The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of Ulysses

by James Anthony Froude

The channel at the entrance is a mile in width. The lagoon (the open part of it) may be seven or eight miles long and half as many broad. It forms the mouth of the Cobre river, one of the largest in Jamaica, on which, ten miles up, stands the original seat of government established by the Spaniards, and called after them Spanish Town. The fashion of past times, as old as the times of Thucydides, and continued on till the end of the last century, was to choose the sites for important towns in estuaries, at a distance from the sea, to be out of the reach of pirates. The Cobre, running down from Spanish Town, turns the plain through which it flows into a swamp. The swamp covers itself with mangroves, and the mangroves fringe the shore of the lagoon itself for two-thirds of its circuit. As Jamaica grew in wealth and population the trade was carried from Port Royal deeper into the bay. Another town sprang up there, called King's Town, or shortly 'Kingston.' The administration was removed thither for convenience, and though fallen away from its old consequence, Kingston, with its extended suburbs, its churches and warehouses, and large mansions overhung with trees, looks at a distance like a place of consideration. Many ships lay along the wharves, or anchored a few cables' distance off. Among them were a couple of Spanish frigates, which remain there in permanence on the watch for refugees from Cuba. On the slopes behind the town, as far as eye could see, were the once splendid estates of the sugar princes of the last century. One of them was pointed out to me as the West Indian home of the author of 'Tom Cringle.'

We had to stop for a few minutes as the officer of the port came alongside for the mails. We then went on at reduced speed. The lagoon is generally shoal. A deep water channel runs along the side of it which is farthest from the sea; made, I suppose, by the river, for as usual there is little tide or none. Halfway up we passed under the walls of Fort Augusta, now a ruin and almost deserted, but once mounting a hundred guns. The money which we spent on the defence of Jamaica in the old times was not always laid out wisely, as will be seen in an account which I shall have to give of this remarkable structure; but, at any rate, we were lavish of it.

Of the sharks with which the water used to swarm we saw none. Port Royal Jack and his kindred are said to have disappeared, driven or frightened out by the screws of the steamers. But it is not a place which I should choose for a swim. Nor did the nigger boys seem as anxious as I had seen them in other spots to dive for sixpences under the ship's side.

No account is made of days when you come into port after a voyage. Cargoes have to be landed, or coal has to be taken in. The donkey engines are at work, hoisting packing cases and luggage out of the hold. Stewards run to and fro, and state-room doors are opened, and busy figures are seen through each, stuffing their portmanteaus and preparing for departure. The church bells at Kingston, ringing for early service, reminded me that it was Sunday. We brought up at a jetty, and I cannot say that, close at hand, the town was as attractive as it had appeared when first I saw it. The enchantment was gone. The blue haze of distance gave place to reality. The water was so fetid under the ship's side that it could not be pumped into the baths. Odours, not Arabian, from open drains reminded me of Jacmel. The streets, up which I could see from the afterdeck, looked dirty and the houses shabby. Docks and wharves, however, are never the brightest part of any town, English or foreign. There were people enough at any rate, and white faces enough among them. Gangways were rigged from the ship to the shore, and ladies and gentlemen rushed on board to meet their friends. The companies' agents appeared in the captain's cabin. Porters were scrambling for luggage; pushing, shoving, and swearing. Passengers who had come out with us, and had never missed attendance at the breakfast table, were hurrying home unbreakfasted to their wives and families. My own plans were uncertain. I had no friends, not even an acquaintance. I knew nothing of the hotels and lodging houses, save that they had generally a doubtful reputation. I had brought with me a letter of introduction to Sir H. Norman, the governor, but Sir Henry had gone to England. On the whole, I thought it best to inclose the letter to Mr. Walker, the Colonial Secretary, who I understood was in Kingston, with a note asking for advice. This I sent by a messenger. Meanwhile I stayed on board to look about me from the deck. The ship was to go on the next morning to the canal works at Darien. Time was precious. Immediately on arriving she had begun to take in coal, Sunday though it might be, and a singular spectacle it was. The coal yard was close by, and some hundreds of negroes, women and men, but women, in four times the number, were hard at work. The entire process was by hand and basket, each basket holding from eighty to a hundred pounds weight. Two planks were laid down at a steep incline from the ship's deck to the yard. Swinging their loads on their heads, erect as statues, and with a step elastic as a racehorse's, they marched up one of the planks, emptied their baskets into the coal bunkers, and ran down the other. Round and round they went under the blazing sun all the morning through, and round and round they would continue to go all the afternoon. The men took it comparatively easy. The women flew along, laughing, and clamouring, as if not knowing what weariness was—willing beasts of burden, for they had the care upon them of their children; the men disclaiming all responsibilities on that score, after the babies have been once brought into the world. The poor women are content with the arrangement, which they prefer to what they would regard as legal bondage. They earn at this coaling work seven or eight shillings a day. If they were wives, their husbands would take it from them and spend it in rum. The companion who is not a wife can refuse and keep her earnings for her little ones. If black suffrage is to be the rule in Jamaica, I would take it away from the men and would give it to the superior sex. The women are the working bees of the hive. They would make a tolerable nation of black amazons, and the babies would not be offered to Jumbi.

