The Darien canal--Jamaica mail packet--Captain W.--Retrospect of
Jamaican history--Waterspout at sea--Hayti--Jacmel--A walk through
the town--A Jamaican planter--First sight of the Blue
Mountains--Port Royal--Kingston--The Colonial Secretary--Gordon
riots--Changes in the Jamaican constitution.
Once more to Barbadoes, but merely to change there from steamer to
steamer. My course was now across the Caribbean Sea to the great islands
at the bottom of it. The English mail, after calling and throwing off
its lateral branches at Bridgetown, pursues its direct course to Hayti
and Jamaica, and so on to Vera Cruz and the Darien canal. This wonderful
enterprise of M. Lesseps has set moving the loose negro population of
the Antilles and Jamaica. Unwilling to work as they are supposed to be,
they have swarmed down to the isthmus, and are still swarming thither in
tens of thousands, tempted by the dollar or dollar and a half a day
which M. Lesseps is furnishing. The vessel which called for us at
Dominica was crowded with them, and we picked up more as we went on.
Their average stay is for a year. At the end of a year half of them have
gone to the other world. Half go home, made easy for life with money
enough to buy a few acres of land and 'live happy ever after.' Heedless
as school-boys they plunge into the enterprise, thinking of nothing but
the harvest of dollars. They might earn as much or more at their own
doors if there were any one to employ them, but quiet industry is out of
joint, and Darien has seized their imaginations as an Eldorado.
If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all the world there
is not perhaps now concentrated in any single spot so much foul disease,
such a hideous dungheap of moral and physical abomination, as in the
scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.
By the scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of
English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a
highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the
happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were
tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. Lesseps's
lottery box. All that money and more besides, I was told, had been
already spent, and only a fifth of the work was done. Meanwhile the
human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers,
card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their
charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp
tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes,
alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as nature made it,
of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made immeasurably more
deadly by the multitudes of people who have crowded thither. Half buried
in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent
out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they
were intended. Unburied altogether lie also skeletons of the human
machines which have broken down there.[12] Everything which imagination
can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into
that locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the moral
surroundings of 'the greatest undertaking of our age,' but my curiosity
was less strong than my disgust. I did not see the place and the
description which I have given is probably too highly coloured. The
accounts which reached me, however, were uniform and consistent. Not one
person whom I met and who could speak from personal knowledge had any
other story to tell.
We looked again into St. Lucia on our way. The training squadron was
lying outside, and the harbour was covered with boats full of
blue-jackets. The big ships were rolling heavily. They could have eaten
up Rodney's fleet. The great 'Ville de Paris' would have been a mouthful
to the smallest of them. Man for man, officers and crew were as good as
Rodney ever commanded. Yet, somehow, they produce small effect on the
imagination of the colonists. The impression is that they are meant more
for show than for serious use. Alas! the stars and stripes on a Yankee
trader have more to say in the West Indies than the white ensigns of a
fleet of British iron-clads.
At Barbadoes there was nothing more for me to do or see. The English
mail was on the point of sailing, and I hastened on board. One does not
realise distance on maps. Jamaica belongs to the West Indies, and the
West Indies are a collective entity. Yet it is removed from the Antilles
by the diameter of the Caribbean Sea, and is farther off than Gibraltar
from Southampton. Thus it was a voyage of several days, and I looked
about to see who were to be my companions. There were several Spaniards,
one or two English tourists, and some ladies who never left their
cabins. The captain was the most remarkable figure: an elderly man with
one eye lost or injured, the other as peremptory as I have often seen in
a human face; rough and prickly on the outside as a pineapple,
internally very much resembling the same fruit, for at the bottom he was
true, genuine, and kindly hearted, very amusing, and intimately known to
all travellers on the West Indian line, in the service of which he had
passed forty years of his life. In his own ship he was sovereign and
recognised no superior. Bishops, colonial governors, presidents of South
American republics were, so far as their office went, no more to him
than other people, and as long as they were on board were chattels of
which he had temporary charge. Peer and peasant were alike under his
orders, which were absolute as the laws of Medes and Persians. On the
other hand, his eye was quick to see if there was any personal merit in
a man, and if you deserved his respect you would have it. One
particular merit he had which I greatly approved. He kept his cabin to
himself, and did not turn it into a smoking room, as I have known
captains do a great deal too often.
All my own thoughts were fixed upon Jamaica. I had read so much about
it, that my memory was full of persons and scenes and adventures of
which Jamaica was the stage or subject. Penn and Venables and the
Puritan conquest, and Morgan and the buccaneers; Port Royal crowded with
Spanish prizes; its busy dockyards, and English frigates and privateers
fitting out there for glorious or desperate enterprises. The name of
Jamaica brought them crowding up with incident on incident; and behind
the history came Tom Cringle and the wild and reckless, yet wholesome
and hearty, planter's life in Kingston; the dark figures of the pirates
swinging above the mangroves at Gallows Point; the balls and parties and
the beautiful quadroons, and the laughing, merry innocent children of
darkness, with the tricks of the middies upon them. There was the tragic
side of it, too, in slavery, the last ugly flash out of the cloud being
not two decades distant in the Eyre and Gordon time. Interest enough
there was about Jamaica, and things would be strangely changed in
Kingston if nothing remained of the society which was once so brilliant.
