I was very happy at the commodore's—low spirits not being allowed in that wholesome element. Decks were washed every morning as if at sea, i.e. every floor was scrubbed and scoured. It was an eternal washing day, lines of linen flying in the brisk sea breeze. The commodore was always busy making work if none had been found for him. He took me one day to see the rock spring where Rodney watered his fleet, as the great admiral describes in one of his letters, and from which Port Royal now draws its supply. The spring itself bursts full and clear out of the limestone rock close to the shore, four or five miles from Kingston. There is a natural basin, slightly improved by art, from which the old conduit pipes carry the stream to the sea. The tug comes daily, fills its tanks, and returns. The commodore has tidied up the place, planted shrubs, and cleared away the bush; but half the water at least, is still allowed to leak away, and turns the hollow below into an unwholesome swamp. It may be a necessity, but it is also a misfortune, that the officers at distant stations hold their appointments for so short a term. By the time that they have learnt what can or ought to be done, they are sent elsewhere, and their successor has to begin over again. The water in this spring, part of which is now worse than wasted and the rest carried laboriously in a vessel to Port Royal to be sold by measure to the people there, might be all conducted thither by pipes at small cost and trouble, were the commodore to remain a few years longer at the Jamaica Station.
He is his own boatman, and we had some fine sails about the lagoon—the breeze always fresh and the surface always smooth. The shallow bays swarm with small fish, and it was a pretty thing to watch the pelicans devouring them. They gather in flocks, sweep and wheel in the air, and when they plunge they strike the water with a violence which one would expect would break their wings. They do not dive, but seize their prey with their long, broad bills, and seem never to miss.
Between the ships and the barracks, there are many single men in Port Royal, for whom amusement has to be found if they are to be kept from drink. A canteen is provided for them, with bowling alley, tennis court, beer in moderation, and a reading room, for such as like it, with reviews and magazines and newspapers They can fish if they want sport, and there are sharks in plenty a cable's length from shore; but the schoolmaster has been abroad, and tastes run in more refined directions. The blacks of Tobago acted 'The Merchant of Venice' before Governor S——. The ships' companies of the gunboats at Port Royal gave a concert while I was there. The officers took no part, and left the men to manage it as they pleased. The commodore brought his party; the garrison, the crews of the other ships, and stray visitors came, and the large room at the canteen was completely full. The taste of the audience was curious. Dibdin was off the boards altogether, and favour was divided between the London popular comic song and the sentimental—no longer with any flavour of salt about it, but the sentimental spoony and sickly. 'She wore a wreath of roses' called out the highest enthusiasm. One of the performers recited a long poem of his own about Mary Stuart, 'the lovely and unfortunate.' Then followed the buffoonery; and this was at least genuine rough and tumble if there was little wit in it. A lad capered about on a tournament horse which flung him every other moment. Various persons pretended to be drunk, and talked and staggered as drunken men do. Then there was a farce, how conceived and by what kind of author I was puzzled to make out. A connoisseur of art is looking for Greek antiques. He has heard that a statue has recently been discovered of 'Ajax quarrelling with his mother-in-law.' What Ajax was quarrelling about or who his mother-in-law might be does not appear. A couple of rogues, each unknown to the other, practise on the connoisseur's credulity. Each promises him the statue; each dresses up a confederate on a pedestal with a modern soldier's helmet and a blanket to represent a Greek hero. The two figures are shown to him. One of them, I forget how, contrived to pass as Ajax; the other had turned into Hercules doing something to the Stymphalides. At last they get tired of standing to be looked at, jump down, and together knock over the connoisseur. Ajax then turns on Hercules, who, of course, is ready for a row. They fight till they are tired, and then make it up over a whisky bottle.
So entirely new an aspect of the British tar took me by surprise, and I speculated whether the inventors and performers of this astonishing drama were an advance on the Ben Bunting type. I was, of course, inclined to say no, but my tendency is to dislike changes, and I allow for it. The commodore said that in certain respects there really was an advance. The seamen fell into few scrapes, and they did not get drunk so often. This was a hardy assertion of the commodore, as a good many of them were drunk at that moment. I could see myself that they were better educated. If Ben Bunting had been asked who Ajax and Hercules were, he would have taken them to be three-deckers which were so named, and his knowledge would have gone no farther. Whether these tars of the new era are better sailors and braver and truer men is another question. They understand their rights much better, if that does any good to them. The officers used to be treated with respect at all times and seasons. This is now qualified. When they are on duty, the men are as respectful as they used to be; when they are off duty, the commodore himself is only old H——.
We returned to the dockyard in a boat under a full moon, the guardship gleaming white in the blue midnight and the phosphorescent water flashing under the oars. The 'Dee,' which was to take me to Havana, was off Port Royal on the following morning. The commodore put me on board in his gig, with the white ensign floating over the stern. I took leave of him with warm thanks for his own and his family's hospitable entertainment of me. The screw went round—we steamed away out of the harbour, and Jamaica and the kind friends whom I had found there faded out of sight. Jamaica was the last of the English West India Islands which I visited. I was to see it again, but I will here set down the impressions which had been left upon me by what I had seen there and seen in the Antilles.
