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

by James Anthony Froude

There were the usual ceremonies to be attended to. The officers of the guardship and gunboats had to be called on. The forts constructed, or in the course of construction, were duly inspected. I believe that there is a real serious intention to strengthen Port Royal in view of the changes which may come about through the opening, if that event ever takes place, of the Darien canal.

Our last visit was to a fort deserted, or all but deserted—the once too celebrated Fort Augusta, which deserves particular description. It stands on the inner side of the lagoon commanding the deep-water channel at the point of the great mangrove swamp at the mouth of the Cobre river. For the purpose for which it was intended no better situation could have been chosen, had there been nothing else to be considered except the defence of the harbour, for a vessel trying to reach Kingston had to pass close in front of its hundred guns. It was constructed on a scale becoming its importance, with accommodation for two or three regiments, and the regiments were sent thither, and they perished, regiment after regiment, officers and men, from the malarious exhalations of the morass. Whole battalions were swept away. The ranks were filled up by reinforcements from home, and these, too, went the same road. Of one regiment the only survivors, according to the traditions of the place, were a quartermaster and a corporal. Finally it occurred to the authorities at the Horse Guards that a regiment of Hussars would be a useful addition to the garrison. It was not easy to see what Hussars were to do there. There is not a spot where the horses could stand twenty yards beyond the lines; nor could they reach Fort Augusta at all except in barges. However, it was perhaps well that they were sent. Horses and men went the way of the rest. The loss of the men might have been supplied, but horses were costly, and the loss of them was more serious. Fort Augusta was gradually abandoned, and is now used only as a powder magazine. A guard is kept there of twenty blacks from the West Indian force, but even these are changed every ten days—so deadly the vapour of that malarious jungle is now understood to be.

I never saw so spectral a scene as met my eyes when we steamed up to the landing place—ramparts broken down, and dismantled cannon lying at the foot of the wall overgrown by jungle. The sentinel who presented arms was like a corpse in uniform. He was not pale, for he was a negro—he was green, and he looked like some ghoul or afrite in a ghastly cemetery. The roofs of the barracks and storehouses had fallen in, the rafters being left standing with the light shining between them as through the bones of skeletons. Great piles of shot lay rusting, as not worth removal; among them conical shot, so recently, had this fatal charnel house been regarded as a fit location for British artillerymen.

I breathed more freely as we turned our backs upon the hideous memorial of parliamentary administration, and steamed away into a purer air. My conservative instincts had undergone a shock. As we look back into the past, the brighter features stand out conspicuously. The mistakes and miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In the present faults and merits are visible alike. The faults attract chief notice that they may be mended; and as there seem so many of them, the impulse is to conclude that the past was better. It is well to be sometimes reminded what the past really was. In Colonel J—— I found a strong advocate of the late army reforms. Thanks to recovering energy and more distinct conscientiousness, thanks to the all-seeing eye of the Press, such an experiment as that of Fort Augusta could hardly be tried again, or if tried could not be persisted in. Extravagance and absurdities, however, remain, and I was next to witness an instance of them.

Having ceased to quarter our regiments in mangrove swamps, we now build a camp for them among the clouds. I mentioned that Captain C—— had undertaken that I should see Newcastle. He had written to a friend there to say that I was coming up, and the junior aide-de-camp kindly lent his services as a guide. As far as Gordon's Town we drove along the same road which we had followed before. There, at a small wayside inn, we found horses waiting which were accustomed to the mountain. Suspicious mists were hanging about aloft, but the landlord, after a glance at them, promised us a fine day, and we mounted and set off. My animal's merits were not in his appearance, but he had been up and down a hundred times, and might be trusted to accomplish his hundred and first without misfortune. For the first mile or so the road was tolerably level, following the bank of the river under the shade of the forest. It then narrowed into a horse path and zigzagged upwards at the side of a torrent into the deep pools of which we occasionally looked down over the edges of uncomfortable precipices. Then again there was a level, with a village and coffee plantations and oranges and bananas. After this the vegetation changed. We issued out upon open mountain, with English grass, English clover, English gorse, and other familiar acquaintances introduced to make the isolation less intolerable. The track was so rough and narrow that we could ride only in single file, and was often no better than a watercourse; yet by this and no other way every article had to be carried on donkeys' backs or human heads which was required for the consumption of 300 infantry and 100 artillerymen. Artillerymen might seem to imply artillery, but they have only a single small field gun. They are there for health's sake only, and to be fit for work if wanted below. An hour's ride brought us to the lowest range of houses, which were 4,000 feet above the sea. From thence they rose, tier above tier, for 500 feet more. The weather so far had held up, and the views had been glorious, but we passed now into a cloud, through which we saw, dimly, groups of figures listlessly lounging. The hillside was bare, and the slope so steep that there was no standing on it, save where it had been flattened by the spade; and here in this extraordinary place were 400 young Englishmen of the common type of which soldiers are made, with nothing to do and nothing to enjoy—remaining, unless they desert or die of ennui, for one, two, or three years, as their chance may be. Every other day they can see nothing, save each other's forms and faces in the fog; for, fine and bright as the air may be below, the moisture in the air is condensed into cloud by the chill rock and soil of the high ranges. The officers come down now and then on furlough or on duty; the men rarely and hardly at all, and soldiers, in spite of General ——, cannot always be made happy by the picturesque. They are not educated enough to find employment for their minds, and of amusement there is none.