There, if anywhere, England and English rule were not yet a vanished
quantity. There was a dockyard still, and a commodore in command, and a
guardship and gunboats, and English regiments and West Indian regiments
with English officers. Some representatives, too, I knew were to be
found of the old Anglo-West Indians, men whose fathers and grandfathers
were born in the island, and whose fortunes were bound up in it. Aaron
Bang! what would not one have given to meet Aaron? The real Aaron had
been gathered to his fathers, and nature does not make two such as he
was; but I might fall in with something that would remind me of him.
Paul Gelid and Pepperpot Wagtail, and Peter Mangrove, better than either
of them--the likeness of these might be surviving, and it would be
delightful to meet and talk to them. They would give fresh flavour to
the immortal 'Log.' Even another Tom was not impossible; some middy to
develop hereafter into a frigate captain and to sail again into Port
Royal with his prizes in tow.
Nature at all events could not be changed. The white rollers would still
be breaking on the coral reefs. The palms would still be waving on the
sand ridge which forms the harbour, and the amber mist would be floating
round the peaks of the Blue Mountains. There were English soldiers and
sailors and English people. The English language was spoken there by
blacks as well as whites. The religion was English. Our country went for
something, and there would be some persons, at least, to whom the old
land was more than a stepmother, and who were not sighing in their
hearts for annexation to the American Union. The governor, Sir Henry
Norman, of Indian fame, I was sorry to learn, was still absent; he had
gone home on some legal business. Sir Henry had an Imperial reputation.
He had been spoken of to me in Barbadoes as able, if he were allowed a
chance, to act as Viceroy of all the islands, and to set them on their
feet again. I could well believe that a man of less than Sir Henry's
reputed power could do it--for in the thing itself there was no great
difficulty--if only we at home were once disenchanted; though all the
ability in the world would be thrown away as long as the enchantment
continued. I did see Sir Henry, as it turned out, but only for a few
hours.
Our voyage was without remarkable incident; as voyages are apt to be in
these days of powerful steamboats. One morning there was a tropical rain
storm which was worth seeing. We had a strong awning over the
quarter-deck, so I could stand and watch it. An ink-black cloud came
suddenly up from the north which seemed to hang into the sea, the
surface of the water below being violently agitated. According to
popular belief, the cloud on these occasions is drawing up water which
it afterwards discharges. Were this so the water discharged would be
salt, which it never is. The cause of the agitation is a cyclonic
rotation of air or local whirlwind. The most noticeable feature was the
blackness of the cloud itself. It became so dark that it would have been
difficult to read any ordinary print. The rain, when it burst, fell not
in drops but in torrents. The deck was flooded, and the scuttle-holes
ran like jets from a pump. The awning was ceasing to be a shelter, for
the water was driven bodily through it; but the downpour passed off as
suddenly as it had risen. There was no lightning and no wind. The sea
under our side was glassy smooth, and was dashed into millions of holes
by the plunging of the rain pellets.
The captain in his journeys to and fro had become acquainted with the
present black President of Hayti, Mr. Salomon. I had heard of this
gentleman as an absolute person, who knew how to make himself obeyed,
and who treated opposition to his authority in a very summary manner. He
seemed to be a favourite of the captain's. He had been educated in
France, had met with many changes of fortune, and after an exile in
Jamaica had become quasi-king of the black republic. I much wished to
see this paradise of negro liberty; we were to touch at Jacmel, which is
one of the principal ports, to leave the mails, and Captain W---- was
good enough to say that, if I liked, I might go ashore for an hour or
two with the officer in charge.
Hayti, as everyone knows who has studied the black problem, is the
western portion of Columbus's Espanola, or St. Domingo, the largest
after Cuba and the most fertile in natural resources of all the islands
of the Caribbean Sea. It was the earliest of the Spanish settlements in
the New World. The Spaniards found there a million or two of mild and
innocent Indians, whom in their first enthusiasm they intended to
convert to Christianity, and to offer as the first fruits of their
discovery to the Virgin Mary and St. Domenic. The saint gave his name to
the island, and his temperament to the conquerors. In carrying out their
pious design, they converted the Indians off the face of the earth,
working them to death in their mines and plantations. They filled their
places with blacks from Africa, who proved of tougher constitution. They
colonised, they built cities; they throve and prospered for nearly two
hundred years; when Hayti, the most valuable half of the island, was
taken from them by the buccaneers and made into a French province. The
rest which keeps the title of St. Domingo, continued Spanish, and is
Spanish still--a thinly inhabited, miserable, Spanish republic. Hayti
became afterwards the theatre of the exploits of the ever-glorious
Toussaint l'Ouverture. When the French Revolution broke out, and Liberty
and the Rights of Man became the new gospel, slavery could not be
allowed to continue in the French dominions. The blacks of the colony
were emancipated and were received into the national brotherhood. In
sympathy with the Jacobins of France, who burnt the chateaux of the
nobles and guillotined the owners of them, the liberated slaves rose as
soon as they were free, and massacred the whole French population, man,
woman, and child. Napoleon sent an army to punish the murderers and
recover the colony. Toussaint, who had no share in the atrocities, and
whose fault was only that he had been caught by the prevailing political
epidemic and believed in the evangel of freedom, surrendered and was
carried to France, where he died or else was made an end of. The yellow
fever avenged him, and secured for his countrymen the opportunity of
trying out to the uttermost the experiment of negro self-government. The
French troops perished in tens of thousands. They were reinforced again
and again, but it was like pouring water into a sieve. The climate won a
victory to the black man which he could not win for himself. They
abandoned their enterprise at last, and Hayti was free. We English tried
our hand to recover it afterwards, but we failed also, and for the same
reason.
