—Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1830)
“[DECEMBER 4, 1844] My first sight of Jamaica was one that I never can forget. There was a conical mass, darkly blue, above the dense bed of clouds that hung around its sides, and enveloped all beneath [the] towering elevation [of Blue Mountain Peak] [. . .] Night soon fell. Many lights were seen in the scattered cottages, and here and there a fire blazed up from the beach, or a torch in the hand of some fisherman was carried from place to place. My mind was full of Columbus, and of his feelings on that eventful night, when the coast of Guanahani [San Salvador, also known as Watlings Island, in the Bahamas] lay spread out before him with its moving lights, and proud anticipations. So did I contemplate the tropical island before me, its romance heightened by the indefiniteness and obscurity in which it lay [. . .] The well-known comparison by which Columbus is said to have given Queen Isabella an idea of Jamaica—a sheet of paper crumpled up tightly in the hand, and then partially stretched out—occurred to me, and I could not but admire its striking appropriateness.”
—Philip Henry Gosse, A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (1851)
Like many islanders the world over, Jamaicans often refer to their island as the Rock; and in the beginning Jamaica was just that, a rock rising above the surface of the sea. Long after its geological history had begun, its natural history followed, with biological life forming in the soupy sea around while on the land plants developed over millions of years until eventually the first tree rose up into the air.
Jamaica would one day be covered by trees; but before that it was shaped by volcanic rocks, which were eroded by wind and water and by limestone produced with the slow disintegration of the shells of marine life, including coral. This limestone then dissolved into pockets and purses called karst formations, the sinkholes and springs and caves and underground reservoirs and cone-shaped hills and honeycomb sides of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, one of the most remarkable examples of such a limestone landscape in the world.
Then, in a familiar island compact, Jamaica’s geography conspired with its geology to give the island a rich diversity of flora and fauna, fascinating travelers and residents alike from ancient times. Such variety remains one of the most reliable markers of island identity. Temperate or tropical, on almost every ocean island around the world there are thousands of plant and animal species, some tiny and hidden away and others portly and prominent, some resident and others just passing through; and over time they create their own island conditions, building a world in which they uniquely belong and bringing nurture and nature together in what Jamaicans might call a rocksteady rhythm. Typical of mountainous islands with windward and leeward shores, Jamaica has two climates; in the northeast, exposed to the wind, it is wet and warm, while in the lee of the mountains to the southwest the weather is drier and cooler. This makes for an even more remarkable range of species, including an exceptional variety of ferns and fruits and berries—and of birds to feed on them.
Birds and islands have a long association, for until very, very recently in the history of the world, birds were the only creatures (other than insects and bats) that could fly over the water to reach islands. The Chinese word for an island combines the ancient ideogram of a bird with that of a mountain—and measured from the seabed, every ocean island is a mountain. In this imagining, an island is a place for a bird to land; and birds hide out or hover about all over Jamaica—it has the highest number of native avian species anywhere in the Caribbean. There are finches and flycatchers, herons and egrets, black-billed and yellow-billed parrots, mockingbirds and kingbirds and the magnificent frigate bird, with its scarlet throat that balloons in breeding season. There are whistling ducks and blue and yellow and black and white warblers, elaenias (called Sarah Birds) and euphonias (called Cho-Cho Quits), an owl called Patoo and an oriole called Banana Katie. The island is also home to a little green and red tody called Rasta Bird, a cuckoo called Old Woman Bird and another called Old Man Bird, and to doves and lots of crows, including the rightly named jabbering crow. And the John Crow, which isn’t really a crow at all but a turkey vulture (graceful or disgraceful, depending on one’s point of view) that has found a place in Jamaican folklore. There are hummingbirds, especially the so-called Doctor Bird, found only on the island and celebrated in Ian Fleming’s James Bond story For Your Eyes Only (1960), where the opening words speak of “the most beautiful bird in Jamaica, and some say the most beautiful bird in the world, the streamer-tail or ‘doctor’ hummingbird.” It is now the national bird of Jamaica. And there are over a hundred species of butterflies, each of exquisite color and design, including the giant swallowtail—largest in the Americas and native to the island.
Green and brown and croaking lizards live in Jamaica, along with a few snakes and one species of crocodile (which appears on the national coat of arms). Turtles have lived on and around Jamaica for millions of years, from the time when the sea was relatively shallow; and now there are green turtles and hawksbills and loggerheads and leatherbacks, bringing the sea and the land together in their amphibious lives. In fact, certain reptiles that can manage significant water crossings are usually among the first animals on any “new” island. Perhaps as importantly, reptiles can go for long periods without eating anything at all, absorbing heat passively from the sun and the ambient air rather than having to generate body heat internally like mammals and birds—which requires a lot of food.
Among the marine mammals, the manatees, or “sea cows,” are relatively scarce around Jamaica these days; but they have made their home close to shore forever, and would have been easy pickings for the earliest human settlers. There are still plenty of dolphins and some whales, including sperm whales and humpbacks, sharing the waters with stingrays and sharks, barracudas and eels, marlin and tuna. Around the reefs there are fish with intriguing names—grunts and groupers, snappers and doctorfish, squirrelfish and goatfish and triggerfish and angelfish—and in some parts of the Caribbean Sea the unusual flying fish, breaking the surface at speeds up to forty miles per hour and gliding on pectoral and pelvic fins for distances from a hundred feet to a quarter mile. Some say it flies over the waves to escape predators; others believe it does it just for fun.
The trees that originally grew on Jamaica, from the dry lowlands to the rainy valleys and up onto the steep hillsides, were drastically reduced—in both number and variety—with the arrival of humans, who cut timber for building and cleared land for agriculture. But this opened up spaces for new plant varieties, some introduced by travelers and some brought there by chance, on the winds and waves or by bird or boat. There are tamarinds whose seeds traveled from Asia, breadfruits brought from Tahiti by William Bligh (the notorious commander of the Bounty), and sapodilla (better known in Jamaica as naseberry) with its delicious fruit and sap called chicle, tapped every six years to make chewing gum. Jamaica has flowering trees such as the native poui, which has a spectacular yellow-gold blossom that lasts only a short while, falling in an apron around the base of the tree; and the blue mahoe, which displays trumpet-shaped, hibiscus-like flowers at different times of the year, its wood prized for cabinet-making and the crafting of musical instruments, and its bark used in Cuba to wrap cigars.
Other trees have various uses. The lignum vitae’s sapwood was once a remedy for syphilis, and its gum is still used in the treatment of arthritis. There is a tree called Duppy Machete, with floral petals deemed suitable for dealing with duppies, West Indian spirits of the dead. The beautiful frangipani has a sweet scent but a poisonous sap, while the fruit of the ackee is poisonous at the wrong time of harvesting but delicious at the right stage. It is now the foundation of Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and salt (cod) fish. There are cashew trees, with a pear-shaped fruit that ends in a kernel that is the nut, and soursop and coconut and pawpaw and mango trees, along with avocado and banana and cocoa and nutmeg, none of them native but all now widely dispersed on the islands of the Caribbean. Nutmeg was an icon of the spice trade, which once centered