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

by James Anthony Froude

Accordingly early on the following morning we set off; two carriages full of us; Mr. M——, a new friend lately made, but I hope long to be preserved, on the box of his four-in-hand. The road was as good as all roads are in Jamaica and Barbadoes, and more cannot be said in their favour. Forest trees made a roof over our heads as we climbed to the crest of the ridge. Thence we descended the side of a long valley, a stream running below us which gradually grew into a river. We passed through all varieties of cultivation. On the high ground there was a large sugar plantation, worked by coolies, the first whom I had seen in Jamaica. In the alluvial meadows on the river-side were tobacco fields, cleanly and carefully kept, belonging to my Spanish friend in Kingston, and only too rich in leaves. There were sago too, and ginger, and tamarinds, and cocoa, and coffee, and cocoa-nut palms. On the hill-sides were the garden farms of the blacks, which were something to see and remember. They receive from the Government at an almost nominal quit rent an acre or two of uncleared forest. To this as the first step they set light; at twenty different spots we saw their fires blazing. To clear an acre they waste the timber on half a dozen or a dozen. They plant their yams and sweet potatoes among the ashes and grow crops there till the soil is exhausted. Then they move on to another, which they treat with the same recklessness, leaving the first to go back to scrub. Since the Chinaman burnt his house to roast his pig, such waste was never seen. The male proprietors were lounging about smoking. Their wives, as it was market day, were tramping into Kingston with their baskets on their head. We met them literally in thousands, all merry and light-hearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at their side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each hundred women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in mouth and carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky too, while the ladies, young and old, had all a civil word for us and curtsied under their loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black constitution I would give the votes only to the women.

We reached Castleton at last. It was in a hot damp valley, said to be a nest of yellow fever. The gardens slightly disappointed me; my expectations had been too much raised by Trinidad. There were lovely flowers of course, and curious plants and trees. Every known palm is growing there. They try hard to grow roses, and they say that they succeed. The roses were not in flower, and I could not judge. Bye the familiar names were all there, and others which were not familiar, the newest importations called after the great ladies of the day. I saw one labelled Mabel Morrison. To find the daughter of an ancient college friend and contemporary giving name to a plant in the New World makes one feel dreadfully old; but I expected to find, and I did not find, some useful practical horticulture going on. They ought, for instance, to have been trying experiments with orange trees. The orange in Jamaica is left to nature. They plant the seeds, and leave the result to chance. They neither bud nor graft, and go upon the hypothesis that as the seed is, so will be the tree which comes of it. Yet even thus, so favourable is the soil and climate that the oranges of Jamaica are prized above all others which are sold in the American market. With skill and knowledge and good selection they might produce the finest in the world. 'There are dollars in that island, sir,' as an American gentleman said to me, 'if they look for them in the right way.' Nothing of this kind was going on at Castleton; so much the worse, but perhaps things will mend by-and-by. I was consoled partly by another specimen of the Amherstia nobilis. It was not so large as those which I had seen at Trinidad, but it was in splendid bloom, and certainly is the most gorgeous flowering tree which the world contains.

Wild nature also was luxuriantly beautiful. We picnicked by the river, which here is a full rushing stream with pools that would have held a salmon, and did hold abundant mullet. We found a bower formed by a twisted vine, so thick that neither sun nor rain could penetrate the roof. The floor was of shining shingle, and the air breathed cool from off the water. It was a spot which nymph or naiad may haunt hereafter, when nymphs are born again in the new era. The creatures of imagination have fled away from modern enlightenment. But we were a pleasant party of human beings, lying about under the shade upon the pebbles. We had brought a blanket of ice with us, and the champagne was manufactured into cup by choicest West Indian skill. Figures fall unconsciously at such moments into attitudes which would satisfy a painter, and the scenes remain upon the memory like some fine finished work of art. We had done with the gardens, and I remember no more of them except that I saw a mongoose stalking a flock of turkeys. The young ones and their mother gathered together and showed fight. The old cock, after the manner of the male animal, seemed chiefly anxious for his own skin, though a little ashamed at the same time, as if conscious that more was expected of him. On the way back we met the returning stream of women and children, loaded heavily as before and with the same elastic step. In spite of all that is incorrect about them, the women are the material to work upon; and if they saw that we were in earnest, they would lend their help to make their husbands bestir themselves. A Dutch gentleman once boasted to me of the wonderful prosperity of Java, where everybody was well off and everybody was industrious. He so insisted upon the industry that I ask him how it was brought about. Were the people slaves? 'Oh,' he cried, as if shocked, 'God forbid that a Christian nation should be so wicked as to keep slaves!' 'Do they never wish to be idle?' I asked. 'Never, never,' he said; 'no, no: we do not permit anyone to be idle.'