Hayti has thus for nearly a century been a black independent state. The
negro race have had it to themselves and have not been interfered with.
They were equipped when they started on their career of freedom with
the Catholic religion, a civilised language, European laws and manners,
and the knowledge of various arts and occupations which they had learnt
while they were slaves. They speak French still; they are nominally
Catholics still; and the tags and rags of the gold lace of French
civilisation continue to cling about their institutions. But in the
heart of them has revived the old idolatry of the Gold Coast, and in the
villages of the interior, where they are out of sight and can follow
their instincts, they sacrifice children in the serpent's honour after
the manner of their forefathers. Perhaps nothing better could be
expected from a liberty which was inaugurated by assassination and
plunder. Political changes which prove successful do not begin in that
way.
The Bight of Leogane is a deep bay carved in the side of the island, one
arm of which is a narrow ridge of high mountains a hundred and fifty
miles long and from thirty to forty wide. At the head of this bay, to
the north of the ridge, is Port au Prince, the capital of this
remarkable community. On the south, on the immediately opposite side of
the mountains and facing the Caribbean Sea, is Jacmel, the town next in
importance. We arrived off it shortly after daybreak. The houses, which
are white, looked cheerful in the sunlight. Harbour there was none, but
an open roadstead into which the swell of the sea sets heavily, curling
over a long coral reef which forms a partial shelter. The mountain range
rose behind, sloping off into rounded woody hills. Here were the feeding
grounds of the herds of wild cattle which tempted the buccaneers into
the island, and from which they took their name. The shore was abrupt;
the land broke off in cliffs of coral rock tinted brilliantly with
various colours. One rather striking white-cliff, a ship's officer
assured me, was chalk; adding flint when I looked incredulous. His
geological education was imperfect. We brought up a mile outside the
black city. The boat was lowered. None of the other passengers
volunteered to go with me; the English are out of favour in Hayti just
now; the captain discouraged landings out of mere curiosity; and,
indeed, the officer with the mails had to reassure himself of Captain
W----'s consent before he would take me. The presence of Europeans in
any form is barely tolerated. A few only are allowed to remain about the
ports, just as the Irish say they let a few Danes remain in Dublin and
Waterford after the battle of Clontarf, to attend to the ignoble
business of trade.
The country after the green of the Antilles looked brown and parched. In
the large islands the winter months are dry. As we approached the reef
we saw the long hills of water turn to emerald as they rolled up the
shoal, then combing and breaking in cataracts of snow-white foam. The
officer in charge took me within oar's length of the rock to try my
nerves, and the sea, he did not fail to tell me, swarmed with sharks of
the worst propensities. Two steamers were lying inside, one of which,
belonging to an English company, had 'happened a misfortune,' and was
breaking up as a deserted wreck. A Yankee clipper schooner had just come
in with salt fish and crackers--a singularly beautiful vessel, with
immense beam, which would have startled the builders of the Cowes
racers. It was precisely like the schooner which Tom Cringle commanded
before the dockyard martinets had improved her into ugliness, built on
the lines of the old pirate craft of the islands, when the lives and
fortunes of men hung on the extra speed, or the point which they could
lie closer to the wind. Her return cargo would be coffee and bananas.
Englishmen move about in Jacmel as if they were ashamed of themselves
among their dusky lords and masters. I observed the Yankee skipper
paddling himself off in a canoe with his broad straw hat and his cigar
in his mouth, looking as if all the world belonged to him, and as if all
the world, and the Hayti blacks in particular, were aware of the fact.
The Yankee, whether we like it or not, is the acknowledged sovereign in
these waters.
The landing place was, or had been, a jetty built on piles and boarded
over. Half the piles were broken; the planks had rotted and fallen
through. The swell was rolling home, and we had to step out quickly as
the boat rose on the crest of the wave. A tattered crowd of negroes were
loafing about variously dressed, none, however, entirely without clothes
of some kind. One of them did kindly give me a hand, observing that I
was less light of foot than once I might have been. The agent's office
was close by. I asked the head clerk--a Frenchman--to find me a guide
through the town. He called one of the bystanders whom he knew, and we
started together, I and my black companion, to see as much as I could in
the hour which was allowed me. The language was less hopeless than at
Dominica. We found that we could understand each other--he, me,
tolerably; I, him, in fragments, for his tongue went as fast as a
shuttle. Though it was still barely eight o'clock the sun was scalding.
The streets were filthy and the stench abominable. The houses were of
white stone, and of some pretensions, but ragged and uninviting--paint
nowhere, and the woodwork of the windows and verandahs mouldy and
worm-eaten. The inhabitants swarmed as in a St. Giles's rookery. I
suppose they were all out of doors. If any were left at home Jacmel must
have been as populous as an African ants' nest. As I had looked for
nothing better than a Kaffir kraal, the degree of civilisation was more
than I expected. I expressed my admiration of the buildings; my guide
was gratified, and pointed out to me with evident pride a new hotel or
boarding house kept by a Madame Somebody who was the great lady of the
place. Madame Ellememe was sitting in a shady balcony outside the
first-floor windows. She was a large menacing-looking mulatto, like some
ogress of the 'Arabian Nights,' capable of devouring, if she found them
palatable, any number of salt babies. I took off my hat to this
formidable dame, which she did not condescend to notice, and we passed
on. A few houses in the outskirts stood in gardens with inclosures about
them. There is some trade in the place, and there were evidently
families, negro or European, who lived in less squalid style than the
generality. There was a governor there, my guide informed me--an
ornamental personage, much respected. To my question whether he had any
soldiers, I was answered 'No,' the Haytians didn't like soldiers. I was
to understand, however, that they were not common blacks. They aspired
to be a commonwealth with public rights and alliances. Hayti a republic,
France a republic: France and Hayti good friends now. They had a French
bishop and French priests and a French currency. In spite of their land
laws, they were proud of their affinity with the great nation; and I
heard afterwards, though not from my Jacmel companion, that the better
part of the Haytians would welcome back the French dominion if they were
not afraid that the Yankees would disapprove.
