Jamaica as it is, 1903

by B. Pullen-Burry

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.