The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 4, October, 1863

CHAPTER IV

GEOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE ISLAND

I had intended writing some of my first impressions about Jamaica, particularly its negro population. But I find, on reviewing my residence of five years and a half in the tranquil island, that first impressions melt so imperceptibly into final conclusions, that it appears best not to attempt a too formal separation of them. Before recounting the results of my own experience, however, in any form, it will not be amiss to attempt some general description of the island and of its population, and to give a slight sketch of its history.

The parallel of 18° N lat. passes through the island of Jamaica, which has thus a true tropical climate. It is 160 miles in length and 40 in average breadth, having thus a plane area of 6,400 square miles, being about equal to the united area of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Although the third in size of the Greater Antilles, it comes at a great remove after Hayti, the second, being not more than one-fourth as large. Nor does it compare in fertility with either Hayti or Cuba. The former island is the centre of geological upheaval, and the great rounded masses, sustaining a soil of inexhaustible depth, run off from thence splintering into sharp ridges, which in Jamaica become veritable knife edges, sustaining a soil comparatively thin. The character of the island is that of a mountain mass, which, as the ancient watermark on the northern coast shows, has at some remote period been tilted over, and has shot out an immense amount of detritus on its southern side, forming thus the plains which extend along a good part of that coast, varying in breadth from ten to twenty miles, besides the alluvial peninsula of Vere. In the interior, also, there is an upland basin of considerable extent, looking like the dry bed of a former lake, which now forms the chief part of the parish of St. Thomas-in-the-Vale. The mountain mass which makes the body of the island, running in various ranges through its whole length, culminates in the eastern part of it in the Blue Mountains, whose principal summit, the Blue Mountain Peak, is 7,500 feet high. It is said that Columbus, wishing to give Queen Isabella an impression of the appearance of these, took a sheet of tissue paper, and crumpling it up in his hand, threw it on a table, exclaiming, 'There! such is their appearance.' The device used by the great discoverer to convey to the mind of the royal Mother of America some image of her new-found realms, forcibly recurs to the mind of the traveller as he sails along the southeastern coast, and notices the strange contortions of the mountain surfaces. But seen from the northern shore, at a greater distance, through the purple haze which envelops them, their outlines leave a different impression. I shall always remember their aspect of graceful sublimity, as seen from Golden Vale, in Portland, and of massive sweetness, as seen from Hermitage House, in the parish of St. George. The gray buttresses of their farthest western peak, itself over 5,000 feet in height, rose in full view of a station where I long resided, and the region covered by their lower spurs, ranging in elevation from seven to ten and twelve hundred feet, is that which especially deserves the name of the 'well-watered land,' or, as it is poetically rendered, the 'isle of springs,' of which Jamaica, or perhaps more exactly Xaymaca, is the Indian equivalent. There you meet in most abundance with those crystal rivulets, every few hundred yards threading the road, and going to swell the wider streams which every mile or two cross the traveller's way, laving his horse's sides with refreshing coolness, as they hurry on in their tortuous course from the mountain heights to the sea. Farther west the mountains and hills assume gentler and more rounded forms, particularly in the parish of St. Anne, the Garden of Jamaica. I regret that I know only by report the scenes of Eden-like loveliness of this delightful parish. It is principally devoted to grazing, and its pastures are maintained in a park-like perfection. Grassy eminences, crowned with woods, and covered with herds of horses and the handsome Jamaica cattle, descend, in successive undulations, to the sea. Over these, from the deck of a vessel a few miles out, may be seen falling the silver threads of many cascades. Excellent roads traverse the parish, which is inhabited by a gentry in easy circumstances, and by a contented and thriving yeomanry. St. Anne appears to be truly a Christian Arcadia.