My guide persisted in leading me outside the town, and as my time was
limited, I tried in various ways to induce him to take me back into it.
He maintained, however, that he had been told to show me whatever was
most interesting, and I found that I was to see an American
windmill-pump which had been just erected to supply Jacmel with fresh
water. It was the first that had been seen in the island, and was a
wonder of wonders. Doubtless it implied 'progress,' and would assist in
the much-needed ablution of the streets and kennels. I looked at it and
admired, and having thus done homage, I was allowed my own way.
It was market day. The Yankee cargo had been unloaded, and a great open
space in front of the cathedral was covered with stalls or else blankets
stretched on poles to keep the sun off, where hundreds of Haytian dames
were sitting or standing disposing of their wares--piles of salt fish,
piles of coloured calicoes, knives, scissors, combs, and brushes. Of
home produce there were great baskets of loaves, fruit, vegetables, and
butcher's meat on slabs. I looked inquisitively at these last; but I
acknowledge that I saw no joints of suspicious appearance. Children were
running about in thousands, not the least as if they were in fear of
being sacrificed, and babies hung upon their mothers as if natural
affection existed in Jacmel as much as in other places. I asked no
compromising questions, not wishing to be torn in pieces. Sir Spenser
St. John's book has been heard of in Hayti, and the anger about it is
considerable. The scene was interesting enough, but the smell was
unendurable. The wild African black is not filthy in his natural state.
He washes much, as wild animals do, and at least tries to keep himself
clear of vermin. The blacks in Jacmel appeared (like the same animals as
soon as they are domesticated) to lose the sense which belongs to them
in their wild condition. My prejudices, if I have any, had not blinded
me to the good qualities of the men and women in Dominica. I do not
think it was prejudice wholly which made me think the faces which I saw
in Hayti the most repulsive which I had ever seen in the world, or
Jacmel itself, taken for all in all, the foulest, dirtiest, and nastiest
of human habitations. The dirt, however, I will do them the justice to
say did not seem to extend to their churches. The cathedral stood at the
upper end of the market place. I went in. It was airy, cool, and
decent-looking. Some priests were saying mass, and there was a fairly
large congregation. I wished to get a nearer sight of the altar and the
images and pictures, imagining that in Hayti the sacred persons might
assume a darker colour than in Europe; but I could not reach the chancel
without disturbing people who were saying their prayers, and, to the
disappointment of my companion, who beckoned me on, and would have
cleared a way for me, I controlled my curiosity and withdrew.
My hour's leave of absence was expired. I made my way back to the
landing place, where the mail steamer's boat was waiting for me. On the
steamer herself the passengers were waiting impatiently for breakfast,
which had been put off on our account. We hurried on board at our best
speed; but before breakfast could be thought of, or any other thing, I
had to strip and plunge into a bath and wash away the odour of the great
negro republic of the West which clung to my clothes and skin.
Leaving Jacmel and its associations, we ran all day along the land,
skirting a range of splendid mountains between seven and eight thousand
feet high; past the Isle a Vache; past the bay of Cayes, once famous as
the haunt of the sea-rovers; past Cape Tubiron, the Cape of Sharks. At
evening we were in the channel which divides St. Domingo from Jamaica.
Captain ---- insisted to me that this was the scene of Rodney's action,
and he pointed out to me the headland under which the British fleet had
been lying. He was probably right in saying that it was the scene of
some action of Rodney's, for there is hardly a corner of the West Indies
where he did not leave behind him the print of his cannon shot; but it
was not the scene of the great fight which saved the British Empire.
That was below the cliffs of Dominica; and Captain W----, as many others
have done, was confounding Dominica with St. Domingo.
The next morning we were to anchor at Port Royal. We had a Jamaica
gentleman of some consequence on board. I had failed so far to make
acquaintance with him, but on this last evening he joined me on deck,
and I gladly used the opportunity to learn something of the present
condition of things. I was mistaken in expecting to find a more vigorous
or more sanguine tone of feeling than I had left at the Antilles. There
was the same despondency, the same sense that their state was hopeless,
and that nothing which they could themselves do would mend it. He
himself, for instance, was the owner of a large sugar estate which a few
years ago was worth 60,000_l._ It was not encumbered. He was his own
manager, and had spared no cost in providing the newest machinery. Yet,
with the present prices and with the refusal of the American Commercial
Treaty, it would not pay the expense of cultivation. He held on, for it
was all that he could do. To sell was impossible, for no one would buy
even at the price of the stock on the land. It was the same story which
I had heard everywhere. The expenses of the administration, this
gentleman said, were out of all proportion to the resources of the
island, and were yearly increasing. The planters had governed in the old
days as the English landlords had governed Ireland. They had governed
cheaply and on their own resources. They had authority; they were
respected; their word was law. Now their power had been taken from them,
and made over to paid officials, and the expense was double what it used
to be. Between the demands made on them in the form of taxation and the
fall in the value of their produce their backs were breaking, and the
'landed interest' would come to an end. I asked him, as I had asked many
persons without getting a satisfactory answer, what he thought that the
Imperial Government could do to mend matters. He seemed to think that it
was too late to do anything. The blacks were increasing so fast, and the
white influence was diminishing so fast, that Jamaica in a few years
would be another Hayti.
