Jamaica as it is, 1903

by B. Pullen-Burry

CHAPTER XIII

MY VISIT TO A PEN—ARAWAK REMAINS—LEGEND OF THE COTTON-TREE

Kingston, March 1903.—After passing Kendal, a place well known for its yearly agricultural shows, I stopped at a station called Balaclava, where my friend in her buggy met me. A drive of about two miles through very hilly country and across one or two bridges spanning one of the many rivers, or springs, which abound in this island, brought me to their property. A gate stood open, and we drove over a grassy track up to the house, which is one of the oldest in Jamaica, and called a “storm-house,” because it was built after the great hurricane of 1722. I was afterwards introduced to an ancient black lady of some eighty summers, who remembered slave times. She had been on the estate, and had never lived elsewhere. The house, she said, had always been “just de same, missus,” when she was a “picaninny and lived in de big niggah houses ovar dar,” pointing towards the wooded hills which lay on my right. My hostess, Mrs M——, said their property had been bought some years before from a coloured family, a death having caused the estate to be sold. It comprised 1600 acres, and besides coffee, which was chiefly grown, logwood, pimento and bananas were cultivated. A river ran through it, and they had on the estate a very interesting cave, about a mile in length, if I cared to visit it. I naturally accepted the latter proposal, and as we could not drive anywhere the next day, the horses and carriage having been promised to some friends for the purposes of a funeral, it was arranged we should visit the cave. Mrs M—— I found to be a most charming hostess, desirous that I should see all there was to be seen in the neighbourhood.

The house reminded me very much of some old-fashioned houses I had seen in Spain the previous spring. It was a square one-storied building with a low, wide verandah running round two sides of it. The ground floor was taken up with storage-rooms, an overseer’s room, and a school-room. Passages were built between thick stone walls for shelter in case of violent storms or hurricanes. A small portion of grass was fenced round about the house to prevent the turkeys, chickens, sheep and pigs from entering the enclosure. On passing through the wicket-gate of this I was conducted up a stone staircase across the piazza or verandah into the drawing-room which, with a sitting-room, ran the whole length of the front of the building. An open doorway, draped with lace curtains, led into a large dining-room, which occupied the central portion of the house. The bedrooms were built on either side, and the kitchen ran along the back of the house. This central high-roofed, cool, windowless room is the characteristic feature of most West Indian houses built in times past. The floors, generally of island cedar-wood, are polished to a nicety by the black servants, who sing as they work at them.

The family, which consisted of Mr and Mrs M——, their three sons and daughter, a girl of nine, with her governess, a tall, dark West Indian girl, the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman, sat down to dinner about six o’clock the evening of my arrival. We were waited on by two neatly-dressed maids, whose faces reminded one of Nubian blacking; they wore caps on their woolly hair and slippers on their feet.

Mrs M——, who is a clergyman’s daughter, and her husband, the son of a British naval commander, belonging to a good old Cornish family, told me that they insisted upon their servants appearing suitably dressed in the house, however smartly they chose to attire themselves out-of-doors. They interested me very much in their conversation about the condition of the island and the amusing ways of the blacks.

Jamaica, they said, had certainly taken a turn for the better; and it is commonly said amongst business-men out here, that the island can never return to the state of depression caused by the failure of sugar. Fortunes are perhaps not to be made, but that a living is to be earned if people are industrious and ordinarily intelligent is conceded on all hands, and was a feature to be noted in the Archbishop’s address to his people for the New Year.

That Dr Nuttall, who is known far and wide as a man of clear-sighted ability, both as an energetic organiser and able administrator, is also an admirable judge of economic and financial problems in these latitudes no better evidence is forthcoming than a study of the methods by which he has guided the barque of the Anglican Church through the stormy waters of Disestablishment. In spite of almost overwhelming difficulties and penury, he has established it on a far surer foundation than it ever boasted of before, for it has its roots now in the hearts of the people. It represents to-day the chosen religious expression of the most enlightened and educated classes in this island.