My stay with Colonel J—— was drawing to a close; one great festivity was impending, which I wished to avoid; but the gracious lady insisted that I must remain. There was to be a ball, and all the neighbourhood was invited. Pretty it was sure to be. Windows and doors, galleries and passages, would be all open. The gardens would be lighted up, and the guests could spread as they pleased. Brilliant it all was; more brilliant than you would see in our larger colonies. A ball in Sydney or Melbourne is like a ball in the north of England or in New York. There are the young men in black coats, and there are brightly dressed young ladies for them to dance with. The chaperons sit along the walls; the elderly gentlemen withdraw to the card room. Here all was different. The black coats in the ball at Jamaica were on the backs of old or middle-aged men, and, except Government officials, there was hardly a young man present in civilian dress. The rooms glittered with scarlet and white and blue and gold lace. The officers were there from the garrison and the fleet; but of men of business, of professional men, merchants, planters, lawyers, &c. there were only those who had grown up to middle age in the island, whose fortunes, bad or good, were bound up with it. When these were gone, it seemed as if there would be no one to succeed them. The coveted heirs of great estates were no longer to be found for mothers to angle after. The trades and professions in Kingston had ceased to offer the prospect of an income to younger brothers who had to make their own way. For 250 years generations of Englishmen had followed one upon another, but we seemed to have come to the last. Of gentlemen unconnected with the public service, under thirty-five or forty, there were few to be seen, they were seeking their fortunes elsewhere. The English interest in Jamaica is still a considerable thing. The English flag flies over Government House, and no one so far wishes to remove it. But the British population is scanty and refuses to grow. Ships and regiments come and go, and officers and State employés make what appears to be a brilliant society. But it is in appearance only. The station is no longer a favourite one. They are gone, those pleasant gentry whose country houses were the paradise of middies sixty years ago. All is changed, even to the officers themselves. The drawling ensign of our boyhood, brave as a lion in the field, and in the mess room or the drawing room an idiot, appears also to be dead as the dodo. Those that one meets now are intelligent and superior men—no trace of the frivolous sort left. Is it the effect of the abolition of purchase, and competitive examinations? Is it that the times themselves are growing serious, and even the most empty-headed feel that this is no season for levity?

I had seen what Jamaican life was like in the upper spheres, and I had heard the opinions that were current in them; but I wished to see other parts of the country. I wished to see a class of people who were farther from headquarters, and who might not all sing to the same note. I determined to start off on an independent cruise of my own. In the centre of the island, two thousand feet above the sea, it was reported to me that I should find a delightful village called Mandeville, after some Duke of Manchester who governed Jamaica a hundred years ago. The scenery was said to have a special charm of its own, the air to be exquisitely pure, the land to be well cultivated. Village manners were to be found there of the old-fashioned sort, and a lodging house and landlady of unequalled merit. There was a railway for the first fifty miles. The line at starting crosses the mangrove swamps at the mouth of the Cobre river. You see the trees standing in the water on each side of the road. Rising slowly, it hardens into level grazing ground, stocked with cattle and studded with mangoes and cedars. You pass Spanish Town, of which only the roofs of the old State buildings are visible from the carriages. Sugar estates follow, some of which are still in cultivation, while ruined mills and fallen aqueducts show where others once had been. The scenery becomes more broken as you begin to ascend into the hills. River beds, dry when I saw them, but powerful torrents in the rainy season, are crossed by picturesque bridges. You come to the forest, where the squatters were at their usual work, burning out their yam patches. Columns of white smoke were rising all about us, yet so abundant the timber and so rapid the work of restoration when the devastating swarm has passed, that in this direction they have as yet made no marked impression, and the forest stretches as far as eye can reach. The glens grew more narrow and the trees grander as the train proceeded. After two hours we arrived at the present terminus, an inland town with the singular name of Porus. No explanation is given of it in the local handbooks; but I find a Porus among the companions of Columbus, and it is probably an interesting relic of the first Spanish occupation. The railway had brought business. Mule carts were going about, and waggons; omnibuses stood in the yards, and there were stores of various kinds. But it was all black. There was not a white face to be seen after we left the station. One of my companions in the train was a Cuban engineer, now employed upon the line; a refugee, I conjectured, belonging to the beaten party in the late rebellion, from the bitterness with which he spoke of the Spanish administration.

