THE WEST INDIES

By the same Artist.
MOROCCO
CONTAINING 74 FULL-PAGE REPRODUCTIONS
IN COLOUR OF Mr. A. S. Forrest’s
pictures.
Text by S. L. BENSUSAN.
Price 20s. Net.

THE WEST INDIES

PAINTED BY A. S. FORREST
DESCRIBED BY JOHN
HENDERSON · PUBLISHED
BY ADAM AND CHARLES
BLACK · LONDON · MCMV

Contents

List of Illustrations

The illustrations in this volume were engraved in England by the Hentschel Colourtype Process.

HISTORICAL

CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL

In Britain we have lost the art of correct perspective. We see distant things through jaundiced eyes; as a nation we are too prone to regard over-sea lands and peoples with compassion tempered with contempt, or with envy and timidity. To ensure our respect and sympathy a country must be successful; we have no room in our Empire for failures. America, because of her commercial genius and industrial enterprise, we respect and revere and imitate. We exaggerate the successes of the States and credit the American with commercial omnipotence. The word American stands in the unprinted national dictionary as meaning efficient, successful, up-to-date. I have heard that English tradesmen have labelled English-made goods “American” in order that a quick sale might be ensured in Britain’s capital. We refuse to believe that America has ceased to be related to us by ties of kinship; to the Englishmen of the homeland Americans are first cousins. And so it is, conversely, with England and the West Indies.

At home we are apt to think of the West Indies as a scattered group of poverty-stricken islands, barren of riches, planted somewhere in some tropical sea, and periodically reduced to absolute desolation by hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes. The poverty of the Western Indies is proverbial. Occasionally Imperial Parliament brings forward some measure, which, in the opinion of some individual, might tend to relieve the distress and commercial poverty of our West Indian possessions; at other times a fund is started at the Mansion-House to help the West Indian victims of some fearful tornado or earthquake. That is all that is generally known of the great islands of the Caribbean Sea. In our dreams of Empire we prefer to think of Canada, Africa, and strenuous Australasia. Commercially and politically our West Indies are, according to the general idea, more than half derelict, and wholly without the attractions of wealth and promise. We forget that these Western islands were at one time the richest of England’s possessions; we do not realise how rich they, some day, will again become. If Britain only understood aright she would know that it is only through her own neglect, through her half-hearted, penurious West Indian policy, that our Caribbean Empire is not in the front rank of her richest possessions to-day. The riches of the West Indies played a large part in the formation of Britain’s greatness. We swept the islands clear of all their surface wealth at a period when England was most in need of gold. And because to-day we cannot send ships from Plymouth with empty

holds and crowded quarter-decks, to return from a six months’ voyage in the Indies crowded with treasure and glory, we count the islands barren. We forget that West Indian wealth was invested in Britain’s greatness years before we had an empire. We forget that Britain’s navy was founded by men who were trained to war and seamanship among those islands of the West. More than once have these islands seen the pride and glory of England hanging in the balance, and once, at least, the Indies knew before the homeland that a blow, which had threatened the very foundations of British greatness, had been hurled in vain.

That was in the time of Burke and Fox and Rodney. Spain and France and Holland had combined, and in one great battle threatened to crush the power of England, and to wrest from her the supremacy of the seas. England trembled, and the popular party advocated surrender and peace. France and Spain wanted the Indies. Rodney sailed from England to uphold the power and dominion of his race. He sailed amidst the sullen silence of a people whose power he was to uphold. A few weeks after his sailing a message was despatched from Parliament commanding him not to fight. He was to strike his colours and surrender the Indies. But the message arrived too late. Rodney had already fought and won when the craven message reached him. The battle had happened off Dominica, and the flag of England remained triumphant in the Caribbean Sea. The English ships were victorious, and Rodney had saved his country against his country’s will. And since that day no one has challenged England’s supremacy in the islands of the West.

The history of the West Indies is filled with chapters as strong even as this; in no corner of the world have so many brave deeds been done for “England, home, and beauty.” Stories of mighty Spanish galleons sunk by British ships of war; of pillage and bloodshed and treasure; of the battles of France and Spain and England; of the wealth of the Spanish main, intercepted among these islands, and stored in some West Indian port for convenience of British merchant adventure houses, are encountered at every step on our journey through the records of the Caribbean group. We read of buccaneers and filibusters; of Morgan, the last of the tribe, knighted and made Vice-Governor of Jamaica; of the doings of the redoubtable Kidd; of the bloodiness of Blackbeard; of the countless list of names, some high-sounding, which at last were painted in crimson splashes on the gallows slip at Port Royal headland. Port Royal itself deserves a niche in the temple of fame. The richest and the most vicious town the world ever knew; so it was before the clean ocean washed away its vice and corruption, and buried it deep in the pure water of the blue Caribbean. When Morgan knew it, when the prizes of Kidd and the others were moored alongside its treasure-laden wharves, the strip of land contained the richest city in the world.

Bearded seamen, bronzed and weather-stained, but decked with priceless jewellery and the finest silks of the Orient, swaggered along its quays, and gambled with heavy golden coins whose value no one cared to estimate. The drinking shops were filled with cups of gold and silver, embellished with flashing gems. Each house was a treasure store. The place was a gilded hell, and mammon held sovereign sway over its people. Such wealth and vice and debauchery had never been dreamed of. Common seamen bathed in the richest wine, and hung their ears with heavy gold rings studded with the costliest gems. Dagger thrusts were as common as brawls, and the body of a murdered man would remain in a dancing-room until the dancing was over. Gold and precious stones were cheap, but life was cheaper. And every man in that crowd of pirates lived beneath the shadow of the gallows.

Finer it is to remember the Western voyages of Drake and Hawkins and all the old sea-dogs who first proclaimed the might of British seamen. Picture them, scurvy-stricken, reduced by disease and famine, resting and recruiting in the wide bays of any West Indian isle. Imagine their joy at finding luscious fruits and sweet, health-giving water. Then see them in their tiny ships darting from behind the cover of some wooded neck of land, surprising a galleon ten times their weight, scuttling the little vessel and manning the Spanish leviathan with British seamen. How many little English barques lie beneath the dark blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico! Having found their prize and tasted the joy of victory, the British captains thirst for more. They sail the Spanish seas in a Spanish ship, and sack the coast towns, levying heavy toll; they fight great battles and pound the deeply laden treasure ships with Spanish cannon trimmed by British gunners. They select the richest spoil and fling the rest to the waves. How many bars of gold and silver, how many crates of silks, and iron boxes filled with gems; how many sacks of doubloons have sunk in these Western waters, and lie there now, buried amidst the skeleton of a rotting vessel!

All these things were done in these seas by Englishmen in the days of old, done for greed of gain and the lust of bloodshed. Done also in the name of religion, and because two sects, worshipping the same God, quarrelled in regard to ritual; and because one sect put a sword at the throat of the other and said, Do as we do, or die. Just as the Inquisition proved to be the undoing of the might and wealth of Spain, so did the Inquisition, indirectly, give the West Indies to the English. The West Indian waters formed the training school of Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Raleigh; and these men founded the navy. In later days Rodney revived the Caribbean school, and there Nelson learned how to outwit the French in ocean battles. Because of these things, but not only because of these things, do we owe a great debt to these Antillean islands.

So far as we are concerned the history of the Indies is a medley of romance, the romance of British greatness. There we laid the foundation of our Empire; the Caribbean Sea is the font of the temple of our greatness.

But, for the islands themselves, there is little record

of history save where their existence first influenced the politics of Europe. The Spaniards were the first white men to tread their fragrant shores and bring destruction to a race of wild red men whose first instinct was that of fear. Columbus, the Genoese mariner, first and greatest of all explorers, anchored his tiny vessels in Morant Bay, Jamaica, on his second voyage to America. The beauty of the place bewildered him, and when his patron, the King of Spain, asked for a description of the island, the artistic Genoese crumpled a piece of paper, and presented that as a picture of the rugged formation of the Queen of the Antilles. Four times did Columbus journey to the Indies, which were annexed by him to the Spanish Crown. The horrors of the early Spanish rule can only be imagined. Millions of the gentle Caribs were transported to the mainland, and worked to death in the Spanish gold mines. Those that were permitted to remain were, if they survived the Inquisition, pressed into slavery.

So the Spaniards ruled for a century and a half; for one hundred and sixty years they claimed the bulk of the West Indian islands as their own. This claim was uncontested by the powers of Europe, but the Spaniards were harassed always by the buccaneers, French and English, whose ships swept the main in search of prey. Whether England was at war with Spain or not, the English sea-dogs were always at the throats of Spaniards in the western hemisphere.

The Protector Cromwell essayed to break the Western power of Spain, and sent Penn and Venables to crush them out of the Indies. In an engagement off Domingo the British were defeated, but the doughty English captains retired on to Jamaica, which they annexed to England. Then the French filibusters drove the Spaniards out of Hayti, and gave it to the crown of France. The French had held the smaller Antilles—Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Antigua. In times of war with France, Britain had taken these islands, but they had been retaken by the French. It was in Rodney’s time that they all came permanently under the English flag. Nowadays the British hold all the larger islands, the French retain the smaller lands of Martinique, Guadaloupe, Deserva, Marie Galante, Les Saints, St. Bartholomew, and part of St. Martin, the Dutch hold five, the Danish three, and Spain still holds three. One or two are part of the Venezuelan Republic, Puerto Rico belongs to the U.S.A., and several are independent.

JAMAICA

CHAPTER II
JAMAICA

Sitting under the shade of a verandah, watching the brilliant butterflies and many-coloured birds fluttering and wheeling among the sweet-scented flowers of Jamaica, it is difficult for one to remember how one passed out of England—I had almost written out of the world—and reached this land, which surely should be called God’s Island. But, I remember, a day or two ago we reached Turk’s Island, and after handing a few bags of mails to a black, buccaneer-like boatman, who said he was the postmaster, we glided along the shore—a few miles of low-lying, palm-treed coral-land—and sailed into the Caribbean Sea. And so we reached the tropics—the other side of the world. At last we were among the hundred isles of the West Indies, and in the full glare of the tropic sun. The paint blistered and bubbled on the handrail, and the sea seemed a giant mirror, on which the sun flashed silver-white, with never-ceasing, blinding force. There seemed to be no air; the space it should have occupied was transparent, and, apparently, empty. It was difficult to move; truth to tell, I remember feeling a little uncomfortable; but, all the same, it was heavenly.

By Turk’s Island it rained. There was a sudden darkness, the blinding sun disappeared, the air became cooler, and then down came the rain. The deck of the ship became a waterfall, and for thirty minutes or so we were enveloped in a furious deluge.

But ten minutes after the rain had ceased, the deck, the sails, and the canvas deck-awnings were dry as though sun-scorched for centuries. That was our weather. We lived on fruit and tepid baths. It was too hot for sleep, too hot for work, too hot for conversation. In the tropics the only thing possible is “nothing"—and a long, iced drink.

Lolling on deck in the daytime, we could watch the flying fish, the dolphin, the drifting nautilus, and the hungry shark; or view the islands as slowly they glided backwards into impenetrable haze. To the right Cuba, a thin irregular line on the horizon, glistening gold above the blue-white of the sea; to the left Hayti, the land in which the black man is supreme, and where, in spite of science and the twentieth century, cannibalism and child murder exist. The white patches, which show above the green of the plantations as you crawl along the shore, are houses. They stand as monuments to the French, who once were masters of the land—masters until, by order of their Government, the French-owned slaves were free—when, by way of exercising their new-found freedom, the niggers slaughtered every white on the island. Since then Hayti has been a republic—a republic with many presidents and many disturbances.

At night there was the wonderful moon and the cool, fresh air. It was pleasant to watch the sea; astern, we left a living, toiling, twisting thread of silver foam; ahead, our bows struck the water, and it flashed fire. Sometimes all was dark; sometimes the sea blazed with phosphorescent light. But always overhead the yellow moon and the golden stars were studded in the blue-black dome of night.

A few hours after leaving Turk’s Island we found Jamaica. Afar off, through the brilliant air of the morning, we saw a tiny pepper-box, which presently turned into a sugar-caster, and gradually, by many complicated but interesting evolutions, developed into a full-fledged lighthouse. The lighthouse is on Morant Point, and Morant Point is the beginning of Jamaica. Columbus named the island Santa Gloria; he was the first European to be bewitched by that low coast-line, all gold shot with green and darker green, stretching back from the sea to the foot of the great Blue Mountains; the Blue Mountains, whose peaks, shrouded in white mist, are buried deep in the hazy sky. Along the shore we sailed, past cane plantations, banana groves, white houses, snow-white roads, and great everlasting clumps of graceful palm-trees. Ahead, standing out at the end of a neck of land, we saw Port Royal—the real, wonderful, most romantic Port Royal, doubly robed in glory by fiction as well as history. Here came Nelson, Rodney, Jervis, Collingwood, and every mighty sailor England ever had.

