COCKPIT COUNTRY—THE MAROONS
If there is one thing more interesting to the unbiassed traveller than others, it is to hear and analyse the various opinions expressed upon the subject he or she is attempting to master in the spirit of disinterestedness and liberal judgment, by those whose lives are being lived in that particular spot of the globe temporarily under review.
“England has treated Jamaica abominably,” I frequently heard. She had insisted on the liberation of the slaves, then inadequately compensated their owners, and when their emancipation upset all prevailing conditions of labour, instead of protecting sugar, the chief industry of her West Indian colonies, and fostering its growth, she fairly knocked it on the head by the introduction of free trade. When beetroot-sugar first arrived in Jamaica the nails were driven into its coffin. Annexation to the United States was not desirable, it was declared, but, so far as business was concerned, America would make things hum.
The negroes were emancipated too soon, thought certain of the grumblers. Had the Jamaican blacks been as well educated as their brothers in the States at the time they became freed, they would have a different race of peasants in the island to-day. “They will never make citizens,” I was told. They have no idea of the responsibilities of a civilised community; even those who had voting powers on local questions were too lazy or too callous to record their votes. If a white man suggested to them how better to cultivate their patch of land, or if the coffee-curers and shippers, for instance, advised them to bring their coffee when picked straight to their mills where they had the proper apparatus for curing the beans, the blacks would immediately suspect the white man had “something up his sleeve,” and was going to get the better of them in some underhand way.
Things, no doubt, are difficult in Jamaica under the very best of circumstances. The negro is unquestionably a low type of humanity, naturally unintelligent and lazy. People forget, however, he has, in the first place, only recently discovered that he has a soul as well as the white man, and, in the second place, but just learnt, the other day as it were, to call that soul his own.
Nearly two centuries of abject slavery, with its accompaniments of forced labour and hard usage, have passed over his head, since, as a free savage, he roamed the African forests, a fetich-worshipper, the victim of the lowest superstitions, and practising every vice known to humanity. Evangelising efforts were spasmodically made here and there to ameliorate the condition of the plantation slaves by those whose conscience was in advance of their times; but when in 1834 the yoke of slavery was removed with such an ancestry, such a history behind them, what could a reasonable person expect of the sons and daughters of Ham! The planters had regarded them as the necessary machinery for producing their princely incomes when the wealth of the West Indian merchant was a known quantity. To improve the breed the physically-fittest were, like cattle, carefully selected, and the women told off for this purpose given especially lighter work to perform. This practice alone might account for much of the indiscriminate living which called forth the blazing indignation and burning words of one of the Keswick delegates, whose work is mentioned on a former page.
The injustice of his wholesale indictment against the character of the women of this island is still felt by many.
One clergyman, of over thirty years’ experience in Jamaica, and whose church numbers 1300 communicants, expressed to me his strong disapproval of the way in which this island was held up as a “plague spot” for its wickedness, by persons who had no practical knowledge either of its history or its inhabitants.
If in the year 1902, 62 per cent. of the children born are illegitimate, in 1834, had a census been taken, probably there would have been over 90 per cent. Of the present 62 per cent., given by the latest returns, I was assured that fifty out of that number would represent the children of persons living together in faithful, though unwedded union.
It is a matter of history that white overseers on the estates were dismissed on their marriage for obvious reasons. Every obstacle was placed upon the marriage of slaves; I believe on many estates it was forbidden. Then the example set by the whites has been most shameful throughout the history of Jamaica in this respect. Considering these circumstances, and the very recent growth of any sort of moral standard, one is not surprised to hear many persons speak indignantly of the Keswick delegates and the superficial nature of their work.