Chapter XVII: African Jamaica (2)

A furzy, almost treeless, red soil region surrounded me on my second afternoon. I was flanking the famous cockpit country, made up of numerous basins in close proximity and densely wooded from top to bottom, wilder forms of what are known in Minnesota as “sink-holes.” In these the Maroons took refuge in their wars with the English. The Maroons (an abbreviation of cimaroon, said to be derived from the Spanish _cima_, or mountain top) were originally slaves of the Spanish, who took to the cockpit country after England captured Jamaica, where they were joined from time to time by runaway slaves of the newcomers. England won her title to the island almost without a struggle, but it took two regiments to keep the Maroons from recapturing it. For nearly two hundred years they lived in wild freedom in the mountain recesses, frequently descending to harry the lowlands and carry off the cattle. The government at length entered into a treaty with them, granting them 2500 acres of land, and getting in turn their assistance in quelling uprisings of the slaves or repelling foreign invasion. They were a bold, hardy lot of men, holding the servile peasant population in great contempt, knowing every inch of the hills and forests, and were great hunters, either of human or four-footed game. In warfare they dressed themselves in green leaves which caused them to blend invisibly into the landscape. It has always been the policy of the Government to keep the Maroons at odds with the rest of the population, England’s familiar old scheme for dominion, like the accentuation of caste lines in India. To-day, though there are several so-called Maroon towns in the cockpit country and another in the northeastern parish, there are said to be almost no “pure blooded” Maroons left. They still exist in name, however, and have their own chiefs, churches, and schools, and once a year they are paid an official visit by the _custos_ of the parish, when they “dress up in leaves and similar rubbish and go through a lot of childish hocuspocus.” In theory at least they are more independent than the other negroes—which is strong language indeed—but though every little while some black countryman bullies his neighbors by claiming to be a Maroon, there is nothing by which to distinguish the present descendants of the warlike slaves from those whose ancestors peacefully awaited emancipation.

Wayside shops are somewhat less numerous in Jamaica than in Barbados, and it is significant of a larger American influence here that they are called stores. The best of them, virtually all the provision shops in fact, are kept by Chinamen, unknown in “Little England.” Even in the most remote corners of the mountainous interior one comes upon Celestials plying their chosen trade, most of them of the younger generation, born in Jamaica and speaking the same slovenly tongue as their negro clients, yet retaining all their native attributes, sphinx-like, taciturn, unflaggingly diligent, apparently wholly devoid of curiosity, only rarely succumbing to the native influence to the extent of mumbling an indifferent “Where y’u go?” or “What y’u name?” In striking contrast to Barbados, too, are the stocks of imported canned and salt fish, even in stores on the edge of the sea. Every scattered collection of huts has its post office, always bearing the blue sign “Quinine for Sale.” Single pills of the febrifuge are sold in printed envelopes at a farthing each, though there are few coins of that size in circulation, and he who buys a penny-worth gets his four pills in as many separate envelopes. The favorite native occupation seems to be the patching of shoes. It is a rare mile that does not have at least one “shoemaker” seated in the door of his tiny shanty or single room, striving to make both ends meet with a few scraps of leather and a handful of nails. Almost the only native manufacture, however, is the weaving of “jippi jappa” hats, a very coarse, poor imitation of the Panama, though the country people make all shapes and sizes of baskets.