Moored to these wharves have lain prizes, rich beyond compare, newly snatched from Spain and France. Here England’s flag, proudly flung from masts of wooden warships, has proclaimed victory; and here also English ships, battered and war-stained, have lain under the dread banner of the buccaneer. For Port Royal was a pirate stronghold centuries before it became a British naval base.

Sailing along the six miles of narrow coral ridge which connects the town with the land, it is not difficult to conjure up the Port Royal Nelson knew. The palm-trees and the luxuriant tropical foliage still abound; the native craft and the nigger boatmen do not seem to belong to to-day, and Kingston, hidden and guarded by this strip of land, seems somehow to suggest romance and mystery. The sea all round is studded with treacherous coral reefs, some of which, just showing above the water, are thickly grown with palm-trees. The effect is beautiful in the extreme; the clumps of trees, planted apparently on nothing, are growing straight out of the sea.

As you round Port Royal you discover Kingston, a large, white, straggling town, on the land side entirely hemmed in by the Blue Mountains, and seawards washed by the waters of a lagoon seven or eight miles long, and nearly half as wide. Slowly we steamed to the town, passing an ancient, dismantled and deserted fort, which once mounted its hundred guns.

I remember that our good ship was at last made fast to the wooden quay, and the black-faced, white-coated labourers grinned us greeting as we stepped ashore. After some excitement with many half-castes representing the Customs, the hotels, and the buggies, who each and all claimed a portion of our baggage, we safely emerged from the dock district into the dusty main road of Kingston. It was strange to find up-to-date, twentieth century, American, electric cars screaming along roads which, if they were ever built at all, were certainly completed two centuries back; and it was even more strange to learn that these cars have not entirely depopulated Kingston.

I remember being possessed of a great idea of walking to my hotel. A fresh sea breeze was blowing, and the prospect of a stroll through the town was peculiarly inviting. But unfortunately the dock gates were barricaded with buggies, and to successfully evade the manœuvres of one only meant falling into the clutches of another. Passage between the vehicles there was none, and when I attempted to step through one carriage to get clear of the others, the fiendish driver whipped his ponies and whirled me out of the dockyard before I could regain my presence of mind. Outside, the delighted man claimed me as a passenger, and when I found that I was sitting on a singularly pompous and overheated Britisher, who had been captured in the same enterprising manner, I forgot to be angry, and began to apologise. The result was entirely satisfactory—the pompous Britisher never forgave me. We dropped him, I remember, the first time the ponies took it into their heads to slow up, but the worthy man seriously offended our driver by refusing to pay. For half an hour they wrangled in the crowded main street, and frequently I feared the sudden death of my white friend. However, the storm came to a sudden and dramatic finish by the skilful capture of the weary Englishman by another buggyman. We left him cursing Jamaica and buggies, and particularly all black men. After a series of adventures and narrow escapes we at last reached the Constant Spring Hotel. The driver suggested that I should pay him a sovereign, but he accepted ten shillings with the utmost cheerfulness. Afterwards I discovered that the fare was certainly not more than a dollar.

I sat in a comfortable wicker chair in the commodious entrance hall of the hotel and tried to collect my scattered senses. The excitement of my buggy journey, and the interest of my first glimpse of the capital of the Queen of the Antilles, had somewhat unstrung my thinking faculties. I was alone in a strange hotel in a strange country. My luggage was heaven knows where, and my companions, Forrest and the others, were left on a crowded quay somewhere down in the dock district.

I called for a cooling drink and mentioned my trouble to the coal-black waiter.

“That’s al’ light, sah. They come soon, sah.”

So I remained in that comfortable chair in the vestibule of the hotel and waited. A ragged, disreputable-looking

John crow, perched on a bush of scarlet blossoms just in front of where I sat, regarded me with a look of thoughtful contempt. As my nerves got more settled I became conscious of the rich perfumes of the flowers; the insects were buzzing and chirping outside, and the strong sun gave to my shaded resting-place an air of quiet coolness. Graceful negresses were watering the flower-beds; they carried the watering-cans on their heads until they found the particular plant they wished to sprinkle with the refreshing liquid. Their movements were slow and deliberate and very graceful.

It was a peaceful summer day; from where I sat I could see, afar off, a thin edge of blue beyond the distant confines of the town, and I made out the white patches of the sails of little vessels. I lit my pipe and waited. Suddenly there was a jangle and a crash, and a buggy stopped at the hotel door; in it the head of my friend Forrest appeared from amidst a heap of sketch-books, easels, portfolios, and virgin canvases. I could see by the agonised expression on his flushed countenance that he was very angry. I called the waiter and told him to help the poor struggling artist to disentangle himself from the debris of his paraphernalia.

Poor Forrest came to where I sat and sank into another wicker chair. He seized my cooling drink and emptied the glass at one gulp.

“Where am I?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Where’s Large and the Colonel?”

I shook my head.

“Seen my luggage?”

I shook my head again.

He glanced through the doorway and caught sight of the disreputable John crow perched on the bank of scarlet blossoms, and, fumbling for a pencil, made his first Jamaican sketch there and then. I ordered another cooling drink, and so we waited for our luggage and our friends.

Jamaica is the largest and most important island in the British West Indies. It contains an area of some two thousand odd square miles, and supports a population of three quarters of a million people, only two per cent of whom are white. The blacks claim the predominating proportion of seventy-seven per cent, the “coloured” people represent nearly twenty per cent, and the remainder of the population is made up of whites, Indian coolies, and Chinese. The ten thousand coolies at work on the plantations in the interior have become a force in the island, and they are destined to play a considerable part in the commercial salvation of the country. The negroes are, of course, the descendants of the slaves imported from Africa in the days of the slave trade; the coloured class are the offsprings of the union of the whites with the blacks, or of the half-breeds with the negroes. The coolies are of recent importation from India, and the Chinese have come, no one knows how, to trade with the negroes in up-country districts.

In the days of old, Jamaica waxed fat on the profits of her sugar estates and the rich prizes of her rum trade. Fortunes were made almost without effort or exertion by old-time planters. Sugar was sold at absurdly high prices, and the planters cultivated their plantations entirely by slave labour.

The Emancipation Act of 1834 flung the industries of the island out of joint, and although the Imperial Government granted compensation to the extent of nearly six millions sterling to the owners of the three hundred thousand slaves they had liberated, the dry rot of decay set in, and Jamaica fell from her high position among commercial communities. The richest planters sold out their plantations and returned to the old country; the poorer planters who remained in the island were terribly handicapped for lack of labour. The freed slaves refused to work for their late masters, and the labour difficulty set in. Factories were forced to stop work; fields lay unplanted and untended for lack of workers. And this labour difficulty has remained more or less acute from that day to this. It was believed by the authorities that the introduction of the ten thousand coolies would help to solve the difficulty. The negroes had built for themselves little huts, and were content to live on the native fruits and vegetables. The pleasant indolence of their new life suited their tastes to a nicety; the rewards offered in return for their labour were neither sufficient nor in any way attractive. The warm climate and rich soil were all the Jamaican African required to make his life all that he desired. Sugar plantations were abandoned and rum factories were shut down, and poverty came to the land of wood and water. Naturally the white people resented the idleness of the blacks, and several eruptions occurred; the Gordon riots, and other disturbances less notorious, were directly caused by the impatience of the whites and the impertinence of the blacks.

Fine as is the picture of those three hundred thousand Africans climbing the mountain sides of their island prison-home in order that they might face the sun on the morning of the emancipation, we must not ignore the prospect of the valleys, lying in the deep shadows of those mountains, which were to be half desolated by the glory of that sunrise. If the black men were willing to work as hard now, or even half as hard, as their fathers once were forced to work, we should hear no dreary stories of Jamaica’s poverty. The island has got an ideal climate, a marvellously productive soil, and labourers in plenty; it lacks but the spirit of labour. The natural wealth of the country is vast enough, but the harvesters are idle and unwilling to work. The fact that the Government was forced to bring ten thousand coolies from distant India to work in the plantations and factories is a lasting disgrace to most of the five hundred thousand black men and many of the hundred and fifty thousand coloured folk. The pity of it is that neither of these classes seems to feel the sting of the disgrace. The negro has in his being no instinct for labour; the women only are willing workers.

Solve the Jamaica labour problem and the commercial problem will solve itself.

The climate of the island is as nearly perfect as any climate can hope to be. It is a country of perpetual sunshine and blue skies. The heat of the day is tropical, but it is always tempered by cool sea breezes; and when the sun has gone the evenings and the nights are deliciously cool and refreshing. The island is really possessed of many different climates. The towns and villages among the hills on the mountain slopes are always cooler than the cities of the plains. The climate of the place has always been grossly maligned by people of the homeland. On my first journey out to Jamaica I imagined that I should find the place filled with yellow fever and malaria; I thought of it as a sort of West Africa—only a little worse. And I found it the most pleasant and healthy place imaginable. In spite of all the statements and statistics to the contrary, the conservative people of England still believe that a journey to the Queen of the Antilles includes the risk of yellow jack. Fevers there are, of course, just as in England there are coughs and colds; and I would choose a Jamaica fever before an English cold. Yellow fever is a disease which attacks you when you least expect it, and leaves you quite dead, or nearly so. It is an uncanny, unwholesome thing, and is not a respecter of persons. Really, for all practical purposes, Jamaica is free of yellow fever; the disease has been stamped out. People die of it even to this date; but even England is not entirely free from smallpox. Yet one cannot describe smallpox as one of the characteristics of our little island. In the same way it would be foolish to associate Jamaica with yellow fever.

The Jamaicans discuss the disease with dispassionate, respectful dread. It is a thing to be avoided; if met face to face it must be combated with heroism, and a particular remedy peculiar almost to every inhabitant. Many there are alive on the island who have had the yellow jack and lived; many more there are who still mourn the loss of those who bowed before its malignant power. The younger colonists—those people who have lived there only ten or fifteen or twenty years—talk of the ’97 outbreak; the old inhabitants speak of the last real epidemic, the ’77 affair. So and so went down then, and poor old what’s-his-name died in two hours. I met one man who told me of a picnic he gave in the mountains some seven years ago. Sixteen guests sat down; eight died of yellow fever before the year closed down. That would be in the ’97 outbreak. But these are rare cases.

Malarial fever is common in the towns and some parts of the country in Jamaica, but it is a little fever without strength; it is not dangerous. There is no malignant malarial. Though Jamaicans contract malarial as frequently perhaps as Englishmen catch cold in London, the malarial is not so dangerous as the cold. So it is not of much account. Jamaica is a pleasanter place to live in than London, but new arrivals should adapt themselves to the condition of things. Clothes and habits admirably adapted for the English climate are generally out of place in a tropical island.

The staple products of the island are entirely agricultural. Jamaica has embraced the fruit trade. Half the total value of her exports is represented by her over-sea trade in bananas, oranges, grape fruit, and pine-apples. The sugar and rum trades take secondary positions, but coffee is rapidly coming to the front.

To-day the island has little political significance save for the fact that it is a strong naval base. It is probable that the completion of the Panama Canal will give to it a more important status in the political world. With the opening of the new ocean route to the East, Jamaica will become a naval base of the utmost importance to Britain.

