“Where’s Large and the Colonel?”
I shook my head.
“Seen my luggage?”
I shook my head again.
He glanced through the doorway and caught sight of the disreputable John crow perched on the bank of scarlet blossoms, and, fumbling for a pencil, made his first Jamaican sketch there and then. I ordered another cooling drink, and so we waited for our luggage and our friends.
Jamaica is the largest and most important island in the British West Indies. It contains an area of some two thousand odd square miles, and supports a population of three quarters of a million people, only two per cent of whom are white. The blacks claim the predominating proportion of seventy-seven per cent, the “coloured” people represent nearly twenty per cent, and the remainder of the population is made up of whites, Indian coolies, and Chinese. The ten thousand coolies at work on the plantations in the interior have become a force in the island, and they are destined to play a considerable part in the commercial salvation of the country. The negroes are, of course, the descendants of the slaves imported from Africa in the days of the slave trade; the coloured class are the offsprings of the union of the whites with the blacks, or of the half-breeds with the negroes. The coolies are of recent importation from India, and the Chinese have come, no one knows how, to trade with the negroes in up-country districts.
In the days of old, Jamaica waxed fat on the profits of her sugar estates and the rich prizes of her rum trade. Fortunes were made almost without effort or exertion by old-time planters. Sugar was sold at absurdly high prices, and the planters cultivated their plantations entirely by slave labour.
The Emancipation Act of 1834 flung the industries of the island out of joint, and although the Imperial Government granted compensation to the extent of nearly six millions sterling to the owners of the three hundred thousand slaves they had liberated, the dry rot of decay set in, and Jamaica fell from her high position among commercial communities. The richest planters sold out their plantations and returned to the old country; the poorer planters who remained in the island were terribly handicapped for lack of labour. The freed slaves refused to work for their late masters, and the labour difficulty set in. Factories were forced to stop work; fields lay unplanted and untended for lack of workers. And this labour difficulty has remained more or less acute from that day to this. It was believed by the authorities that the introduction of the ten thousand coolies would help to solve the difficulty. The negroes had built for themselves little huts, and were content to live on the native fruits and vegetables. The pleasant indolence of their new life suited their tastes to a nicety; the rewards offered in return for their labour were neither sufficient nor in any way attractive. The warm climate and rich soil were all the Jamaican African required to make his life all that he desired. Sugar plantations were abandoned and rum factories were shut down, and poverty came to the land of wood and water. Naturally the white people resented the idleness of the blacks, and several eruptions occurred; the Gordon riots, and other disturbances less notorious, were directly caused by the impatience of the whites and the impertinence of the blacks.
Fine as is the picture of those three hundred thousand Africans climbing the mountain sides of their island prison-home in order that they might face the sun on the morning of the emancipation, we must not ignore the prospect of the valleys, lying in the deep shadows of those mountains, which were to be half desolated by the glory of that sunrise. If the black men were willing to work as hard now, or even half as hard, as their fathers once were forced to work, we should hear no dreary stories of Jamaica’s poverty. The island has got an ideal climate, a marvellously productive soil, and labourers in plenty; it lacks but the spirit of labour. The natural wealth of the country is vast enough, but the harvesters are idle and unwilling to work. The fact that the Government was forced to bring ten thousand coolies from distant India to work in the plantations and factories is a lasting disgrace to most of the five hundred thousand black men and many of the hundred and fifty thousand coloured folk. The pity of it is that neither of these classes seems to feel the sting of the disgrace. The negro has in his being no instinct for labour; the women only are willing workers.