CHAPTER XVII.
Present state of Jamaica—Test of progress—Resources of the island—Political alternatives—Black supremacy and probable consequences—The West Indian problem.
As I was stepping into the boat at Port Royal, a pamphlet was thrust into my hand, which I was entreated to read at my leisure. It was by some discontented white of the island—no rare phenomenon, and the subject of it was the precipitate decline in the value of property there. The writer, unlike the planters, insisted that the people were taxed in proportion to their industry. There were taxes on mules, on carts, on donkeys, all bearing on the small black proprietors, whose ability to cultivate was thus checked, and who were thus deliberately encouraged in idleness. He might have added, although he did not, that while both in Jamaica and Trinidad everyone is clamouring against the beetroot bounty which artificially lowers the price of sugar, the local councils in these two islands try to counteract the effect and artificially raise the price of sugar by an export duty on their own produce—a singular method of doing it which, I presume, admits of explanation. My pamphleteer was persuaded that all the world were fools, and that he and his friends were the only wise ones: again a not uncommon occurrence in pamphleteers. He demanded the suppression of absenteeism; he demanded free trade. In exchange for the customs duties, which were to be abolished, he demanded a land tax—the very mention of which, I had been told by others, drove the black proprietors whom he wished to benefit into madness. He wanted Home Rule. He wanted fifty things besides which I have forgotten, but his grand want of all was a new currency. Mankind, he thought, had been very mad at all periods of their history. The most significant illustration of their madness had been the selection of gold and silver as the medium of exchange. The true base of the currency was the land. The Government of Jamaica was to lend to every freeholder up to the mortgage value of his land in paper notes, at 5 per cent. interest, the current rate being at present 8 per cent. The notes so issued, having the land as their security, would be in no danger of depreciation, and they would flow over the sugar estates like an irrigating stream. On the produce of sugar the fate of the island depended.
On the produce of sugar? And why not on the produce of a fine race of men? The prospects of Jamaica, the prospects of all countries, depend not on sugar or on any form or degree of material wealth, but on the characters of the men and women whom they are breeding and rearing. Where there are men and women of a noble nature, the rest will go well of itself; where these are not, there will be no true prosperity though the sugar hogsheads be raised from thousands into millions. The colonies are interesting only as offering homes where English people can increase and multiply; English of the old type with simple habits, who do not need imported luxuries. There is room even in the West Indies for hundreds of thousands of them if they can be contented to lead human lives, and do not go there to make fortunes which they are to carry home with them. The time may not be far off when men will be sick of making fortunes, sick of being ground to pattern in the commonplace mill-wheel of modern society; sick of a state of things which blights and kills simple and original feeling, which makes us think and speak and act under the tyranny of general opinion, which masquerades as liberty and means only submission to the newspapers. I can conceive some modern men may weary of all this, and retire from it like the old ascetics, not as they did into the wilderness, but behind their own walls and hedges, shutting out the world and its noises, to inquire whether after all they have really immortal souls, and, if they have, what ought to be done about them. The West India Islands, with their inimitable climate and soil and prickly pears ad libitum to make fences with, would be fine places for such recluses. Failing these ideal personages, there is work enough of the common sort to create wholesome prosperity. There are oranges to be grown, and pines and plantains, and coffee and cocoa, and rice and indigo and tobacco, not to speak of the dollars which my American friend found in the bamboos, and of the further dollars which other Americans will find in the untested qualities of thousands of other productions. Here are opportunities for innocent industrious families, where children can be brought up to be manly and simple and true and brave as their fathers were brought up, or as their fathers expressed it 'in the nurture and admonition of the Lord;' while such neighbours as their dark brothers-in-law might have a chance of a rise in life, in the only sense in which a 'rise' can be of real benefit to them. These are the objects which statesmen who have the care and conduct of a nation's welfare ought to set before themselves, and unfortunately they are the last which are remembered in countries which are popularly governed. There is a clamour for education in such countries, but education means to them only the sharpening of the faculties for the competitive race which is called progress. In democracies no one man is his brother's keeper. Each lives and struggles to make his own way and his own position. All that is insisted on is that there shall be a fair stage and that every lad shall learn the use of the weapons which will enable him to fight his own way. Ἀρετὴ, 'manliness,' the most essential of all acquisitions and the hardest to cultivate, as Aristotle observed long ago, is assumed in democracies as a matter of course. Of ἀρετὴ a moderate quantity (ὁποσονοῦν) would do, and in Aristotle's opinion this was the rock on which the Greek republics foundered. Their ἀρετὴ did not come as a matter of course, and they lost it, and the Macedonians and the Romans ate them up.