but dates show that emancipation has
nothing to do with it. Of course the main cause of decline in the trade
of the city has been the decline in the prosperity of the island, but
such a change in the channels of trade as is indicated above was an
independent cause.
The statistics of illegitimacy, of infant mortality, of ignorance and
irreligion, and of destitution in Kingston, are shocking. Churches are
numerous, and congregations flourishing, but the vast mass of the
negroes are scarcely affected by them. This is very different from the
state of things in the country, and nothing could be more preposterous
than to judge of the rural population by Kingston. The Kingstonians
themselves are laughably ignorant of the country parts. One of them
assured a clergyman of my acquaintance, with all the gravity imaginable,
that the country negroes lived principally upon fruits! No doubt he has
had the chance of telling some American touching at the port the same
story, who has been able to attest it at home on the authority of a
'Jamaica gentleman of great intelligence.' The Kingston people may be
intelligent, but a good many of them know little more about the interior
of their own island than they do about the interior of Africa.
But ignorant and depraved as the negroes of Kingston are, besides being
three times as numerous as the trade of the place requires, I do not see
that they particularly deserve the reproach of laziness. Mr. Sewell
remarks that he was puzzled to know how they had incurred it when he saw
them crowding around him, all wild for a job. The negro women certainly,
who coal the vessels, appear anything but indolent as they go to and fro
erect under their heavy burdens: if the men let them do more than their
share of the heavy work, it is precisely as in Germany,[C] and for just
the same reason, namely, that the common people of neither country are
sufficiently civilized to treat women as much more than a superior sort
of beasts of burden. That even the Kingston populace have felt the
quickening benefit of freedom, is shown by a little fact related by a
shipmaster who has traded to the port for many years. He says that now
he can always get his ship loaded and unloaded in quicker time than he
could then.
As to security of life and property, there are few cities where both are
safer than in Kingston. I have gone long distances though its unlighted
streets late at night, with as little sense of danger as in a New
England country road. There is a good police of black men, whose
appearance is quite picturesque in their suits of spotless white, and a
force of black soldiers quartered in barracks in the heart of the town,
besides a part of a white regiment a few miles distant. The conduct of
the black troops, however, at an extensive fire some two years ago,
which destroyed a large district in the business part of the town, was
an illustration of what seems a curious peculiarity of the African
character, namely, that while docile and amenable to discipline in the
highest degree in common, the negroes are apt in critical moments to
break out into uncontrollable license. On this occasion, the black men,
soldiers and all, instead of assisting to put out the fire, broke into
the liquor shops, and having maddened themselves by drinking, fell to
indiscriminate plundering. If it had not been for the women, who, to
their great credit, rendered energetic assistance in working the
engines, the city might have been consumed.
The most curious feature in the life of a city where there are many
blacks is the incessant chatter in the streets. Chaffering, quarrelling,
joking, there seems to be no end to their volubility. In the country it
is the same, and you will sometimes hear two shrews scolding each other
from a couple of hilltops a quarter of a mile apart, with an energy and
unction only equalled by an angry Irishwoman. Men and women fortunately
quarrel so much that they fight very little. Notwithstanding the heroic
deeds of valor performed by black soldiers, I incline to think that they
are, what some one describes the Arabs as being, cowardly, or at least
timid, as individuals, and brave only through discipline and number.