THE TOWN OF KINGSTON

CHAPTER III
THE TOWN OF KINGSTON

The town of Kingston is made up of mean streets crammed with little bungalow houses, filled to overflowing with people coloured in all the shades of black and yellow. If the place resembles any well-known capital it must be New York; but a New York built by children in doll’s-house style, and painted green and white. In the manner of New York the streets stretch to the wharves and quays of the giant harbour, and electric tram-cars clang along the busy roads by day and night. Electric poles stick up along the roadway in blatant disregard of the finer feelings of romantic tourists. The shops are usually called emporiums, and they flash with all the gaudy fitments common to the meaner streets of New York city. Some there are that might be English—quiet and respectable places in which the white man finds his needs supplied by intelligent half-breeds, who do not count themselves among the coloured class. These aristocrats among Jamaica’s shop assistants have all the polish of a London draper, mixed with an obvious consciousness of vast responsibility. As a rule he affects gold spectacles, and closely resembles an Indian Babu studying law. With this class of salesman it is impossible to exercise one’s powers of bargaining. The suggestion of a reduction in the price of a linen collar would be to these commercial gentlemen entirely in the nature of an insult. They do not live to amass money. Their mission is to supply Jamaican Englishmen with necessary comforts at the lowest possible price; there is no suggestion of gain in their commerce. Homilies on the ethics of tradesmanship, delivered with great eloquence and a religious accent from behind a dark face screened with gold spectacles, are impressive in the extreme. The real salesman is to be found in smaller stores. There the tradesman regards as a man without wisdom the dull buyer who pays more than half the sum asked for any article. It is on such that the people wax fat in the land. This acute process of buying is tedious if the buyer lacks experience. The easiest method is to offer the merchant just one quarter the sum asked for any article. This gives the keeper of the shop a shock, but impresses him with the fact that he is not likely to be able to swindle you to an unlimited extent. It has become legitimate trade with him, and so when you double your offer and proffer half the original figure, the desired commodity is wrapped up and money changes hands. It is only by adopting this method that a tourist can afford to live in Jamaica. There is still another class of seller, but with this class the white man has no dealings. The women who sell sticky

sweetmeats or sweating pastries along the kerb-stones, do not appeal to the adult of the race of England. Such sellers are the native costermongers. They have no barrows or elaborate stalls; their paraphernalia consists of a broken basket, or piece of board supported across the knees. They are the sellers of fruit, sweetmeats, tobacco, eggs, live poultry, and the sticky, greasy pastries dear to the heart of the negro, be he old or young. As a rule the basket stalls are placed at the roadside, well in the glare of the sun. The saleswoman is usually very old, and her costume is of dull rags constructed to resemble a lady’s dress. Her face is creased at the jaws, and the cheek bones stand out like gnarled fists; her remaining teeth are very yellow, and her skinny hands are for ever shuffling the contents of her basket. Such women make no bid for trade; the buyer comes or he comes not. The dull face shows no emotion. It may be that the basket and its contents are the property of a negro speculator; she, the seller, perhaps, is simply an agent working for her daily yam. These are not the merry women of the market-place who come in from the country with a load of produce to sell and to spend a day in town. If it were not for the sweetmeats they would pass as ancient beggars. Of course Kingston has its gamin—the wild, bareheaded, barelegged boy, who is always shouting or running or playing his mysterious games of the streets. He, of course, is the essence of youthful happiness. His day is divided between the harbour, where he dives for pennies among the sharks alongside ocean-going passenger boats, and the streets, where he is prepared for anything, from stealing a water melon to chasing the donkeys of the market-place. When a stranger accosts him he becomes all grinning innocence and flashing teeth. “Me work, sah, yes, sah, very hard work, very little money. I ask you for a penny, sah, for my mother’s sake, sah, one penny.” It seems to me that every boy, be he black or white, or yellow or red, whether he live in London, Paris, Tokio, or Kingston, Jamaica, is afflicted with the same genius of mischief.

The capital of Jamaica has its pest also. In most places frequented by tourists the great pest is the guide pest; in Jamaica it is the buggyman. The buggy, of course, is the cab of the Indies, and the buggyman is the curse of the country. With him we will deal at length elsewhere. But the buggies and the buggyman should always be considered as the Jamaican pests.

It is curious to see the long electric Canadian road car swing at ten-mile speed down these narrow streets crowded with the picturesque people of the Western Indies. The effect of the streets is kaleidoscopic; the sudden appearance of a car reminds one of the mutoscope which shows a railway train rushing at the audience. Such is the impression of the road car in the crowded Jamaican streets. The people have become accustomed to this touch of a vigorous Western world. The noise of its rushing and the horrible jangle of its clanking bell have ceased to provoke interest. The car is a thing on which, for a copper or two, the workers may ride home. It saves great fatigue and much walking. The market baskets may be placed beneath the seats; the town slips rapidly behind, and home is reached. Heaven knows what moves the car along. There are no horses, and no engines like those on the railway. It is a thing causing annoyance to the buggyman, that is all. For the rest you can ride five or six miles at ten miles an hour speed for four Jamaican pennies.

The country-people, who come once a week to sell their produce in the great Saturday foregathering of agricultural Jamaica, still show wonder and fear at the approach of a tram. They still jump into the hedges as the tram flies along—still turn their eyes away from the chaff of the negro conductor. But that is the only respect shown to this foreign importation.

The dusty streets of the capital melt into country lanes with scented hedges as you swing out of the city on a journey to the Constant Spring terminus of the tramway. White dust takes the place of the darker city dust. The scent of half the flowers of the world crush out the musty odour of crowded alleys, always stewing beneath a tropic sun. That is the great charm of the tramway, the only real excuse for its existence. By it you can rush out of evil town-life into the sweetness of the most beautiful country in the world. To see a high range of purple mountains, fronted by heavy fields of banana trees and towering pines, and brilliant flowers of every tint and shade and shape—to see all these from the seat of a tram car which might just as well be taking you from Shepherd’s Bush to Kew, is a thing every one should experience. The attitude of the native to the cars is representative of ingrained indifference to everything.

Of all places in and about Kingston, the market-place is the most fascinating. Really there are two buildings—two groups of compact sheds, walled in and guarded by lazy constables of justice. They are distant from each other to the extent of about half a mile, but the road which links the one to the other is, on market days, just as busy a place as either building. So it is easier to count both buildings and roadway one long market. And it is better to trade in the open highway than it is to haggle with women in a crowded building reeking with strong smells of fruit and fowls and vegetables, musty basket-work, decomposing meat, and a few hundred healthy negroes. Of course it is necessary that we should go the round of the covered stalls and stand the cross-fire of two rows of anxious saleswomen, whose lung power is of artillery force. After the first ten yards of the passage any ordinary Englishman has lost his power of blushing. The blandishments of the women are crude and full of personalities. One calls you a pretty English gentleman, and shouts her strong opinion that you would look very handsome in her fine hat of Ippi Appa straw. Another hails you as her long-lost lover; and a younger woman, more brazen than her seniors, invites you to greet her with a “fine big kiss, my love.” It is embarrassing, especially if you show embarrassment. A blush on your cheek is, as it were, a red flag to

the wit of three hundred women. Soon you find your utter abandon and exchange compliments. The negro woman respects a white man who has no reserve. At one stall you will find all the fruits of the Indies: succulent mangoes, golden grape fruit, oranges, bananas, guavas, nazeberries, pine-apples, and a half hundred others. The combined force of all the smells is terrific. Next, an aged basket-woman displays examples of the only real art-work produced by the West Indian negroes. The baskets are really good. You can buy one of any shape, any size, and any and every design. Coloured grass is let into snow-white reed with fine cunning, and without regard for any canon of conventionality. The character of the casual negroes is shown in the patterns of their basket-work. All the younger women are told off to superintend the stalls which cater to the weaknesses of tourists. The women are given silver ornaments to wear on their coal black wrists, and frequently their ears are hung with heavy Eastern rings. This is a fashion copied from the coolie women. All the woman’s personal jewellery is offered for sale. She will explain the meaning of the most complicated article of native manufactures with cheerful languor. She assumes an air of indifference so long as she knows you intend to buy. When you begin to show indifference, the instinct of the saleswoman springs to life in her, and she is all entreaty. She offers wonderful whips made from the lace bark tree, whips whose butt and long plaited lash are both made from one piece of wood. She offers walking sticks of ebony, groo groo palm, pimento, bamboo, or cinnamon. Or if you prefer it, you can purchase a shark’s backbone mounted on a steel rod and fitted with a handle of scented sandal wood. This, the lady will tell you, is in England a great novelty, and surely worth five little dollars. Of course there is basket-work, and some pottery shaped out of red Caribbean clay. There are strings of coloured seeds and flower-pots made from wide bamboos. Gourds are carved and coloured and cut into useless shapes alleged to be ornamental, and cocoa-nuts are carved into men’s heads, the red hair left to make a frizzy beard. These, the lady says, are very fine. There are little gourds set on wooden skewers, and so formed into babies’ rattles. These the arch maiden sells to young men and maidens. Last of all, she produces dainty d’oyleys and table-centres and fine ornaments made from the lace bark-tree, and fashioned with ferns and pressed blossoms. These things cost a great deal of money, but as a rule they are very decorative. When you leave her stall, the lady pursues you for many yards with a mammoth lamp-shade, which, she assures you, will be greatly appreciated by your home folks.

But the stall of the tourist caterer suggests artificiality. After all, the real market is under the vestibule of the great square building. Here are the native people with their pepper-pods and cocoa, their live fowls and jackass rope. The latter, be it understood, is tobacco. Sold in rope form at one penny or twopence per yard, the tobacco is called jackass rope, for what reason I could not discover. It is in this corner of the market-place that one meets the negro only. The woman minds the stall and does the selling, while the husband gossips with his fellows, or sips strong liquids at the rum bars. The anxious wife squats, nigger fashion, beside her heap of pepper-pods, and her hands play with them listlessly, just as we imagine a miser plays with his gold, until the heap is sold. She is patient and ladylike. The white man walks along her strip of market land, and she voices no light banter. If you ask questions as to her wares she answers with modesty and with intelligence. This is the country-woman, polite and unsophisticated. Beyond the department devoted to the sale of spices and pepper-pods and tobacco, we come to the chicken saleroom. Jamaican market-women nurse captive fowls just in the same manner as Englishwomen fondle lap-dogs. They stroke them and play with their feathers, open a wing to show the strength and youth of a bird, and hold the beak towards their face as if pleading with the doomed fowls for farewell kisses.

Fronting the poultry-women are the sellers of native vegetables and fruits. These wares are heaped on strips of torn sacking spread upon the stone floor of the market. Each woman sits next her piece of sacking and noisily shouts the merits of her own particular goods. When no customers are about, these women are content to wrangle among themselves as to the comparative merits of rival heaps of fruit; from commercial squabbles of this description it is easy for the conversation to descend to the level of vulgar personalities and strong abuse.

The meat market is the only selling place which offers no attraction to the idle lounger. For myself I was content to smell it afar off and pass quickly by. Opposite the main entrance to the principal building is the market courtyard, a square patch of grey dust enclosed by an iron railing, and containing a drinking fountain for the people and a long water-filled trough for the donkeys. This is the resting-place for the workers and idling-place for the idlers. Littered about the dust are groups of children, and donkeys, and adults. The children are playing their games, the donkeys are munching at heaps of half-dried green grass, and the adults, stretched at full length on the dust, or on the grass heaps at which the donkeys are taking their meal, are for the most part sleeping the sleep of the tired negro. A few there are who have chosen to lie in the shadow of empty market carts, but more are to be found sleeping in the full glare of the sun.

The fountain in the centre of the courtyard is the drawing-room of the market place. Here come the youth and the maiden to gossip and flirt over the midday cup of water, and here lounge the matrons to discuss prices, and costumes, and husbands. The men for the most part have found the rum bars, but the women and the striplings congregate round the drinking fountain, drink cups of water, and bathe their hands and faces in the donkey’s drinking trough. The noise of the laughter and talking is louder than the sound of a

heavy tide breaking over a pebbly beach. And the place is filled with grey dust-clouds as the people pass and repass, moving from the fountain to make way for new-comers. The blackness of their bare legs is hidden by the dirty grey dust. No matter how supple or glossy the skin may really be, two minutes’ walking in the courtyard gives bare legs the appearance of age, and suggests the existence of loathsome disease. The grey dust rises up and powders the women’s hair until the black curls are lightened to the colour of brown pepper. In fact the unpleasant dust envelopes everything under a cloud of unclean greyness. In the courtyard of the market-place the black people seem grey and diseased; the white folk never pass beyond the entrance gate.

It is on market days that one can see in the Kingston high roads, and in the suburban lanes, groups of country women walking beneath heavy head-loads of garden produce. In all the world there is nothing more graceful than the carriage of a negro woman swinging along, with free and easy motion, under a head-load which would be heavy to an ordinary white man. With head erect, straight neck, chest flung forward, and arms swinging with unconscious freedom, the women present perfect examples of graceful strength. Their stride is long, and easy, and very regular. They are the most graceful walkers in the world. I have never seen a lady in Europe with a carriage as perfect as that of the ordinary Jamaica negro market-woman.

