Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

In his despair Columbus sent out the first exploring expedition into Jamaica. Diego Mendez, one of the best and bravest of his officers, and three men, started to walk through Trelawny, St James, and Hanover, visiting the villages and interviewing the native chiefs and making treaties with them by which the forlorn company were to receive regular supplies of food in exchange for fish hooks, knives, beads, combs, and such trifles as all the world over have taken the fancy of primitive man.

I have been through these parishes—in a motor car. There are coconut walks there now, the tall and graceful palms standing out against the sky, sugar plantations, patches of vivid green, pimento groves with trees like great myrtles clothed in glossy dark green, and rows of broad-leaved bananas and plantains, and the air is fragrant with the scent of orange and lemon blossom and hundreds of other growing things. On the hill tops are the Great Houses of the pen keepers and planters set in gardens, with the overseers' and book-keepers' houses lower down, and as near the road as they can get, the shacks of the negro helpers and independent cultivators. Strangely enough, in a little island that has been settled by Europeans for over four hundred years, the roads that wander along the entrancing sea shore and by the mountain side often look into gullies, at the bottom of which it seems as if we might find the villages where Diego Mendez made treaties. I should hardly have been surprised if in one of the little lonely coves we had come across the sunken ships of Columbus fastened close together for safety and with little houses thatched over in bow and stern. There are wild places still in this island which, after all, is only 4207 square miles—of hillside—not much larger than a good sized station in Australia, and gullies waiting for man to come and turn to good account their wealth. Here is room, and more than room, for the dwellers in the great cities who have never seen a glorious sunset and know not the scent of a pimento grove.

That meant for Columbus a weary time of waiting among dissatisfied men, for what adventurer, who had come out seeking gold and silver and precious stones, would be content to lie sweltering—rotting, I expect they called it—even in the most beautiful cove in the world. Presently the story went round that Columbus had been banished, his prestige was gone, and two brothers named Porras rose as leaders of the mutineers.

Even the life of the veteran was in danger. As I write this on my verandah, looking out over the blue Caribbean, with a little pauperised tingting bird sitting on the rail calling aloud that I have always provided his breakfast and that even little slim black birds with bright yellow eyes can be led astray by too much ease and comfort, I seem to realise with what bitterness the iron entered into the soul of the old man. There was no actual danger, they had enough to eat, and could sleep, sheltered and in peace, and sooner or later he thought help would come. Patience, he preached, patience. But the mutineers would have their way. They built or stole ten canoes and went out along the coast, ravaging and pillaging. The first of the pirates who ravaged the coasts of Jamaica and their victims, were not the white people but the gentle brown folk whom Columbus had designed to make peacefully their slaves. “They wandered from village to village,” says his chronicler, “a dissolute and lawless gang, supporting themselves by fair means or foul, according as they met with kindness or hostility, and passing like a pestilence through the land.”

I can almost understand it and forgive. Almost anything was better than sitting still watching the sun climb over the mountain in the morning and sink into the sea in the evening, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the relief that was so long in coming.

For Mendez having got to Hispaniola had then to make his way to Spain, and it was not till the 28th June 1504 that relief ships came sailing in and Columbus was able to leave Jamaica. He died in 1506, and by way of recompense, I suppose, in 1508 his son Diego was appointed Governor of the Indies, and in 1509 went out to San Domingo, taking with him his wife, who was a cousin of King Ferdinand.

In Jamaica under the Spaniards, a translation by Frank Cundall and Joseph Pieterez of documents found in the archives of Seville in Spain, the curious may read the slow story of the Spanish settling of Jamaica and its gradual evacuation. They did not come in with a rush, for there was no fabulous wealth of gold and silver here. Again and again the Spanish King urges the Governors to seek for gold, but though doubtless, they sought diligently, for the finding would have been the making of them, they found none, and we cannot but feel that the Spanish colonists were poor and of but little account. If you read Hans Sloane on the remains he found round about the old city of Seville, your sense of romance is satisfied, but the cold facts taken from the archives of Seville in Spain speak of a little handful of poor people struggling with an exuberant nature. Here, as I write, there comes to me the smell of very poor tobacco, only fragrant in the open air, and looking up I see a negro woman in leisurely fashion digging up the weeds among the grass of what will, some day I hope, be a lawn under the coconut palms. How leisurely is that fashion I can hardly describe, save by mentioning she only gets 3s. 6d. a week, boards and lodges herself and works accordingly. She has bare feet, a nondescript, drab-coloured garment that calls itself a dress, and a ragged hat made out of a banana trash and bound with a string of bright red. She is of African descent, but not unlike her probably were the Indians who worked in the fields for those first Jamaican colonists. Yes, she is content, fairly content I should say, almost too content, or she would strive a little to better herself.

I should like to have seen the beginnings of the Spanish occupation of Jamaica. How they slowly set up their hatos round the island, choosing out the fertile river bottoms and fencing in their lands lightly, so lightly that soon the lonely parts of the island were overrun with wild cattle and pigs descended from those that escaped. They planted coconut palms and brought over oranges and lemons and limes from their native land which took root and flourished, so that Hans Sloane, writing thirty years after the Spaniards had been driven out, talks of the orange and lime walks, and nowadays if you want orange trees on your land you have only to throw out one or two rotten oranges to have a crop of young seedlings.

“The buildings of the Spaniards,” says Hans Sloane, “on this island were usually one Story high, having a Porch, a Parlour, and at each end a Room with small ones behind for Closets etc. They built with Posts put deep into the ground, on the sides their Houses were plaistered up with Clay on Reeds, or made of the split Truncs of Cabbage Trees nail'd close to one another and covered with Tiles or Palmetto Thatch. The Lowness as well as the fixing the Posts deep in the Earth was for fear their Houses should be ruin'd by Earthquakes, as well as for Coolness.”

Immediately they settled, the Spaniards rounded-up the luckless Indians. Their lot was hard enough, though possibly not as hard as that of those driven to work in the mines, and as labourers on the hatos they soon began to fail their masters. Perhaps that is not to be wondered at. Las Casas, the benevolent bishop, who is responsible for the first introduction of negro slaves into the New World says, “they hanged the unfortunates by thirteens in honour of the thirteen apostles. I have beheld them throw the Indian infants to their dogs; I have seen five caciques burnt alive; I have heard the Spaniards borrow the limb of an human being to feed their dogs and next day return a quarter to the lender.”