Not only does this wealth of vegetation give to the island a most picturesque appearance, but also it constitutes a natural wealth which hitherto has been hardly sampled. The fruit-trees are beginning to be exploited, and already they support fleets of swift steamers between Port Antonio and America, and between Kingston and Bristol, and bring large profits to intelligent planters. But the exploitation of the timber forest has scarcely begun.
The mahogany is exported in a small way, and valuable logwood finds its way into the holds of ocean-going steamers. Satin-wood is exported in a very small way, and there are large fortunes awaiting men who will develop this trade. Bamboo is valuable, and one occasionally sees a single negro despoiling a mighty clump of giant trees with a light hand chopper, but the trade in Jamaican timber is in its infancy.
In the Kingston bazaars you can purchase walking-sticks for a shilling which in England would cost six times that sum, and the Kingston merchants make a profit on the transaction of more than five hundred per cent. Mr. Frank Bullen, whom I met in one of the Kingston hotels, told me that in the days when he was a seaman on a sailing ship, before he took to the trade of writing books, he once carried a cargo of walking-sticks from Kingston to England. I could not find any trace of the industry in the island to-day. But it should be a most profitable one. The Jamaican ebony or caccu-wood is one of the most beautiful woods one can imagine—a dark-coloured, close-grained heavy stick, which, common enough in Jamaica, is rare and valuable in England. And so it is with many other species.
I have not mentioned the Jamaican ferns, yet the island contains almost every species known to the collector, from the tiny, dainty maidenhair to the giant tree-fern forty feet high. There is a deep ravine in the island so crowded with the refreshing greenness of a thousand varieties of the species of the cryptogram that the natives have named it Fern Gully. Here, and in the shadow of the mountain peaks, the fern collector can find every variety of his favoured plant. He can spend months in gathering and cataloguing, but he can never exhaust the resources of the island.