In respect of climate and vegetation, there are three Jamaicas—Jamaica of the plains, Jamaica of the uplands, and Jamaica of the high mountains. The highest summit of the mountain region, is below the line at which snow is ever formed in this latitude, and it is disputed whether an evanescent hoarfrost even is sometimes seen upon it. As high as four and five thousand feet there are residences, which, however, purchase freedom from the lowland heats at the expense of being a large part of the time enveloped in chilling fogs. Here the properly tropical productions cease to thrive, and melancholy caricatures of northern vegetables and fruits take their place. You see in the Kingston market diminutive and watery potatoes and apples, that have come down from the clouds, and on St. Catherine's Peak I once picked a few strawberries, which had about as much savor as so many chips. The noble forest trees of the lower mountains, as you go up, give way to an exuberant but spongy growth of tree-ferns and bushes. Great herds of wild swine, descended from those introduced by the Spaniards, roam these secluded thickets, and once furnished subsistence to the runaway negroes who, under the name of Maroons, for several generations annoyed and terrified the island.

In these high mountains the sense of deep solitude is at once heightened and softened by the flute-like notes of the solitaire. I shall never forget the impression produced by first hearing this. It was on the top of St. Catherine's Peak, fifty-two hundred feet above the sea, in the early morning, when the mountain solitude seemed most profound, that my companion and I heard from the adjacent woods its mysterious note. It was a soft and clear tone, somewhat prolonged, and ending in a modulation which imparted to it an indescribable effect, as if of supernal melancholy. It seemed almost as if some mild angel were lingering pensively upon the mountain tops, before pursuing his downward flight among the unhappy sons of men.

The uplands of the island, from 800 to 1,500 feet above the sea, are a cheerful, sunny region, in which the tropical heat is tempered by almost constant refreshing breezes, and, in the eastern part at least, by abundant showers. Some of the western parishes not unfrequently suffer terribly from drought. There are two or three which have not even a spring, depending wholly upon rain water collected in tanks. These sometimes become dry, causing unutterable distress both to man and beast. We hear even sometimes of poor people starving during these seasons of drought. But our more favored region in the east scarcely knows dearth. Our mighty mountain neighbors seldom permitted us even to fear it, and were more apt to send us a deluge than a drought.

In the uplands our winter temperature was commonly about 75° in the shade at noon, and the summer temperature about ten degrees higher. The nights are almost always agreeably cool, and frequent showers and breezes allay the sultriness of the days. I never saw the thermometer above 90° in the shade, and seldom below 65°. It once fell to 54°, to the lamentable discomfort of our feelings and fingers. Of course, where the sun for months is nearly vertical, and twice in the summer actually so, the heat of his direct beams is intense. But those careful precautions of avoiding travelling in the middle of the day, on which some lay such stress, we never concerned ourselves with in Jamaica, and I could not discover that we were ever the worse for it. An umbrella was enough to stand between us and mischief.

On the whole, it may safely be said that there is no climate more like that which we imagine of Eden than that of the highland region of Jamaica during a large part of the year. It is true that after a while northern constitutions begin to miss the stimulus of occasional cold. But for a few years nothing could be more delightful. The chief drawback is that at uncertain cycles there come incessant deluges of rain for months together, making it dreary and uncomfortable both in doors and out. Years will sometimes pass before there is any excessive amount of these, and then sometimes for years together they will prevail to a most disagreeable extent. They break up the mountain roads and swell the mountain streams to such a degree as to render travelling almost impossible, and in a country where your friends are few, you do not like to be kept back from seeing them by the imminent risk of finding no road at all on the side of a hill where at best there is barely room enough between the bank and the gully for one horse to pass another, or of finding yourself between two turns of a stream, with a sudden shower making it impossible for you to get either forward or back. But during my residence I had just enough of these adventures to give a pleasant zest to life. And after a tremendous rain of hours, when the sun reappeared, and the banks of fleecy cloud were once more seen floating tranquilly in heaven, and the streams ran again crystal clear, and the hills smiled again in all the glory of their brilliant green, and the air had again its wonted temper, at once balmy and elastic, it was enough to make amends for all previous discomfort.