The language of Jamaica is at best curious; that spoken in the hills seems almost a foreign dialect, and the stranger must listen attentively and usually have phrases repeated before he understands them. He is unlikely to catch more than the general drift of a conversation between the natives. Yet few African words remain; what seem such to the stranger turn out upon inquiry to be mutilated forms of English. “No, please” and “Oh, yes, please, sah” are the habitual negative and affirmative of the rural districts when addressing white persons. Now and then the greeting of the older people is “Good mawnin’, dear massa,” or “I tell you good evenin’, mistress.” It is always “I couldn’t tell you,” never “I don’t know.” A white baby is a “bukra pickney” to the country people; smile at any of their childish antics and they are flattered into confiding to one another “De bukra him laugh.” African languages consist largely of gesture. With the learning of English from the stolid Anglo-Saxon this has in great measure disappeared. It is much more prevalent in the country than in the towns, and much more marked when they are talking to one another than when addressing a white man. The negro-English of the masses is no more intelligible to the newcomer than real English is to the rural population, and most planters save themselves time and trouble by addressing their laborers in their own dialect. The Jamaican negro is much given to talking things over with himself, his brain evidently refusing to work silently, and it is the rule rather than the exception to hear those one meets along the roads engaged in a soliloquy. In slavery days queer terms were used for money and they are still heard in the rural districts and in town markets. I found a Chinaman spending his spare time between customers in wrapping up tiny packages of sugar and asked him if they were a penny-worth, which seemed small enough indeed at present prices. No, they are sold at a “gill,” or three farthings. Two “gills,” or three “ha’p’nnies,” is a “quattie.” A shilling used to be a “macaroni,” three pence was for some reason called “fippence,” and to this day one occasionally hears the equivalent of thirty West Indian cents referred to as “a mac an’ fippence.” The ejaculatory “I mean to say” is as frequent in the speech of even the peasants as it is in England.

What may be called proverbs for lack of a more exact name are numerous among the masses of Jamaica. Let me quote a few, leaving the reader to catch what meaning he can out of them:

“Better fe water trow ’way dan gourd fe bruck.”

“Black man tief, him tief half a bit; bukra tief, him tief whole a
estate.”

“Cock crow ’trongest ’pon him own dung’ll.”

“Cedar board laugh after dead man.”

“Don’ cry oveh milk wha’ trow ’way a’ready.”

“Dog hab too much owner him sleep widout supper.”

“Ebery dog tink himself lion in him massa yard.”

“Ebery John Crow tink him pickney white.”

“Ebery man know where him house a leak.”

“Follow fashin mek monkey cut him tail.”

“Get a quattie better dan a kick.”

“Larn te dance a home befo’ y’u go outside.”

“Man no done grow mus’n laugh afteh short man.”

“Man get in trouble pickney breeches fit he.”

“Runnin’ ’bout too much de ruin ob woman an’ fowl.”

“Same ting sweet mout’ hu’t belly.”

“Sometime high standin’ collar stan’ top a empty belly.”

“Too much cousin broke shop.”

“When y’u hab bad husban’ don’ mek y’u sweethea’t ca’ y’u half way.”

“Man run too fast run two time.”

“Ebery jackass tink him pickney a race horse.”

Folk lore shows evidence of English and African mixture. Here is a story as it was told by our son’s Jamaican nursemaid, without the inimitable pronunciation:

“One day a gentleman and lady have two girl. And they sent them out to look for them granny. When them got in the thick wood and them meet with a _orangootang_. The orangootang axed them where are them going to. ‘I am going to look for my granny.’ And said, ‘Here is my granny.’ And them said, ‘No, you is not my granny. My granny got a mark right on her mout’.’ And he went in the thick wood took a knife scrape off his mout’ and come out and said, ‘Here is your granny now.’ And he took dem and carry dem in his house and just half cook de food dat carry for dem granny. And when night come him eat off de middle of de biggest one and lef’ only de hand and de head and de feet. And de little one said, ‘Granny, let I go outside.’ And he said go and de smallest one run home and can’t talk till three days. And de father get twelve men and gone look for de orangootang. And when he going six mont’ he catch de orangootang and put him into de cage and when six mont’ come he throw kerosene oil on him and light him a fire.”

Tenses mean nothing to the uneducated Jamaican, and the subjective and objective pronouns are more likely to be reversed than not. Between the plural and singular of either verb or noun he shows an engaging impartiality, while the double negative is to him a form of emphasis.

