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