But although I cannot refrain from speaking of the conspicuous ability which has retrieved the position of Anglicanism during the last two decades, it is not because one depreciates, or would wish to undervalue, the self-denying labours of Wesleyan and other nonconformist ministers. Pitying the condition of “poor slaves” they came to Jamaica in the eighteenth century, and commenced their labours when the clergy of the Established Church were steeped in avarice, or in apathy. Here they live and labour on the merest pittances. I heard recently of a nonconformist minister whose income, all told, was not over £40 a year.

Since I intend to devote other pages to this subject, I will shorten my reflections on religious phases in Jamaica, and will only mention the way in which my friends were able to get a church built in this neighbourhood.

Mr M——, adding some practical training he had had in his youth to certain handy-man qualities, inherited perhaps from a sailor ancestry, superintended the whole of the undertaking when once the spot of ground was selected, whereon to build. He was both architect and builder. Many of the contributors, who could not give money, gave their labour and time. The ladies of the country-side devoted their energies to the cause, inciting and encouraging their black sisters to aid them. Appeals to their friends in England for help met with generous response, and a bazaar, or rather country fête, brought in a very satisfactory sum total. The cost of the erection of the church to which I was taken probably represents the smallest amount in Jamaica, for one of its size.

It is difficult for us at home with our various secular interests improving, or otherwise, to realise how, in the life of the country people of our colonies, removed from all these, religion, whether sham or real, plays an all-important part. Only by living in these out-of-the-way places does one at all appreciate this side of colonial life, and, having seen it, one feels that if the want of solid teaching is felt amongst the educated laity, it should be met by the best possible attainable. So far as my own powers of observation go, I incline to think that the emotional side of religion is not what is needed in Jamaica; they have had plenty of that sort of thing. What they ask for is a broad-minded, literary, practical theology, which can hold its own with the advancing science and democratic faddisms of these days, and this it is the duty of the English Church, to, my mind, to provide.

An interesting visitor to the house whilst I stayed at N—— was a local doctor, with antiquarian and artistic tastes. I learnt from him that there had been several finds in the island of prehistoric remains, consisting of kitchen-middens, refuse-heaps, or shell-mounds, near which various objects such as aboriginal pottery, fish-bones, and those of the Indian coney had been discovered. The locations of these having generally been near the sea-coasts, and in some cases extending over quite large areas on both sides of the island; the numerous limestone caves have provided many skulls and relics of Indian origin. A series of rock-carvings with deep incisions representing human figures and heads, also rude outlines of lizards, birds, and turtles, have been found in the parish of St Catherine, possessing analogous features to similar finds in various West Indian islands. Implements too, such as chisels, axes, celts, mealing-stones, flaked flints, chalcedony beads, perforated ornamental shells, have been unearthed in different localities. Columbus spoke of the idols worshipped by the Indians of Jamaica, and it is interesting to learn that two stone images, probably examples of their gods, were sent home for exhibition by the Hon. D. Campbell; others, perforated behind for suspension, were found in a shell-heap, and probably were worn as amulets. In speaking of the Indians as the aborigines, it must be understood that this was a generic name applied indiscriminately to all the inhabitants of the lands discovered by Columbus, but the Arawak tribe is distinct from the man-eating Caribs who lived near the regions of the Orinoco. In Mr im-Thurn’s work, “Among the Indians of Guiana,” he compares these prehistoric Jamaican objects with those of other West Indian islands, and the mainland of America, and finds that there are more notes of resemblance between them and those of the Indians, both ancient and modern, of British Guiana. With this last-named race, the former inhabitants of Jamaica, as well as many of the aborigines of other islands, are supposed to be most closely related.

It was one of these limestone caverns, where Indian remains had been found, that I visited, for it was in such hiding-places the poor Arawaks took refuge from the tender mercies of their Spanish conquerors, who, at the most moderate computation, accounted for some 60,000 of them before the English occupation under Cromwell. The entrance was up a path leading from the main road, and was by no means conspicuous, but once inside, the cave was spacious and lofty; the stalactites hanging from the roof were of a very curious formation. Two of Mrs M——’s children accompanied me, and an overseer, with two attendant “boys,” carried torches. It was very rough walking and fearfully hot, slippery and wet here and there. In one place, which the children called the banqueting-hall, from its vast proportions and high roof, we startled thousands of rat-bats, who had taken up their habitation in the deep recesses of the stalactites which hung over our heads. Two were knocked over, and I secured one; they have bat’s wings attached to a mouse-like body. At last we came to a full stop, an unscaleable barrier of rock barred our way; the other side, they told me, was one of those underground rivers so common in the Cockpit Country, of which I shall speak further on; they run through the interstices between the limestone rocks. However, we contented ourselves with what we had seen, and were glad enough to breathe fresh air after nearly an hour’s subterranean exploration.

