There is water, too, in the crevices of the asphalt field
We landed with misgiving, having often heard of “that terrible walk” from the pier to the “lake.” No doubt it seems so to many a tourist, being nearly ten minutes long up a very gentle slope by a perfect macadam highway. Beside it buckets are constantly roaring past on elevated cables, carrying pitch to the ship or returning for a new load with an almost human air of preoccupation. The highway leads to the gate of a yard with a mine-like reduction plant peopled with tar-smeared negroes, immediately behind which opens out the “lake.”
The far-famed deposit is not much to look at. It is a slightly concave, black patch of a hundred acres, with as definite shores as a lake of water, surrounded by a Venezuelan landscape of scanty brush and low, thirsty palms. To the left the black towers of half a dozen oil-wells break the otherwise featureless horizon. About the surface of the hollow several groups of negroes work leisurely. One in each group turns up with every blow of his pick a black, porous lump of pitch averaging the size of a market-basket; the others bear these away on their heads to small cars on narrow tracks, along which they are pushed by hand to the “factory.” That is all there is to it; an easier job for all concerned would be hard to find. A trade wind sweeps almost constantly across the field, the pitch is so light that the largest lump is hardly a burden, from the nature of the case the pace is not fast, and the workers are so constantly in sight that an overseer is hardly needed, nor piece-work required. The men are paid eighty cents a day of ten hours, which seems much to them and little to their employers, producing mutual satisfaction. The work calls for no skill whatever; it is carried on in the open air, with women venders of food and drink free to come and go; on the side of the concessionists the deposit offers not even the difficulty of transportation, being barely a mile from the ship, furnishing its own material for the necessary roads, and virtually inexhaustible. The holes dug during the day fill imperceptibly and are gone by morning, the deepest one ever excavated having disappeared in three days. Only a small fraction of the field is exploited, it could easily keep all the ships of the world busy. Should it ever be exhausted, there is a still larger deposit just across the bay in Venezuela. In the slang of financial circles, “it is like finding it.”
The lake is soft underfoot, like a tar sidewalk in midsummer, the heels sinking out of sight in a minute or two, and has a faint smell of sulphur. In a few places it is not solid enough to sustain a man’s weight, though children and the barefooted workmen scamper across it anywhere at sight of a white visitor for the inevitable British West Indian purpose of demanding “a penny, please, sir.” A crease remains around each hole as it refills, some of these rolling under like the edge of a rising mass of dough, and in these crevices, the rain gathers in puddles of clear, though black-looking, water in which the surrounding families do their washing. Only negroes are employed as laborers; the twenty-five white men in the higher positions are nearly all Americans, those with families housed in company bungalows on the slope above the gulf, the bachelors in a company hotel. Most of the pitch goes directly to the steamer, but as it is one-third water, and royalties, duties, and transportation are paid by weight, a certain proportion is boiled in vats in the “factory” and shipped in barrels constructed on the spot. From the vat-platforms spreads out a vast panorama, with San Fernando at the base of its lonely hill, Port of Spain on its gently sloping plain, the entire Gulf of Paria, the Bocas Islands, and the mountains of eastern Venezuela all in plain sight.
The pitch lake was known even in the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, who “payed” his vessels here during lulls in buccaneering, but it has been exploited only during the last few decades. Three hundred thousands tons have been shipped during a single year, the revenue to the Government of Trinidad in 1912 being £63,453. Indeed, one of the main reasons why the island has a much more prosperous air than its neighbors is that millions have been paid into its treasury in royalties and duties from its only “lake.” When a steamer is loading, buckets and negroes toil all through the night in the glare of electric-lights. The barrels of the refined product were first stowed on their sides, but as they flattened out into a four hundred pound cube that could neither be rolled nor lifted, they are now stood on end, tier after tier. The crude pitch becomes a solid mass during the journey north, and must be dug up again with picks when it reaches Perth Amboy.
