The details are mostly only worth forgetting. The senior aide-de-camp, Captain C——, an officer in the Artillery, was a man of ability and observation. He, too, like the Colonel, was mainly interested in his profession, to which he was anxious to return; but he was watching, too, with serious interest the waning fortunes of the West Indies. He superintended the social part of the governor's business to perfection. Anything which I wished for had only to be mentioned to be provided. He gave me the benefit, though less often than I could have wished, of his shrewd, and not ungenial, observations. He drove me one morning into Kingston. I had passed through it hastily on the day of my landing. There were libraries, museums, public offices, and such like to be seen, besides the town itself. High up on the mountain side, more often in the clouds than out of them, the cantonments of the English regiments were visible from the park at Government House. The slope where they had been placed was so steep that one wondered how they held on. They looked like tablecloths stretched out to dry. I was to ride up there one day. Meanwhile, as we were driving through the park and saw the white spots shining up above us, I asked the aide-de-camp what the privates found to do in such a place. The ground was too steep for athletics; no cricket could be possible there, no lawn tennis, no quoits, no anything. There were no neighbours. Sports there were none. The mongoose had destroyed the winged game, and there was neither hare nor rabbit, pig nor deer; not a wild animal to be hunted and killed. With nothing to do, no one to speak to, and nothing to kill, what could become of them? Did they drink? Well, yes. They drank rum occasionally; but there were no public houses. They could only get it at the canteen, and the daily allowance was moderate. As to beer, it was out of reach altogether. At the foot of the mountains it was double the price which it was in England. At Newcastle the price was doubled again by the cost of carriage to the camp. I inquired if they did not occasionally hang themselves. 'Perhaps they would,' he said, 'if they had no choice, but they preferred to desert, and this they did in large numbers. They slipped down the back of the range, made their way to the sea, and escaped to the United States.' The officers—what became of them? The officers! Oh, well! they gardened! Did they like it? Some did and some didn't. They were not so ill off as the men, as occasionally they could come down on leave.
One wondered what the process had been which had led the authorities to select such a situation. Of course it was for the health of the troops, but the hill country in Jamaica is wide; there were many other places available, less utterly detestable, and ennui and discontent are as mischievous as fever. General ——, a short time ago, went up to hold an inquiry into the desertions, and expressed his wonder how such things could be. With such air, such scenery, such views far and wide over the island, what could human creatures wish for more? 'You would desert yourself, general,' said another officer, 'if you were obliged to stay there a month.'
Captain C—— undertook that I should go up myself in a day or two. He promised to write and make arrangements. Meanwhile we went on to Kingston. It was not beautiful. There was Rodney's statue. Rodney is venerated in Jamaica, as he ought to be; but for him it would have been a Spanish colony again. But there is nothing grand about the buildings, nothing even handsome, nothing even specially characteristic of England or the English mind. They were once perhaps business-like, and business having slackened they are now dingy. Shops, houses, wharves, want brightness and colour. We called at the office of the Colonial Secretary, the central point of the administration. It was an old mansion, plain, unambitious, sufficient perhaps for its purpose, but lifeless and dark. If it represented economy there would be no objection. The public debt has doubled since Jamaica became a Crown colony. In 1876 it was half a million. It is now more than a million and a half. The explanation is the extension of the railway system, and there has been no culpable extravagance. I do not suppose that the re-establishment of a constitution would mend matters. Democracies are always extravagant. The majority, who have little property or none, regulate the expenditure. They lay the taxes on the minority, who have to find the money, and have no interest in sparing them.
Ireland when it was governed by the landowners, Jamaica in the days of slavery, were administered at a cost which seems now incredibly small. The authority of the landowners and of the planters was undisputed. They were feared and obeyed, and magistrates unpaid and local constables sufficed to maintain tolerable order. Their authority is gone. Their functions are transferred to the police, and every service has to be paid for. There may be fewer serious crimes, but the subordination is immeasurably less, the expense of administration is immeasurably greater. I declined to be taken over sugar mills, or to be shown the latest improvements. I was too ignorant to understand in what the improvements consisted, and could take them upon trust. The public bakery was more interesting. In tropical climates a hot oven in a small house makes an inconvenient addition to the temperature. The bread for Kingston, and for many miles around it, is manufactured at night by a single company and is distributed in carts in the morning. We saw the museum and public library. There were the usual specimens of island antiquities—of local fish, birds, insects, reptiles, plants, geological formations, and such like. In the library were old editions of curious books at the West Indies, some of them unique, ready to yield ampler pictures of the romance of the old life there than we at present possess. I had but leisure to glance at title-pages and engravings. The most noticeable relic preserved there, if it be only genuine, is the identical bauble which Cromwell ordered to be taken away from the Speaker's table in the House of Commons. Explanations are given of the manner in which it came to Jamaica. The evidence, so far as I could understand it, did not appear conclusive.