THE PEOPLE OF JAMAICA

CHAPTER IV
THE PEOPLE OF JAMAICA

At one time Jamaica was peopled by a race of red men whose beauty and timidity were the wonder and convenience of the little band of Europeans who were the first whites to tread the fragrant shores of the Pearl of the Antilles. To-day not a trace of these Caribs remains. Unfit for competition with the strenuous white or muscular black, the race, so far as Jamaica is concerned, has run its course. The red people are remembered only by the stone implements and rude pottery preserved in the Jamaican museum. Nowadays the island is peopled by whites—English, American, and those of Spanish blood; blacks—grandchildren of the slaves imported from West and West Central Africa; and half-breeds—yellow and brown people—the descendants of those intrigues of the white man and his black servant which, not many years back, were common among the people of the country.

The white man needs but little description; you can see him in England or in any colony: an Englishman who takes his cold bath, and considers himself not the least important member of the most important race extant. His arrogance is undiminished by the tropic sun, though his habits of life may have become West Indianised. He rises at six and breakfasts at ten or eleven, lunches at two or three, and dines at seven. His food is as it is in England, save that fruit and vegetables are more plentiful. His house is built bungalow fashion, and his servants (with whom he has more trouble than his brethren in London) are blacker than the blackest hat. His complexion is either white with a yellowish tinge, or red mahogany. His women-folk dress in the latest Parisian creations, and suffer only from lack of exercise. It is not a climate for exertion, and the English lady goes to the length of taking none at all. She crosses the street in her buggy, and has a black maid to hand, so that she may never be called upon to make any unnecessary movement. The man has his polo, and tennis, and pigeon-shooting, his saddle-horse, and golf. If he is very brave and a great enthusiast, there is the cricket field. The lady always prefers the unhealthy luxury of repose. So her face is milk-coloured; she is whiter than her husband.

The society of the island is divided into three sections—the military, the civil officials, and the others. The three sets meet occasionally when one matches itself against another at sport, or when there is a great reception at Government House. These foregatherings are of interest to those who deal in scandal. In the clubs the men mix more frequently, but it is not the men who make the social life of Jamaica. The life of the Englishman

differs from that of the Anglo-Indian at a hill station; it is not the same as the life in a provincial town. But somehow it is a strange mixture of these two, except that in the social life the bachelor plays but a puny part. Not many mothers take their daughters to Jamaica, so, in the capital, the bachelor lives in one of the hotels and plays billiards in the evenings. It would be a blessing to the single men if a few enterprising mothers with many daughters would take up their abode in some of the charming villa residences a few miles out of Kingston.

The life of the Jamaica negro is almost ideal. As a rule he either entirely ignores the little work he ought to do, or leaves it to the exhaustless energy of his indefatigable wife. He spends his life in shady parts of the market-place, or lolls in the sun outside the place of his abode. Nothing worries him. He is imperturbable; glorious in his idleness, happy in a blissful ignorance which takes no account of yesterday or to-morrow. His only grievance, if he has one, is the limited working power of one woman. Happy is the man who is the father of many able-bodied youngsters. If by some mischance—the accident of domestic misfortune, or the promptings of ennui born of inaction—he is forced to work, he works with cheerfulness, and with a happy grin complains through the day, and then spends his night in revelry. When you have questioned one black man as to the extent and remuneration of his labour, you have interviewed the island. The temperament of the negro is inborn; it never varies; all negroes are blood brethren. Ask any man if he works hard and you will hear—

“Yes, me work very hard, sah.”

“You look well on it.”

“No, me no well, sah; me not fit for work; too sick.”

“But you get well paid.”

“No well paid, sah. Plenty work; very little money, sah.”

All this with a satisfied grin except when he describes the weakness of his health; then his eyes roll and his face clouds in a manner almost convincing to new arrivals.

With the women it is different. They have no time for conversation with idle strangers; they work with unceasing energy. If they pause, it is only to stare with an air of half-timid wonder, or to break into long peals of boisterous laughter. If it were not for the women folk, Jamaica would indeed be hard put to it for workers.

In character the Jamaican negroes are a mixture of good and bad; of Africa and Europe, with the vices of both the blacks and the whites, and only some of the virtues of the people of Europe. They are civilised with a sort of quasi-civilisation, which somehow suggests an indifferently humorous burlesque performed by irresponsible amateurs. It takes many months to educate a new-comer into treating the black Jamaicans with becoming seriousness. As a rule they are well-meaning people, full of curious mannerisms, with which

it is difficult for the white man to be in entire sympathy. The ideas of a black man are different from those of white. He sees things from a different point of view, and cannot really be happy with a white, who, legally his equal, is actually in many ways infinitely his superior. In many ways the Jamaican native resembles his coloured brother of the American States; he is just as arrogant—even more so—but he is not quite so really independent, and by no means so energetic. It is certainly a fact that the Jamaican negroes are the happiest, relatively the richest, and quite the most comfortable inhabitants of the globe. Though there may be poverty among them, there is no unsatisfied hunger. The fields and the hedges, as well as the market-places, afford food and comfort for the dweller in this land of perpetual sun. Clothes they have in too great an abundance. It is only for the purposes of pride and vainglory that clothes are worn at all. The climate is warm enough to justify nudity, and although this happy condition of freedom is not compatible with the canons of modern society, it is easily possible for a native to be clad and outwardly furnished for a very few shillings per annum. Overcoats are unknown. Coals are only associated with the steamships in Kingston Harbour, and the railway. Meat is an unnecessary luxury—almost an unhealthy one. The people live on fruit and vegetables, with an occasional dish of salt fish caught in the rivers or from the waters of the Caribbean Sea, and cured with a total disregard for delicate sweetness. At the first and the twenty-first glance, the European would pronounce the dried fish of the Jamaican nigger bad, if not entirely putrid. The popularity of this form of diet among the people is evidence of the over-sensitiveness of the civilised nose. The West Indian soldier of the line receives full rations as well as his shilling a day. The meat he receives from a beneficent Government is the same as that served out to his English brother-in-arms, and it is from this source that the old English settler draws the supply of fresh meat for his own table. It is better to go among the West Indian messrooms and buy the soldiers’ meat rations than it is to chance the tenderness of the joints on the market butcher’s slabs. By a little enterprise and a good deal of bargaining with a coal-black mess sergeant, you are certain of obtaining the juiciest steak to be found on the island; and in doing so you materially add to the popularity of the army among possible recruits by enlarging the pocket-money of the black soldiers of the line. Our West Indian Tommies prefer the saltest of stale salt-fish to the juiciest of fresh juicy-steaks, and as a rule the officer of the day is quite prepared to wink at a little irregularity which makes for the happiness of his men and the comfort of the island. Besides, it is probable that the same officer of the day is occasionally invited to dine out in the bungalows of older inhabitants. The readiness with which the soldier is prepared to part with meat rations is proof that flesh foods are an unnecessary luxury for the West Indian native.

The negroes of the island are sharply divided into

two classes: those who live in the towns, and the country labourers. The two classes differ as much as do English agriculturists and Londoners. In Jamaica the country people are superior to the town-bred class. The influences of town life are not good for emotional people whose fathers’ fathers hunted men in the forest lands of Western Africa. They receive impressions too easily. They are impressed by the bad as well as by the good. A black servant is always his own idea of his white master. A black man must imitate; his race has only just come in contact with civilisation. Instinctively he imitates because he has not yet reached that state which some day may enable him to initiate. If he is to appear in the guise of a civilised man he must follow; his experience is not great enough to enable him to lead; his instincts are still African and barbarian. So the town man, subject to the influences of a city in which live types of every class of every European race, is necessarily at a disadvantage compared with the man who lives with nature among people of his own colour and only one or two white men of one race.

The dwellers in the Jamaican cities look down upon the country folk as unsophisticated nonentities. The country people imagine the townsmen to be priests of iniquity, cunning, and steeped in wickedness. Just as it is in England, only more so. In the country all the coloured people are, approximately, of one class; they all belong to one station. In towns the buggyman looks down upon the costermonger as an inferior, just as the wives of shopkeepers ignore the existence of Mrs. Buggyman. In imitation of the English, foolish class distinction has given birth to a form of snobbishness which is entirely ludicrous. In Kingston the outward and visible sign of prosperity or social superiority is shown in the costume of the women-folk, and in the simpering accent of the maidens. The more uncomfortable a woman looks when she goes on church parade, the more diffidence she shows before opening her mouth to answer a simple question, the higher she is in the social scale, as it is understood by native Jamaicans. This is as it is among the shopkeepers and the proprietors of buggy horses and worn-out four-wheel tourist conveyances. With the workers it is altogether different. The aged lady, who sits for twelve hours of every day selling gingerbread beneath the half-shade of a decaying arch fronting an important shop in the main street, thinks little of costume and nothing of accent. She is persuaded to talk with great difficulty, though her story would be really interesting. An old black lady lacks that venerable appearance peculiar to the aged dames of England. She does not appear too clean, her hair is reduced to mangy patches of dusty black curls, showing here and there on the top of her smooth black pate. The forehead is furrowed and her cheeks sunken, the chin protrudes, and is the heaviest and most noticeable of all the features. Her lips have vanished, and the eyes peer through dull-red rims from behind a half-screen of fallen skin. She is bent double by age and the infirmities born of rough work. There, all day long, she sits selling gingerbread cake beneath the half-shade of decaying archways. No one ever seems to buy her dainties, but there she sits all day long staring vacantly into nothing. Occasionally she fingers her cakes, and the movement of her hands disturbs a cloud of flies who claim her cookies as their own. She is listless and entirely dumb; there is no crowd of chattering loafers round her stall, no group of children playing hide-and-seek under the shadow of her protection. She is alone—a picture of desolation. She will sit there gazing at nothing, heeding nothing, until she finds the consolation of the sleep of death. As a conversationalist she is quite impossible. If a white man stops to give her greeting, she replies not by word of mouth, but with an out-thrust hand. She has money greed. Half her day is spent in silent pleading for alms. Altogether she is not picturesque; she lacks the elements of cleanliness, and her cookies are not wholesome. She is something to pass by with a shudder—a human being of the lowest species undergoing a very slow process of decay. If she has intelligence, it is hidden with her life-story behind the shrunken eyes half-hidden by the dull-red rims and hanging skin.

The most obvious inhabitants of Kingston are the drivers of the buggies. A Jamaican buggy is a spider-like species of the four-wheeled vehicle, known in England as the country fly. It is drawn by one horse, which is neither a horse, nor a pony, nor a mule, but something remotely resembling all these things, and raising sentiments of deep pity in the hearts of all beholders. The driver of the buggy, the buggyman, supplies the necessary enthusiasm to the horse and buggy alike. One instinctively feels that but for the elevating spirit of sublime optimism which the buggyman possesses to the fullest degree, the poor horse would drop dead and the vehicle would fall to bits. The buggyman ignores everything in life save possible customers. If you hire a buggy you are the life and soul of the driver until you enter his crazy carriage; then you become as less than nothing, and the driver shamelessly bargains with pedestrians for the use of his coach when the time comes for you to leave. The buggymen know Kingston as well as the London cabby knows his London, and that is saying much. He drives with a rattling carelessness which is entirely good for weakly nerves. He ignores the protests of his nervous fare, and smiles in derision of the warning hand of an outraged police. He cannons other buggies as though they were billiard balls, and finally lands his victim, in a condition entirely demoralised and feverish, at a place where he has no desire to go. Then the driver blames the passenger for not giving correct directions, and explains that to drive on will be another sixpenny fare. The law in Jamaica reads, “Sixpence per passenger to any place in town,” so the driver gallops to an unfrequented corner of the place and demands an extra sixpence. The fare must pay, or walk back in the sun through the stench of poorer Kingston. It is really better for tourists to buy a buggy and a horse and to hire a driver if they intend to stay in the island for

more than three weeks. These can be as easily sold as they can be purchased, and the possession of them saves the waste of much precious energy, and it is better for the language and morals of a vigorous person.

