Visit to Port Royal--Dockyard--Town--Church--Fort Augusta--The eyrie
in the mountains--Ride to Newcastle--Society in Jamaica--Religious
bodies--Liberty and authority.
A new fort was being built at the mouth of the harbour. New batteries
were being armed on the sandbanks at Port Royal. Colonel J---- had to
inspect what was going on, and he allowed me to go with him. We were to
lunch with the commodore of the station at the Port Royal dockyard. I
could then see the town--or what was left of it, for the story went that
half of it had been swallowed up by an earthquake. We ran out in a
steam launch from Kingston, passing under the sterns of the Spanish
frigates. I was told that there were always one or more Spanish ships of
war stationed there, but no one knew anything about them except
generally that they were on the look-out for Cuban conspirators. There
was no exchange of courtesies between their officers and ours, nor even
official communication beyond what was formally necessary. I thought it
strange, but it was no business of mine. My surprise, however, was
admitted to be natural. As the launch drew little water, we had no
occasion to follow the circuitous channel, but went straight over the
shoals. We passed close by Gallows Point, where the Johnny crows used to
pick the pirates' bones. In the mangrove swamp adjoining, it was said
that there was an old Spanish cemetery; but the swamp was poisonous, and
no one had ever seen it. At the dockyard pier the commodore was waiting
for us. I found that he was an old acquaintance whom I had met ten years
before at the Cape. He was a brisk, smart officer, quiet and sailor-like
in his manners, but with plenty of talent and cultivation. He showed us
his stores and his machinery, large engines, and engineers to work them,
ready for any work which might be wanted, but apparently with none to
do. We went over the hospital, airy and clean, with scarcely a single
occupant, so healthy has now been made a spot which was once a nest of
yellow fever. Naval stores soon become antiquated; and parts of the
great square were paved with the old cannon balls which had become
useless on the introduction of rifled guns. The fortifications were
antiquated also, but new works were being thrown up armed with the
modern monster cannon. One difficulty struck me; Port Royal stood upon a
sandbank. In such a place no spring of fresh water could be looked for.
On the large acreage of roofs there were no shoots to catch the rain and
carry it into cisterns. Whence did the water come for the people in the
town? How were the fleets supplied which used to ride there? How was it
in the old times when Port Royal was crowded with revelling crews of
buccaneers? I found that every drop which is consumed in the place, or
which is taken on board either of merchant ship or man-of-war, is
brought in a steam tug from a spring ten miles off upon the coast.
Before steam came in, it was fetched in barges rowed by hand. Nothing
could be easier than to save the rain which falls in abundance. Nothing
could be easier than to lay pipes along the sand-spit to the spring. But
the tug plies daily to and fro, and no one thinks more about the matter.
A West Indian regiment is stationed at Port Royal. After the dockyard we
went through the soldiers' quarters and then walked through the streets
of the once famous station. It is now a mere hamlet of boatmen and
fishermen, squalid and wretched, without and within. Half-naked children
stared at us from the doors with their dark, round eyes. I found it hard
to call up the scenes of riot, and confusion, and wild excitement which
are alleged to have been witnessed there. The story that it once covered
a far larger area has been, perhaps, invented to account for the
incongruity. Old plans exist which seem to show that the end of the spit
could never have been of any larger dimensions than it is at present.
There is proof enough, however, that in the sand there lie the remains
of many thousand English soldiers and seamen, who ended their lives
there for one cause or other. The bones lie so close that they are
turned up as in a country churchyard when a fresh grave is dug. The
walls of the old church are inlaid thickly with monuments and monumental
tablets to the memory of officers of either service, young and old; some
killed by fever, some by accidents of war or sea; some decorated with
the honours which they had won in a hundred fights, some carried off
before they had gathered the first flower of fame. The costliness of
many of these memorials was an affecting indication how precious to
their families those now resting there once had been. One in high relief
struck me as a characteristic specimen of Rubillac's workmanship. It was
to a young lieutenant who had been killed by the bursting of a gun.
Flame and vapour were rushing out of the breech. The youth himself was
falling backwards, with his arms spread out, and a vast preternatural
face--death, judgment, eternity, or whatever it was meant to be--was
glaring at him through the smoke. Bad art, though the execution was
remarkable; but better, perhaps, than the weeping angels now grown
common among ourselves.
After luncheon the commodore showed us his curiosities, especially his
garden, which, considering the state of his water supply, he had created
under unfavourable conditions. He had a very respectable collection of
tropical ferns and flowers, with palms and plantains to shade and
shelter them. He was an artist besides, within the lines of his own
profession. Drawings of ships and boats of all sorts and in all
attitudes by his own brush or pencil were hanging on the walls of his
working room. He was good enough to ask me to spend a day or two with
him at Port Royal before I left the island, and I looked forward with
special pleasure to becoming closer acquainted with such a genuine piece
of fine-grained British oak.