Although no part of the island is peculiarly favorable to constitutions of the European race, yet with prudence and temperance foreigners find this midland region reasonably healthy. The missionaries, who have mostly resided in the uplands, have but seldom fallen victims to fevers. Foreigners must not expect to live here without occasional attacks of fever; but with care, there need be little apprehension of a fatal result, except to those of a sanguine temperament or of a corpulent habit. And the general exemption from the dreadful ravages of consumption may well be thought to compensate the somewhat greater risks from fever. Even on the plains, that immense mortality of whites from the mother country which once gave to Jamaica the ominous name of 'The Grave of Europeans,' was caused as much by their reckless intemperance as by any necessity of the climate. Or, rather, habits which in Great Britain might have been indulged in with comparative impunity, in Jamaica were rapidly fatal. It is said that another cause of the excessive mortality among the overseers was that they were often secretly poisoned by the blacks. On some plantations, I have heard it said, overseer after overseer was poisoned off, almost as soon as he arrived. In most cases, I dare say, it would be found that over-liberal potations of Jamaica rum were the poison that did the mischief. But the reports have probably some foundation in truth. An oppressed race, seldom daring to strike openly, would be very apt to devise subtle ways of vengeance. It will be remembered that one of the most frequent items in our own Southern newspapers used to be accounts of attempts made by slave girls to poison their masters' families. Arsenic, which they commonly used, is a clumsy means, almost sure to be detected; but in the West Indies, where the proportion of native Africans was always very large, the African sorcerers, the dreaded Obi-men, who exercise so baleful a power over the imaginations of the blacks, appear also to have availed themselves of other than imaginary charms to keep up their credit as the disposers of life and death, and to have often gained such a knowledge of slow vegetable poisons as made them formidable helpers of revenge, whether against their own race or against the race of their oppressors. In a recent Jamaica story of Captain Mayne Reid's, the plot centres in the hideous figure of an old Obi-man, who wreaks his revenge for former wrongs in this secret way, destroying victim after victim from among the lords of the soil. The piece is stocked with horrors enough for the most ravenous devourer of yellow-covered literature, but nevertheless it is so true to the conditions of life in the old days of Jamaica, that it is well worth reading for a lively sense of the time when the fearful influences of savage heathenism, slavery, and tropical passion were working together in that land of rarest beauty and of foulest sin. Evil enough remains, but, thank God, the hideous shadows of the past have fled away forever.

But these tragical remembrances and suspicions belong rather to the plains, into which we are about to descend. Here we feel distinctly that we are in the tropics. The sweltering heat, tempered, indeed, by the land and sea breezes, but still sufficiently oppressive, and almost the same day and night, leaves no doubt of this fact. Vegetation, too, appears more distinctly tropical. The character of the landscape in the two regions is quite different. In the uplands the wealth of glowing green swallows up peculiarities of form, and presents little difference of color except the endless diversity of its own shades. There are, however, some distinct features of the landscape. Conspicuous on every hillside are the groves 'where the mango apples grow,' their mass of dense rounded foliage looking not unlike our maples, and giving a pleasant sense of home to the northern sojourner. The feathery bamboo, most gigantic of grasses, runs in plumy lines across the country. Around the negro cottages, here and there, rise groups of the cocoanut palms, giving, more than anything else, a tropical character to the landscape. On a distant eminence may perhaps be seen a lofty ceiba or cotton tree, its white trunk rising sixty or seventy feet from the ground without a limb, and then putting out huge, scraggy arms, loaded with parasites. Every lesser feature is swamped in verdure, except that here and there the white-washed walls of a negro cottage of the better sort gleam pleasantly forth from embowering hedges and fruit trees. I do not know how Wordsworth's advice to make country houses as much as possible of the color of the surrounding country may apply among the gray hills of Westmoreland; but among the green hills of Jamaica, the white which he deprecates forms a welcome relief to the splendid monotony of glowing emerald. It is not amiss to call it emerald, for there are so many plants here with glossy leaves, that under the brilliant sunlight the lustre of the green is almost more than the eye can bear. To the southward of Oberlin station, formerly belonging to our mission, rises a range of verdant hills, which in some lights has so much the pure, continuous color of a gem, as almost to realize Arabian fables to the eye. Indeed, I have gazed at it sometimes with such a feeling as Aladdin had when the magician had left him confined in the Hall of Jewels, and have almost wished for an earthquake to cleave its oppressive superbness and give a refreshing sight of the blue sea beyond.