When he is not pursuing possible customers, the buggyman is asleep inside his carriage. His battered hat is carelessly balanced on the tip of his little nose, his feet are resting on the cushion of the front seat, his hands hanging limp, and he slumbers deeply, exhibiting the deep caverns of his mighty jaw. Flies settle and nest in his open mouth, children swarm round his buggy and tickle him with half-chewed sweetstuffs, women chaff him from the side walks, but he stirs not, not an eyelid moves. But let a tourist or a white man come within one hundred yards of him and he is alive again and in pursuit. He discovers a possible fare by the sense of smell. He is all eyes and ears and nose for white men. When he sleeps, his horse sleeps also. It is in many cases all the rest the poor beast hopes to get. It is usual for the poor beast to be dragged from his resting-place (it is neither stable, nor nest, nor open field) and harnessed at 8 A.M. He retires when the night is far spent, and the last straggler has settled beneath the mosquito netting of his bungalow bedroom. During the day he is driven to the full extent of his capabilities. He must always run his quickest. There are no words spoken to him: he is driven with the whip, and with the whip only. His food is coarse guinea-grass, and he is lucky if he finds much of that; his water comes should his journeying carry him past a water tank. For all that, he has the heart and soul of a carriage horse, and he is as keen in his master’s hunt for fares as a trained polo pony is in following the ball. In colour he is usually a bright yellowy red, with mane and tail of light yellow. He always shows his ribs, and the whip is pleasant to him because the lash disturbs the flies. He never falls or stumbles; he has learned to be sure of his feet by carrying tourists up high mountains by way of narrow winding paths. If he has one vice it is sleepiness, but in that matter he is well under the control of his driver.

When the buggy driver has finished his work he lolls about the drinking shops—an important man. He is the hardest drinker in Kingston. He mixes more with white men than do most of the other natives, and his calling puts him in touch with the doings of men of all types. He calls for his rum, and chaffs the barmaid, for all the world like a city clerk; and his conversation is of horse-racing and betting odds, and worse. He is well-to-do, and proud that the Government has sufficient confidence in his personal character and in his prowess as a coachman to entrust him with a license to drive a hackney coach. This license is to the Jamaica buggyman exactly what his commission is to a newly-joined young officer. It gives the black man status. It is a link between him and the Government. It shows him and all Jamaica that he, buggy-driver, with a license and a number, is not an unknown man, but an official with a position recognised by officialdom.

When a buggyman marries he usually chooses his wife from among the yellow women. The negress is beneath him. He likes to have as his wife a woman who may call herself white when she receives his guests or attends his chapel on the Sabbath. He will tell you that he married white, and you will wonder how he managed it, until you see his lady. If you are so inclined, you may abuse the driver and his wife and his children, his horse and his buggy, his incapacity and everything that is his. He will only laugh and crack his whip and sway about in his seat with merriment. He will do anything to please you, on the chance of your dealing generously with him when the time comes for payment. He is a thick-skinned black man. He has no delicacy, and no false pride, and little shame. This you will find out when you hand him your silver and tell him to be gone. Compared with him the London four-wheel cabby is an angel of mercy. The buggyman will abandon his horse and his buggy, and follow you down side streets, shouting that you have paid him too little. He will fling your silver to the ground and stamp on it. Then, picking it up, he will follow you shouting that you owe him money. No one heeds him. It is a common scene, and not worthy the attention of Jamaicans.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF A JAMAICAN GAMIN

CHAPTER V
THE PHILOSOPHY OF A JAMAICAN GAMIN

In the day-time it is good to sit on one of the jutting piers which fringe the bay of Kingston, and, lolling under the deep shade of a heavy roof, give the sea breeze free play with your hair. It is a touch of health, a vision of sweet coolness, a sensation of rare joy. You are in the atmosphere of Southern Europe. Round you spread the tropics. Shorewards the palm bends languidly as it feels the breath of the sea’s vigour; the sun, seen through an ocean breeze, is dulled into purple haze; the moving boats and rocking masts give life and motion to a dead world. At midday the West Indies present the picture of death. There is no movement, no life current. It is as though the island of Jamaica were scorched dead. The birds float like ragged strips of paper on the edge of the breeze which dies on its journey inland. Here, by the sea, the senses are lulled to sweet indifference to all things save the noise and coolness of the breeze. Jamaicans call this breeze the doctor; it is the doctor that makes Jamaica a place fit for the homes of the white men. Without it, the place would be a fever-ridden land of pestilence. With it, and not even the sun is more regular, the land is called a health resort.

As I sit here musing, the strip of land on which are planted the forts and military cantonments of Port Royal, swings seaward, a thin line of deep green, a false horizon for a sea of richest blue. Parts of the place are blotted out by sailing ships with canvas spread, or steamers, painted white, and little fishing craft. Above Port Royal a single strip of cloud rises from behind the land in a dull haze of grey; where the cloud-chain touches the light blue of the sky it bellies out white to the sun. The broad domes of this cloud-range are whiter than the snowy caps of the ocean rollers.

As I sit, breathing in the sweet coolness of the breeze, a flash of warm brown shoots from the blue of the sea, and a diving boy shimmers in the laughing sun. He will dive for pennies he says. Better sit here and cool I suggest, and in this manner I first get to know something of the inner life of Timothy Dorias, gamin and diving boy, as good a young rogue as you will find anywhere. Vicious and happy as the sun, joyous as the sparkling wavelet, he is thirteen, and, apparently, already deeply experienced in the vice of the world. Yes he goes to school—that is to say, he has been to school; really on second thoughts he intended to convey the fact that he is going to school—next month.

He is thirteen and has a wife—not really a wife, you know—there is no suggestion of wedlock—but a wife nevertheless.

No he does not go to church—there are no boots. His father is a fisherman, and he is of a family of eight. His two sisters stay at home and help their mother, who sees to the children and the grandchildren; the grandchildren are offsprings of the two sisters. “No, sah, they be not married yet—some day perhaps.” He wishes to show us strange places in the town of Kingston—a merry enough guide, but one lacking in restraint. His accent is mellow and he is not black. A rich, dark brown colour he is, with curly hair, white teeth, and deep black eyes. His stories of Jamaica are of intrigue, dancing eyes, and sunlight; green-shuttered windows and soft glances. He is a born Romeo, a West Indian Don Juan.

The history of Jamaica he knows not, he says, neither can he tell us why some people are black and some white. Best of all is to be brown, “like me,” he says; then one is black to the black people, and white to the white. Really it is a wise thirteen-year-old, witness the postscript. “I should pass as white in England, but not here. Too many nearly white here, sah.” He likes the black people best because they are “plenty more happier,” but the money is in the hands of the whites. When he is old he will catch fish and live alone in a house with his wife and children. If ever he should tire of fishing, Jamaica is “plenty full of fruit.” A little work would be necessary, perhaps, but he does not mind work. Witness the time he spends in practising diving in the Kingston bay, he says. Women will do his housework and attend to his fruit patch; his wife will see to the clothes of his children. Yes, perhaps it would be good to go out to the sea in big ships, and find adventure in lands beyond the colour line of the setting sun. But in the big ships there is little fruit, and women are not at hand to wait on men. No, it is better to remain where people are safe. Sometimes the big ships go away and never return. The reason is that some one on board has sinned in the eyes of God. Yes, everyone sins plenty often, but God is kind and shuts His eye, otherwise every living man and woman would be blasted dead. Women are not so important as men. We tell them they are, because it pleases them, and so they do more work. But really it is better to be a man. Women are weak and little in their minds, they are too much afraid, and too little given to thinking of big things. You must be kind, but not too kind, to a woman. If you are too kind, she will think you weak and foolish, and she will do no work for you. Yes, he loved his mother and his sisters, but he loved his father most of all, because he was big and strong, and fished in the bay even when the weather was very rough. His father only laughed and cuffed him when he stole the bananas from the cart in the market-place, but his mother talked of it for days, and told all the neighbours that he was a thief and a bad boy; and she told the parson man, who at any moment might tell God. Then he would be sent to hell, all for one or two bananas. His father was angry with his mother for telling the people, and his mother cuffed him still, because his father had beaten her for telling people his son was a thief.

His own people were better than the blacks, because they were whiter, and God himself is white. He was not certain whether black people would go to heaven, but he was certain that white and brown folk could go there and live in the skies in the same great house. When he went there he should want to dive plenty much, and fish in the river with a rod with a wheel on it. No, he was not afraid to die, except that if he died now he would find none of his friends in heaven. He never thought of sharks when he dived in the bay, but his friend had only one leg left, because a shark took the other one off when he was diving for pennies flung from an American fruit-boat. He guessed he made too much noise himself to please the sharks; anyway he could dive under one if it tried to bite him.

He was telling us of his passion for the English and of his love of truth and justice, when suddenly he flung himself from our jetty and splashed into the bay to reappear well out of reach of land. A policeman appeared at my elbow and grinned quietly; he assured us that he would have given much had the boy not caught sight of him as he crept towards us. The rascal was a thief and a blackguard, and he would be arrested, sure as eggs sah, and then birched or sent to gaol. This he assured us was true and unvarnished fact, on his word as a constable of justice. So much for Jamaican youth.

THE DEVOTION OF THE JAMAICAN NEGRO

CHAPTER VI
THE DEVOTION OF THE JAMAICAN NEGRO

The native of Jamaica flies to religion as an ant creeps to the honey-pot. Give a nigger a few catch-words and a ritual in which he can take a leading part, and there is no more religious man on the face of the earth. I never met a native man or woman who was not either Baptist or Methodist, Catholic or Church of England, or member of some other sect to which he or she clung with the strength of pious madness. There is no tolerance in the really religious Black. Every member of every other sect is a member of the eternally damned. In the opinion of the Catholic there is no hope for his Plymouth Brother. The Baptist cannot hope for the salvation of the Free Methodist. Every Sunday every religious nigger goes to church in the morning, in the afternoon if possible, and then again at night. After evensong there are open-air services where crowds of souls are saved, with great regularity, week by week. They tell each other that they have been plucked like a brand from the burning, and they dance and shout and sing; sometimes, in moments of great exaltation, they grovel on the ground and clutch at the earth for inspiration and spiritual comfort. It is impossible for a saved soul to be cool. The idea of having so narrowly escaped from the burning brimstone inflames the hearts of the newly saved at each weekly performance. A revivalist ceremony closely resembles a fetich dance in an African forest. The ritual is similar, though the cause and effect are happily different. I do not wish it to be supposed that I venture to scoff at the religion of the natives of Jamaica. My desire is simply to attempt a description of the outward and visible effect of the religious services. At heart every negro is most painfully emotional. After undergoing the deepest sensation of salvation the negro wanders homeward satisfied, relieved, and very merry. There is no evidence of deep impression; no outward suggestion that the man is spiritually affected to any great degree. The impression I gathered was that Jamaicans are religious with their lips and voices; that salvation was a thing to be regularly sought and experienced once a week—just as among certain people in other more civilised countries. This capacity for the endurance of great spirituality gives birth in Jamaica to many lamentable exhibitions of religious humbug. Prophets arrive; new sects are called into being by unscrupulous adventurers who claim to be in direct contact with the Deity.

The story goes that a very little while ago a negro arrived in Kingston from one of the Southern American States. He brought with him a second-hand uniform of a captain of the British Navy, sword included. He purchased a donkey in the market place and quietly attired himself in all the glory of the blue and gold of the British Navy. He mounted the donkey and loosely slung his sword so that the scabbard rattled along the cobbles of the rough Kingston roadways. Then, slowly he rode through the town. Men, women, and children followed him in mighty astonishment. He rode slowly, with bent head, his arms folded across his breast. By the time he reached the outskirts of the town the following crowd numbered many hundreds. He led them to a great field, and halted his sorry steed, and for several moments sat solemnly staring at his donkey’s ears, making no movement. Suddenly he drew the sword from out the scabbard and flung himself upright in his stirrups, waving the sword aloft. Thrice he did this in silence. Then he turned to the wondering crowd and shouted—“Kneel to the might of God. Bow down to His servant. I am come to save you from sin.”

Then he preached to them for an hour. He remained in that field for several days, and made many converts and found a multitude of followers. These he marched in procession to the side of a river in which he baptised them all. Part of his creed was that all people should bathe every day in water which he had blessed with his all powerful sword. He dispensed the blessed river water to many hundreds of people every day, making a money charge for every gallon. When he had amassed a small fortune he quietly disappeared, and left his flock leaderless and disconsolate. There appears to be many such chapters in the religious life of Jamaica. The people are at the mercy of any adventurer who has sufficient intelligence and enough audacity to prey upon their credulity, and play his own hand with unfaltering boldness.