Beyond Ulster Spring, a scattered town in a kind of cockpit so full of mist in the early morning as to seem a lake, my road dropped rapidly down a beautiful narrow valley, the high, ragged hills on both sides tree-clothed in all but the barest white sheer spots. Little wooden houses were pitched on wooded knolls and jutting places that seemed almost inaccessible. Here and there the ancient stone road-parapet had fallen away, giving splendid opportunities for far swifter descent on a dark night. Through the canyon echoed the voice of a negro woman, singing hymns as she walked. Birds sang continually; from the inaccessible little houses came the occasional bleating of goats. Dry River Lake, evidently in the bottom of a prehistoric crater, shimmered far below me, surrounded by the densest vegetation, and utter silence. Jamaica has many rivers that disappear and reappear at random throughout their course. Negro men on their way to work on the jungled hillsides carried their machetes in one hand and a smouldering block of wood in the other, to smoke out the mosquitos. Some bore in addition a blackened five-gallon oil tin of water on their heads. The day did not grow unpleasantly warm until I had passed Sawyer’s Market and entered a long fertile plain, completely uncultivated, almost uninhabited, studded with great clumps of bamboo. Dolphin Head, the highest peak in western Jamaica, peered above the landscape to the left. Then bit by bit the negroes grew numerous and impudent again, and I knew that the sugar-bearing coastlands were at hand.

Negroes so black and ox-like that they seemed scarcely human plodded past, never giving greeting as in the hills, though sometimes shouting an obscene jest. Children ran at sight of me, as those of Italy, for instance, do at sight of a negro. Ragged old women were hoeing cane in the fields. They earned five shillings a week; the strongest men three a day, at “task-work,” laboring from Monday to Friday. Here and there was an old-fashioned rum-mill, recognizable by its stench as well as by its old brick chimney and the heaps of rotting cane-pulp about it. The cane-carts were hauled by three or four pairs of oxen, a dozen men shrieking about them to urge them up the slopes of the soft fields. Like most of those in Jamaica they were crosses between English and East Indian cattle, particularly the Mysore breed. Though inferior from the butcher’s point of view, these cross-breeds are noted for their quickness and endurance under the yoke, and they have a black, sun-resistant skin even when outwardly light-colored or white. Once I passed a ruined old windmill tower, capped with ivy, but they are rare in Jamaica. The thick, hot air hung motionless after the afternoon shower. Rocky, bush-grown hills intruded again where one expected flat, fertile coastlands, sugar-cane died out once more, and with it the negroes.

Then suddenly the Caribbean appeared through a break in the hills, so high and dark-blue that it seemed at first a new mountain range, and on the edge of it I caught a glimpse of Falmouth, not to be seen again until I was treading its very streets. Many old stone ruins, especially the foundations and steps of what had evidently been big plantation houses, peered forth from the bush. There were other signs that large estates had once flourished where all was not “ruinate.” Dreary, silent, dismal, swarming with mosquitoes, the last few miles led through an unbroken mangrove swamp. Myriads of land-crabs of all sizes and colors, some huge as small turtles, others no larger than flies, with green, red, cream-colored, and multi-colored backs, scuttled into their holes as I passed. Falmouth had little to recommend it, either as a place of abode or of sojourn. Sweltering even at midnight, its streets impudent with lounging negroes, it recalled by contrast the cool and simple little villages in the hills. I found lodging in a room strewn with the greasy paraphernalia of a negro dentist and which had not known the luxury of a broom or a dust-cloth in weeks, though the mulatto house-owner complained that she “can’t get no work to do.” A Salvation Army street meeting which erupted a few doors away was the nearest replica of a Central African tomtom dance, with clothes on and smeared with a thin English veneer, that it has ever been my luck to behold in an ostensibly civilized country.

I had not intended to walk the twenty-two miles along the coast from Falmouth to Montego Bay, but as the mail bus left at three in the morning and private automobiles demanded three shillings a mile, I changed my plans. Groups of ragged negro women came down out of the hills singing, their dinner in a rag or a pail on their heads, and fell to work in newly cleared cane-fields. Pedestrians were constantly beating off the mosquitoes with leafy branches. Once there had been big stone houses here also, now there were only miserable negro shacks scattered among the cocoanut groves. The sea breeze was nearly always cut off by these or mangrove jungles. The only noise except occasional shrieking negroes was the cry of mourning doves and the equally mournful “sough” of the slow breakers on the reefs far out from shore. Fishermen were rare. Now and then the swamps disappeared and the road plodded endlessly onward at the very edge of the unruffled inner lagoons. I passed only one shop on the journey, kept of course by a Jamaica-born Chinaman. Drinking water was not to be had; the June sun beat down like a red-hot ingot; the incredibly stupid watchmen, most of whom were females, could not be induced to sell a single one of the green cocoanuts under their charge. I adopted the Jamaican custom of praedial larceny and, picking a plump green nut now and then from the low young trees, jabbed a hole in it on a sharp fencepost and quenched a raging thirst that returned again within a half mile. Noisome carrion crows, with red heads instead of black, unlike those of Trinidad, and called “johncrow” by the natives, moved lazily aside as I advanced.

