"It is traversed by over two hundred streams, forty of which are from twenty-five to one hundred feet in breadth; and, it deserves to be mentioned, furnish water-power sufficient to manufacture every thing produced by the soil, or consumed by the inhabitants. Far less expense than is usually incurred on the same surface in the United States for manure, would irrigate all the dry lands of the island, and enable them to defy the most protracted droughts by which it is ever visited."[15]
The productiveness of the soil is immense. Fruits of every variety abound; vegetables of every kind for the table, and Indian corn, grow abundantly. The island is rich in dyestuffs, drugs, and spices of the greatest value; and the forests furnish the most celebrated woods in the greatest variety. In addition to this, it possesses copper-mines inferior to none in the world, and coal will probably be mined extensively before many years. "Such," says Mr. Bigelow,—
"Are some of the natural resources of this dilapidated and poverty-stricken country. Capable as it is of producing almost every thing, and actually producing nothing which might not become a staple with a proper application of capital and skill, its inhabitants are miserably poor, and daily sinking deeper and deeper into the utter helplessness of abject want.
"'Magnas inter opes inops.'
"Shipping has deserted her ports; her magnificent plantations of sugar and coffee are running to weeds; her private dwellings are falling to decay; the comforts and luxuries which belong to industrial prosperity have been cut off, one by one, from her inhabitants; and the day, I think, is at hand when there will be none left to represent the wealth, intelligence, and hospitality for which the Jamaica planter was once so distinguished."
The cause of all this, say the planters, is that wages are too high for the price of sugar. This Mr. Bigelow denies—not conceding that a shilling a day is high wages; but all the facts he adduces tend to show that the labourer gives very little labour for the money he receives; and that, as compared with the work done, wages are really far higher than in any part of the Union. Like the Fingo of Southern Africa, he can obtain from a little patch of land all that is indispensably necessary for his subsistence, and he will do little more work than is needed for accomplishing that object. The consequence of this is that potatoes sell for six cents a pound, eggs from three to five cents each, milk at eighteen cents a quart, and corn-meal at twelve or fourteen dollars a barrel; and yet there are now more than a hundred thousand of these small proprietors, being almost one for every three people on the island. All cultivators, they yet produce little to sell, and the consequence of this is seen in the fact that the mass of the flour, rice, corn, peas, butter, lard, herrings, &c. needed for consumption requires to be imported, as well as all the lumber, although millions of acres of timber are to be found among the unappropriated lands of the island.
It is impossible to read Mr. Bigelow's volume, without arriving at the conclusion that the freedom granted to the negro has had little effect except that of enabling him to live at the expense of the planter so long as any thing remained. Sixteen years of freedom did not appear to its author to have "advanced the dignity of labour or of the labouring classes one particle," while it had ruined the proprietors of the land; and thus great damage had been done to the one class without benefit of any kind to the other. From a statistical table published in August last, it appears, says the New York Herald, that since 1846—
"The number of sugar-estates on the island that have been totally abandoned amounts to one hundred and sixty-eight, and the number partially abandoned to sixty-three; the value of which two hundred and thirty-one estates was assessed, in 1841, at £1,655,140, or nearly eight millions and a half of dollars. Within the same period, two hundred and twenty-three coffee-plantations have been totally, and twenty partially abandoned, the assessed value of which was, in 1841, £500,000, or two millions and a half of dollars; and of cattle-pens, (grazing-farms,) one hundred and twenty-two have been totally, and ten partially abandoned, the value of which was a million and a half of dollars. The aggregate value of these six hundred and six estates, which have been thus ruined and abandoned in the island of Jamaica, within the last seven or eight years, amounted by the regular assessments, ten years since, to the sum of nearly two and a half millions of pounds sterling, or twelve and a half million of dollars."
As a necessary consequence of this, "there is little heard of," says
Dr. King, "but ruin."[16] "In many districts," he adds—
"The marks of decay abound. Neglected fields, crumbling houses, fragmentary fences, noiseless machinery—these are common sights, and soon become familiar to observation. I sometimes rode for miles in succession over fertile ground which used to be cultivated, and which is now lying waste. So rapidly has cultivation retrograded, and the wild luxuriance of nature replaced the conveniences of art, that parties still inhabiting these desolated districts, have sometimes, in the strong language of a speaker at Kingston, 'to seek about the bush to find the entrance into their houses.'