Jamaica was discovered by Columbus himself, on the 3d of May, 1494, while prosecuting his second voyage. On his fourth and last voyage he was shipwrecked on its northern coast, and, through the cruel jealousy of the governor of Hispaniola, was detained there nearly a year before relief was sent. In the dearth of historical associations, I have sometimes pleased myself with gazing at the high summit of Cape Clear Hill, which is far and wide conspicuous along the northern shore, and reflecting that the eye of the great discoverer may have often rested upon it during his weary detention, endeavoring thus to raise present insignificance somewhat by linking it with the one illustrious name in the annals of the island.
Sevilla d'Oro, the first settlement of the Spaniards in Jamaica, was founded in 1509, near the place of Columbus's shipwreck. It soon became a splendid city. Traces of pavement are still discoverable two miles distant from the church and abbey around which the town was built. In a few years, however, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arisen. Even the cause of its destruction is not certainly known. It is supposed, however, to have been a sudden irruption of the Indians. These were of the same voluptuous and gentle race which peopled the other Great Antilles, but, like them, might have been roused to temporary madness by the diabolical cruelties of the Spaniards. If so, their brief revenge availed them little, for by 1558, the sixty thousand Indians, who inhabited the island when discovered, had been extirpated, it is said, to the very last one. Near the seashore in the east of the island are some caves, in which mouldering bones of the unhappy aborigines are still found, who had taken refuge here, preferring to die of famine rather than to fall into the merciless hands of the Spaniards.
After the extirpation of the Indians, the labor of African slaves was introduced. Some sugar was raised, but the greater part of the island was devoted to the raising of cattle and swine. Besides the few whites and negroes needed for this, and a small number at two or three seaports, the population was mainly gathered in the town of St. Jago de la Vega. This was built on the south side, a few miles from the sea, after the destruction of Sevilla d'Oro. At the time of the English conquest in 1655, during Cromwell's protectorate, the population consisted of twelve hundred whites and fifteen hundred negro slaves. They were summoned by the English admiral to take the oath of allegiance to England or to leave the island. But they declared that they could do neither; that they were born subjects of the King of Spain, and knew no other allegiance; and, on the other hand, that they were natives of Jamaica, and had neither friends nor kindred elsewhere. They implored him, therefore, not to exact an impossible oath, nor yet to turn them adrift in the wide world. But the misfortunes of Spanish Papists were a matter of little concern to English Puritans. They were expelled the island, but leaving their slaves in the mountain forests of the central ridge, they planted a seed which for generations bore bitter fruit to their cruel enemies. These slaves became the nucleus of those formidable Maroon communities which for generations were a terror to the island. Their masters, having conveyed their families across to Cuba, returned with a body of Spanish troops, hoping, in their turn, to expel the invaders. They intrenched themselves in a natural fastness that appeared impregnable, and an English messenger being sent to demand a surrender, the venerable governor, Don Arnoldo Sasi, it is said, ordered him to be shown around the fortification, that he might see that it was impossible to take it, and then dismissed him with a handsome present. But the English soldiers knew no such thing as an impregnable fortress; they soon stormed the height, and, as the Spaniards were fleeing along the cliffs, picked them off like so many crows. A few attendants hurried down the aged governor to the sea, and conveyed him across to Cuba. And thus perished the tranquil and happy colony of St. Jago de la Vega. The victors took possession of the deserted town, which has finally become the seat of government. But they changed its Popish appellation of St. Jago de la Vega to the homely but unimpeachably Protestant name of Spanishtown, which it still bears in popular use, although officially it has resumed its former designation. There were two Roman Catholic churches in the town, each of which gave the name of its patron saint to the street on which it stood. But the Puritans would know them only as Whitechurch street and Redchurch street—names which, I believe, still remain, curious monuments of Puritan scrupulosity in that southern land. Spanishtown has increased in population to about five thousand, and in its palmy days of slaveholding prosperity exhibited doubtless much pomp of vice-regal splendor. But this has long fled, and its sandy streets are now almost as silent and sombre in the glittering sunshine as if traversed only by the ghosts of the Spanish colonists who dwelt here in peace until ruthlessly thrust forth by the English invader.