CHAPTER XVII
AFRICAN JAMAICA
It may be that our affection for Jamaica is tempered by the difficulties we had in reaching it. Lying well inside the curve described by the other West Indies, the scarcity of shipping caused by the World War has left it almost unattainable from any of the other islands and hardly to be reached, except directly from New York or Panama. We first attempted to visit it from Santiago de Cuba, early in our journey. But as this would have meant spending an interminable twenty-four hours, and perhaps much more, on a little coasting-steamer not even fit for the “slave traffic” in which it is chiefly engaged, at a fare equal to that from St. Thomas to Barbados in an ocean liner, the depositing of an equal amount to pay the expenses of a very probable quarantine of a week because of a few scattered cases of smallpox in Cuba, and the unwinding of a formidable mesh of red tape, we decided to defer our call and pick up the island on the way home. That surely would be easy, we concluded, for traffic certainly should be frequent between the two largest of the British West Indies. Arrived in Trinidad, however, we found that island as completely cut off from Jamaica as if they belonged to two enemy powers. We at length succeeded in coaxing the captain of a British freighter—the most pleasant craft, by the way, of all our journey—touching at every port on the north coast of South America and spending three weeks on the way, to carry us to Panama, whence another steamer bore us back again to several Columbian ports and eventually landed us in Jamaica seven weeks after leaving Trinidad. Had we not set our hearts on making our tour of the West Indies complete, we should have long since invited the principal British island to withdraw to a sphere where the temperature is reputed to be more than tropical.
The first view of Jamaica and of its capital is pleasing. A mountainous mass, gradually developing on the horizon, grows into a series of ranges which promise to rival the beauty of Porto Rico. Beyond a long, low, narrow, sand-reef lies an immense harbor, on the further shore of which Kingston is suspected, rather than seen, only a few wharves and one domed building rising above the wooded plain on which the low city stands. The hills behind it tumble into a disordered heap culminating in the cloud-swathed peak of what are most fittingly called the Blue Mountains. On this strip of sand, known as the Palisadoes, lies buried the famous buccaneer, Sir Henry Morgan, once governor of Jamaica, and at the extreme end of it stands the remnant of the old capital, Port Royal. In the good old days of pirates, who made it their headquarters, the depository of their loot, and the scene of their debauchery, this was the most important town in the West Indies, some say the richest and most wicked spot on earth. One must be chary, however, of too hastily granting such superlatives. An earthquake befell it one day, sinking all but a fragment of the town beneath the sea, and a new capital, named Kingston, was founded on what promised to be safer ground across the bay. A later century brought regret that a still more distant site had not been chosen. To-day Port Royal consists of a quarantine station and a small village so isolated from the mainland that servant women brought from it to the capital have been known to shriek with dismay at sight of their first cow. Ships circling the reef on their way in or out of the harbor sail over the very spot where pirates once held their revels, and negro boatmen still assert that on stormy evenings one may hear the tolling of Port Royal’s cathedral bell, lying fathoms deep beneath the waves.
One’s first impression of the Jamaicans, as they lounge about the wharf eyeing each trunk or bundle several minutes before summoning up the energy to tackle it, is that they are far less courageous in the face of work than their cousins, the Barbadians. This is closely followed by the discovery that Kingston is the most disappointing town in the West Indies. With the exception of a few bright yellow public buildings and a scattered block or two of new business houses, it is a negro slum, spreading for miles over a dusty plain. Scarcely a street has even the pretense of a pavement; the few sidewalks that exist are blocked by stairways, posts, and the trash of a disorderly population, or degenerate every few yards into stretches of loose stones and earth. The only building worth crossing the street to see is that domed structure sighted from the bay, the Catholic cathedral. To be sure, the earthquake wrought great havoc, but that was thirteen years ago, time enough, surely, in which to have made a much farther advance toward recovery.
The insolence of nearly all the British West Indies reaches its zenith in Kingston. Even in the main street clamoring black urchins and no small number of adults trail the white visitor, heaping upon him foul-mouthed taunts, all but snatching his possessions out of his hands in broad daylight; diseased beggars plod beside him in bare feet that seem never to have known the luxury of a scrubbing, scattering their germs in a fine gray limestone dust that swirls in blinding clouds which envelop everything in a yellowish veil whenever a breath of wind stirs or a street-car sweeps past. Loose-mannered black females ply their trade with perfect impunity, shrieking worse than indecencies at unresponsive passers-by; assaults and robbery are frequent even by day. One must be vaccinated and often quarantined before entering Jamaica, yet it is doubtful whether any island of the West Indies has more evidence of disease than Kingston itself. Those who carry firearms must deposit them at the custom house, yet with the possible exception of Hispaniola, a revolver is more often needed in the Jamaican capital than anywhere in the Caribbean, as several harmless Chinese merchants learned to their sorrow during our brief stay there. The town is dismal, disagreeable, and unsafe for self-respecting white women at any hour; by night it is virtually abandoned to the lawless black hordes that infest it. Weak gas-lights give it scarcely a suggestion of illumination; swarms of negroes shuffle through the hot dust, cackling their silly laughter, shouting their obscenity, heckling, if not attacking, the rare white men who venture abroad, love-making in perfect indifference to the proximity of other human beings, while the pompous black policemen look on without the slightest attempt to quell the disorder.