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

by James Anthony Froude

Never have rulers been less self-seeking than we have been in our Asiatic empire. No 'lex de repetundis' has been needed to punish avaricious proconsuls who had fattened on the provinces. In such positions the English show at their best, and do their best. India has been the training school of our greatest soldiers and greatest administrators. Strike off the Anglo-Indian names from the roll of famous Englishmen, and we shall lose the most illustrious of them all.

In India the rule of England has been an unexampled success, glorious to ourselves and of infinite benefit to our subjects, because we have been upright and disinterested, and have tried sincerely and honourably to do our duty. In other countries belonging to us, where with the same methods we might have produced the same results, we have applied them with a hesitating and less clean hand. We planted Ireland as a colony with our own people, we gave them a parliament of their own, and set them to govern the native Irish for us instead of doing it ourselves, to save appearances and to save trouble. We have not failed altogether. All the good that has been done at all in that poor island has been done by the Anglo-Irish landlords. But it has not been much, as the present condition of things shows. In the West Indies similarly the first settlers carried with them their English institutions. They were themselves a handful. The bulk of the population were slaves, and as long as slavery continued those institutions continued to work tolerably in the interest of the white race. When the slaves were emancipated, the distinction of colour done away with, and the black multitude and their white employers made equal before the law and equally privileged, constitutional government became no longer adapted to the new conditions. The white minority could not be trusted with the exclusive possession of political power. The blacks could not be trusted with the equally dangerous supremacy which their numbers would insure them. Our duty, if we did not and do not mean to abandon them altogether, has been to govern both with the same equity with which we govern at Calcutta. If you choose to take a race like the Irish or like the negroes whom you have forced into an unwilling subjection and have not treated when in that condition with perfect justice—if you take such a race, strike the fetters off them, and arm them at once with all the powers and privileges of loyal citizens, you ought not to be surprised if they attribute your concessions to fear, and if they turn again and rend you. When we are brought in contact with races of men who are not strong enough or brave enough to defend their own independence, and whom our own safety cannot allow to fall under any other power, our right and our duty is to govern such races and to govern them well, or they will have a right in turn to cut our throats. This is our mission. When we have dared to act up to it we have succeeded magnificently; we have failed when we have paltered and trifled; and we shall fail again, and the great empire on which the sun never sets will be shattered to atoms, if we refuse to look facts in the face.

From these meditations, suggested by the batch of newspapers which I had been studying, I was roused by the arrival of the promised aide-de-camp, a good-looking and good-humoured young officer in white uniform (they all wear white in the tropics), who had brought the governor's carriage for me. Government House, or King's House, as it is called, answering to a 'Queen's House' in Barbadoes, is five miles from Kingston, on the slope which gradually ascends from the sea to the mountains. We drove through the town, which did not improve on closer acquaintance. The houses which front towards the streets are generally insignificant. The better sort, being behind walls or overhung with trees, were imperfectly visible. The roads were deep in white dust, which flies everywhere in whirling clouds from the unceasing wind. It was the dry season. The rains are not constant in Jamaica, as they are in the Antilles. The fields and the sides of the mountains were bare and brown and parched. The blacks, however, were about in crowds in their Sunday finery. Being in a British island, we had got back into the white calicoes and ostrich plumes, and I missed the grace of the women at Dominica; but men and women seemed as if they had not a care in the world. We passed Up Park Camp and the cantonments of the West India regiments, and then through a 'scrub' of dwarf acacia and blue flowered lignum vitae. Handsome villas were spread along the road with lawns and gardens, and the road itself was as excellent as those in Barbadoes. Half an hour's drive brought us to the lodge, and through the park to the King's House itself, which stands among groups of fine trees four hundred feet above the sea.

All the large houses in Jamaica—and this was one of the largest of them—are like those in Barbadoes, with the type more completely developed, generally square, built of stone, standing on blocks, hollow underneath for circulation of air, and approached by a broad flight of steps. On the three sides which the sun touches, deep verandahs or balconies are thrown out on the first and second floors, closed in front by green blinds, which can be shut either completely or partially, so that at a distance they look like houses of cards or great green boxes, made pretty by the trees which shelter them or the creepers which climb over them. Behind the blinds run long airy darkened galleries, and into these the sitting rooms open which are of course still darker with a subdued green light, in which, till you are used to it, you can hardly read. The floors are black, smooth, and polished, with loose mats for carpets. The reader of 'Tom Cringle' will remember Tom's misadventure when he blundered into a party of pretty laughing girls, slipped on one of these floors with a retrospective misadventure, and could not rise till his creole cousin slipped a petticoat over his head. All the arrangements are made to shut out heat and light. The galleries have sofas to lounge upon—everybody smokes, and smokes where he pleases; the draught sweeping away all residuary traces. At the King's House to increase the accommodation a large separate dining saloon has been thrown out on the north side, to which you descend from the drawing room by stairs, and thence along a covered passage. Among the mango trees behind there is a separate suite of rooms for the aides de-camp, and a superb swimming bath sixty feet long and eight feet deep. Altogether it was a sumptuous sort of palace where a governor with 7,000l. a year might spend his term of office with considerable comfort were it not haunted by recollections of poor Eyre. He, it seems, lived in the 'King's House,' and two miles off, within sight of his windows, lived Gordon.

