As you round Port Royal you discover Kingston, a large, white, straggling town, on the land side entirely hemmed in by the Blue Mountains, and seawards washed by the waters of a lagoon seven or eight miles long, and nearly half as wide. Slowly we steamed to the town, passing an ancient, dismantled and deserted fort, which once mounted its hundred guns.
I remember that our good ship was at last made fast to the wooden quay, and the black-faced, white-coated labourers grinned us greeting as we stepped ashore. After some excitement with many half-castes representing the Customs, the hotels, and the buggies, who each and all claimed a portion of our baggage, we safely emerged from the dock district into the dusty main road of Kingston. It was strange to find up-to-date, twentieth century, American, electric cars screaming along roads which, if they were ever built at all, were certainly completed two centuries back; and it was even more strange to learn that these cars have not entirely depopulated Kingston.
I remember being possessed of a great idea of walking to my hotel. A fresh sea breeze was blowing, and the prospect of a stroll through the town was peculiarly inviting. But unfortunately the dock gates were barricaded with buggies, and to successfully evade the manœuvres of one only meant falling into the clutches of another. Passage between the vehicles there was none, and when I attempted to step through one carriage to get clear of the others, the fiendish driver whipped his ponies and whirled me out of the dockyard before I could regain my presence of mind. Outside, the delighted man claimed me as a passenger, and when I found that I was sitting on a singularly pompous and overheated Britisher, who had been captured in the same enterprising manner, I forgot to be angry, and began to apologise. The result was entirely satisfactory—the pompous Britisher never forgave me. We dropped him, I remember, the first time the ponies took it into their heads to slow up, but the worthy man seriously offended our driver by refusing to pay. For half an hour they wrangled in the crowded main street, and frequently I feared the sudden death of my white friend. However, the storm came to a sudden and dramatic finish by the skilful capture of the weary Englishman by another buggyman. We left him cursing Jamaica and buggies, and particularly all black men. After a series of adventures and narrow escapes we at last reached the Constant Spring Hotel. The driver suggested that I should pay him a sovereign, but he accepted ten shillings with the utmost cheerfulness. Afterwards I discovered that the fare was certainly not more than a dollar.
I sat in a comfortable wicker chair in the commodious entrance hall of the hotel and tried to collect my scattered senses. The excitement of my buggy journey, and the interest of my first glimpse of the capital of the Queen of the Antilles, had somewhat unstrung my thinking faculties. I was alone in a strange hotel in a strange country. My luggage was heaven knows where, and my companions, Forrest and the others, were left on a crowded quay somewhere down in the dock district.
I called for a cooling drink and mentioned my trouble to the coal-black waiter.
“That’s al’ light, sah. They come soon, sah.”
So I remained in that comfortable chair in the vestibule of the hotel and waited. A ragged, disreputable-looking
John crow, perched on a bush of scarlet blossoms just in front of where I sat, regarded me with a look of thoughtful contempt. As my nerves got more settled I became conscious of the rich perfumes of the flowers; the insects were buzzing and chirping outside, and the strong sun gave to my shaded resting-place an air of quiet coolness. Graceful negresses were watering the flower-beds; they carried the watering-cans on their heads until they found the particular plant they wished to sprinkle with the refreshing liquid. Their movements were slow and deliberate and very graceful.
It was a peaceful summer day; from where I sat I could see, afar off, a thin edge of blue beyond the distant confines of the town, and I made out the white patches of the sails of little vessels. I lit my pipe and waited. Suddenly there was a jangle and a crash, and a buggy stopped at the hotel door; in it the head of my friend Forrest appeared from amidst a heap of sketch-books, easels, portfolios, and virgin canvases. I could see by the agonised expression on his flushed countenance that he was very angry. I called the waiter and told him to help the poor struggling artist to disentangle himself from the debris of his paraphernalia.
Poor Forrest came to where I sat and sank into another wicker chair. He seized my cooling drink and emptied the glass at one gulp.
“Where am I?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Where’s Large and the Colonel?”
I shook my head.
“Seen my luggage?”
I shook my head again.
He glanced through the doorway and caught sight of the disreputable John crow perched on the bank of scarlet blossoms, and, fumbling for a pencil, made his first Jamaican sketch there and then. I ordered another cooling drink, and so we waited for our luggage and our friends.
Jamaica is the largest and most important island in the British West Indies. It contains an area of some two thousand odd square miles, and supports a population of three quarters of a million people, only two per cent of whom are white. The blacks claim the predominating proportion of seventy-seven per cent, the “coloured” people represent nearly twenty per cent, and the remainder of the population is made up of whites, Indian coolies, and Chinese. The ten thousand coolies at work on the plantations in the interior have become a force in the island, and they are destined to play a considerable part in the commercial salvation of the country. The negroes are, of course, the descendants of the slaves imported from Africa in the days of the slave trade; the coloured class are the offsprings of the union of the whites with the blacks, or of the half-breeds with the negroes. The coolies are of recent importation from India, and the Chinese have come, no one knows how, to trade with the negroes in up-country districts.
In the days of old, Jamaica waxed fat on the profits of her sugar estates and the rich prizes of her rum trade. Fortunes were made almost without effort or exertion by old-time planters. Sugar was sold at absurdly high prices, and the planters cultivated their plantations entirely by slave labour.
The Emancipation Act of 1834 flung the industries of the island out of joint, and although the Imperial Government granted compensation to the extent of nearly six millions sterling to the owners of the three hundred thousand slaves they had liberated, the dry rot of decay set in, and Jamaica fell from her high position among commercial communities. The richest planters sold out their plantations and returned to the old country; the poorer planters who remained in the island were terribly handicapped for lack of labour. The freed slaves refused to work for their late masters, and the labour difficulty set in. Factories were forced to stop work; fields lay unplanted and untended for lack of workers. And this labour difficulty has remained more or less acute from that day to this. It was believed by the authorities that the introduction of the ten thousand coolies would help to solve the difficulty. The negroes had built for themselves little huts, and were content to live on the native fruits and vegetables. The pleasant indolence of their new life suited their tastes to a nicety; the rewards offered in return for their labour were neither sufficient nor in any way attractive. The warm climate and rich soil were all the Jamaican African required to make his life all that he desired. Sugar plantations were abandoned and rum factories were shut down, and poverty came to the land of wood and water. Naturally the white people resented the idleness of the blacks, and several eruptions occurred; the Gordon riots, and other disturbances