Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

When first I went to Jamaica, a friend, Mr Clarence Lopez, with kindness I can never forget, lent me a house in the northern part of the island in the parish of Trelawny. It was the Great House on the Hyde, a pen about eight miles as the crow flies from the sea. Jamaica is 144 miles long at the longest portion and 49 miles broad at the broadest, it is little more than half the size of Wales, but when I went to that house set on the side of a mountain with a glorious view of hill and valley, coco-palm and banana, I went to the very loneliest place I have ever lived in in my life, and I have been in many lands. It is one of the loveliest too. Behind are the mountains, clothed to their peaks in woodland, bound together with all manner of creeping vines and the mountains fling their arms round, so that they seem to guard the old house from the winds of the south, and all in the ground grow pimento and orange and lemon trees, handsome, broad-leaved bread-fruit and tall naseberry trees, while the little garden on a plateau just behind the house is a wilderness of roses, pink and white, and red and yellow, and fragrant as the first roses that ever grew in a Persian garden. The house is two storied, and though it has many annexes the main building stands by itself. Much money has been expended upon it. Two great flights of stone steps lead up to the porch at the front door, the floor of which is tessellated as carefully as if it had been done in Italy; all the handles of the doors are of heavy cut glass and so are the door plates, while gilded beading decorates what they call in Jamaica the two great halls, that is the dining room downstairs and its fellow upstairs. The floors are of polished mahogany and so is the staircase; but no one had lived in it for years and “Ichabod” was written over everything.

It had been built with a view to defence, there was no doubt about it. On the porch a couple of men with guns could hold the front of the house, in the hall there is a trap-door leading to the storey below, cellars half underground, and in the walls in front are loop-holes through which a man might easily shoot. The second storey overhangs the first a little and there is not a corner but could easily be held by a man with a gun. Yes, decidedly it was built for defence, such defence as might be needed in the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The first night we spent there, my companion, Eva Parsons, and I alone with the weird black servants who had seen but very few white people and whose ways were strange to us, we felt the loneliness keenly. Eva was ill, and she was a Londoner born and bred. There were rats racing about downstairs, there were bats making curious sounds in the roof, and when a potoo bird gave vent to its long drawn-out uncanny cry, Eva abandoned courage and came flying into my room. And she was no coward. I comforted her to the best of my ability, and we decided that until we got the house a little more habitable one bedroom was quite big enough for the two of us.

But what must it have been like on those ranches in the old days when the Spaniards were few and scattered, and the corsairs, English and Portuguese and French and Dutch, and a nondescript crowd that were worse than any, came cruising along the coasts and landed and attacked the lonely houses? Think of the women who lay still shivering or crept to each other's rooms and wondered was that the pirates or was it only a rat, or possibly a bat in the roof? Or that weird sound?—Was it a potoo bird killing rats? or was it an English sailor calling to his mate in his harsh, unknown tongue?

“Except in the principal one, Caguya,” says Sedeno de Albornoz, speaking of the corsairs, “they anchor in the ports without being disturbed by anyone, and refit and careen their ships with perfect ease as if in their country. I can certify that, while a prisoner of theirs, I have heard with much concern many conversations with regard to colonising this island and fortifying two ports, one on the north side and one on the south. I always told them that there was a garrison of ten companies of infantry stationed by the King our master, besides three in the town, and two of mounted mulattoes and free negroes armed with hocking knives and half moons, of whom they are much afraid. They did not like that reply, and though doubtful contradicted me, saying they knew very well what was in the island. It is very certain that it is more important to them than any other, as it is better and more fertile and abundant than all those they have settled in the Indies; nor is there another like it in the Indies. Cuba and Espanola are indeed much larger, but Jamaica in its entirety is more plentiful than these, for it has much horned stock, and herds of tame swine, and wild ones in great numbers, from the hunting of which every year is obtained a quantity of lard that serves instead of oil for cooking.” So much lard that there are people who declare that Montego Bay, from which much lard was exported, took its name from a corruption of the Spanish word for lard.

“Likewise,” goes on Sedeno, “there is a large number of good horses, donkeys, and mules, fisheries of turtle and dainty fish, and a very fine climate from its healthy airs and waters.” Indeed he cannot say enough for the island. He finishes, “there are now a little over 300 colonists, mostly poor people. Nearly 450 men bear arms,” so I suppose he only counts those as colonists who actually settled on the land, “including the hunters and country folks, all of whom are labouring people, strong and suitable for war by reason of their courageous spirits if indeed lacking military discipline.”

And even as he wrote the enemy was within the gates, and the Governor of Jamaica writes despairingly to the King of Spain. He says 53 ships of war—there were really 38—came in sight of the island, and they bore 15,000 seamen and soldiers, while the invaders claim they conquered with 7000 soldiers and a sea regiment of 1000. But he probably is right when he says “there are 8000 souls scattered about the mountains, children, women, and slaves, without any hope of protection except from God, with the enemy's knife every hour at their throats.” We hear so little about the women and children in these wars of conquest and yet on them most heavily of all must have pressed the difficulties and the dangers.

And the Governor died a prisoner of war, and finally this Governorship which never seems to have been much sought after and was worth nothing, now descended upon Christ oval Arnaldo Ysassi, who was not even a trained soldier.

The rest of the pitiful story is one of flight, flight, flight, the Spaniards always pressed northward, always begging and praying help from Cuba, begging for bread and getting a stone.

For we say Jamaica was conquered in 1655, but it takes a long while for a people who are holding a land by guerilla warfare to understand that they are beaten, and it was evident that Ysassi was heartened by many a skirmish that seemed to him a success. Towards the end of October 1656, however, we find the King of Spain writing—“The English have a foothold in Jamaica, obstructing the commerce of all the islands to windward with the coasts of the mainland and of New Spain. The fleets and galleons run great risk in passing by Jamaica.”

But even in March of the next year the Viceroy of Mexico writes to Ysassi congratulating him on his appointment to the Government of Jamaica, though he himself was beginning to realise what a hollow farce it was.