Over the passage I draw a veil. We wound our way down the narrow neck of the fiord (sacred to the memory of the heroic Hobson), passed under the bluff crowned by the bastions of Morro Castle, and plunged into the rollers of a marvellous sapphire sea. From that time, I remember nothing for about eighteen hours, except the truly infernal heat of a grimy little oven, facetiously described as a stateroom. Next morning, when I came on deck, the blue mountains of Jamaica were towering over us, and we were heading for the low spit of Port Royal, which forms, as it were, the breakwater of Kingston Harbour.

Of Jamaica I shall say very little, for the simple reason that my feelings concerning it are beyond expression. |The City Desolate.| The burden of my message is, “Go and see it.” Until you have crossed the Blue Mountain range of this incomparable island you do not know what Nature can achieve in the creation of pure beauty. In Italy Nature is helped out by art, by architecture, by the magic of antiquity, by all sorts of historic associations; and it would, of course, be ridiculous to under-value these advantages. Here beauty has no such adjuncts; if it is enhanced at all by the intervention of man, it is by mere accident. Comparison, then, is futile; but with the liveliest memory of many of the loveliest scenes in Italy, I say deliberately that I did not know what pure beauty meant until I visited Jamaica.

But I did not learn it in Kingston. Rebuilding had scarcely begun in that luckless city, which can at no time, I fancy, be very attractive. It was, to put it briefly, the abomination of desolation. The heat in the long, straight streets was torrid; and all the mortar that ought to have been in the house-walls was blowing about in the form of scorching and stinging dust-clouds. So I presently shook the dust of Kingston, not so much off my feet as out of my eyes and lungs, and (under the advice of kind friends at King’s House), set forth on a short tour, of which the first stage was a railway journey to Port Antonio.

Never shall I forget that afternoon. |A Midsummer Day’s Dream.| Perhaps it impressed me the more because I had not been led to expect anything unusually beautiful. Between Kingston and the old capital, Spanish Town, the route was of no great interest; but no sooner had the train passed Spanish Town, and begun to creep up into the hills which form the backbone of the island, than I found myself in a valley of enchantment. A gorge rather than a valley—a winding, Highland glen, with a clear blue river flowing musically down its rocky bed, and a white road following the curves of the stream. Everywhere were glorious forest trees and slender palms—very different from the paunchy Cuban species—with an underwood of the richest tropical growths. The banana groves, sometimes mixed with orange trees, were numberless, and at almost every turn huge clumps of feathery bamboos were mirrored in the stream. The giant limbs of the forest trees were often clad for their whole length with the tender green of thick-clustering ferns. As for the temperature, it was perfection. I can only describe it by a contradiction in terms—very warm and yet beautifully cool—whereby I mean that, though the thermometer was doubtless high, the delicate freshness of the air, the clearness of the water, and the depth of the green shadows through which we were running, produced a perfect illusion of coolness. Slowly as the train meandered along, it went far too fast for me. I was tortured by a desire to linger, to get out and walk, to fix in my mind some of the ever-shifting aspects of beauty. Presently—all too soon—we reached the top of the pass and began to wind down the wider valley on the other side. Beneath jag-toothed mountain walls in the grey distance, spread a labyrinth of crinkly hills, all tending to a pyramidal form, and many of them crowned with red-roofed cabins or wattle huts. Down their corrugations flowed exquisitely limpid brooks, and up their sides climbed forests of broad-leaved bananas. On every hand were palms, oranges, and brilliant flowering shrubs. It gave one an odd little shock to see at a wayside station, amid all this wealth of tropical colour, a patch of homely British vermilion in the shape of a mail-cart inscribed with the familiar “E.R.” At times the train would plunge into tunnels, just long enough to afford a pleasant pause in the overpowering feast of beauty; then out again to serpentine along amid fairy dells and dingles each lovelier than the last. As we drew downwards, the noble mountain background began to flush in the evening light; and at last we ran out into the wide bed of a torrent debouching in a sweep of purple sea. This was Annotto Bay; whence the line skirts round headland after headland of the romantic coast to the bright little town of Port Antonio.

Here I spent a perfect tropical day. |At Port Antonio.| The great American caravanserai on the promontory between the two bays was closed; so I went to the pleasant little Waverley Hotel on the neck of land at the base of the promontory. Through the still hot hours of blazing sunlight, I sat in the airiest of attire on a shady verandah, writing some of the foregoing pages, while the vulture-like “John Crows” wheeled solemnly around, in sedulous devotion to their craft of scavenging. The waters of the smaller bay were lapping at my feet; and I looked out over their blue expanse to a little red-and-white light-house on the opposite head-land, and the white walls of an American millionaire’s villa gleaming through a forest of palms. In the cool of the afternoon, I climbed to a small plantation on the top of a hill some seven or eight hundred feet high, almost perpendicularly overhanging the town. Nothing more glorious can be conceived than the falling of the purple twilight over the innumerable folds of the foothills filling the bottom of the great basin of mountains to the south; while northward lay the measureless expanse of the sleeping Spanish Main. It was a scene of sheer enchantment. I lingered until the great stars began to blaze in the crystal deeps of heaven; then took my way downward, unutterably moved, as by some august and gorgeous ritual. In the town, the lamplight was glowing through the walls of the houses—for here, as often as not, the walls are of pivoted slats which open and close like Venetian blinds. The streets were swarming with a dusky throng, and a band of black Salvationists was making an unholy clatter under the star-sown silences.