Midway between the two towns I passed a three-story mansion set somewhat back from the sea on what was once one of the finest estates in Jamaica. To-day it is closed and abandoned, yet needs no watchman, for the negroes are convinced that it is haunted. Rose Hall it is called, and its story has long been familiar throughout Jamaica. Here, runs the yarn, lived a pretty Mrs. Palmer, who was so eccentric that she caused the house to be built according to the divisions of time,—365 windows, 52 doors, 24 rooms, 12 of this, 7 of that, and so on. But eccentricity seems to have been the least of her faults, for in this very house, the tale goes on, she killed four husbands and was on the point of sending the fifth to join them when he turned the tables.

At length the featureless road swung inland along the edge of an immense bay, across which stood forth the wooded hills of Hanover parish. Its waters were glass-smooth, but the sea-wall smashed for long distances recalled that the Caribbean does not always lie so peaceful and enticing. Cottages with bathing-suits hung over the veranda rails began to appear, then white men, of whom I had seen but one in three days, and he with a negro wife. Montego Bay aspires to be a tourists’ winter paradise, but unfortunately the town lies around behind a hill that cuts off that life-saving trade wind which Jamaicans call “the doctor” and in its place comes only the fitful land breeze known as “the undertaker.” Then, too, it is short of water. Most of Jamaica is, for unlike Barbados, which has not a tithe as many sources of supply, the island depends chiefly on what it can catch from the rains. The result is frequently to deprive the perspiring visitor of his bath. Tourist literature would have us believe that “the band of the Montego Bay Citizens’ Association performs in the Parade”—most Jamaican towns have a dusty central square known by that name—“in the evenings, and greatly adds to the pleasure of the visitor.” “Perform” it does indeed, and none can deny that it adds to the risibility of nations; but let no music lover be misled by this particular abuse of the maltreated word “pleasure.”

Of the many other beauties of Jamaica space precludes anything more than brief mention. There are the cane-fields of Westmoreland parish, for instance, the tobacco growing hills of St. Elizabeth, the journey up the gorge to Bog Walk, St. Ann’s parish with its newly born lake of Moneague, its many pimento trees, its beguiling Fern Gully, where are to be found innumerable species of the plants that give the ravine its name, from the maidenhair to the tree-fern, known locally as the “rattadrum.” Here, too, are Roaring River Falls and the scene of Columbus’ longest residence in the West Indies, for he lay a twelve-month with his worm-eaten vessels in what is now called Dry Harbor.

But it would never do to leave Jamaica without getting a “close-up” of her banana industry, and to do this to best advantage one should go to Port Antonio. Above Bog Walk on the way there is Natural Bridge, where the river cuts a great archway through the rocky hills, the highway crossing it far above, recalling famous Rumichaca on the boundary of Colombia and Ecuador, to say nothing of one of our own scenic beauties. Here is a splendid place to end a Sunday stroll, for there is a magnificent bath awaiting one amid the boulders over which the river pours with a constant subway roar and, if one can elude the gaping negroes who are otherwise sure to follow, no other observers than the hundreds of little swallows always flitting in and out of their nests in the rock cliffs. Then when the sun has lost its youthful ardor one may climb again to the village and catch the afternoon train over the mountains to the north coast. The region about Highgate almost rivals the beauty of Porto Rico. Cacao, cocoanuts, clumps of bamboo, the spreading breadfruit-trees, whole valleys full of bananas, some of which climb far up the surrounding slopes, decorate the rugged landscape. One looks almost in vain, however, as in all Jamaica, for the queen of tropical vegetation, the royal—or, as the English unimaginatively call it, the cabbage-palm. Then the train descends quickly through tunnels and across lofty viaducts to Anotta Bay, a large collection of wooden shanties noted for its mosquitoes, but with the blue Caribbean stretching away beyond it to the horizon.