When I had finished my meditations on the coaling women, there were other black creatures to wonder at; great boobies or pelicans, old acquaintances of the Zoological Gardens, who act as scavengers in these waters. We had perhaps a couple of dozen of them round us as large as vultures, ponderous and sleepy to look at when squatting on rocks or piles, over-weighted by their enormous bills. On the wing they were astonishingly swift, wheeling in circles, till they could fix their prey with their eyes, then pouncing upon it with a violent slanting plunge. I suppose their beaks might be broken if they struck directly, but I never saw one miss its aim. Nor do they ever go below the surface, but seize always what is close to it. I was told—I do not know how truly—that like the diablots in Dominica, they nest in the mountains and only come down to the sea to feed.

Hearing that I was in search of quarters, a Miss Burton, a handsome mulatto woman, came up and introduced herself to me. Hotels in the English West Indies are generally detestable. This dame had set up a boarding house on improved principles, or rather two boarding houses, between which she invited me to take my choice, one in the suburbs of Kingston, one on the bank of a river in a rocky gorge in the Blue Mountains. In either of these she promised that she would make me happy, and I do not doubt that she would have succeeded, for her fame had spread through all Jamaica, and her face was as merry as it was honest. As it turned out I was provided for elsewhere, and I lost the chance of making an acquaintance which I should have valued. When she spoke to me she seemed a very model of vigour and health. She died suddenly while I was in the island.

The day was still early. When the vessel was in some order again, and those who were going on shore had disappeared, the rest of us were called down to breakfast to taste some of those Jamaica delicacies on which Paul Gelid was so eloquent. The fruit was the chief attraction: pineapples, of which one can eat as much as one likes in these countries with immunity from after suffering; oranges, more excellent than even those of Grenada and Dominica; shaddocks, admirable as that memorable one which seduced Adam; and for the first time mangoes, the famous Number Eleven of which I had heard such high report, and was now to taste. The English gardeners can do much, but they cannot ripen a Number Eleven, and it is too delicate to bear carriage. It must be eaten in the tropics or nowhere. The mango is the size and shape of a swan's egg, of a ruddy yellow colour when ripe, and in flavour like an exceptionally good apricot, with a very slight intimation of resin. The stone is disproportionately large. The flesh adheres to it, and one abandons as hopeless the attempt to eat mangoes with clean lips and fingers. The epicures insist that they should be eaten only in a bath.