In this gentleman, too, I found to my sorrow that there was the same
longing for admission to the American Union which I had left behind me
at the Antilles. In spite of soldiers and the naval station, the old
country was still looked upon as a stepmother, and of genuine loyalty
there was, according to him, little or nothing. If the West Indies were
ever to become prosperous again, it could only be when they were annexed
to the United States. For the present, at least, he admitted that
annexation was impossible. Not on account of any possible objection on
the part of the British Government; for it seems to be assumed by every
one that the British Government cares nothing what they do; nor wholly
on account of the objections of the Americans, though he admitted that
the Americans were unwilling to receive them; but because in the
existing state of feeling such a change could not be carried out without
civil war. In Jamaica, at least, the blacks and mulattoes would resist.
There were nearly 700,000 of them, while of the whites there were but
15,000, and the relative numbers were every year becoming more
unfavourable. The blacks knew that under England they had nothing to
fear. They would have everything more and more their own way, and in a
short time they expected to have the island to themselves. They might
collect arms; they might do what they pleased, and no English officer
dared to use rough measures with them; while, if they belonged to the
Union, the whites would recover authority one way or another. The
Americans were ready with their rifles on occasions of disorder, and
their own countrymen did not call them to account for it as we did. The
blacks, therefore, preferred the liberty which they had and the
prospects to which they looked forward, and they and the mulattoes also
would fight, and fight desperately, before they would allow themselves
to be made American citizens.
The prospect which Mr. ---- laid before me was not a beautiful one, and
was coming a step nearer at each advance that was made in the direction
of constitutional self-government; for, like every other person with
whom I spoke on the subject, he said emphatically that Europeans would
not remain to be ruled under a black representative system; nor would
they take any part in it when they would be so overwhelmingly outvoted
and outnumbered. They would sooner forfeit all that they had in the
world and go away. An effective and economical administration on the
Indian pattern might have saved all a few years ago. It was too late
now, and Jamaica was past recovery. At this rate it was a sadly altered
Jamaica since Tom Cringle's time, though his friend Aaron even then had
seen what was probably coming. But I could not accept entirely all that
Mr. ---- had been saying, and had to discount the natural irritation of
a man who sees his fortune sliding out of his hands. Moreover, for
myself, I never listen much to a desponding person. Even when a cause is
lost utterly, and no rational hope remains, I would still go down, if it
had to be so, with my spirit unbroken and my face to the enemy. Mr. ----
perhaps would recover heart if the price of sugar mended a little. For
my own part, I do not care much whether it mends or not. The economics
of the islands ought not to depend exclusively on any single article of
produce. I believe, too, in spite of gloomy prognostics, that a loyal
and prosperous Jamaica is still among the possibilities of the future,
if we will but study in earnest the character of the problem. Mr. ----,
however, did most really convey to me the convictions of a large and
influential body of West Indians--convictions on which they are already
acting, and will act more and more. With Hayti so close, and with
opinion in England indifferent to what becomes of them, they will clear
out while they have something left to lose, and will not wait till ruin
is upon them or till they are ordered off the land by a black
legislature. There is a saying in Hayti that the white man has no
rights which the blacks are bound to recognise.
I walked forward after we had done talking. We had five hundred of the
poor creatures on board on their way to the Darien pandemonium. The
vessel was rolling with a heavy beam sea. I found the whole mass of them
reduced into the condition of the pigs who used to occupy the foredeck
in the Cork and Bristol packets. They were lying in a confused heap
together, helpless, miserable, without consciousness apparently, save a
sense in each that he was wretched. Unfortunate brothers-in-law!
following the laws of political economy, and carrying their labour to
the dearest market, where, before a year was out, half of them were to
die. They had souls, too, some of them, and honest and kindly hearts. I
observed one man who was suffering less than the rest reading aloud to a
prostrate group a chapter of the New Testament; another was reading to
himself a French Catholic book of devotion.
The dawn was breaking in the east when I came on deck in the morning.
The Blue Mountains were hanging over us on our right hand, the peaks
buried in white mist which the unrisen sun was faintly tinting with
orange. We had passed Morant Bay, the scene of Gordon's rash attempt to
imitate Toussaint l'Ouverture. As so often in the Antilles, a level
plain stretched between the sea and the base of the hills, formed by the
debris washed down by the rivers in the rainy season. Among cane fields
and cocoa-nut groves we saw houses and the chimneys of the sugar
factories; and, as we came nearer, we saw men and horses going to their
early work. Presently Kingston itself came in sight, and Up Park Camp,
and the white barracks high up on the mountain side, of which one had
read and heard so much. Here was actually Tom Cringle's Kingston, and
between us and the town was the long sand spit which incloses the lagoon
at the head of which Kingston is built. How this natural breakwater had
been deposited I could find no one to tell me. It is eight miles long,
rising but a few feet above the water-line, in places not more than
thirty yards across--nowhere, except at the extremity, more than sixty
or a hundred.
[Illustration: PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA.]