I had a more than gracious welcome from Colonel J—— and his family. In him I found a high-bred soldier, who had served with distinction in India, who had been at the storm of Delhi, and who was close by when Nicholson was shot. No one could have looked fitter for the post which he now temporarily occupied. I felt uncomfortable at being thus thrust upon his hospitality. I had letters of introduction with me to the various governors of the islands, but on Colonel J—— I had no claim at all. I was not even aware of his existence, or he, very likely, of mine. If not he, at any rate the ladies of his establishment, might reasonably look upon me as a bore, and if I had been allowed I should simply have paid my respects and have gone on to my mulatto. But they would not hear of it. They were so evidently hearty in their invitation to me that I could only submit and do my best not to be a bore, the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.

In the circle into which I was thrown I was unlikely to hear much of West Indian politics or problems. Colonel J—— was acting as governor by accident, and for a few months only. He had his professional duties to look after; his term of service in Jamaica had nearly expired; and he could not trouble himself with possibilities and tendencies with which he would have no personal concern. As a spectator he considered probably that we were not making much of the West Indies, and were not on the way to make much. He confirmed the complaint which I had heard so often, that the blacks would not work for wages more than three days in the week, or regularly upon those, preferring to cultivate their own yams and sweet potatoes; but as it was admitted that they did work one way or another at home, I could not see that there was much to complain of. The blacks were only doing as we do. We, too, only work as much as we like or as we must, and we prefer working for ourselves to working for others.

On his special subjects the Colonel was as interesting as he could not help being. He talked of the army and of the recent changes in it without insisting that it was going to the devil. He talked of India and the Russians, and for a wonder he had no Russophobia. He thought that England and Russia might as easily be friends as enemies, and that it would be better for the world if they were. As this had been my own fixed opinion for the last thirty years, I thought him a very sensible man. In the evening there was a small dinner party, made up chiefly of officers from the West Indian regiments at Kingston. The English troops are in the mountains at Newcastle, four or five thousand feet up and beyond common visiting distance. Among those whom I met on this occasion was an officer who struck me particularly. There was a mystery about his origin. He had risen from the ranks, but was evidently a gentleman by birth; he had seen service all over the world; he had been in Chili, and, among his other accomplishments, spoke Spanish fluently; he entered the English army as a private, had been in the war in the Transvaal, and was the only survivor of the regiment which was surprised and shot down by the Boers in an intricate pass where they could neither retreat nor defend themselves. On that occasion he had escaped and saved the colours, for which he was rewarded by a commission. He was acquainted with many of my friends there who had been in the thick of the campaign; knew Sir Owen Lanyon, Sir Morrison Barlow, and Colley. He had surveyed the plateau on Majuba Hill after the action, and had gathered the rumours which were flying many coloured about Colley's death. Friend and foe alike loved Colley, and his already legendary fame is an unconscious tribute to his memory. By whose hand he fell can never be known. We believe as we wish or as we fancy. Mr. —— was so fine an officer, so clever a man, and so reserved about his personal affairs, that about him too 'myths' were growing. He was credited in the mess room with being the then unknown author of 'Solomon's Mines.' Mr. Haggard will forgive a mistake which, if he knows Mr. ——, he will feel to be a compliment.

From general conversation I gathered that the sanguine views of the Colonial Secretary were not widely shared. The English interest was still something in Jamaica; but the phenomena of the Antilles were present there also, if in a less extreme form. There were 700,000 coloured people in the island, with but 15,000 or 16,000 whites; and the blacks there also were increasing rapidly, and the whites were stationary if not declining. There was the same uneasy social jealousy, and the absence of any social relation between the two races. There were mulattoes in the island of wealth and consequence, and at Government House there are no distinctions; but the English residents of pure colonial blood would not associate with them, social exclusiveness increasing with political equality. The blacks disliked the mulattoes; the mulattoes despised the blacks, and would not intermarry with them. The impression was that the mulatto would die out, that the tendency of the whites and blacks was to a constantly sharpening separation, and that if things went on as they were going for another generation, it was easy to see which of the two colours would then be in the ascendant. The blacks were growing saucy, too; with much else of the same kind. I could but listen and wait to judge for myself.

Meanwhile my quarters were unexceptionable, my kind entertainers leaving nothing undone to make my stay with them agreeable. In hot climates one sleeps lightly; but light sleep is all that one wants, and one wakes early. The swimming bath was waiting for me underneath my window. After a plunge in the clear cold water came coffee, grown and dried and roasted on the spot, and 'made' as such coffee ought to be. Then came the early walk. One missed the tropical luxuriance of Trinidad and Dominica, for the winter months in Jamaica are almost rainless; but it would have been beautiful anywhere else, and the mango trees were in their glory. There was a corner given to orchids, which were hung in baskets and just coming into flower. Lizards swarmed in the sunshine, running up the tree trunks, or basking on the garden seats. Snakes there are none; the mongoose has cleared them all away so completely that there is nothing left for him to eat but the poultry, in which he makes havoc, and, having been introduced to exterminate the vermin, has become a vermin himself.

To drive, to ride, to visit was the employment of the days. I saw the country. I saw what people were doing, and heard what they had to say.