But on descending to the plains, where there is less moisture, and where vegetation therefore is scantier, we find the unwonted forms of growth more distinct, and have the full sense of being in a southern land. Here the thorn palms, the cactus hedges, the penguin fences, resembling huge pineapple plants, and various trees and shrubs, being seen more isolated, make a stronger impression of the peculiarities of tropical forms. Here too we meet in greater abundance with the cocoanut tree, occasionally forming long avenues of lofty palms on the estates. And here we see more frequently the huge squares of many acres, heavy with the luxuriant wealth of the cane, and thronged by dusky laborers. The heat, which in the uplands is pleasant, though rather too steady in the plains, becomes oppressive and enervating. The distinction between the wet and dry seasons, also, is much more distinctly marked, and, in short, everything corresponds more fully with the usual idea of a tropical land.

The luxuriance and the glory of nature are the same now as ever; but everywhere over the island the traveller sees the melancholy evidences of the decay of former wealth. You may travel over miles and miles on the plains once rich with the cane, or ridge after ridge in the uplands once covered with the dark-green coffee plantations, which now are almost a wilderness. To quote the language of another, 'ridges, overgrown with guava bushes, mark the cornfields; rank vegetation fills the courtyard, and even bursts through the once hospitable roof. A curse seems to have fallen upon the land, as if this generation were atoning for the sins of the past. For while we lament the ruin of the present proprietors, we cannot forget the unrequited toil which in times gone by created the wealth they have lost; nor that hapless race, the original owners of the soil, whose fate darkens the saddest page in history.'

A passing traveller will see little to compensate the sadness occasioned by old magnificence thus in ruins, strewing the whole island with its melancholy wrecks. What there is to set off against it, we shall consider hereafter.

What survives of the agriculture and commerce of Jamaica is still, as formerly, mainly dependent on the two great staples, sugar and coffee; the former being raised chiefly in the plains and valleys, the latter in the uplands and mountains. There was, it is said, an indigenous sugar cane in the West Indies, when first discovered; but if so, it has long been supplanted by the Mauritius cane, which is now cultivated. The joints of the cane, being cut and laid horizontally in furrows, which are then covered over, spring up in a crop which comes to maturity in about a year; and when this is cut, the roots rattoon, or send up shoots for five or six years in succession. This is one reason why Jamaica sugar planters find it so hard to compete with Cuban production. On the deep soil of Cuba the cane rattoons, it is said, not five or six, but forty years in succession.

The coffee plant is a beautiful shrub. Left to itself, it would grow twenty or thirty feet high; but it is kept down to such a height as that the berries can easily be picked by the hand. Its glossy, dark-green leaves resemble a good deal the jessamine; and the resemblance is increased during the time of flowering, by the beautiful white blossoms, of a faint, delicate fragrance, which are scattered over the branches like a light powdering of snow. It thrives well in a moist air; and coffee plantations may be seen clothing the sides of mountains three, four, and even five thousand feet above the sea. The history of the way in which coffee was introduced to the West Indies is really quite a little romance, though an authentic one. It is well known that Holland used to practise the most odious commercial monopoly ever known among Christian nations. Her spice islands were guarded with a cruel jealousy rivalling the fables of the dragon that guarded the golden apples; and her great coffee island, Java, was equally locked up from the world. To give a spice plant or a coffee plant to a stranger, was an offence inexorably punished with death. A single coffee plant, however, was allowed to come to Europe as an ornament to the conservatory of a wealthy Amsterdam burgomaster. This was still more jealously watched than its fellows in the East Indies; but at length a French visitor managed to secrete a living berry, and, taking it with him to Paris, to raise a plant. From this again a young plant was taken to Martinique, one of the French West Indies. When the young stranger, freighted with such possibilities of wealth, arrived there, it was found that the exposure of the voyage had nearly extinguished its vitality. It was tended with the most anxious care; but for two or three years it continued to languish, and threatened by an untimely death to give Dutch selfishness a triumph after all. At last, however, it took a happy start, and from that plant the whole West Indies have derived their coffee. It was introduced into Jamaica in 1720, and Temple Hall, one of the two estates which I have mentioned as being in the beautiful valley between Kingston and the American Mission, has the honor of showing the oldest coffee walk in the island.