The thundering swell of the Caribbean Sea breaks upon it from year's
end to year's end, and never washes it any thinner. Where the sand is
dry, beyond the reach of the waves, it is planted thickly all along with
palms, and appears from the sea a soft green line, over which appear the
masts and spars of the vessels at anchor in the harbour, and the higher
houses of Kingston itself. To reach the opening into the lagoon you have
to run on to the end of the sandbank, where there is a peninsula on
which is built the Port Royal so famous in West Indian story. Halfway
down among the palms the lighthouse stands, from which a gun was fired
as we passed, to give notice that the English mail was coming in.
Treacherous coral reefs rise out of the deep water for several miles,
some under water and visible only by the breakers over them, others
forming into low wooded islands. Only local pilots can take a ship
safely through these powerful natural defence works. There are but two
channels through which the lagoon can be approached. The eastern
passage, along which we were steaming, runs so near the shore that an
enemy's ship would be destroyed by the batteries among the sandhills
long before it could reach the mouth. The western passage is less
intricate, but that also is commanded by powerful forts. In old times
Kingston was unattackable, so strong had the position been made by
nature and art combined. It could be shelled now over the spit from the
open sea. It might be destroyed, but even so could not easily be taken.
I do not know that I have ever seen any scene more interesting than that
which broke upon my eyes as we rounded the point, and the lagoon opened
out before me. Kingston, which we had passed half an hour, before, lay
six miles off at the head of the bay, now inside the sand, ridge, blue
and hazy in the distance. At the back were the mountains. The mist had
melted off, standing in shadowy grey masses with the sun rising behind
them. Immediately in front were the dockyards, forts, and towers of Port
Royal, with the guardship, gunboats, and tenders, with street and
terrace, roof and turret and glistening vane, all clearly and sharply
defined in the exquisite transparency of the air. The associations of
the place no doubt added to the impression. Before the first hut was run
up in Kingston, Port Royal was the rendezvous of all English ships
which, for spoil or commerce, frequented the West Indian seas. Here the
buccaneers sold their plunder and squandered their gains in gambling and
riot. Here in the later century of legitimate wars, whole fleets were
gathered to take in stores, or refit when shattered by engagements. Here
Nelson had been, and Collingwood and Jervis, and all our other naval
heroes. Here prizes were brought in for adjudication, and pirates to be
tried and hanged. In this spot more than in any other, beyond Great
Britain herself, the energy of the Empire once was throbbing. The
'Urgent,' an old two-decker, and three gunboats were all that were now
floating in the once crowded water; the 'Urgent,' no longer equipped for
active service, imperfectly armed, inadequately manned, but still
flaunting the broad white ensign, and as if grandly watching over the
houses which lay behind her. There were batteries at the point, and
batteries on the opposite shore. The morning bugle rang out clear and
inspiriting from the town, and white coats and gold and silver lace
glanced in and out as men and officers were passing to parade. Here, at
any rate, England was still alive.
The channel at the entrance is a mile in width. The lagoon (the open
part of it) may be seven or eight miles long and half as many broad. It
forms the mouth of the Cobre river, one of the largest in Jamaica, on
which, ten miles up, stands the original seat of government established
by the Spaniards, and called after them Spanish Town. The fashion of
past times, as old as the times of Thucydides, and continued on till the
end of the last century, was to choose the sites for important towns in
estuaries, at a distance from the sea, to be out of the reach of
pirates. The Cobre, running down from Spanish Town, turns the plain
through which it flows into a swamp. The swamp covers itself with
mangroves, and the mangroves fringe the shore of the lagoon itself for
two-thirds of its circuit. As Jamaica grew in wealth and population the
trade was carried from Port Royal deeper into the bay. Another town
sprang up there, called King's Town, or shortly 'Kingston.' The
administration was removed thither for convenience, and though fallen
away from its old consequence, Kingston, with its extended suburbs, its
churches and warehouses, and large mansions overhung with trees, looks
at a distance like a place of consideration. Many ships lay along the
wharves, or anchored a few cables' distance off. Among them were a
couple of Spanish frigates, which remain there in permanence on the
watch for refugees from Cuba. On the slopes behind the town, as far as
eye could see, were the once splendid estates of the sugar princes of
the last century. One of them was pointed out to me as the West Indian
home of the author of 'Tom Cringle.'
We had to stop for a few minutes as the officer of the port came
alongside for the mails. We then went on at reduced speed. The lagoon is
generally shoal. A deep water channel runs along the side of it which is
farthest from the sea; made, I suppose, by the river, for as usual there
is little tide or none. Halfway up we passed under the walls of Fort
Augusta, now a ruin and almost deserted, but once mounting a hundred
guns. The money which we spent on the defence of Jamaica in the old
times was not always laid out wisely, as will be seen in an account
which I shall have to give of this remarkable structure; but, at any
rate, we were lavish of it.
Of the sharks with which the water used to swarm we saw none. Port Royal
Jack and his kindred are said to have disappeared, driven or frightened
out by the screws of the steamers. But it is not a place which I should
choose for a swim. Nor did the nigger boys seem as anxious as I had seen
them in other spots to dive for sixpences under the ship's side.
No account is made of days when you come into port after a voyage.
Cargoes have to be landed, or coal has to be taken in. The donkey
engines are at work, hoisting packing cases and luggage out of the hold.
