Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

Among the English themselves it was not all peace, because they were unhappily divided into Roundheads and Cavaliers, fanatics and men of license if we take extremes, and the two parties again and again were at each other's throats.

And even if there had not been two parties, the soldier as a colonist was a dead failure. He did not want to try and develop the land that fell to his lot. He was an adventurer, a fine adventurer often, but on the whole more given to destruction than to the building up of a colony. What the first settlers looked to find was literally gold and silver, pearls, and precious stones. They felt their work was done when they had conquered the land. They thought they had a right to sit down and reap the harvest of their labour.

And of course there wasn't any harvest. That wealth lay hidden in the soil they did not and could not understand. Indeed they did not want to understand. For if the land was to produce they must labour, labour under a tropical sun and under conditions that to them were strange. And even if they did labour to get results, there must be a market and as yet there was no market. All they could hope for was to get enough to keep themselves alive. Added to this, their pay was in arrears.

No money, a climate that because they were unaccustomed to it they regarded as pestilential, and idle hands, no wonder these conquerors of Jamaica were discontented, no wonder they roamed through the savannahs slaying ruthlessly the cattle and horses than ran wild in what seemed to the newcomers countless numbers. And so presently it happened that the cattle that had amply supplied the buccaneers for many decades were all slain and the men who had declined to plant were starving. They did not want to settle on the land. They wanted a little more excitement in their lives. In the end, I think, the average inhabitant of Jamaica had plenty of that commodity.

To this boiling pot Cromwell sent ont 1000 Irish men and 1000 Irish women. I can find nothing but the bare notification that they arrived, and it hardly seems to me those 2000 Irish can have helped matters much, whether they were poor convicts or political prisoners.

Somebody must till the ground, that was clear; and there came along Luke Stokes, the Governor of Nevis, intrigued by the stories of the new conquest; he brought with him 1600 people, men, women, children, and slaves, to settle in the eastern part of the colony round Port Morant on the site of an old Spanish hato. The Jamaican Government hoped much from these new importations.

Nevis is a tiny mountain island only fifty square miles in extent, and the people who came from there came to work and were accustomed to the isolation that is the lot of the pioneer. They settled in a part fertile certainly, with a wonderful and amazing fertility, but where the rainfall was very heavy and the heat far greater than in little Nevis, where the sea breeze swept every corner. There were mosquitoes too in the swamps, and a number of those settlers died, men, women, children, and slaves. Governor Stokes had hardly built himself a house when he and his wife died. If it was lonely in Nevis, ringed by the eternal sea, it was lonelier far in Port Morant, Jamaica, with the swamps around and the mountains, beautiful but stern and inaccessible, frowning down upon them.

We know very little about those first comers, but we do know that after the first decimating sickness that fell upon them, the remainder held on and tried to make good.

There were in 1671, the historian Long tells us, sixty settlements in the Port Morant district.

Probably we should read for the word “settlements” “estates” either pens or sugar estates. Now to people who do not understand conditions in Jamaica that sounds quite thickly populated. But Jamaica is all hills and valleys—rather I should say, steep precipices and deep ravines—and, as I cannot say too often, especially in that district the vegetation is dense. A mile in Jamaica, it often seemed to me, is farther than ten in England, much farther than a hundred in Australia. Even now many pens, many sugar estates are cut off entirely from neighbours. I lived for three months a guest of hospitable Miss Maxwell Hall, at her house Kempshot, on top of a steep mountain, from which we could see literally hundreds of hills melting away into the dim distance. We could see Montego Bay 1800 feet below us, but no other habitation of a white man was in sight, and we were so cut off by the inaccessibility of the country that though my hostess is certainly one of the most charming and popular young women in the countryside, no one from the town ever made their way up that steep hill. They were content that she who knew the road should come down and see them when she had the time.