Jamaica coffee is of an excellent quality; the berries, it is said, if kept two years, being equal to the best Mocha. As some one laments that the cooks and grooms of the Romans spoke better Latin than even Milton among the moderns could write, so I can boast in behalf of the Jamaica negroes, that even Delmonico, unless he could secure the services of one of them who understands the true method of reducing the browned berry to an impalpable powder, by pulverizing it between a flat stone and a round one, must give up all hopes of presenting his guests with the ideal cup of coffee. I would give the whole process by which an amber-colored stream, of perfect flavor, might be poured out, without a trace of sediment, to the very last drop, did I not reflect with pity that probably in all the wide extent of my country there is neither the apparatus of grinding nor the sable domestic with skill to use it. Nay, even in Jamaica, where one would think they could afford to be slow for a good thing, since they are so amazingly slow to every good thing, I grieve to say that the barbarous mill, hacking and mangling the fragrant berry, has almost universally supplanted the more laborious ancient method by which it was gently reduced to its most perfect attrition, yielding up every particle of its aromatic strength. Thus the modern demon of expedition, to whom quickness is so much more than quality, has invaded even the slumberous repose of our fair island, bringing under his arm, not a locomotive, but a coffee mill. There are, to be sure, two or three locomotives on the twelve-mile railway between Kingston and Spanishtown, but it would be a cruel sarcasm to intimate that the genius of expedition ever brought them.

There are several other vegetable products of Jamaica, which it owes likewise to a happy accident. The mango, for instance, which now grows in such profusion on uplands and plains, that if the groves should be cut down, the face of the country would seem naked, was a spoil of war, being brought from a French ship destined for Martinique, somewhere about 1790. At first it is said the mangoes sold for a guinea a piece, with the express stipulation that the seed should be returned. Now, in a good bearing season, I have actually seen a narrow mountain road fetlock deep with decaying mangoes, besides the thousands consumed by man and beast. During the summer, in the good years, they furnish the main subsistence to the negro children, and a large part of the subsistence of the adults, and make a grateful and wholesome change from the yam and salt fish which constitute the staples of their diet the rest of the time. It is this, probably, which has given rise to the absurd report that the negroes live principally on fruits spontaneously growing.

The young leaves of the mango are of a brownish red; and amid the general profusion of green, they impart a not ungrateful relief to the eye. Even their russet blossoms have a pleasant look. But in a good season, when the fruit is ripe, the groves have a magnificently rich appearance. Rows upon rows of yellow fruit look like lines of golden apples. Most people are extravagantly fond of them; but for myself I must say that, excepting the superb 'No. 11'—so named from being thus numbered on the captured French ship—and one or two other rare kinds, I concur with the late Prof. Adams, of Amherst, in thinking that a very good mango might be made by steeping raw cotton in turpentine, and sprinkling a little sugar over it.

Another fortuitous gift to Jamaica, so far as human intention is concerned, was the invaluable donation of the Guinea grass. Toward a century ago some African birds were brought as a present to a gentleman in the west of the island. Some grass seeds had been brought along for their feed; and when they reached their journey's end, the seeds were thrown away. After a while it was noticed that the cattle were very eager to reach the grass growing on a certain spot, and on examination it was found that the seeds thrown away had come up as a grass of remarkable succulence and nutritiousness. It was soon distributed, and now it is spread over the island. You pass rich meadows of it on every lowland estate; and it clothes hundreds of hills to their tops with its yellowish green. I do not see what the island would do without it. The pens or grazing farms in particular have been almost wholly created by it.