Stewards run to and fro, and state-room doors are opened, and busy
figures are seen through each, stuffing their portmanteaus and preparing
for departure. The church bells at Kingston, ringing for early service,
reminded me that it was Sunday. We brought up at a jetty, and I cannot
say that, close at hand, the town was as attractive as it had appeared
when first I saw it. The enchantment was gone. The blue haze of distance
gave place to reality. The water was so fetid under the ship's side that
it could not be pumped into the baths. Odours, not Arabian, from open
drains reminded me of Jacmel. The streets, up which I could see from the
afterdeck, looked dirty and the houses shabby. Docks and wharves,
however, are never the brightest part of any town, English or foreign.
There were people enough at any rate, and white faces enough among them.
Gangways were rigged from the ship to the shore, and ladies and
gentlemen rushed on board to meet their friends. The companies' agents
appeared in the captain's cabin. Porters were scrambling for luggage;
pushing, shoving, and swearing. Passengers who had come out with us, and
had never missed attendance at the breakfast table, were hurrying home
unbreakfasted to their wives and families. My own plans were uncertain.
I had no friends, not even an acquaintance. I knew nothing of the hotels
and lodging houses, save that they had generally a doubtful reputation.
I had brought with me a letter of introduction to Sir H. Norman, the
governor, but Sir Henry had gone to England. On the whole, I thought it
best to inclose the letter to Mr. Walker, the Colonial Secretary, who I
understood was in Kingston, with a note asking for advice. This I sent
by a messenger. Meanwhile I stayed on board to look about me from the
deck. The ship was to go on the next morning to the canal works at
Darien. Time was precious. Immediately on arriving she had begun to take
in coal, Sunday though it might be, and a singular spectacle it was. The
coal yard was close by, and some hundreds of negroes, women and men, but
women, in four times the number, were hard at work. The entire process
was by hand and basket, each basket holding from eighty to a hundred
pounds weight. Two planks were laid down at a steep incline from the
ship's deck to the yard. Swinging their loads on their heads, erect as
statues, and with a step elastic as a racehorse's, they marched up one
of the planks, emptied their baskets into the coal bunkers, and ran down
the other. Round and round they went under the blazing sun all the
morning through, and round and round they would continue to go all the
afternoon. The men took it comparatively easy. The women flew along,
laughing, and clamouring, as if not knowing what weariness was--willing
beasts of burden, for they had the care upon them of their children; the
men disclaiming all responsibilities on that score, after the babies
have been once brought into the world. The poor women are content with
the arrangement, which they prefer to what they would regard as legal
bondage. They earn at this coaling work seven or eight shillings a day.
If they were wives, their husbands would take it from them and spend it
in rum. The companion who is not a wife can refuse and keep her earnings
for her little ones. If black suffrage is to be the rule in Jamaica, I
would take it away from the men and would give it to the superior sex.
The women are the working bees of the hive. They would make a tolerable
nation of black amazons, and the babies would not be offered to Jumbi.
When I had finished my meditations on the coaling women, there were
other black creatures to wonder at; great boobies or pelicans, old
acquaintances of the Zoological Gardens, who act as scavengers in these
waters. We had perhaps a couple of dozen of them round us as large as
vultures, ponderous and sleepy to look at when squatting on rocks or
piles, over-weighted by their enormous bills. On the wing they were
astonishingly swift, wheeling in circles, till they could fix their prey
with their eyes, then pouncing upon it with a violent slanting plunge. I
suppose their beaks might be broken if they struck directly, but I never
saw one miss its aim. Nor do they ever go below the surface, but seize
always what is close to it. I was told--I do not know how truly--that
like the diablots in Dominica, they nest in the mountains and only come
down to the sea to feed.
Hearing that I was in search of quarters, a Miss Burton, a handsome
mulatto woman, came up and introduced herself to me. Hotels in the
English West Indies are generally detestable. This dame had set up a
boarding house on improved principles, or rather two boarding houses,
between which she invited me to take my choice, one in the suburbs of
Kingston, one on the bank of a river in a rocky gorge in the Blue
Mountains. In either of these she promised that she would make me happy,
and I do not doubt that she would have succeeded, for her fame had
spread through all Jamaica, and her face was as merry as it was honest.
As it turned out I was provided for elsewhere, and I lost the chance of
making an acquaintance which I should have valued. When she spoke to me
she seemed a very model of vigour and health. She died suddenly while I
was in the island.
The day was still early. When the vessel was in some order again, and
those who were going on shore had disappeared, the rest of us were
called down to breakfast to taste some of those Jamaica delicacies on
which Paul Gelid was so eloquent. The fruit was the chief attraction:
pineapples, of which one can eat as much as one likes in these countries
with immunity from after suffering; oranges, more excellent than even
those of Grenada and Dominica; shaddocks, admirable as that memorable
one which seduced Adam; and for the first time mangoes, the famous
Number Eleven of which I had heard such high report, and was now to
taste. The English gardeners can do much, but they cannot ripen a Number
Eleven, and it is too delicate to bear carriage. It must be eaten in the
tropics or nowhere. The mango is the size and shape of a swan's egg, of
a ruddy yellow colour when ripe, and in flavour like an exceptionally
good apricot, with a very slight intimation of resin. The stone is
disproportionately large. The flesh adheres to it, and one abandons as
hopeless the attempt to eat mangoes with clean lips and fingers. The
epicures insist that they should be eaten only in a bath.
The heat was considerable, and the feast of fruit was the more welcome.
Soon after the Colonial Secretary politely answered my note in person.