I know of no reminiscences connected with Kingston of any essential
note, unless it be a horrible incident mentioned by Bryan Edwards, the
distinguished historian of the West Indies, as witnessed by himself in
1760. This was the execution of two black men, native Africans,
convicted of the murder of their master. They were exposed in the
parade, in the centre of the town, in an iron frame, and starved to
death! Free access was allowed to the crowds who wished to talk with
them, and with whom they kept up conversation, apparently supremely
indifferent to their fate. Mr. Edwards himself, after they had been
exposed some days, addressed them some questions, but could not
understand their reply. At something he said, however, they both burst
into a hearty laugh. On the morning of the ninth day one silently
expired, and the other soon followed. Punishments so barbarous strike us
with horror, but they are no gratuitous addition to slavery--they are
one of its necessary features. A relation founded purely on force can be
maintained only by terror. And where the proportion of whites is very
small, as in most of the West Indies, they must compensate by the
atrocity of their inflictions for the weakness of their numbers. On the
20th of April, 1856, there fell a rain of uncommon violence in the
parish of St. Andrew, in which I was then residing. For six hours it
seemed as if Niagara were rushing down upon our heads. The river
Wagwater, which is commonly about knee deep, ran the next morning thirty
feet high. The effect of this terrible visitation of nature was
heightened by the disclosure through it of one of the monuments of
ancient cruelty. At Halfway Tree, a few miles from Kingston, the seat of
justice for the parish of St. Andrew, and the place of sepulture for
many of the old aristocracy of the prouder days of the island, the rain
washed up an iron cage, just of size to contain a human form, and so
arranged with bars and spikes as to make it certain that the wretched
victim could only stand in one long agony of torture. Along with it were
found the bones of a woman, who had to appearance perished in this
hideous apparatus. This dreadful revelation of the past struck horror
throughout the island. The cage, with its sad contents, is still
preserved in the collection of the Society of Arts.
The remarkable religious movement of 1861, which produced fruits so
excellent in some parts of the island, in Kingston appears to have
degenerated wholly into froth and noise. But there are some agencies of
spiritual and temporal good working among the lower classes with happy
effect. If they do not operate appreciably in changing the general
character of the feculent mass, at least they rescue from it many who in
the great day of account will call their authors blessed. I may mention
particularly the charitable institutions of the excellent rector, Rev.
Duncan Campbell, the reformatory for girls under the special patronage
of the Rev. Mr. Watson, United Presbyterian, the vigorous efforts of
Rev. William Gardner and his people, and many others less familiar to
me, but doubtless not less worthy of mention. But Kingston offers such
attractions to the very worst of the negro population, which, at the
highest, has so much of barbarism and ignorance, that it will long
continue a most forbidding and certainly a very unfair specimen of an
emancipated race.
But, forlorn as Kingston is in itself, it is magnificently situated.
Before it stretches for six miles in breadth the noble harbor, the sight
of whose brilliant blue waters, sparkling in the sun, imparts a
delicious refreshment as the eye catches a glimpse of them at the end of
the long sandy streets. Inward stretches, sloping gently up to the
mountains, the beautiful plain of Liguanea, about eight miles in
breadth, scattered over with fine villas, and here and there a sugar
estate. I remember with delight a view I once enjoyed just after sunset
from St. Michael's church tower, toward the eastern end of the city.
From that height the numerous trees planted in the yards, and which are
not conspicuous from the streets, appeared in full view, and every mean
and repulsive feature being hidden, the city seemed embowered in a
paradise of verdure. On the right spread out the pleasant plain of
Liguanea, bounded by the massive corrugations of the dark green
mountains, while on the left the lines of cocoanut trees skirted the
tranquil waters of the harbor, over which the evening star was shining.
I wished that those foreigners who touch at Kingston, and, disgusted
with its wretched squalor, go away and give an evil report of the goodly
island, could be permitted to see the city from no other point than St.
Michael's church tower.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote C: See J. Ross Browne's sparkling papers in _Harper's
Magazine_.]
THE GRAVE.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY L. D. PYCHOWSKA.
The grave is deep and still,
And fearful is its night;
It hides, with darkened veil,
The _Unknown_ from our sight.
No song of nightingale
Within its depths is heard;
And only is its moss
By friendship's roses stirred.
In vain their aching hands
Forsaken brides may wring;
No answer from the grave
The cries of orphans bring:
_Yet_ is it _there_ alone
The longed-for rest is found;
Alone through these dark gates
May pass the _homeward_ bound.
The silent heart beneath,
That pain and sorrow bore,
Hath only found true peace
_There_, where it beats no more.
REASON, RHYME, AND RHYTHM.