Jamaica has, of course, the usual West Indian fruits, the orange, the shaddock, the lime, the pineapple, the guava, the nispero, the banana, the cocoanut, and many others not much known abroad. But the lusciousness of tropical fruits compares ill with the thousand delicate flavors which cultivation has extended through our temperate clime; while, at the same time, steam makes nearly all the best fruits of the West Indies familiar to our markets. The resident of New York or Philadelphia, and still more of Baltimore has small occasion to wish himself in the tropics for the sake of fruit.

The great staple of negro existence, and therefore the great staple of existence to the immense majority of the inhabitants, is the yam. There are some indigenous kinds; but the species most in use appear to have been brought in by the imported African slaves. This solid edible dwarfs our potatoes, a single root varying in weight from five to ten pounds, and sometimes even reaching the weight of fifty pounds. They are of all shapes, globular, finger shaped, and long; and the latter, with their thick, brown rinds, look more like billets of wood, crusted with earth, than anything else. People in this country are apt to imagine them to be a huge kind of sweet potato, with which they have no other connection than that both are edible roots. The white yams, boiled and mashed, are scarcely distinguishable from very superior white potatoes. Above ground the plant is a vine, requiring to be trained on a pole, and a yamfield looks precisely like a vineyard. But oh, the difference! while the vineyard calls up a thousand recollections of laughing girls treading the grape, and the sunny lands of story, a yamfield reminds you only that under the ground is a bulky esculent, which some months hence will be put into a negro pot, and boiled and eaten, with an utter absence of poetry, or of anything but appetite and salt. It is plain that in this case solid usefulness stands no chance with erratic and rather loose-mannered brilliancy. And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard. So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which, when African poets arise, will doubtless be duly canonized in song.

As yet the small freeholders have chiefly occupied themselves in raising these 'ground provisions,' as yams, plantains, bananas, and the various vegetables are called. But they are more and more largely planting cane and coffee, greatly to their own advantage and that of the island.

If in this favored zone the earth is pleasant underneath, nothing can be more glorious than the heavens above. Being under the parallel of 18° N. lat., of course we have a full view of all the northern heavens, and of all the southern heavens, except 18° about the South Pole. The rarefied atmosphere gives peculiar brilliancy to the stars; and on a clear night—and most nights are clear—the heavens are indeed flooded with white fire, while, according to the season of the year, Orion and his northern company appear with a lustre unwonted to us, or the Scorpion unfolds his sparkling length, or the Ship displays its glittering confusion of stars, or the Southern Cross rears aloft its sacred symbol. Meanwhile, well down toward the northern horizon, the pole star holds its fixed position, and the Great and the Little Bear, dipping toward the ocean wave, but not yet dipping in it, pursue their nightly revolutions. Long after sunset, and long before sunrise, night after night, the faint, nebulous gleam of the zodiacal lights stretches up toward the zenith. The shortness of the twilight frequently leaves the fugacious planet, Mercury, so seldom seen at the north, in distinct view. While Venus not merely casts a shadow in a clear night, as she does with us, but when she is brightest, actually shines through the clouds with an illumining power.

Alternating with these glories of the starry firmament, the moon at the full fills the lower air with a soft, yet bright light, in which you can read without difficulty the smallest print. Under this milder illumination, the overpowering luxuriance of the landscape loses its oppressiveness, the hills assume more rounded forms, and from the general obscurity, the palms, a tree made for moonlight, stand out in soft distinctness. At such a time we forget the foul crimes which disfigure the past, and the vices which degrade the present of this fair land, and can easily imagine ourselves in the garden where the yet unfallen progenitors of mankind walked under a firmament 'glowing with living sapphires,' and together hymned the praises of their Creator. Daylight chases away this illusion, but brings back the reality of Christian work, whose rugged but cheerful tasks replace the delicious but ineffectual dreams of Paradise Lost, by the hope of contributing, in some humble measure, toward restoring in a province of fallen earth the lineaments of Paradise Regained.