In the absence of the governor of a colony, the colonial secretary, as
a rule, takes his place. In Jamaica, and wherever we have a garrison,
the commander of the forces becomes acting governor; I suppose because
it is not convenient to place an officer of high military rank under the
orders of a civilian who is not the direct representative of the
sovereign. In the gentleman who now called on me I found an old
acquaintance whom I had known as a boy many years ago. He told me that,
if I had made no other arrangements, Colonel J----, who was the present
chief, was expecting me to be his guest at the 'King's House' during my
stay in Jamaica. My reluctance to trespass on the hospitality of an
entire stranger was not to be allowed. Soldiers who have distinguished
themselves are, next to lawyers, the most agreeable people to be met
with, and when I was convinced that I should really be welcome, I had no
other objection. An aide-de-camp, I was told, would call for me in the
afternoon. Meanwhile the secretary stayed with me for an hour or two,
and I was able to learn something authentic from him as to the general
condition of things. I had not given entire credit to the
representations of my planter friend of the evening before. Mr. Walker
took a more cheerful view, and, although the prospects were not as
bright as they might be, he saw no reason for despondency. Sugar was
down of course. The public debt had increased, and taxation was heavy.
Many gentlemen in Jamaica, as in the Antilles, were selling, or trying
to sell, their estates and go out of it. On the other hand, expenses of
government were being reduced, and the revenue showed a surplus. The
fruit trade with the United States was growing, and promised to grow
still further. American capitalists had come into the island, and were
experimenting on various industries. The sugar treaty with America would
naturally have been welcome; but Jamaica was less dependent on its sugar
crop, and the action of the British Government was less keenly resented.
In the Antilles, the Colonial Secretary admitted, there might be a
desire for annexation to the United States, and Jamaican landowners had
certainly expressed the same wish to myself. Mr. Walker, however,
assured me that, while the blacks would oppose it unanimously, the
feeling, if it existed at all among the whites, was confined as yet to a
very few persons. They had been English for 230 years, and the large
majority of them wished to remain English. There had been suffering
among them; but there had been suffering in other places besides
Jamaica. Better times might perhaps be coming with the opening of the
Darien canal, when Kingston might hope to become again the centre of a
trade. Of the negroes, both men and women, Mr. Walker spoke extremely
favourably. They were far less indolent than they were supposed to be;
they were settling on the waste lands, acquiring property, growing yams
and oranges, and harming no one; they had no grievance left; they knew
it, and were perfectly contented.
As Mr. Walker was an official, I did not ask him about the working of
the recent changes in the constitution; nor could he have properly
answered me if I had. The state of things is briefly this: Jamaica,
after the first settlement, received a parliamentary form of government,
modelled on that of Ireland, the colonial liberties being restricted by
a law analogous to Poynings' Act. The legislature, so constructed, of
course represented the white interest only and was entirely composed of
whites. It remained substantially unaltered till 1853, when
modifications were made which admitted coloured men to the suffrage,
though with so high a franchise as to be almost exclusive. It became
generally felt that the franchise would have to be extended. A popular
movement, led by Mr. Gordon, who was a member of the legislature,
developed into a riot, into bloodshed and panic. Gordon was hanged by a
court-martial, and the assembly, aware that, if allowed to exist any
longer, it could exist only with the broad admission of the negro vote,
pronounced its own dissolution, surrendered its powers to the Crown, and
represented formally 'that nothing but a strong government could prevent
the island from lapsing into the condition of Hayti.'
The surrender was accepted. Jamaica was administered till within the
last four years by a governor, officials, and council all nominated by
the Queen. No dissatisfaction had been expressed, and the blacks at
least had enjoyed a prosperity and tranquillity which had been unbroken
by a single disturbance. If the island has suffered, it has suffered
from causes with which political dissatisfaction has had nothing to do,
and which, therefore, political changes cannot remove. In 1884 Mr.
Gladstone's Government, for reasons which I have not been able to
ascertain, revived suddenly the representative system; constructed a
council composed equally of nominated and of elected members, and placed
the franchise so low as to include practically every negro peasant who
possessed a hut and a garden. So long as the Crown retains and exercises
its power of nomination, no worse results can ensue than the inevitable
discontent when the votes of the elected members are disregarded or
overborne. But to have ventured so important an alteration with the
intention of leaving it without further extension would have been an act
of gratuitous folly, of which it would be impossible to imagine an
English cabinet to have been capable. It is therefore assumed and
understood to have been no more than an initial step towards passing
over the management of Jamaica to the black constituencies. It has been
so construed in the other islands, and was the occasion of the agitation
in Trinidad which I observed when I was there.
My own opinion as to the wisdom of such an experiment matters little:
but I have a right to say that neither blacks nor whites have asked for
it; that no one who knows anything of the West Indies and wishes them to
remain English sincerely asked for it; that no one has agitated for it
save a few newspaper writers and politicians whom it would raise into
consequence. If tried at all, it will be tried either with a deliberate
intention of cutting Jamaica free from us altogether, or else in
deference to English political superstitions, which attribute
supernatural virtues to the exercise of the franchise, and assume that a
form of self-government which suits us tolerably at home will be equally
beneficial in all countries and under all conditions.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] This has been angrily denied. A gentleman whose veracity I cannot
doubt assured me that he had himself seen a dead body lying unburied
among some bushes. When he returned to the place a month after it was
still there. The frightful mortality among the labourers, at least in
the early years of the undertaking, is too notorious to be called in
question.