But I must cut short my Jamaican raptures, and not attempt to express the inexpressible. Starting from Buff Bay the next morning, at seven o’clock, under the guidance of a negro whoso regal name was Clovis, I rode all day long up a valley of paradise, into the heart of the mountains. |A Valley of Paradise.| Sometimes, when the road skirted a ravine, we would look down a hundred feet or so, and see shining brown bodies plashing about in the silver pools, flecked with sunlight through the overarching palms. More than once, in some sequestered nook, we came upon a negro family party performing an elaborate go-to-meeting toilet—for it happened to be Sunday, and the road was populous with worshippers, all of whom gave us a grinning good-day. While we took our midday rest at a hospitable plantation, half ruined by the earthquake, a deluge of rain came down and lasted over an hour; but when we rode forward—now on a mere bridle-path winding along the sides of often precipitous gorges—it was wonderful to see the clouds rolling up like giant curtains from the glittering mountain-sides. On we clambered over the watershed, and a little way down the southern valley, to the plantation of Chester Vale, 3000 feet high. There I spent several delightful days of work and mountain wandering, on which I must not allow myself to enlarge. Almost every afternoon—for it was the rainy season—there came a tropical downpour. But rain itself, in this climate, is a thing of beauty and of joy; and as for the lifting of the clouds and breaking through of the evening sun, who shall describe the splendours of the spectacle? Perhaps the most beautiful of all my experiences was an early morning ride from Chester Vale along the ridge to Newcastle, on my way back to Kingston. Such ferns, such exquisite wild flowers, as lined the path, I have seen nowhere else; and the view from our shady fringe of the forest, over the sunbathed valley fading away to the northern sea, was sumptuous in the extreme.

I cannot better sum up my impressions of Jamaica than by saying that there was scarcely an hour of my brief stay in the island which I would not willingly have prolonged indefinitely. Again and again—many times in the day—I would feel, “Why cannot the sun stand still? Why must this marvellous moment pass away before I have absorbed a hundredth part of its beauty? Why is there no means of ‘fixing’ on the memory, as on a photographic plate, the details of this heavenly scene?” We have all, I suppose, experienced these moments of exasperation at the tyrannous march of time; but I have never known them come crowding upon me as they did in Jamaica. In a very real sense, the island is too lovely; one is sated, surfeited with beauty. I should hesitate to live there, lest perchance I should sicken of Nature’s prodigality. But for a month or two, or for a winter, nothing could be more fascinating. And Jamaica, in my experience, has few or none of the usual draw-backs of the tropics—poisonous insects, snakes, and so forth. It is the nearest conceivable approach to an earthly Paradise. It is a fragment of Fairyland.

To confess the truth, I was too much occupied in sheer enjoyment of life during my stay in Jamaica to pursue with any ardour my researches into the race-problem. |Black, White, and Coloured.| But I saw enough to realize the heaven-wide difference between this black community, administered by a benevolent but scarcely qualified despotism, and the piebald democracies of the Southern States. There were in Jamaica, in 1905, 15,000 whites, ten times as many “coloured” people (that is to say mulattoes), and nearly 630,000 blacks. In other words, the white population of the island is smaller than that of Rugby, the non-white population is larger than that of Manchester and Salford. There are fifty-five non-whites to every one white. Moreover, the terms of the enumeration point to a characteristic difference between the United States and Jamaica. In America, every one with the smallest strain of African blood is black, though he may, in fact, be as white as George Washington. “Coloured man” and “negro” are synonymous, there being no legal, social, or statistical distinction between the pure black and the mulatto. We have seen how impossible it is to arrive at anything but a merely conjectural estimate of the relative numbers of the pure and mixed breeds. But in the West Indies “coloured”[“coloured”] means “not black” as clearly as it means “not white.” The “coloured” population is a middle class between the white aristocracy and the black proletariat; and whereas in America there is almost complete solidarity of feeling and interest between the mulatto and the negro, I am told that in the West Indies the “coloured” man despises the “nigger,” and feels himself immeasurably his social superior.[[75]]

This means that no real race-problem exists in Jamaica. There may be a certain amount of marginal friction and unpleasantness where the coloured population, the intermediate stratum, touches the black basis of society on the one hand, and the white upper-crust on the other; but these difficulties are not essentially different from those which necessarily arise in any community which includes a large class of indeterminate social standing. There is, in fact, none of that[that] race rivalry which declares itself where two races are practically equal in numbers and theoretically equal in political status. The integrity and the social position of the white race are absolutely unthreatened. They are, like the English in India, a small body of “sahibs” in a non-white country. The situation in Jamaica, in fact, has scarcely an element in common with that of the Southern States.

There are, I believe, some slight stirrings of democratic ambition, and of resentment at their lack of political rights, among the Jamaican populace—especially in the small class of urban negroes. |Let Well Alone?| It would be absurd for me to offer an opinion as to whether they have any substantial and practical grievance. But I confess I could not work up any enthusiasm for the “elevation” of the Jamaican masses. Beyond a little better sanitation, I do not know what they want. They seemed as happy as South Sea Islanders, and much more tenacious of life. Both the coloured population and the black population have nearly doubled within the past half-century. From the point of view of the white employer, no doubt, it is highly desirable that, as Mr. Booker Washington puts it, they should “want more wants:” more civilization would mean more stability and industry, with less inclination to “prædial larceny[larceny].” But from the point of view of the black man himself, the benefits of progress seem far more questionable. I read without the appropriate sense of horror that “not more than half of the native population is effectively reached by religious and educational influences,” and that 60 per cent. of the births are illegitimate. It seems to me that the Jamaican negro enjoys all the advantages of the primitive life without its disadvantages, whereas the American negro (broadly speaking) is subjected to all the evils of civilization, while he receives but a disproportionate share of its benefits.