There were the usual ceremonies to be attended to. The officers of the
guardship and gunboats had to be called on. The forts constructed, or in
the course of construction, were duly inspected. I believe that there is
a real serious intention to strengthen Port Royal in view of the changes
which may come about through the opening, if that event ever takes
place, of the Darien canal.
Our last visit was to a fort deserted, or all but deserted--the once too
celebrated Fort Augusta, which deserves particular description. It
stands on the inner side of the lagoon commanding the deep-water channel
at the point of the great mangrove swamp at the mouth of the Cobre
river. For the purpose for which it was intended no better situation
could have been chosen, had there been nothing else to be considered
except the defence of the harbour, for a vessel trying to reach Kingston
had to pass close in front of its hundred guns. It was constructed on a
scale becoming its importance, with accommodation for two or three
regiments, and the regiments were sent thither, and they perished,
regiment after regiment, officers and men, from the malarious
exhalations of the morass. Whole battalions were swept away. The ranks
were filled up by reinforcements from home, and these, too, went the
same road. Of one regiment the only survivors, according to the
traditions of the place, were a quartermaster and a corporal. Finally it
occurred to the authorities at the Horse Guards that a regiment of
Hussars would be a useful addition to the garrison. It was not easy to
see what Hussars were to do there. There is not a spot where the horses
could stand twenty yards beyond the lines; nor could they reach Fort
Augusta at all except in barges. However, it was perhaps well that they
were sent. Horses and men went the way of the rest. The loss of the men
might have been supplied, but horses were costly, and the loss of them
was more serious. Fort Augusta was gradually abandoned, and is now used
only as a powder magazine. A guard is kept there of twenty blacks from
the West Indian force, but even these are changed every ten days--so
deadly the vapour of that malarious jungle is now understood to be.
I never saw so spectral a scene as met my eyes when we steamed up to the
landing place--ramparts broken down, and dismantled cannon lying at the
foot of the wall overgrown by jungle. The sentinel who presented arms
was like a corpse in uniform. He was not pale, for he was a negro--he
was green, and he looked like some ghoul or afrite in a ghastly
cemetery. The roofs of the barracks and storehouses had fallen in, the
rafters being left standing with the light shining between them as
through the bones of skeletons. Great piles of shot lay rusting, as not
worth removal; among them conical shot, so recently, had this fatal
charnel house been regarded as a fit location for British artillerymen.
I breathed more freely as we turned our backs upon the hideous memorial
of parliamentary administration, and steamed away into a purer air. My
conservative instincts had undergone a shock. As we look back into the
past, the brighter features stand out conspicuously. The mistakes and
miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In the present
faults and merits are visible alike. The faults attract chief notice
that they may be mended; and as there seem so many of them, the impulse
is to conclude that the past was better. It is well to be sometimes
reminded what the past really was. In Colonel J---- I found a strong
advocate of the late army reforms. Thanks to recovering energy and more
distinct conscientiousness, thanks to the all-seeing eye of the Press,
such an experiment as that of Fort Augusta could hardly be tried again,
or if tried could not be persisted in. Extravagance and absurdities,
however, remain, and I was next to witness an instance of them.
Having ceased to quarter our regiments in mangrove swamps, we now build
a camp for them among the clouds. I mentioned that Captain C---- had
undertaken that I should see Newcastle. He had written to a friend there
to say that I was coming up, and the junior aide-de-camp kindly lent his
services as a guide. As far as Gordon's Town we drove along the same
road which we had followed before. There, at a small wayside inn, we
found horses waiting which were accustomed to the mountain. Suspicious
mists were hanging about aloft, but the landlord, after a glance at
them, promised us a fine day, and we mounted and set off. My animal's
merits were not in his appearance, but he had been up and down a hundred
times, and might be trusted to accomplish his hundred and first without
misfortune. For the first mile or so the road was tolerably level,
following the bank of the river under the shade of the forest. It then
narrowed into a horse path and zigzagged upwards at the side of a
torrent into the deep pools of which we occasionally looked down over
the edges of uncomfortable precipices. Then again there was a level,
with a village and coffee plantations and oranges and bananas. After
this the vegetation changed. We issued out upon open mountain, with
English grass, English clover, English gorse, and other familiar
acquaintances introduced to make the isolation less intolerable. The
track was so rough and narrow that we could ride only in single file,
and was often no better than a watercourse; yet by this and no other
way every article had to be carried on donkeys' backs or human heads
which was required for the consumption of 300 infantry and 100
artillerymen. Artillerymen might seem to imply artillery, but they have
only a single small field gun. They are there for health's sake only,
and to be fit for work if wanted below. An hour's ride brought us to the
lowest range of houses, which were 4,000 feet above the sea. From thence
they rose, tier above tier, for 500 feet more. The weather so far had
held up, and the views had been glorious, but we passed now into a
cloud, through which we saw, dimly, groups of figures listlessly
lounging. The hillside was bare, and the slope so steep that there was
no standing on it, save where it had been flattened by the spade; and
here in this extraordinary place were 400 young Englishmen of the common
type of which soldiers are made, with nothing to do and nothing to
enjoy--remaining, unless they desert or die of ennui, for one, two, or
three years, as their chance may be. Every other day they can see
nothing, save each other's forms and faces in the fog; for, fine and
bright as the air may be below, the moisture in the air is condensed
into cloud by the chill rock and soil of the high ranges. The officers
come down now and then on furlough or on duty; the men rarely and hardly
at all, and soldiers, in spite of General ----, cannot always be made
happy by the picturesque. They are not educated enough to find
employment for their minds, and of amusement there is none.