Porus is many hundred feet above the sea, in a hollow where three valleys meet. Mandeville, to which I was bound, was ten miles farther on, the road ascending all the way. A carriage was waiting for me, but too small for my luggage. A black boy offered to carry up a heavy bag for a shilling, a feat which he faithfully and expeditiously performed. After climbing a steep hill, we came out upon a rich undulating plateau, long cleared and cultivated; green fields with cows feeding on them; pretty houses standing in gardens; a Wesleyan station; a Moravian station, with chapels and parsonages. The red soil was mixed with crumbling lumps of white coral, a ready-made and inexhaustible supply of manure. Great silk-cotton trees towered up in lonely magnificence, the home of the dreaded Jumbi—woe to the wretch who strikes an axe into those sacred stems! Almonds, cedars, mangoes, gum trees spread their shade over the road. Orange trees were everywhere; sometimes in orchards, sometimes growing at their own wild will in hedges and copse and thicket. Finally, at the outskirts of a perfectly English village, we brought up at the door of the lodging house kept by the justly celebrated Miss Roy. The house, or cottage, stood at the roadside, at the top of a steep flight of steps; a rambling one-story building, from which rooms, creeper-covered, had been thrown out as they were wanted. There was the universal green verandah into which they all opened; and the windows looked out on a large common, used of old, and perhaps now, as a race-course; on wooded slopes, with sunny mansions dropped here and there in openings among the woods; on farm buildings at intervals in the distance, surrounded by clumps of palms; and beyond them ranges of mountains almost as blue as the sky against which they were faintly visible. Miss Roy, the lady and mistress of the establishment, came out to meet me: middle-aged, with a touch of the black blood, but with a face in which one places instant and sure dependence, shrewd, quiet, sensible, and entirely good-humoured. A white-haired brother, somewhat infirm and older than she, glided behind her as her shadow. She attends to the business. His pride is in his garden, where he has gathered a collection of rare plants in admired disorder; the night-blowing cereus hanging carelessly over a broken paling, and a palm, unique of its kind, waving behind it. At the back were orange trees and plantains and coffee bushes, with long-tailed humming birds flitting about their nests among the branches. All kinds of delicacies, from fruit and preserves to coffee, Miss Roy grows for her visitors on her own soil, and prepares from the first stage to the last with her own cunning hands.

Having made acquaintance with the mistress, I strolled out to look about me. After walking up the road for a quarter of a mile, I found myself in an exact reproduction of a Warwickshire hamlet before the days of railways and brick chimneys. There were no elms to be sure—there were silk cotton-trees and mangoes where the elms should have been; but there were the boys playing cricket, and a market house, and a modest inn, and a shop or two, and a blacksmith's forge with a shed where horses were standing waiting their turn to be shod. Across the green was the parish church, with its three aisles and low square tower, in which hung an old peal of bells. Parish stocks I did not observe, though, perhaps, I might have had I looked for them; but there was a schoolhouse and parsonage, and, withdrawn at a distance as of superior dignity, what had once perhaps been the squire's mansion, when squire and such-like had been the natural growth of the country. It was as if a branch of the old tree had been carried over and planted there ages ago, and as if it had taken root and become an exact resemblance of the parent stock. The people had black faces; but even they, too, had shaped their manners on the old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully (as they eminently did not in Kingston and its environs). The women smiled and curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to them. The name of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have been something human and kindly about it, too, when it left upon the character the marks of courtesy and good breeding. I wish I could say as much for the effect of modern ideas. The negroes in Mandeville were, perhaps, as happy in their old condition as they have been since their glorious emancipation, and some of them to this day speak regretfully of a time when children did not die of neglect; when the sick and the aged were taken care of, and the strong and healthy were, at least, as well looked after as their owner's cattle.

Slavery could not last; but neither can the condition last which has followed it. The equality between black and white is a forced equality and not a real one, and nature in the long run has her way, and readjusts in their proper relations what theorists and philanthropists have disturbed.

I was not Miss Roy's only guest. An American lady and gentleman were staying there; he, I believe, for his health, as the climate of Mandeville is celebrated. Americans, whatever may be their faults, are always unaffected; and so are easy to get on with. We dined together, and talked of the place and its inhabitants. They had been struck like myself with the manners of the peasants, which were something entirely new to them. The lady said, and without expressing the least disapproval, that she had fallen in with an old slave who told her that, thanks to God, he had seen good times. 'He was bred in a good home, with a master and mistress belonging to him. What the master and mistress had the slaves had, and there was no difference; and his master used to visit at King's House, and his men were all proud of him. Yes, glory be to God, he had seen good times.'

In the evening we sat out in the verandah in the soft sweet air, the husband and I smoking our cigars, and the lady not minding it. They had come to Mandeville, as we go to Italy, to escape the New England winter. They had meant to stay but a few days; they found it so charming that they had stayed for many weeks. We talked on till twilight became night, and then appeared a show of natural pyrotechnics which beat anything of the kind which I had ever seen or read of: fireflies as large as cockchafers flitting round us among the leaves of the creepers, with two long antennæ, at the point of each of which hangs out a blazing lanthorn. The unimaginative colonists call them gig-lamps. Had Shakespeare ever heard of them, they would have played round Ferdinand and Miranda in Prospero's cave, and would have borne a fairer name. The light is bluish-green, like a glowworm's, but immeasurably brighter; and we could trace them far away glancing like spirits over the meadows.