As I had several purchases to make and to expedite by the Port Antonio on its homeward passage, I prepared myself for a long day’s shopping on Monday, and indeed I did very little else before going to the first official garden-party at King’s House on the Friday following my arrival.
The town of Kingston has been called in my hearing “a collection of shanties,” and although I will not give my assent quite to this appellation, I cannot honestly admire it. Fine buildings it certainly lacks. The chief street is Harbour Street, and having once found that, the other streets run either at right angles or parallel with it.
My first commission was to order a number of tortoiseshell articles, which are made here cheaply and well by a man called Andrews. Then it is a nice thing to know that you can send your friends a box containing a hundred oranges properly packed for the sum of twelve shillings, provided they do not live beyond a certain distance from London. Blue Mountain coffee is also an acceptable present. Experts declare that there is no better in the world; and whether it be true or not I cannot tell, but I learnt from apparently reliable authority that the Czar is supplied entirely with the product of one of these upland plantations. Guava jelly made in the island is delicious, and often sent home by request of those who have known it out here. Indeed I think many families with delicate-chested members might do worse than live, for a while at least, in Jamaica. House-rent in the upper part of the town is not dear, and the houses are well built, all of them being surrounded with gardens of varying size, where bougainvillia, hibiscus, palm-trees, and the crimson-leaved poin-settia are nearly always to be seen. The rents of these vary from £50 to £100, according to size. They have three postal deliveries per diem. Fruit, vegetables and fish are cheap, and prices generally most moderate; for instance, beef is sixpence a pound, pork, ninepence, bread, threepence, sugar, twopence, coffee, one shilling, fish, sixpence. The dearest articles of diet are ham, at eighteenpence, tea, three shillings, good butter, eighteenpence to two shillings, English cheese, eighteenpence. Fruit and vegetables are not worth mentioning; pines are to be had for twopence, and for a penny you can get a dozen bananas. The native produce is of course cheap, and you pay more in proportion for imported goods. A buggy to hold four persons costs, when new, about £40, and you can buy sufficiently good horses from £15 to £20, and even cheaper; but the town of Kingston and environs is so well served by the tramway service, and the hire of buggies within the urban limits so cheap, that it is quite possible to live comfortably in the suburbs without a conveyance. The streets are well lighted by gas, some of the hotels and public buildings by electricity. Labour is not a very dear item either; the working hours are from 6 A.M. to 5 P.M., with an hour off, between 11 and 12 o’clock. On Saturdays no work is done after 11 o’clock. Labourers are paid from eighteenpence to two shillings a day, women from ninepence to one shilling. Many of the domestic servants live away from the houses, coming early in the morning, and leaving about nine in the evening. In a great many households the mistress does not feed the women-servants. If there are several, they have a room to eat in, providing for themselves; and I should imagine this was by far the best way, for the nauseous compounds in their stock-pots, when they thus choose their own provender, are unsuitable to the stomach of any average English domestic servant. Salt-fish in an advanced stage of decay is a favourite dish with them, but nothing comes amiss, and all finds its way into the big pot.
There are not many curios to be bought in any of the West Indian islands, but for what few there are it is best to go to the Women’s Self-Help Society. Here you can get lamp-shades, doyleys, mats of all descriptions made from lace-bark, and ferns artistically arranged; long chains for the neck, or muff, made from native seeds dried and strung together. Those which are mostly bought are known locally as “Job’s Tears” and “Women’s Tongues.” There was a great run on these a week or two back when Dr Lunn’s tourist steamer, the Argonaut, put into Kingston Harbour, and its passengers, to the number of a hundred and thirty, spent £70 on the island curiosities. Great joy reigned amongst the lady promoters of the Society: such a windfall does not often happen to them.
This “Women’s Self-Help Society” was founded by Lady Musgrave, the wife of a former Governor, and was opened in 1879. Apparently there are a number of what some of our papers at home are pleased to designate as decayed gentlewomen in Jamaica, and the object of this industry is to find a sale for all kinds of work which they, when industriously inclined, are able to do. There is, however, an agency attached to it whereby distressed needlewomen can get orders to execute for ladies and gentlemen, and there is a stock of clothes always kept ready, suitable for servants and working people.
The latest Handbook of Jamaica says of this institution: “The Society has been a great boon to many people in reduced circumstances who have to work for their living, but find it difficult to get suitable employment. It also enables other women, who do not require the profit of their work for themselves, to earn something for charities and philanthropic objects, as well as to raise the standard of work by bringing to bear on it that cultivated taste and artistic grace which is the natural result of a refined education.” So much for this Society and its aims. I should mention that the seeds called “Women’s Tongues” are those which hang in long pods from a tree called ponciana. When the seeds are dry, and the wind blows the boughs of the trees, they rattle in the pods, hence the title. “Job’s Tears” are the seeds of a plant which bends by the water-edge, its melancholy attitude having given rise to the name.
CHAPTER VII
DOMINICA’S FLOURISHING CONDITION—SCOTCH DINNER—TROPICAL VEGETATION
Two or three days after my arrival at Constant Spring Hotel, I began to feel that my West Indian experiences would lack any degree of thoroughness if I did not include a journey to the Windward and Leeward Islands; how to get to them I had yet to learn.