After the conquest, the island filled up with English, partly by voluntary emigration, and partly by a double deportation from home, first of refractory Cavaliers during Cromwell's protectorate, and partly of mutinous Puritans after the return of the Stuarts. These often renewed in the streets of Spanishtown the brawls of the mother country, and the exclamation, 'My king!' which the negroes are fond of using, is said to be a genuine relic of the time when it was the watchword of the outnumbered but courageous Cavaliers. Even after the Restoration, the Puritans were for a while in the ascendant in the island which the Puritan protector had wrested from the great foe of Protestantism; but gradually all traces of that hardy sect disappeared from a land which an enervating climate and the rapidly advancing barbarism of slavery rendered far fitter for another sort of inhabitants, namely, the buccaneers. The buccaneers, it will be remembered, were not exactly pirates preying indiscriminately upon all. They were rather English corsairs, who took advantage of the long enmity between England and Spain to carry on, in time of peace and war alike, perpetual forrays against the Spanish settlements and commerce of the West Indies. They were simply the jayhawkers and border ruffians of their day, and, with some traits of chivalry, differed probably as little from pirates as Quantrell and his fellow scoundrels differ from robbers. This villanous crew early resorted in great numbers to Jamaica, which became as good a base of operations against a power with which England was professedly at peace as Liverpool and Greenock are now against another power with which she is professedly at peace. Dr. Arnold, in one of his letters, says he imagines the British West Indies have never recovered from the taint of buccaneer blood. It is hard to say, for the universal corruption of morals and justice induced by slavery, existing in the overwhelming proportions which it had in the West Indies, renders it almost impossible to measure how far any subsidiary influence of evil may have helped to aggravate the mischief.
Jamaica, like the other colonies, soon received a constitution. Like her sisters on the continent, she opposed a spirited and successful resistance to the early encroachments of the crown. When our Revolution broke out, her Assembly passed resolutions declaring their entire concurrence in the principles set forth by the Congress, and gave as the reasons for not joining in our armed vindication of them, their insular position, and the peculiar nature of their population. Had geography permitted, Jamaica would doubtless have made one Slave State the more in the original Union, and would have been one of the fiercest afterward in the secession. We may well believe that nothing but the knowledge that she would be crushed like an eggshell by the mighty power of England, hindered her in 1834 from heading her sister islands in a revolt against the impending abolition of slavery, and thus giving the world twenty-seven years earlier the spectacle of a great slaveholders' rebellion.
The history of Jamaica, otherwise so monotonous and devoid of interest, even to its own people, yet includes one awful event, the destruction of Port Royal by the earthquake of 1692. This city, built by the English soon after the conquest, on the tongue of land which encloses the present harbor of Kingston, soon became the most splendid city of the English in America. Its quays and warehouses, Macaulay says, were thought to rival those of Cheapside. This wealth and splendor were not wholly the fruit of lawful commerce, for Port Royal was the favored resort of the buccaneers. Their lawless forrays against the Spanish filled it with wealth, and filled it also with voluptuous wickedness.
Tradition adds, perhaps to give emphasis to its doom, that just before the earthquake, a successful expedition had filled the city with booty, which loaded the warehouses, and even overflowed into the dwelling houses and verandas. But the stroke of judgment came, and a few shocks of an earthquake in a few seconds buried the greater part of the dissolute and splendid city beneath the waters of its own harbor. The decaying bodies that were thrown afterward on the shore produced a pestilence which swept off three thousand of those who had survived the earthquake. The sad remnant went over to the inside shore of the harbor, and built Kingston. A poor village of some twelve or fifteen hundred souls, adjoining the naval station, is now all that represents the once wealthy and wicked city, the Sodom of the West, and smitten with a fate like that of Sodom.
The same earthquake which destroyed Port Royal, almost ruined the island. Whole plantations changed their places. The mountains were strangely torn and rent. In many parts the immense accumulation of earth fallen from the mountains choked up the course of the streams for twenty-four hours, and when at last they burst their way through, they bore down on their swollen floods thousands of trunks of trees, branchless and barkless, to the sea. The gorge of the Bocaguas, through which the Rio Cobre winds in a glorious succession of cascades and whirling pools, is said to have been entirely filled up, causing the waters to overspread the upland basin of St. Thomas-in-the-Vale with a lake, which lasted nine days before the waters tore loose from their confinement, and swept over the plains to the ocean. There was evidence of a slight subsidence over the whole island. The earthquake of 1692 is undoubtedly the most desolating convulsion of nature which has ever befallen any portion of the English race.
For generations after the destruction of Port Royal, it was affirmed that the spires and housetops of the sunken city could be discerned on a clear day through the waters of the harbor. Even now there is a floating belief that they may occasionally be dimly descried, though I have never been able to ascertain whether it is worthy of credit.
Since then, although there are often shocks of earthquake, sometimes several in a year, and though some have occurred quite destructive to property, there has been none to divide with that of 1692 its awful preeminence of desolation. It is true, we know not at what time such a one may come, and it has been truly said that 'this beautiful island may be regarded as a gorgeous carpet spread over the deeply charged mines of a volcano.' Hurricanes, though very much less frequent than in the Windward Islands, have yet left their traces in the annals of Jamaica. Particularly noted are those of the 28th of August, 1712, of the 28th of August, 1722, and the series which, with the exception of two years, annually ravaged the island from 1780 to 1786 inclusive. It was in one of these that the town of Savanna-la-Mar was so completely overwhelmed by the sea, driven over it by the force of the wind, that when the flood rolled back to its home, not the slightest vestige of the place was discernible. In such a region the petition of the Litany, as it is here offered, 'From lightning, tempest, and earthquake, good Lord, deliver us,' falls on the stranger's ear with unwontedly solemn force.