The West Indian way of living, especially on these pens, strikes one as being the most suitable to the climate. We rose before 7 A.M., coffee was ready on the verandah at 7.30. The mistress of the house fed her poultry, and looked after household matters till 11. I made my excursion to the cave, walked or sketched until that hour, when the household retired to their bedrooms, where baths had been prepared; we then made our toilet for the day. Breakfast, which was similar to our luncheon, was served at mid-day; tea about 3.30, before we went for a drive; dinner, being a moveable feast, according to whatever constituted the afternoon programme, was at any hour between 5 and 7. On this particular day the buggy had been lent for a funeral. The difficulties of providing for sudden emergencies of this nature in a hot country, in a hilly and sparsely-inhabited region, struck me forcibly. The seats and cover were removed from the carriage, upon which wooden planks were laid so as to make a kind of platform; on this the coffin rested. “There are some gruesome things connected with funerals in these parts, where a coffin, or ‘box’ has to be put together in a few hours,” Mr M—— said. Often, when death seemed a certainty, they had to send out “boys” to collect the necessary deals for the coffin, and set about making it before the breath was out of a man’s body. Unless the gravediggers were well primed with rum, said he, they would not dig the grave, “for fear of duppy springing up, buckra.” But the corpse expectant may recover occasionally, and the coffin then is calmly kept for use at a future date. Having seen some graves on the estate, neatly bricked over and cemented, in one of my walks, I asked if they belonged to the family who had formerly lived at N——, when Mrs M—— explained to me that it was the custom, if a bereaved widower thought fit to take a second wife into his hut, to make a brick erection, firmly cemented together, over that part of his compound where the former partner of his life had been laid to rest, or at any rate over the spot where he thought he had buried her, for fear of being disturbed by her ghostly wanderings. She had once enquired of a negro, who was hard at work on his wife’s grave, why he was taking so much trouble with it; he told her it was to “keep down duppy, missus.”

A beautiful drive one afternoon to the Maggoty Falls on the Black River was one of the most exquisite I had in Jamaica. The falls were 13 miles away; part of the road lay over a savannah, where deadly poison lurked in morass and swamp, and no white man dared live too near to these breeding-places of the malarial mosquito. The exquisite peacock-green hues of the Black River water must be seen to be appreciated. On either bank profuse parasitical growth obscured the most majestic trees; tropical foliage was to be seen here at its very best.

The heat was most oppressive; it rained as we returned. The suffocating atmosphere in the lowlands made us glad to climb the steep hills which lay between us and my friend’s estate.

The Black River is the only navigable one in the island; lighters bring their cargoes up a considerable distance into the interior of it. In this neighbourhood I remarked again the size of the cotton-tree, with the wonderful spurs it sends out from its roots. This is not the red silk cotton-tree of India and of Java, known as the Simal tree from the seed-vessel containing red silk cotton; the cotton-tree of Jamaica has seed-vessels containing white silk cotton. The Arawaks attached a religious importance to this tree, and at the present day the son of Ham regards it as the haunt and home of “duppies.” The aboriginal idea was that “after the earth was made the Supreme Being, our Father, our Maker,” made His throne in the cotton-tree. The legend of this Arawak belief is worthy of note, and I quote it as given by Bret:

“Still no life was in the land,

No sweet birds sang songs of love,

O’er the plain and through the grove,

Nothing then was seen to move.

From that bright green throne His hand

Scattered twigs and bark around,

Some in air and some on land,

Some the sparkling waters found.

Soon He saw with life abound

Water, air, and solid ground;

Those which fell upon the stream

Found a pleasant shelter there.

Shining fishes dart and gleam

Where those woody fragments were;

Others sported through the air

Bright with wings and feathers fair.”