The heat was considerable, and the feast of fruit was the more welcome. Soon after the Colonial Secretary politely answered my note in person. In the absence of the governor of a colony, the colonial secretary, as a rule, takes his place. In Jamaica, and wherever we have a garrison, the commander of the forces becomes acting governor; I suppose because it is not convenient to place an officer of high military rank under the orders of a civilian who is not the direct representative of the sovereign. In the gentleman who now called on me I found an old acquaintance whom I had known as a boy many years ago. He told me that, if I had made no other arrangements, Colonel J——, who was the present chief, was expecting me to be his guest at the 'King's House' during my stay in Jamaica. My reluctance to trespass on the hospitality of an entire stranger was not to be allowed. Soldiers who have distinguished themselves are, next to lawyers, the most agreeable people to be met with, and when I was convinced that I should really be welcome, I had no other objection. An aide-de-camp, I was told, would call for me in the afternoon. Meanwhile the secretary stayed with me for an hour or two, and I was able to learn something authentic from him as to the general condition of things. I had not given entire credit to the representations of my planter friend of the evening before. Mr. Walker took a more cheerful view, and, although the prospects were not as bright as they might be, he saw no reason for despondency. Sugar was down of course. The public debt had increased, and taxation was heavy. Many gentlemen in Jamaica, as in the Antilles, were selling, or trying to sell, their estates and go out of it. On the other hand, expenses of government were being reduced, and the revenue showed a surplus. The fruit trade with the United States was growing, and promised to grow still further. American capitalists had come into the island, and were experimenting on various industries. The sugar treaty with America would naturally have been welcome; but Jamaica was less dependent on its sugar crop, and the action of the British Government was less keenly resented. In the Antilles, the Colonial Secretary admitted, there might be a desire for annexation to the United States, and Jamaican landowners had certainly expressed the same wish to myself. Mr. Walker, however, assured me that, while the blacks would oppose it unanimously, the feeling, if it existed at all among the whites, was confined as yet to a very few persons. They had been English for 230 years, and the large majority of them wished to remain English. There had been suffering among them; but there had been suffering in other places besides Jamaica. Better times might perhaps be coming with the opening of the Darien canal, when Kingston might hope to become again the centre of a trade. Of the negroes, both men and women, Mr. Walker spoke extremely favourably. They were far less indolent than they were supposed to be; they were settling on the waste lands, acquiring property, growing yams and oranges, and harming no one; they had no grievance left; they knew it, and were perfectly contented.

As Mr. Walker was an official, I did not ask him about the working of the recent changes in the constitution; nor could he have properly answered me if I had. The state of things is briefly this: Jamaica, after the first settlement, received a parliamentary form of government, modelled on that of Ireland, the colonial liberties being restricted by a law analogous to Poynings' Act. The legislature, so constructed, of course represented the white interest only and was entirely composed of whites. It remained substantially unaltered till 1853, when modifications were made which admitted coloured men to the suffrage, though with so high a franchise as to be almost exclusive. It became generally felt that the franchise would have to be extended. A popular movement, led by Mr. Gordon, who was a member of the legislature, developed into a riot, into bloodshed and panic. Gordon was hanged by a court-martial, and the assembly, aware that, if allowed to exist any longer, it could exist only with the broad admission of the negro vote, pronounced its own dissolution, surrendered its powers to the Crown, and represented formally 'that nothing but a strong government could prevent the island from lapsing into the condition of Hayti.'

The surrender was accepted. Jamaica was administered till within the last four years by a governor, officials, and council all nominated by the Queen. No dissatisfaction had been expressed, and the blacks at least had enjoyed a prosperity and tranquillity which had been unbroken by a single disturbance. If the island has suffered, it has suffered from causes with which political dissatisfaction has had nothing to do, and which, therefore, political changes cannot remove. In 1884 Mr. Gladstone's Government, for reasons which I have not been able to ascertain, revived suddenly the representative system; constructed a council composed equally of nominated and of elected members, and placed the franchise so low as to include practically every negro peasant who possessed a hut and a garden. So long as the Crown retains and exercises its power of nomination, no worse results can ensue than the inevitable discontent when the votes of the elected members are disregarded or overborne. But to have ventured so important an alteration with the intention of leaving it without further extension would have been an act of gratuitous folly, of which it would be impossible to imagine an English cabinet to have been capable. It is therefore assumed and understood to have been no more than an initial step towards passing over the management of Jamaica to the black constituencies. It has been so construed in the other islands, and was the occasion of the agitation in Trinidad which I observed when I was there.