We continued our way up, the track if anything growing steeper, till we
reached the highest point of the camp, and found ourselves before a
pretty cottage with creepers climbing about it belonging to the major in
command. A few yards off was the officers' mess room. They expected us.
They knew my companion, and visitors from the under-world were naturally
welcome. The major was an active clever man, with a bright laughing
Irish wife, whose relations in the old country were friends of my own.
The American consul and his lady happened to have ridden up also the
same day; so, in spite of fog, which grew thicker every moment, we had a
good time. As to seeing, we could see nothing; but then there was
nothing to see except views; and panoramic views from mountain tops,
extolled as they may be, do not particularly interest me. The officers,
so far as I could learn, are less ill off than the privates. Those who
are married have their wives with them; they can read, they can draw,
they can ride; they have gardens about their houses where they can grow
English flowers and vegetables and try experiments. Science can be
followed anywhere, and is everywhere a resource. Major ----told me that
he had never known what it was to find the day too long. Healthy the
camp is at any rate. The temperature never rises above 70 deg. nor sinks
often below 60 deg.. They require charcoal fires to keep the damp out and
blankets to sleep under; and when they see the sun it is an agreeable
change and something to talk about. There are no large incidents, but
small ones do instead. While I was there a man came to report that he
had slipped by accident and set a stone rolling; the stone had cut a
water pipe in two, and it had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work
for somebody. Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of
course, bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor
feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the partridges. I
suggested that they should import two or three couple of bears from
Norway; they would fatten and multiply among the roots and sugar canes,
with a black piccaninny now and then for a special delicacy. One of the
party extemporised us a speech which would be made on the occasion in
Exeter Hall.
We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted to ride back the
fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge. The track became a
torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for the water rushed down one's
neck, and every crease made itself into a conduit carrying the stream
among one's inner garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the
violence of these Jamaican downpourings. False had proved our prophet
down below. There was no help for it but to go on; and we knew by
experience that one does not melt on these occasions. At a turn of the
road we met another group of riders, among them Lady N----, who, during
her husband's absence in England, was living at a country house in the
hills. She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not
weather to stand talking in; the torrent washed us apart.
And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand feet down we
passed out below the clouds into clear bright sunshine. Above us it was
still black as ever. The vapour clung about the peaks and did not leave
them. Underneath us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The
farther we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen. When
we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was on the road as we
left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us on the correctness of his
forecast. Clothes soon dry in that country, and we drove down home none
the worse for our wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I
had heard so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the
authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor soldiers
halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the Caucasian cliffs to
which they are chained like Prometheus. Malice did say that Newcastle
was the property of a certain Sir ----, a high official of a past
generation, who wished to part with it, and found a convenient purchaser
in the Government.
The hospitalities at Government House were well maintained under the
J---- administration. The Colonel was gracious, the lady beautiful and
brilliant. There were lawn parties and evening parties, when all that
was best in the island was collected; the old Jamaican aristocracy, army
and navy officers, civilians, eminent lawyers, a few men among them of
high intelligence. The tone was old-fashioned and courteous, with
little, perhaps too little, of the _go-a-headism_ of younger colonies,
but not the less agreeable on that account. As to prospects, or the
present condition of things in the island, there were wide differences
of opinion. If there was unanimity about anything, it was about the
consequences likely to arise from an extension of the principle of
self-government. There, at all events, lay the right road to the wrong
place. The blacks had nothing to complain of, and the wrong at present
was on the other side. The taxation fell heavily on the articles
consumed by the upper classes. The duty on tea, for instance, was a
shilling a pound, and the duties on other luxuries in the same
proportion. It scarcely touched the negroes at all. They were acquiring
land, and some thought that there ought to be a land tax. They would
probably object and resist, and trouble would come if it was proposed,
for the blacks object to taxes. As long as there are white men to pay
them, they will be satisfied to get the benefit of the expenditure; but
let not their English friends suppose that when they have the island for
their own they will tax themselves for police or schools, or for any
other of those educational institutions from which the believers in
progress anticipate such glorious results.
