As in Trinidad the Spaniards preferred an inland site for their principal city, and this Villa de la Vega was founded by Columbus’s son Diego after they had abandoned their first capital of Sevilla Nueva on the north coast. The English, being a maritime people before all else, first set up their government in Port Royal, but even they could not endure a capital that had sunk beneath the sea, and returned to the old Spanish headquarters. This had come to be called St. Jago de la Vega, a name still to be found on ancient mile-posts along the roads of the vicinity, but that was too much of an effort for the thick negro tongues and the place was rechristened Spanish Town. It remained the capital of the island until 1870, and still retains the records’ office. Set in a flat plain half covered with bushy trees, it is but a very trifle cooler and not much more pleasant than Kingston. There are still many Spanish names and features in Spanish Town, but only one family which speaks that language, and very few Catholics. An old red brick cathedral recently restored is said to be the oldest in the British colonies, Anglican now, of course, and open only during services. Spanish Town has scarcely ten thousand inhabitants, though it disputes with Montego Bay and Port Antonio the second place among towns of the island. In its center is still a kind of Spanish plaza, with only its grass and trees left, and surrounded by old yellow brick government buildings—all of which, one learns with surprise, were built by the English. Under the portico of one of these is a statue of Rodney, who raised the Union Jack over the French in the West Indies, dressed in that glorified undershirt or incomplete Roman toga worn no doubt by all British admirals in those heated days. The old capital has an open market which is a trifle better dressed, though more bestial and insolent than those of Haiti, and its only hotel is a negro joint overrun with plate-licking cats and setting hens, which masquerades under the name of “Marble Hall.”
Though it was for a century and a half under Spanish rule, Jamaica shows few signs of Iberian influence, except in its geographical names. Some of these remain pure, but the majority of them have been corrupted by the thick-tongued negroes into something only faintly resembling the original. Thus Managua has become Moneague, Agua Alta is now Wag Water, a place once noted for its manteca, or lard, is Montego Bay, and Boca del Agua has adopted the alias of Bog Walk. When England wrested Jamaica from Spain the property which the Spaniards could not take with them they largely destroyed, so that no real Spanish building has remained intact. Unlike Trinidad the Spanish tongue is almost never heard in Jamaica.
The train continues across the flat plain, everywhere thinly covered with big bushy trees. Indeed one of the stations is called Bushy Park, where an old brick aqueduct which looks Spanish, though it probably is not, still carries water across the cane-fields. Muscular negro youths in rags, either without the possibility or the desire to earn better garments, swarm about the stations and into the cars, pouncing upon the luggage of any traveler who shows the slightest sign of descending. An hour and a half from Kingston, beyond the station for Old Harbour, the land begins slowly and gradually to rise, and one is soon overlooking a vast tree-bushy rather than forested country. Broad fields of henequen, jute sisal, or rope-cactus, as you choose to call it, are planted in rows on rather arid looking ground completely covered with high brown grass. The first suggestion of beauty in the landscape appears near May Pen. A “pen” in the Jamaica dialect means a grassy field or a pasture, and “pen keeping” is the local term for breeding and raising cattle. Here and there the inevitable old square brick chimneys of sugar-mills dot the ever descending plain, which at length begins to be hidden by low foothills. Sapling-like forests spring up along the way, and the logwood that grows in scattered quantities all over the island lies piled at the railway stations, the outer layer of wood roughly hacked away, leaving only the reddish heart. Schooners carry north many cargoes of these crooked logs and the still more awkward stumps, while several mills on the island turn it into an extract that is shipped in barrels to color our garments dark-blue or black. Jamaica produces also a certain amount of fustic, a smooth, straight tree which gives a khaki color.
Soon the soil, or “sile,” as they call it in Jamaica, turns reddish and clearings and habitations become rare. By this time we were the only white persons on the train and shortly after that the only passengers in the first-class coach. A larger engine took us in tow and we climbed 865 feet in the next six miles. Dense, almost unpopulated forests, like some sections of eastern Cuba, covered the ever more rugged landscape; but if the scenery flanking Jamaica’s railway is more striking than that visible from the trains in Porto Rico, it is because it passes through rather than around the island, for on the whole our own West Indian colony is more beautiful. The train continues to climb until it attains an altitude of 1680 feet at Green Vale, then descends steadily past several villages of no great importance, through numerous “tubes,” as Jamaicans call a tunnel, now and then past long stretches of bananas, otherwise through almost a wilderness broken only by tiny corn or cane-fields about the rare negro shacks. At Catadupa it breaks out upon a vast vista of wooded valley, and sinks at length into a square mile of sugar-cane beyond which lies Montego Bay on the northern coast.
As I passed this group on a Jamaican highway, the woman reading the Bible was saying, “So I ax de Lard what I shall do”
“Draw me portrait please, sir.” The load consists of school books and a pair of hobnail shoes
A very frequent sight along the roads of Jamaica