It would not be fair to suggest that all the inhabitants of Jamaica could be influenced by a jackanapes in a naval uniform and sword, riding on a donkey. There are of course a large number, a large majority, of really intelligent men and women who are properly religious. I mention extreme cases in order that it may be possible for you to gain some insight into the extraordinary character of the Black man. It is easy for any educated man to make great crowds of Jamaicans profess and call themselves Christians. To really imbue the people with a knowledge of the elementary duties of Christian people is a task of great difficulty. Sunday is their day of rest. The old people smoke their pipes and gossip in the shade of their doorways, the youngsters parade the town in all the glory of their gaudy finery. On Sunday the natural idleness of the coloured man is as it were legalised. Once a week their besetting sin of indolence becomes a real virtue. So the day is enjoyed to the full. It is never necessary to drive home to a nigger the fact that it is wicked to labour on the seventh day. The difficulty is to persuade him to work on the other six.

Everyone has heard of the Jamaican revivalist meetings, those weird religious orgies where men and women run riot in the name of great salvation. They are difficult services to witness; the people, especially

the parson people, are shy in the presence of the unbelieving. You can only enter a native synagogue by means of great cunning and an utter absence of self-restraint. The interiors of such synagogues are commonplace—you can see their furniture and fittings in any tiny bethel in poorer London. The difference lies in the people only; in Jamaica they are all utterly black and very happy. The preacher wears spectacles, and has a white beard and conventional clerical collar and white shirt. The congregation are attired in all the tints of a German Noah’s Ark, and show examples of half the costumes known to civilisation and Whitechapel. Of course there are more women than men, but still the males that appear are not less zealous than the most excitable of the ladies. When the service has half spent itself, order, and the souls of the people, have become really affected. The solemnity of the place entirely disappears, and pandemonium comes in like a rustling, choking tornado. Men and women dance and pray and sing and shout, and then fall backwards to the hard wood floor clutching the empty air in the agony of spiritual exaltation. The preacher abstains from flinging himself into the heat of the melée with infinite difficulty, and by exercising his power of self-restraint in a manner inspiring to behold. The congregation exhausts its frenzy and lies quiet and purified, in the manner of a snake that has exhausted its poison gland in attacking the sacking held by an experienced charmer. In this manner is a large proportion of the population of the island every week, with great regularity, saved from damnation. The parson is carried home to sup with the senior deacon, and the congregation disperses into little groups of devotees, each member anxious to examine the religious experience of his brother, or explain at great length his own sensations of salvation.

TURTLE FISHING

CHAPTER VII
TURTLE FISHING

“Turtles or tortoises constitute one of the orders of reptiles, the Chelonia. They are characterised by having the trunk of the body incased in a more or less ossified carapace, which consists of a dorsal more or less convex portion, and of a flat ventral one, the so-called plastron.”

If you could see a turtle panting for breath, sighing in fat breathless agony, or swallowing nothing, in the manner of a nervous singer, you would conclude that this description should be wrapped in more sympathetic terms. I can imagine nothing more absolutely pitiable than the sight of a full hundred turtle overturned, belly upwards, in the full glare of a noon sun, awaiting shipment over the four thousand miles of rolling Atlantic weather, to meet a doom intimately associated with the beginning, the first course, of an Aldermanic dinner. The soulful eyes of a panting turtle express knowledge of impending doom, and only half conquer agony. It is a sight to turn away from—one which must always be remembered at the first reading of a rich menu. But, really, in his native haunts, the turtle is an elusive beast, a kind of marine De Wet, who wants a lot of catching, but who, once caught, proves himself or herself to be good all round. Good, that is, if belonging to the succulent green species, for the Hornbilled variety is of little use save for the production of tortoise-shell, and the Loggerhead is a truculent rascal who is best left alone. Strictly speaking, of course, the turtle is not a beast at all, but a reptile, dear to lovers of callipee and turtle eggs, and otherwise useful in a score of ways. Although this most succulent of all reptiles frequents all tropical oceans more or less, his true home may be said to be at the alligator-shaped island of Grand Cayman or Cairman, called by Columbus Las Tortugas because of the hosts of turtle that he found there. Grand Cayman is a dependency of Jamaica, and passed into the possession of the Crown soon after the conquest of the Queen of the West India islands.

Hunting the turtle is carried on in different ways according to the locality; the simplest plan, of course, is to waylay the female when she leaves the shore after depositing her eggs, and then just turn her on her back and wait until it is convenient to remove her to a kraal. There is no risk or sport about this proceeding, which, in nine cases out of ten, is successful; occasionally, however, a round-backed turtle will roll over and make tracks for the sea with unexpected swiftness. Another plan is to spear or harpoon the reptiles in open sea, and yet another to entangle them in nets when they come to the surface to breathe.

The inhabitants of Grand Cayman are born seamen and turtle hunters, and they favour the last course. Their plan is to make large webbed fishing nets from the leaves of the thatch palm, first denuding the leaf of a certain membranous substance at the back, and then twisting into almost unbreakable cords and drying. This laborious task is all done by hand, and when the net is finished the strongest turtle vainly tries to release his head or fin from its meshes. The folks of Grand Cayman are their own boat-builders, and their custom is to sail in small fleets to the banks off the coast of Nicaragua, and cast their heavily-weighted nets in the direction the turtle is sure to take when intent upon an egg-laying expedition. Often enough the boats are out for weeks before enough turtle are captured to repay the boatmen for their labour. But, once caught, it is easy enough to hoist the net-entangled turtle into the schooners, where he is stored, shell downwards, in the hold, and fed on sea-grass and weed. At one time the trade suffered greatly because the Spaniards persistently destroyed the females before the eggs were deposited, simply for the sake of obtaining calipee. But nowadays the turtle is hunted with greater wisdom, and our civic fathers need not tremble for the future of their beloved delicacy.

With their cargo of turtles aboard the schooners make tracks for Jamaica, where their catch is deposited in kraals to await shipment to Europe.

It is a commonplace story when reduced to a bare description, but really the fishing is full of romance. The sailing amidst the golden islands of the west, the anchorage off the sandy coast of Nicaragua; the casting of the wide-meshed nets and the catching of heavy two or three hundred pound turtles, desperately savage. The turning of a half-exhausted turtle on to his shell-armoured back; the noise of the heavy flapping of over two hundred fins stronger than a strong man’s arm; the pathos of continual sighing, uncanny, half human, wholly unnerving. The journey to the Jamaica jetty. The flopping of the catch into a deep-sea pool, boarded off from the open bay; the feeding of the brutes with curious grass which, seemingly ignored, somehow disappears gradually, when no one is by to witness. Then the romantic drudgery of turtle fishing ends, and the dangerous part begins. The danger lies in the fishing from the pool, the turning on the hot wooden slab, the shipment, in a steamer homeward bound, and—the dinner table.

Of late there has been some excitement over Jamaica turtle fishing. The British fishers claim the right of fishing in places Nicaragua called her very own. Schooners were detained and a British ship of war journeyed to the fishing grounds to see that the game was played with fairness. The affair has blown over now, at least so the black Jamaican turtle fisherman told me. Not that he would care anyway; for his work is only that of fishing up the turtle from the pool. He does not bother about the troubles of schooners. His is pretty work, filled to overflowing with dangerous possibilities. Still there are compensations. The feeding of the turtle is employment entailing the expenditure of very little bodily exertion; the thrusting of a few heaps of weed through a loose board; and the fishing comes but seldom, once a week perhaps, or once in two weeks. And, after all, a little danger is a good thing for a man who must swagger before his women folk as one in authority over more than a hundred turtle.

He will invite you to the fishing with all the joy of a young child conscious of an audience before whom he knows he can carry himself with distinction. First he strips in the full glare of noonday, and glories in the exhibition of his nudity. “I go among all those savage fishes with no knife, no, not even a gun,” he will tell you. Though why a gun should be mentioned I cannot imagine, since his work is under water. He strides to the loose board with the air of an African chieftain in his village among his women and little children. And after all some weakness, if weakness it be, is permissible in a man who has to play a man’s part in the fullest meaning of the phrase.

With a single rope in his left hand he falls, feet first, into the pool, in which the turtle are jostling each other for room. He disappears absolutely; the surface of the pool is bare save for the half hidden shells of a group of the turtle. After two minutes, it may be a little less or perhaps a few seconds more, the man’s head reappears, and he shouts to his watching mates the order to pull. They haul at the rope the other end of which sank with the man, the fisher meanwhile floating quietly and keeping a bright look out for the snapping heads of the beasts he could not avoid disturbing. The result of the hauling shows the white belly of a turtle as it is hoisted upwards, head first, out of the water. The noise of the heavy sighs, and the heavier noise of the sighing chorus in the pool, disturbs the whole jetty. Blood comes on the giant fins in the places where they touch the back shell. First the thrust head appears above the boarding, a head which at once resembles the face of a flat-nosed snake and the top of a mammoth branch of asparagus. The eyes roll like a drunken man to whom the shame of his drunkenness has suddenly become apparent. Then come the flapping fins, the broad white belly, and lastly the other fins. Then two hundred pounds of soup flesh is flung upwards and crashed on to its hard back shell; the rope which encircled its breast just below the fore fins is unloosed, and the poor beast is left to sigh and flap and shake in peace. It is almost impossible for a turtle to regain its legs once it has been turned fairly on its back. Then the fishing game begins afresh.

I saw just one hundred fish brought to light in this manner. One beast turned the scale at three hundred pounds. He was the giant of his tribe, and he showed his high breeding when the time came for his uplifting. All his fins flapped blood at each stroke and his sighing resembled the noise of a young cow who has lost her first calf.

THE WOMEN OF WILD MAN STREET

CHAPTER VIII
THE WOMEN OF WILD MAN STREET

Wild Man Street is the central place of Jamaican gaiety. In the day-time it seems an ordinary street, white in the roadway and green in its walls of painted houses. The evening shadows blacken the place into an abode of infamy.

We drove there through the wild scents of a tropic night. The bejewelled skies sparkled no brighter than the flashing insects; the fresh sea breeze struggled in vain to kill the half Eastern scents of the garden flowers and aromatic woods. The singing of the insects made music which the soft air translated into a sweet lullaby. As you drive to the town of Kingston, the noises and the scents become more and more suggestive of the East. The place might be Ceylon, Yokohama, or Hong Kong. We were to see a bungalow which might be found with equal ease in the byways of any of these places; the difference existing only in the skins and tongues of the women. The place was larger than an ordinary house of the working people; the gaining of fugitive wealth is the only compensation looked for by the Jamaican dancing women.

The reception room was fitted with cheap muslins and common bamboo furniture. The stained wood floor was relieved in patches by tiny squares of matting or cheap imitations of the carpets of Turkey. Several of the rickety tables supported brass ash trays in which cheap and evil-smelling pastils smouldered unhealthily, half drowning the odour of the scents the women used. With finger rings made of silver, flashing with lack lustre glass or paste; arms and necks encircled with coral or cheap pearl bands, the women, gowned in flowing robes of white or yellow, listlessly sustained a difficult part. It is difficult for a gay woman to appear gay without the aid of strong liquors. This place is one of the houses where the women dance only at the bidding of white men, the black man is not a welcome guest. The women call themselves white; really they are brown or yellow or nearly black. They use powder freely, and cheap rouge also. The effect is awful; a black man in war streaks of white or vermilion is not more hideous; they speak the pigeon English of an affected Eurasian, with a tincture of the sing-song drawl of an educated negro. To these women all the other natives of Jamaica are coloured. They speak of the England they have never seen as home. White men are “chaps” or “felhers”; whisky is their drink, and they suggest with proud frankness that they are the daughters of great white men. But coloured people, especially coloured people of this class, are not infallible. We gave them money, which they received with the grace of a dissatisfied four-wheel cab driver,

but they produced liquor and became animated. White teeth flashed and the accent became more coloured and so more natural. It was not pretty talk, and it was lacking in the elements of refinement. The gaiety of the women of this class always seems forced. As they talked and gesticulated the paint and powder flaked off their cheeks as whitewash scales off a crumpled ceiling. They lost their reserve and found abandon. One, of uncertain age but decided embonpoint, took up a mandoline, which was well varnished and hung with ribbons, but badly tuned, and sang a song. The words were indistinct; the title of the song I never knew; the tune I am glad to have forgotten.

The doors were closed and window shutters drawn; the unholy stench of the pastils filled the room with suffocating smoke; it was as though these women acted their parts and had obtained cheap properties and mismanaged scenic effects. The amusement of the place, if it existed at all, was colourless in the extreme. The dancing we did not see. So we left the place and found the sweet-smelling night breeze.

