VALLEY IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, JAMAICA.
The place had been made, I believe, in the days of plantation prosperity. What would become of it all, if Jamaica drifted after her sisters in the Antilles, as some persons thought that she was drifting, and became, like Grenada, an island of small black proprietors? Was such a fate really hanging over her? Not necessarily, not by any law of nature. If it came, it would come from the dispiritment, the lack of energy and hope in the languid representatives of the English colonists; for the land even in the mountains will grow what it is asked to grow, and men do not live by sugar alone; and my friend Dr. Nicholl in Dominica and Colonel Duncan in Grenada itself were showing what English energy could do if it was alive and vigorous. The pale complaining beings of whom I saw too many, seemed as if they could not be of the same race as the men who ruled in the days of the slave trade. The question to be asked in every colony is, what sort of men is it rearing? If that cannot be answered satisfactorily, the rest is not worth caring for. The blacks do not deserve the ill that is spoken of them. Colonel J——'s house is twelve miles from Kingston. He told me that a woman would walk in with a load for him, and return on the same day with another, for a shilling. With such material of labour wisely directed, whites and blacks might live and prosper together; but even the poor negro will not work when he is regarded only as a machine to bring grist to his master's mill.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Euripides.
CHAPTER XIV.
Visit to Port Royal—Dockyard—Town—Church—Fort Augusta—The eyrie in the mountains—Ride to Newcastle—Society in Jamaica—Religious bodies—Liberty and authority.
A new fort was being built at the mouth of the harbour. New batteries were being armed on the sandbanks at Port Royal. Colonel J—— had to inspect what was going on, and he allowed me to go with him. We were to lunch with the commodore of the station at the Port Royal dockyard. I could then see the town—or what was left of it, for the story went that half of it had been swallowed up by an earthquake. We ran out in a steam launch from Kingston, passing under the sterns of the Spanish frigates. I was told that there were always one or more Spanish ships of war stationed there, but no one knew anything about them except generally that they were on the look-out for Cuban conspirators. There was no exchange of courtesies between their officers and ours, nor even official communication beyond what was formally necessary. I thought it strange, but it was no business of mine. My surprise, however, was admitted to be natural. As the launch drew little water, we had no occasion to follow the circuitous channel, but went straight over the shoals. We passed close by Gallows Point, where the Johnny crows used to pick the pirates' bones. In the mangrove swamp adjoining, it was said that there was an old Spanish cemetery; but the swamp was poisonous, and no one had ever seen it. At the dockyard pier the commodore was waiting for us. I found that he was an old acquaintance whom I had met ten years before at the Cape. He was a brisk, smart officer, quiet and sailor-like in his manners, but with plenty of talent and cultivation. He showed us his stores and his machinery, large engines, and engineers to work them, ready for any work which might be wanted, but apparently with none to do. We went over the hospital, airy and clean, with scarcely a single occupant, so healthy has now been made a spot which was once a nest of yellow fever. Naval stores soon become antiquated; and parts of the great square were paved with the old cannon balls which had become useless on the introduction of rifled guns. The fortifications were antiquated also, but new works were being thrown up armed with the modern monster cannon. One difficulty struck me; Port Royal stood upon a sandbank. In such a place no spring of fresh water could be looked for. On the large acreage of roofs there were no shoots to catch the rain and carry it into cisterns. Whence did the water come for the people in the town? How were the fleets supplied which used to ride there? How was it in the old times when Port Royal was crowded with revelling crews of buccaneers? I found that every drop which is consumed in the place, or which is taken on board either of merchant ship or man-of-war, is brought in a steam tug from a spring ten miles off upon the coast. Before steam came in, it was fetched in barges rowed by hand. Nothing could be easier than to save the rain which falls in abundance. Nothing could be easier than to lay pipes along the sand-spit to the spring. But the tug plies daily to and fro, and no one thinks more about the matter.
A West Indian regiment is stationed at Port Royal. After the dockyard we went through the soldiers' quarters and then walked through the streets of the once famous station. It is now a mere hamlet of boatmen and fishermen, squalid and wretched, without and within. Half-naked children stared at us from the doors with their dark, round eyes. I found it hard to call up the scenes of riot, and confusion, and wild excitement which are alleged to have been witnessed there. The story that it once covered a far larger area has been, perhaps, invented to account for the incongruity. Old plans exist which seem to show that the end of the spit could never have been of any larger dimensions than it is at present. There is proof enough, however, that in the sand there lie the remains of many thousand English soldiers and seamen, who ended their lives there for one cause or other. The bones lie so close that they are turned up as in a country churchyard when a fresh grave is dug. The walls of the old church are inlaid thickly with monuments and monumental tablets to the memory of officers of either service, young and old; some killed by fever, some by accidents of war or sea; some decorated with the honours which they had won in a hundred fights, some carried off before they had gathered the first flower of fame. The costliness of many of these memorials was an affecting indication how precious to their families those now resting there once had been. One in high relief struck me as a characteristic specimen of Rubillac's workmanship. It was to a young lieutenant who had been killed by the bursting of a gun. Flame and vapour were rushing out of the breech. The youth himself was falling backwards, with his arms spread out, and a vast preternatural face—death, judgment, eternity, or whatever it was meant to be—was glaring at him through the smoke. Bad art, though the execution was remarkable; but better, perhaps, than the weeping angels now grown common among ourselves.
After luncheon the commodore showed us his curiosities, especially his garden, which, considering the state of his water supply, he had created under unfavourable conditions. He had a very respectable collection of tropical ferns and flowers, with palms and plantains to shade and shelter them. He was an artist besides, within the lines of his own profession. Drawings of ships and boats of all sorts and in all attitudes by his own brush or pencil were hanging on the walls of his working room. He was good enough to ask me to spend a day or two with him at Port Royal before I left the island, and I looked forward with special pleasure to becoming closer acquainted with such a genuine piece of fine-grained British oak.