Along the edge of this the railway squirms through a wide fringe of cocoanuts for two hours more. The frequent stations swarm with female negro food-venders. Hindus are somewhat more numerous and though even the women nearly all wear Jamaican dress their Aryan features and unobtrusive manner distinguish them as quickly as their nose-rings and massive necklaces from the African bulk of the population. At length comes Port Antonio, with its twin harbors, embowered in hills half wooded with cocoanuts, an unexpectedly delightful place to the traveler who has known other Jamaican coast towns. Here the trade wind, unknown in Kingston, blows unceasingly, and that alone doubles the worth of any West Indian spot. Irregular and more compact than the two rivals it has probably outdistanced since the last census, Port Antonio has a more thriving, sanitary, comfort-loving air, thanks perhaps to the American influence of its banana trade.

Jamaica claims advantages over all the rest of the world for banana cultivation. The vast tracts of virgin land in Central America and Colombia are two days farther from the principal market. Costa Rica is hampered by frequent droughts at the very season when the fruit most needs rain; for the great game in banana growing is to have them ready to cut at the time when other fruit is scarce in the north. Cuba is a trifle too near the north pole, it is wedded to its sugar industry, and its labor is several times more expensive than that of Jamaica. Bananas demand heat, moisture, and a good fat soil, and all these may be had in the largest of the British West Indies, particularly in the northeastern parish of Portland, for the Blue Mountains which deny Kingston and its vicinity the rainfall it needs precipitate most of it here. What was then a little known fruit in American markets was first planted on a large scale in this very parish a half century ago. By 1894 it had become the most important export of the island, out-distancing both products of the sugarcane, and twenty years later it constituted sixty per cent. of Jamaica’s contribution to the world’s larder. The war, abetted by three consecutive hurricanes, the banana’s greatest enemy, reversed this condition, but the sugar-men themselves do not long hope to hold their new lead.

I chanced to reach Port Antonio at the very height of a banana war. The two powerful older companies had determined to annihilate a new one by that simple little method of starving it to death. Before the World War a bunch of bananas seldom sold for more than two shillings and six pence in Jamaica, but the competition of the newcomers had gradually forced this up to four shillings. In the single day of my visit it advanced hourly by leaps and bounds,—five shillings, five shillings and three pence commission, six shillings, six and six, seven shillings, with a six pence commission if need be, and free transportation to the port—as often as the interlopers covered their bids the imperturbable managers of the powerful companies sent out new inducements over their private telephone system, until the joyful planters of some sections were pocketing eleven shillings for every bunch of bananas they could lay down at the roadside bordering their fields. The fruit poured into Port Antonio in an endless stream, by motor-truck, by wagon, pack-donkey, on the heads of men and women, for even the negroes who had but a single bunch worth cutting hastened to part with it at this unprecedented price.

But let us watch the process from the ground up, for the benefit of those who know the banana only as it appears on the fruit-seller’s stand. We have only to catch one of the mammoth trucks thundering away empty into the hills in the direction of Mooretown, once a settlement of Maroons. Every little while along the way, jolly, muscular negro laborers swing up over the tail-board until by the time we have reached Golden Vale, said to be the oldest export banana farm in the world, there are enough of them to load the truck in a bare twenty minutes. It is scarcely necessary to say, I suppose, that bananas grow on a species of mammoth weed rather than a tree, that each produces a single bunch, that this grows “upside down” from our fruit-stand point of view, and that they must be cut before they are ripe. Golden Vale looks like an immense green lake surrounded by mountains, up the lower slopes of which the bananas climb for a considerable distance. Close overhead sits Blue Mountain Peak, coiffed in blue-black clouds. Hindu men, whom the overseers invariably address as “Babu,” do most of the cutting, while the more powerful but less careful negroes do the handling. The “Babus” wander in and out through the green archways, giving a glance at each hanging bunch. When they see one which has reached the proper stage of development, they grasp it by the protruding stem, to which the big blue flower usually still clings, and pull down “tree” and all with a savage jerk. A machete, called a cutlass in Jamaica, flashes, a negro catches the bunch as it falls, another slash severs the flower-bearing stem a few inches from the topmost bananas, a third leaves the “tree” a mere stump, shoulder-high, and the cutters continue their search. Days later, when its sap has run back into the roots, the stump is cut off at the ground and a new shoot springs up to produce next year’s bunch. The bunches that have been gathered are wrapped in dry brown banana leaves, and carried to the roadside, along which other brown heaps lie everywhere as we hurry down to the port, the loaders dropping off one by one at their shanties or the frequent rum-shops along the way. Quick handling is an absolute requisite in the banana business, and many a planter has come to grief by not giving sufficient attention to the question of transportation.