If it is possible to find a place in which the stupefying smoke of a burning pastil is not altogether bad, I would suggest that that place might be a hall in which black people are dancing the dignity dance. To the white man the negro is not without a curious odour, which seems to get more powerful when the black man takes violent exercise. Picture a room, bare as a barn, painted light blue, and filled to overflowing with people of all shades of colour, from ebony to dark walnut. Though the window shutters are half open the light night breeze is too delicate to cool all the people in a room whose temperature must be above one hundred degrees. Arranged in couples the dancers are executing most weird and complicated antics—some with a certain degree of grace and rhythm—to the noise of a band of three tired musicians. Probably the dancing would be more regular if the music were abolished. If the three men were playing the same tune, each had learned the piece in different time, and was playing his hardest in order to show the others how the thing should really run. However the dancers did not mind, so the spectator had no right to grumble. The dancing waxed more furious, and the lagging music raced to keep pace with the spirit of the dancers. The more excited of the twirling crowd began to chant a weird chorus; the words seemed to be entirely impromptu, the melody was monotonous, and somehow it reminded me of the muffled sound of a band of tom-toms. The dignity dance itself, if it has any set arrangement at all, is something like the visiting and the grand chain in our lancers. The dancers, twirling in couples at most giddy speed, frequently separated, and the men in a long line approached the women, who in turn retired. When the wall is reached the men retire, and the women do the advancing. A sudden bang on the part of the orchestra, and a shout by the eager dancers, is the signal for the breaking of the lines; and the men snatch their partners and twirl more giddy circles. Interesting as the dancing was it could not be called either fascinating or unique. Save for the coloured skin of the dancers, and the curious odour of the room, a similar scene can be witnessed in any European ballroom. From the dignity ballroom we went to a concert hall where all the performers were coloured and all the audience jet black. The performers seemed to enjoy the entertainment most of all.

The songs were delivered in European concert fashion, and they were mostly well known ballads:—“Robin Adair,” “I dreamt that I dwelt in Marble Halls,” and other old airs of that description. It was not an interesting performance. But the audience applauded everything, they encored everyone, and when a reciter appeared and gave a rendering of Hamlet by “Mr. William Shakespeare” members of the audience could scarcely contain themselves. It was a bad recitation, but I fancy the people in the body of the hall had paid their entrance money and were determined to make the best of the business. Certainly they seemed to like hearing themselves shout. We asked a supercilious half-breed, who wore an evening suit and a crimson necktie, where we could hear some native singing.

“If,” said he, “you refer to the songs of the negroes, I can only indicate the low rum shops, and even there it is not permitted.”

Evidently his opinion of the musical abilities of the black man was not a high one. However we accepted his advice and journeyed to the rum shops.

In the architecture of their drinking saloons, as in nearly everything else, the Jamaicans have imitated New York rather than London. You enter a swing door and discover a long room fitted with a serving counter, and otherwise bare of furniture. A man presides over the rum bottles, and the drinkers are mostly negroes of the richer class; small shopkeepers, clerks, buggymen, and adventurers. We put our heads in the doors of many of the drinking shops but we never heard the native music.

We had to be content with a pilgrimage through the deserted streets of the capital. Save for a few buggies and now and then a noisy road car, Kingston was almost deserted. At some of the street corners groups of men were engaged in violent conversation, and occasionally we saw a policeman; otherwise the empty pavements echoed only the noise of our walking. There are no theatres in Jamaica, and all the wealthier people live in the distant suburbs. The poorer black men who live in the side streets of the town have to be up betimes, so they do not waste their strength by keeping up late at night. It is a cold and a deathly place at night, this little town of Kingston. No shop keeps open after dark; no lights appear in the windows of the houses; no crowds of people promenade the High Street, and jostle each other in friendly rivalry.

Occasionally when passing a house we heard the echo of laughter, and sometimes merry noise of music, but as a rule the homes were dark and silent. It seemed a decayed, deserted city; a place from which all people had fled.

THE WEST INDIAN ARMY

CHAPTER IX
THE WEST INDIAN ARMY

In Jamaica the Army is mainly considered as a prop to society. Among the whites the officers are in great request as dancing men, players at the game of tennis and possible husbands for fair daughters. Among the blacks the same applies to the coloured Tommy, except that there is no tennis. The West Indian regiments have seen service, and have proved their metal as fighting men in various parts of Africa. The West Indian Colonels are as proud of their black regiments as any commander of any white battalion of the line. But the languorous atmosphere of Jamaica does not suggest strife; so, the tendency among Jamaicans, high and low, rich and poor, is to regard the military as purely social people. When the Governor is one guest short at a dinner or luncheon or tennis function, an officer is requisitioned from the nearest garrison or camp. When Mama is hard up for men at one of her select dances, the subaltern receives a dainty invitation.

In the day-time the young West Indian Army officer gets through his early morning work as quickly as possible, and then scrambles, schoolboy fashion, into the playing fields. Drill is over by midday, and then the uniform (khaki and sun helmet) is flung aside for cool flannels or polo breeches. From midday until four the hours must be spent inside a house, away from the sun. So after luncheon it is forty winks, or cards or a game of pool. Then, when the full heat of the sun has smouldered into the early evening glow, the games begin. Polo, cricket, tennis, or golf; these are the first favourites. A few will take a spin on a fast pony; others, it may be, will sail across Kingston Bay and take a surf bath among the palisadoes. But for the majority it is either polo, cricket, tennis, or golf. Golf for seniors, polo for the young subaltern newly joined, tennis for the older captains, and cricket for full lieutenants. The two hours between four and six mark the playtime for the Jamaican Army. After six the clubhouses or mess smokerooms tinkle with the music of many glasses, as the young officers refresh themselves after two hours’ work in a climate marking well above 100° on the thermometer. An hour with pipes and comrades over the friendly glass, and then a bath and dinner. After dinner the officer becomes the social animal, and the messroom and barrack-yard know him no more till midnight. That is the life of the Army officer. It is rather dull and a little monotonous; but the young men make the most of it and meanwhile pray for leave and England.

With the Colonial Tommy it is different. He works at his drill or musketry and then, at midday,

dines. If he can he gets off for the afternoon; then he lounges into Kingston and plumes himself on the side walks to the admiration of the black and yellow girls. No sun has any terrors for your true West Indian soldier. His skull is thick enough even without the protection of his smart undress cap. His amusement is similar to that of an English Tommy in any garrison town, except that he does not drink so much. He is the idol of the populace; especially on the afternoon of the Sabbath, when, after Church is over, he is permitted to parade at large in the brilliant full-dress uniform of his regiment. Scarlet and yellow or scarlet and white, zouave jackets, and white or yellow spats, his get up is that of a French Zouave West Indianised; and he is the King of feminine Jamaica. He is popular among men and women alike, since the civilian men are conscious of a reflected grandeur when in company with a soldier in full dress. A military comrade helps them with the women, just as one returned yeoman peopled a smokeroom with heroes during our South African War. The black Tommy is paid his shilling a day, just as though he were a redcoated white man. He was recruited in some West Indian island, or in Western Africa in the district Sierra Leone,—he cares not where, for now his home is the cool barrack-room,—and he is quite content to stand before a few thousand people as a soldier of the King. Generally he has at least one silver medal to show that he has heard the music of the Martini fired in anger. He has fought savage races in lands where a white man has no right to go, and he knows that he has his value. He is not jealous of the draft of the white British regiment which, for some unknown reason, is always to be found in the hills somewhere about Newcastle; he is not jealous because he is too conscious of superiority. Could a white regiment have marched in the full glare of the noon sun through Ashanti and not dropped a man? Could a white man pierce jungle and fight through malarious tangled undergrowth, wading slimy swamps, swimming rushing rivers, and live? Can any company of white soldiers march with the swing of a West Indian Regiment when the black pipers shriek the quick-step?

When the white men think they can, and say so, then West India rises by half companies and ties service razors on stout sticks of ebony, and there is riot in the land of perpetual sunshine. Black men are mauled with heavy belts in the fashion of the British Infantry, and white men stagger home gashed with razor cuts and faint for lack of blood. When the civil war is over, each side, conscious of victory, willingly forgives and for several months forgets. Then peace is found among the huts at Newcastle, and sweet peace amidst the tents of the plains.

The black troops insist that it is necessary that their women should be treated with respect, even deference, by their white brothers in arms. This the white Tommy has not yet learned to do. Possibly the lesson is difficult owing to the infinite extent of the acquaintanceship with feminine Jamaica peculiar to the West Indian regiments. Every lady is a friend of some soldier’s friend, if she is not his sister, aunt, wife, or mother. So trouble sometimes springs from this source. Then it is out belts and razors until the officers intervene. Shots have been fired, but this is unusual. And the result of the court-martial offers no encouragement to would-be marksmen. As a rule the Tommies, black and white, mix and fraternise as well as may be expected. Each has a large respect, well mixed with a great contempt, for his alien brother. Each serves the same white King whose dominion over all the earth is unquestioned. The King is the common sentiment to which hangs the brotherhood of the British soldiers, white and black.

On the other hand the Jamaican police are not popular with the people of the island. The uniform they wear is not sufficiently striking; there is no great blaze of colour—no suggestion of power or rank or beauty. A plain white tunic and dark blue trousers with a red stripe, a simple white helmet and plain black leather boots, make up the uniform of the Constabulary. It is impossible for a negro to respect such a costume, or to be proud of a police so uniformed. So the people have come to look upon the policemen as workers; men made for use, and not turned out for the sake of ornamenting a town already bright and picturesque enough. And it may be that this is the reason why the Jamaican constable is regarded as a judicial potentate—a man whose word is law—a person to be avoided, even feared. The presence of a policeman stops the noisy jabber or a street crowd of fruit-sellers; his approach melts a group of excited quarrellers; his uplifted hand stems the tide of rushing traffic—just as it is in England. The police are efficient and unpopular. The constable alone among the inhabitants of Kingston does not lounge and laugh and chatter. If he smiles it is with an air of conscious superiority. The mouths of the men are curved downwards in the form of a perpetual sneer. The law cannot be merry; the limbs of the law may not be humanly happy.

The Jamaican police force is well organised and very efficient. There are inspectors and sub-inspectors, staff-sergeants and sergeants and constables, and above all one white Chief. Most of the senior officers are white men; the rank and file are black and brown, and yellow and dusky white. It is on the rank and file that the work of Government falls. A plain constable in Jamaica is a far more powerful man than any white-gloved, long-sworded police inspector in England. Every regulation beat in the island of rivers is a courthouse, presided over by an impartial and all powerful policeman-judge. Fifty times a day he will be called upon to arbitrate in matters of great delicacy. It may be that there is a doubt in the minds of two women as to the ownership of a valuable article of diet or furniture. The policeman weighs the evidence of witnesses and pronounces judgment. He will, in cases of real necessity, administer the oath to people whose mere word is open to doubt, and he makes people swear, Scotch fashion, with uplifted hands.

Round such street-corner courts small crowds are allowed to congregate, and respectfully listen to the words of one whose knowledge of police-court ritual stands him in good stead. I have heard a policeman restore to a woman that good name which the jealousy of a chattering neighbour had flung to the four winds; the same man afterwards settled a knotty point in regard to the freshness of a heap of fish which a despondent purchaser pleaded were bad. This was a serious case; the constable smelt the fish and handled them with the reverence of an usher for a barrister’s brief bag. In this instance the judgment of the constable gave satisfaction to one man and made him unpopular with a crowd. It was openly suggested that he had received a promise of largess from the man whose case he upheld. As a body the force has a Spartan-like love for unpopularity, born of the exhibition of unbending power in performing their illegal office of judge and jury. I once toured the side streets of the city with a pompous black sergeant who obviously knew the town only from the kerbstone to the railing. The Jamaica police have no eyes that see through brick walls. They have a love for intrigue, but lack the capacity of meeting cunning with detective craft. If a thing is to be seen with the naked eye they see it well enough; but, as a rule, they have no imagination and no power of working up theories. Sherlock Holmes would have been a chemist only had he been born a negro.

Every constable seems to imagine that, socially and politically, he is far above the ordinary inhabitant. He feels towards his coloured brethren in about the same way as a cavalry colonel feels towards a newly-joined militia private. Between a member of the constabulary force and an ordinary person there can be no close friendship. The black policeman lives in a atmosphere of the police court, and seems always to regard every member of the public as a possible prisoner and a certain criminal. Really in his heart I think he feels the bitterness of his exalted loneliness. He inwardly regrets the necessity of his aloofness from human pleasures. He would probably prefer to be a soldier. This he will never admit, even to himself. But, I repeat, probably he would prefer to be a soldier of the line. The uniform is better; it is far more picturesque. And the men of the West Indian Regiments combine dignity and popularity in a manner entirely mystifying to the Jamaican police. Besides, the brilliant-soldier companies march down the high road to the music of pipes and drums, and the weary constable has to stand by and see that the road is clear. The soldier is a picturesque hero; the police constable is—a constable of justice and nothing more.