We continued our way up, the track if anything growing steeper, till we reached the highest point of the camp, and found ourselves before a pretty cottage with creepers climbing about it belonging to the major in command. A few yards off was the officers' mess room. They expected us. They knew my companion, and visitors from the under-world were naturally welcome. The major was an active clever man, with a bright laughing Irish wife, whose relations in the old country were friends of my own. The American consul and his lady happened to have ridden up also the same day; so, in spite of fog, which grew thicker every moment, we had a good time. As to seeing, we could see nothing; but then there was nothing to see except views; and panoramic views from mountain tops, extolled as they may be, do not particularly interest me. The officers, so far as I could learn, are less ill off than the privates. Those who are married have their wives with them; they can read, they can draw, they can ride; they have gardens about their houses where they can grow English flowers and vegetables and try experiments. Science can be followed anywhere, and is everywhere a resource. Major —— told me that he had never known what it was to find the day too long. Healthy the camp is at any rate. The temperature never rises above 70° nor sinks often below 60°. They require charcoal fires to keep the damp out and blankets to sleep under; and when they see the sun it is an agreeable change and something to talk about. There are no large incidents, but small ones do instead. While I was there a man came to report that he had slipped by accident and set a stone rolling; the stone had cut a water pipe in two, and it had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work for somebody. Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of course, bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the partridges. I suggested that they should import two or three couple of bears from Norway; they would fatten and multiply among the roots and sugar canes, with a black piccaninny now and then for a special delicacy. One of the party extemporised us a speech which would be made on the occasion in Exeter Hall.

We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted to ride back the fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge. The track became a torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for the water rushed down one's neck, and every crease made itself into a conduit carrying the stream among one's inner garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the violence of these Jamaican downpourings. False had proved our prophet down below. There was no help for it but to go on; and we knew by experience that one does not melt on these occasions. At a turn of the road we met another group of riders, among them Lady N——, who, during her husband's absence in England, was living at a country house in the hills. She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not weather to stand talking in; the torrent washed us apart.

And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand feet down we passed out below the clouds into clear bright sunshine. Above us it was still black as ever. The vapour clung about the peaks and did not leave them. Underneath us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The farther we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen. When we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was on the road as we left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us on the correctness of his forecast. Clothes soon dry in that country, and we drove down home none the worse for our wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I had heard so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor soldiers halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the Caucasian cliffs to which they are chained like Prometheus. Malice did say that Newcastle was the property of a certain Sir ——, a high official of a past generation, who wished to part with it, and found a convenient purchaser in the Government.

The hospitalities at Government House were well maintained under the J—— administration. The Colonel was gracious, the lady beautiful and brilliant. There were lawn parties and evening parties, when all that was best in the island was collected; the old Jamaican aristocracy, army and navy officers, civilians, eminent lawyers, a few men among them of high intelligence. The tone was old-fashioned and courteous, with little, perhaps too little, of the go-a-headism of younger colonies, but not the less agreeable on that account. As to prospects, or the present condition of things in the island, there were wide differences of opinion. If there was unanimity about anything, it was about the consequences likely to arise from an extension of the principle of self-government. There, at all events, lay the right road to the wrong place. The blacks had nothing to complain of, and the wrong at present was on the other side. The taxation fell heavily on the articles consumed by the upper classes. The duty on tea, for instance, was a shilling a pound, and the duties on other luxuries in the same proportion. It scarcely touched the negroes at all. They were acquiring land, and some thought that there ought to be a land tax. They would probably object and resist, and trouble would come if it was proposed, for the blacks object to taxes. As long as there are white men to pay them, they will be satisfied to get the benefit of the expenditure; but let not their English friends suppose that when they have the island for their own they will tax themselves for police or schools, or for any other of those educational institutions from which the believers in progress anticipate such glorious results.

As to the planters, it seemed agreed that when an estate was unencumbered and the owner resided upon it and managed it himself, he could still keep afloat. It was agreed also that when the owner was an absentee the cost of management consumed all the profits, and thus the same impulse to sell which had gone so far in the Antilles was showing itself more and more in Jamaica also. Fine properties all about the island were in the market for any price which purchasers could be found to give. Too many even of the old English families were tired of the struggle, and were longing to be out of it at any cost.