Arrived at the wharves the truck is as quickly unloaded, and an endless chain of negroes, nearly all women, take up the task of distribution, according to size and destination. For there are “English” and “American” bananas, grown in the same field and differing not at all in species but by about ten days in their cutting time, so that the former are lean and the latter fat. Moreover, a bunch is not by any means always a bunch in the language of the banana companies. In the first place they are more often called “stems,” and a “stem” must have at least nine “hands” of fruit (the latter average a dozen bananas each) if it is to be paid for as a full bunch. If it has more than that well and good; that is the company’s gain and no one’s loss. But if there are but eight “hands” it is rated two thirds of a “stem,” if seven, one half, if six, one fourth, if less than that the planter might better have fed it to his hogs or his laborers, for the buyers will have none of it. This rating is less unjust than it appears, for the fewer the “hands” the smaller and fewer are the bananas.

The slouching negroes who make up the endless chain, are not required to tax their minds with these problems of size and nationality. They use their heads, to be sure, but only in the manner that seems best fitted to the race—as common carriers. Two men snatch up the bunches one by one, casting aside the brown leaf wrappers, and lay each one flat on a passing head, the owner of which shuffles away as if it were burdened with nothing but a hat instead of an average weight of eighty pounds. At the edge of the shed in which the bananas are piled to await prompt shipment stands a high desk with three men, usually quadroons or lighter, standing about it. The oldest, most intelligent, and most experienced looking of these casts what seems to be a careless glance at each “stem” and mumbles in a weary monotone, “English, eight,” “American, nine,” “English, seven,” or some other of the combinations; his most youthful companion makes a pencil mark on the ledger before him, the least lively looking of the trio hands a metal or cardboard disk to the carrier, who drops it into a pocket and slouches on to the particular pile to which her burden has been assigned. On the way she passes a negro armed with a cutlass, who lops off the protruding ends of the stem in front of her nose and behind her ears as she walks without so much as arousing a flicker of her drowsy, black eyelids.

When the ship comes in, which must be that night or at latest next day, a similar endless chain of negroes, more nearly male in sex, carry the bananas on board, a tally-clerk ringing the bell of an automatic counter in his hand as each “stem” passes. In some ports a wide leather belt takes the place of this human chain. But a large gang is required for all that, and when the last pile has disappeared from the wharf the carriers strew themselves about it and sleep soundly on the hard planks until the next load arrives. Its quota supplied, the steamer’s hatches are quickly battened down, icy air is turned in upon the perishable cargo, and the vessel rushes full speed ahead for the United States or England, where the fruit begins to rattle away in other trucks before the mere human passengers have leave to descend the gangway. Not until it has reached the retailer does it take on that golden yellow hue that is familiar to the ultimate consumer.

* * * * *

I dropped off at Buff Bay station on the return journey for a jaunt over the Blue Mountain range. The “finger-boards” announced the distance to Kingston as forty-three miles, but there are many shortcuts and an average pedestrian can make the journey in a single day. It is a pleasant walk despite the fact that the first sixteen miles impose a climb of 4080 feet to Hardware Gap. For the foothills begin at once, and the road, narrow and grass-grown from disuse except near the coast, climbs in almost constant shade along the bank of Buff Bay river, and the trade wind sweeps incessantly up the valley. Jamaica is noted for its birds, of which there are said to be more than forty varieties peculiar to the island, and the majority of them seem to make this region their chief rendezvous. Perpendicular banana fields cover the hillsides here and there as high as they can endure the altitude. Masses of bamboos lend a needed touch of daintiness to the dense greenery, as a red-brown tree now and then speckling the steep slopes adds contrast to what would be an almost monotonous color. Then there are the akee-trees, numerous throughout Jamaica, with their bright red, pear-shaped fruit, a favorite food among the negroes, though it is deadly poison except at certain stages of its growth, and even then is reputed the cause of the vomiting sickness that is prevalent among the masses.