As to the planters, it seemed agreed that when an estate was
unencumbered and the owner resided upon it and managed it himself, he
could still keep afloat. It was agreed also that when the owner was an
absentee the cost of management consumed all the profits, and thus the
same impulse to sell which had gone so far in the Antilles was showing
itself more and more in Jamaica also. Fine properties all about the
island were in the market for any price which purchasers could be found
to give. Too many even of the old English families were tired of the
struggle, and were longing to be out of it at any cost.
At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and the power which it
was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely that the political authority of
the white race will be allowed to reassert itself, it must be through
their minds and through those other qualities which religion addresses
that the black race will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be
influenced at all.
I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy were treated in
Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still maintains the French
episcopate and priesthood. But I could not find that the Church of
England in Jamaica either was at present or had ever been more than the
Church of the English in Jamaica, respected as long as the English
gentry were a dominant power there, but with no independent charm to
work on imagination or on superstition. Labat says, as I noted above,
that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the black babies, on
the curious ground that Christians could not lawfully be held as slaves,
and the slaves therefore were not to be made Christians. A Jesuit Father
whom I met at Government House told me that even now the clergy refuse
to baptise the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official
returns, nearly two-thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica come
into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become more
popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father ----was doing what a good
many other people do, making a general practice out of a few instances.
Perhaps the blacks themselves who wish their children to be Christians
carry them to the minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not
be the Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in Jamaica;
of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest praise. They, above
all the religious bodies in the island, are admitted to have a practical
power for good over the limited number of people which belong to them.
But the Moravians are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in
the highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost led me
to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual authority, the
Catholics might become more numerous than they are. The priests in
Dominica were the only Europeans who, for their own sakes and on
independent grounds, were looked up to with fear and respect.
The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises
before us at the close of this waning century. The future of the West
Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the
spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men
will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form
and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman
Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed
had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning
materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen
and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for
1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The
masses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The
masses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal
retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the
misery produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus.
Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than
welcoming it; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian gods, it
was not because they doubted whether gods existed at all, but because
the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature
of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made
wretched by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is against
the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the telescope can
search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or
the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only
uniformity and connection of cause and effect--no sign anywhere of a
personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a
subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific
explanation; we no longer refer 'ad Deum,' whom we regard as a
constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed,
however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly
professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might
become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain
the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the
reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but
wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the
presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the
Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of
reconciliation with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered
in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness to adapt
itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian gods survived for seven
centuries after Aristophanes with the help of allegory and 'economy.'
The Church of Rome may survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle
mocked at the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle
seemed to think that the mass was the only form of faith in Europe which
had any sincerity remaining in it.
A religion, at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from
falling into devil worship is still to seek. Constitutions and belief in
progress may satisfy Europe, but will not answer in Jamaica. In spite of
the priests, child murder and cannibalism have reappeared in Hayti; but
without them things might have been worse than they are, and the
preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be
better than none.
White authority and white influence may, however, still be preserved in
a nobler and better way. Slavery was a survival from a social order
which had passed away, and slavery could not be continued. It does not
follow that _per se_ it was a crime. The negroes who were sold to the
dealers in the African factories were most of them either slaves already
to worse masters or were _servi_, servants in the old meaning of the
word, prisoners of war, or else criminals, _servati_ or reserved from
death. They would otherwise have been killed; and since the slave trade
has been abolished are again killed in the too celebrated 'customs.' The
slave trade was a crime when the chiefs made war on each other for the
sake of captives whom they could turn into money. In many instances,
perhaps in most, it was innocent and even beneficent. Nature has made us
unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and
some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind. For
myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley than
the slave of a majority in the House of Commons or the slave of my own
folly. Slavery is gone, with all that belonged to it; but it will be an
ill day for mankind if no one is to be compelled any more to obey those
who are wiser than himself, and each of us is to do only what is right
in our own eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is
not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is
not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or emancipate
themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has
placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The
negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient
children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams
only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking
for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive them
back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade
was the beginning of their emancipation.