Among the new industries in the island in the place of sugar was, or ought to be, tobacco. A few years ago I asked Sir J. Hooker, the chief living authority in such matters, why Cuba was allowed the monopoly of delicate cigar tobacco—whether there were no other countries where it could be grown equally good. He said that at the very moment cigars, as fine as the finest Havanas, were being produced in Jamaica. He gave me an excellent specimen with the address of the house which supplied it; and for a year or two I was able to buy from it what, if not perfect, was more than tolerable. The house acquired a reputation; and then, for some reason or other, perhaps from weariness of the same flavour, perhaps from a falling off in the character of the cigars, I, and possibly others, began to be less satisfied. Here on the spot I wished to make another experiment. Captain C—— introduced me to a famous manufacturer, a Spaniard, with a Spanish manager under him who had been trained at Havana. I bespoke his good will by adjuring him in his own tongue not to disappoint me; and I believe that he gave me the best that he had. But, alas! it is with tobacco as with most other things. Democracy is king; and the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the rule of modern life. The average of everything is higher than it used to be; the high quality which rises above mediocrity is rare or is non-existent. We are swept away by the genius of the age, and must be content with such other blessings as it has been pleased to bring with it.
Why should I murmur thus and vainly moan?
The Gods will have it so—their will be done.[14]
The earth is patient also, and allows the successive generations of human creatures to play their parts upon her surface as they please. She spins on upon her own course; and seas and skies, and crags and forests, are spiritual and beautiful as ever.
Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range underneath Newcastle. Colonel J—— had a villa there, and one afternoon he took me over to see it. You pass abruptly from the open country into the mountains. The way to Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river, which cuts its way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders in the bed were round as cannon balls, and, weighing hundreds of tons, show what its power must be in the coming down of the floods. Within the limits of the torrent, which must rise at such times thirty feet above its winter level, the rocks were bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow there. Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory: ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds, gum trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts of the crags, and hanging out over the abysses below them. Aloes flung up their tall spiral stems; flowering shrubs and creepers covered bank and slope with green and blue and white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we drove along, frowned the great limestone blocks which thunder down when loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides, where the slopes are less precipitous, the forest has been burnt off by the unthrifty blacks, who use fire to clear the ground for their yam gardens, and destroy the timber over a dozen acres when they intend to cultivate but a single one. The landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates, become bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines are marked more sharply against the sky.
Introduced among scenery of this kind, we followed the river two or three miles, when it was crossed by a bridge, above which stood my friend Miss Burton's lodging house, where she had designed entertaining me. At Gordon's Town, which is again a mile farther on, the valley widens out, and there are cocoa and coffee plantations. Through an opening we saw far above our heads, like specks of snow against the mountain side, the homes or prisons of our unfortunate troops. Overlooking the village through which we were passing, and three hundred feet above it, was perched the Colonel's villa on a projecting spur where a tributary of the Hope river has carved out a second ravine. We drove to the door up a steep winding lane among coffee bushes, which scented the air with their jessamine-like blossom, and wild oranges on which the fruit hung untouched, glowing like balls of gold. We were now eleven hundred feet above the sea. The air was already many degrees cooler than at Kingston. The ground in front of the house was levelled for a garden. Ivy was growing about the trellis work, and scarlet geraniums and sweet violets and roses which cannot be cultivated in the lower regions, were here in full bloom. Elsewhere in the grounds there was a lawn tennis court to tempt the officers down from their eyrie in the clouds. The house was empty, in charge of servants. From the balcony in front of the drawing room we saw peak rising behind peak, till the highest, four thousand feet above us, was lost in the white mist. Below was the valley of the Hope river with its gardens and trees and scattered huts, with buildings here and there of higher pretensions. On the other side the tributary stream rushed down its own ravine, while the breeze among the trees and the sound of the falling waters swayed up to us in intermittent pulsations.