Higher up every turn of the road brings to view a new waterfall, standing out against the greenery in flashing whiteness. No wonder the aborigines called the island Xamayca, the land of springs and water; and how one regrets that those same red men do not inhabit it still, if only to give relief from the monotony of black, brutal faces that in time grow almost intolerable to the traveler in the West Indies, until there come moments when he would give all he possesses to see these gems of the Caribbean as they were before they became mere hives of African slovenliness. But the only Arawaks left in the Jamaica of to-day are those which uphold the arms of the colony on its shield. Here indeed the ancient saying that “every prospect pleases and only man is vile” reaches its full meaning.

I grew weary at length of the incessant negro impudence along the way, which ranged from foul-mouthed shouts to more or less innocent demands of “Heh, bukra, what you sell?” It is a ridiculous failing, no doubt, but I detest being taken for a peddler. I took to shouting back, “I am selling something to make niggers white. Want some?” But, alas, sarcasm seldom penetrates the African skull. Far from resenting my rudeness, the simple-minded souls greeted it with roars of laughter or took it seriously, more often the latter. Dozens called after me to know the price of this desirable remedy; several followed me up the road offering to purchase; one old woman pursued me for nearly half a mile; one group sent a boy running after me, clamoring to know the cost of my wares. “A thousand pounds,” I called back over my shoulder, which being duly reported in all solemnity to the group, brought forth a chorus of giggles and a regretful-toned, “Ah, him humbug we!”

The last two hours, from Jiggerfoot Market to the summit, was a laborious climb, but unlike many such it was lightened by frequent streams of clear, cold water. Then all at once I found myself at the gap, or _abra_, as the Spaniards would call it, and upon me burst a view worth many times the exertion. All the Liguanea plain from St. Thomas parish to Spanish Town and beyond, far beyond, into the farthermost hills of St. Catherine’s lay spread out like a colored map on a draughtsman’s table, Kingston in full sight from the scattered rocks far outside its harbor, with the sea breaking white upon them, to its last suburbs among the foothills, the sand reef called the Palisadoes curving like a fishhook about the harbor, the remnants of what once boasted itself the most wicked town on earth at its point, the water about it so clear that one might easily have fancied he saw the sunken city of the buccaneers. There is spring water at the very edge of the gap and if one has thought to bring a pocket lunch there is nothing to hinder a long contemplation of this marvelous panorama, except the gradually penetrating cold of the mountains, which seems indeed an anachronism within plain sight of sweltering Kingston.

This sent me striding downward again sooner than I had expected. A hill covered with an abandoned cluster of big barracks soon cut off Kingston and most of the plain, and left the eyes to contemplate a nearer scene. Ahead, the road, leisurely and still grassy, had clawed itself a foothold in the rocky hillside, sheer and wooded with scrub growth everywhere except where landslides had scratched a white line down its face. Birds sang lustily, as if tuning up their voices for a later public appearance; human kind was pleasantly conspicuous by its absence. Beyond, on the steep flank of Catherine’s Peak, the soldier town of Newcastle, where British “Tommies” live in an agreeable climate and still keep an eye on Kingston, went down like a giant’s stairway into the gorge, an immense gorge always at my very feet, with little strings of roads winding in and out along its bottom as if in vain quest of an exit. And though the plain below had been faintly hazy and there were banks of clouds in the sky high above, the twin peaks of Blue Mountain range, 7360 higher than the sea, stood out as plainly as though one might have thrown a stone over them.

Five miles constantly downward by a mountain trail, though it is twice that by the highway, brings one from Newcastle to Gordontown, a somnolent hamlet closely shut in by high hills and noisy with the little river which furnishes Kingston its water. Down the bank of this I hurried on to the plain of Liguanea, where rocking street-cars carry one quickly into the insolent capital, for the mangoes were already ripening and it was high time we sailed away from the island Columbus called Santa Gloria.

THE FRENCH WEST INDIES AND THE OTHERS