A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE

CHAPTER X
A WEST INDIAN COURT HOUSE

A square room painted white and fitted with dull red benches and a raised platform; on the platform the magistrate, a weary-looking man with faded hair and wrinkled face, and eyes screened by gold-rimmed spectacles. As he sits, listlessly playing with his papers, apparently indifferent to the pleadings of the prisoners, or the garrulous stormings of nervous witnesses, he seems to suggest a tired speculator reading the first official details of his own bankruptcy. Occasionally he raises his voice and a hushed court hears, “All right, get down now,” and a witness, only just sufficiently recovered from nervousness to have reached the period of unintelligible verbosity, gets down with a sulky jerk and proud bearing. All Jamaican negroes speak a language officially known as English. From the fact that it is alleged that he can understand the unbroken flow of their fearful eloquence, the magistrate must be counted a man of consummate linguistic ability. In front of the platform is a huge table, at which all the whites and yellow-whites of the district are foregathered to witness the administration of justice. At the head of the table, and at the feet of the magistrate, is the clerk; an ancient man with the remains of a weak voice, and a habit of looking over his steel eye-glasses in the approved scholastic style. He is an important, if not a picturesque personage. The decorative touch is afforded to the court by the appearance of the inspector of police. He sits at another corner of the large table behind a great white helmet carefully placed on the summit of a large pile of important blue papers, in the proper crown and cushion fashion. The helmet is the police inspector’s shield and guard, and badge of office. It is an inflexible example of the power and nobility of the law; it is an object on which the prisoners may fasten their eyes, should they be unable to gaze for ever into the inscrutable depths of the spectacles of the presiding magistrate. Compared with the magistrate, the clerk and the inspector of police, the other whites and yellow-whites are unimportant. Planters and tradesmen, and commission agents, they lounge gracelessly round the table, fingering their riding whips or pulling at the ends of their scrubby beards. The table marks the boundary line of the charmed circle, into which only the whites, and the not very yellow-whites, may enter with impunity. Beyond, in the public benches, grouped carelessly in picturesque disorder, are the natives. A sweltering crowd it is, throbbing with silence, just as the tropical midday throbs with heat. The prisoner at the bar, a ragged, unkempt negro, whose cleaner father must have come from the malarial swamps behind the Gold Coast, is answering to a charge of stealing, feloniously and with malicious intent, one and a half pairs of meat known and described (in Jamaica and elsewhere) as pig’s trotters. As we entered, the prisoner at the bar was tearing at the mangy patches of his mud-coloured hair, and pleading “I no took them master, sir, yer honor, I no took them; I ask to be set free. I no see them, I no eat them, ’fore God in ’eaven.”

It was interesting to watch the varied emotions playing over the expressive faces of the watching crowd of the man’s enemies and friends. Enemies first, because the natives seemed as cruelly thoughtless, and quite as vicious, as the ladies in any balcony at a Spanish bull-ring. When the monotonous mumble of the magistrate has finished, only the pleased smile of the prisoner told us the news of his acquittal. To the unexperienced ear, the magistrate’s mumble was just as incomprehensible as any of the jargon of the witnesses themselves.

The next two or three cases were concerned with the question of paternity, and in each instance the plaintive lady received the consolation of eighteen-pence a week for a period of years. Then followed a charge of assault. One lady had beaten another with an implement remotely resembling a carpenter’s stool. On each side there were many witnesses and, apparently, many liars. One coquette in a West Indian gown of yellow, green, blue, and pink, ventured to repeat to the court some of the vulgar abuse which, in her opinion, contributed to, and completely justified, the assault referred to. Hers was an eloquent and ingenious pleading. First, she swore before God and Heaven that the assault was not an assault at all, “Ester did not lay a finger on the woman”; then she justified the assault in language which stirred even the lethargic magistrate. “Such language will do your friend no good; it only serves to show that you are a low abandoned woman"—he ventured to remark in a low, even monotone.

“So’s she, she is low and abandoned too; she is ... and she said".... The woman was on her metal, and desired above all things to incriminate the enemy of her friend.

In the end someone was fined eight shillings and costs. Who it was I never knew; but my impression is that it was either a witness or the police constable.

Two young and innocent-looking boys were charged by a one-legged baker with stealing a loaf, value one penny. The baker was evidently a man of parts, one of which was religion. He kissed the book with a vivacious reverence and commenced, “Your Honour and gentlemen:—Them two boys Simon Fogarty and Thomas Smiff was in my bakery on the pretence of executing a purchase. I ask them to lift a board in order that I may take up bread enough to supply them. They become impertinent. I rebuke them. They only laugh and say I too much fool. I again rebuke them, and then I get over the counter in order to chastise them. They fly; but I seize one, Simon

Fogarty, and he struggle so hard that I oblige to call in the aid of Constable Perkin, who shall come before your Honour and say I speak the truth only. When I go back to my shop I find that one loaf had gone. I run into the street and see Thomas Smiff with my loaf to his lips. I call witness to see him also, and they tell you how the wicked boy, who is the pest of the street, eat my loaf for which I receive no payment.” The police constable confirmed the baker’s statement, and the magistrate looked bored to extinction. It is just the police court in which that ancient suburban drama “Black justice” might be performed with propriety.

In spite of the eloquence of the baker and the accurate testimony of the police constable, those boys might have been let off with a caution; but, just as justice was looking its weakest, the police inspector rose, and, placing one hand gracefully upon the summit of his helmet, addressed the court.

“May I venture to say that those boys are the most incorrigible rascals in the district. They do no work; they are dirty, lazy, and a terror to the neighbourhood. They give more trouble to the police than any other man or woman on the island.” The quality of mercy is immediately strained, and although the pardon flows out (mainly because the baker requests it) the dregs remain in a sentence to come up for judgment when called upon to do so.

The boys jointly attempt to hide a wide and intelligent grin behind the battered remains of what must once have been a felt hat.

And so the court goes on.

The merry hum of the day insects mingles with the shrill tones of singing birds, and the chatter of anxious litigants in the yard below. The magistrate continues his anxious calculations, and the clerk is assiduous in his endeavours to balance a pair of rusty pince-nez on a nose obviously too slippery with sweat. The police inspector frowns round the room from behind the majestic screen of his helmet, and the black usher shouts silence, or swears a witness after the usual caution of “Take se bible in you righ’ ’and"....

THE MILITARY CAMP AT NEWCASTLE

CHAPTER XI
THE MILITARY CAMP AT NEWCASTLE

In the streets of Kingston I had frequently seen companies of one or other of the brilliant West Indian Regiments swinging along to the music of their drums, and on dance and dinner nights I had noticed Artillery officers lounging about the terraces of my hotel. I had seen a couple of Service Corps men trying their polo ponies, and afar off, among a sparkling group of bejewelled women, I once caught sight of a glittering aide-de-camp. But of our friend Tommy of the line I had seen nothing. A friendly Artilleryman assured me that some of the British Line were on the island. I met him in the Kingston High Street, and he pointed towards the mountain chain which overhangs the town. “They’re up there,” he said. Following his direction, I saw a few white specks faintly showing through the summit haze of a mountain peak. The white specks, I discovered, were the cantonments of Newcastle, the military hill station of Jamaica.

The next morning we started at nine, and drove along shaded lanes and dusty, open roads, flanked by gardens and plantations, banana trees, pines, and cocoanuts. Around us the air was transparently clear, above us a sky of the deepest blue, and everywhere—above, below and around—we felt the sun. For two miles we had the level road, and then we reached the mountains.

A rushing mountain torrent crashing through a deep chasm filled almost to the brim with giant boulders, on which trees and plants and creeping flowers had found abundant soil; a road twisting like a tangled thread up and along the face of the mountain, and then lost in the mists of the summit; a heavy scent of tropical flowers; a vast sea of flashing colour—these things marked the beginning of the mountains. Slowly we crawled along a road just wide enough to contain our buggy. On one side the mountain walled us in; on the other a precipice deepened as we ascended. The valley below and the walls around were clothed in yellow grass and thickly set with trees; cotton and pine and cocoanut, banana, orange, and a hundred others grew in clumps and groves and lines, just as their father-seed had fallen or casual native had chanced to plant. Sometimes we passed a mile or so of level stretch, and there we found plantations and nigger huts. Below us we could see coffee mills and sugar estates; halfway up another peak a little church appeared amidst a tiny hamlet; but far above we made out Newcastle and the upper heights, bare and frowning amidst the gloom of the mountain mists. Soon the climate changed. In place of fruit and flowers, we found brown scrub and English gorse. Rainbows became common as trees. Then the sun disappeared,

and we found the clammy rain-mist. Somehow we had slipped away from joyous sun-kissed Jamaica and found Newcastle.

If I were a soldier I should pray all day long that I might never see the military station at Newcastle. Imagine a small parade-ground, levelled by spade work; a straggling collection of huts, built on never-ending steps; a few cottages for the officers; a very obvious burial-ground, well stocked with tombstones streaked with names, planted among the huts just outside the reading-room, and you have the cantonments of Newcastle. On the parade-ground, half a yard from the face of a step of rock thirty feet high, a couple of posts and a tape enable the sporting Tommy to practise goal shooting from dawn till sunset. Failing this he has half-a-dozen six-week old English newspapers in the reading-room, and a magnificent view of Kingston always to be seen through the mists and rain which seem for ever to bedim this eerie camp. The officers, I believe, have a tennis-court; but for Tommy it is shooting the goal, the newspapers, or the view, if he wishes to avoid the cells. Otherwise——

I heard the story from Tommy himself. He showed us the camp; first the burial-ground, and then—“Well there ain’t much more to see ’ere. That’s the parade-ground, and that’s the sergeants’ mess. We sleeps over there, and bein’ Sunday, the canteen don’t open to-day till six. We usually shoots the goal, and smokes, and sometimes we rags the blacks. See that nigger ’ut? Well, we goes there sometimes—of course, it’s out’er bounds—and takes the beer and rags the blacks. Once we chucked three or four of ’em over the gully because they set on one of ours. There’s one or two in cells now for molestin’ the natives. Then some of us deserts, you know. Goes off down to the coast, ships as firemen and gets to the States. I ’aven’t done that yet. Don’t know why we come up ’ere; there ain’t no fever nowhere now....” It was a long and interesting description he gave us. I gathered that in spite of the parade-ground and kicking the goal; in spite of the reading-room, with its platform and soldier-painted scenery; in spite even of the tiny billiard-table and the picturesque cemetery, the life of Tommy in garrison at Newcastle is not a jolly one. Tired of doing the things he is allowed to do, and without the means to appreciate expensive joys of the canteen, the youthful, full-blooded soldier sallies forth on mischief bent. Then he experiences a salutary change of scenery in the confines of the cells. Sometimes, as our friend remarked, he deserts.

Every year for many weary months a few hundred Tommies do these things in Newcastle. Kingston and the plains are peopled by tourists in search of health and pleasure; the climate of the island is entirely salubrious; Jamaica is a recognised sanatorium; but the Government says that the British soldier must live in the Hill station so many months of the year. It is a ridiculous story, something in the nature of a repetition of the blunders of fifty years ago. Then the British regiments were sent to garrison Fort Augusta, a camp delightfully situated in the midst of a deadly swamp. From Fort Augusta the military authorities jumped to Newcastle. Fifty years hence these gentlemen may realise that the plains of Jamaica are perfectly healthy, and that Newcastle is really a little dull; until then—poor Tommy.

Newcastle is not unhealthy: it is merely a little damp and a little dull. From the point of view of the tourist it is magnificent. The romantic grandeur of the giant mountain chains stretching east and west; the wonderful view of town and harbour; the marvellous colour effects; the cathedral-like solemnity of the place—all these things are delightful in the extreme. But I turned my back on the place without regret. For I remembered that far below the valleys were bathed in light and warmth and colour. I knew that halfway down the mountain I should find the orange, the passion flower, and the scented air of the tropics. And I was glad when the horses bumped us along the path which zigzagged downwards through the clouds to the land of sunshine.