When first I took passage to Jamaica it seemed as if purest chance were sending me there. But I begin to believe there is no such thing as chance, for when I remembered that Jamaica was an old slave colony I realised that this last coincidence was but the culmination of a curious series that have guided my steps through long years.

No one in my youth that I ever heard of wanted to go to West Africa, and yet from the time I was twelve years old I had an intense desire to go there, without the faintest hope of its being gratified.

As a young girl I came home to England and stayed with friends in Liverpool, shipowners, whose people had been African traders for hundreds of years, and African traders one hundred and twenty years ago certainly meant slave traders, for the slave trade was a “very genteel trade.” I pored over the models of the factories they had on the West Coast of Africa, and the pictures of their ships in the Oil Rivers, and voiced my great desire to go there, a desire that amused them very much, for they who could have gone any day would not have dreamt of taking the trouble. They had estates in Jamaica too, had had them for many years, and I found on a shelf an old slave account book from that island which meant so little to them that they jotted down on the blank pages the number of eggs their hens laid. How I wished I could see the place whither those slaves from Africa had gone, but Africa and Jamaica were far away in those days.

I went back to Australia, married and settled down, and then being widowed came to England again to make my way in the literary world, and the first spare money I had, it was ￡225, I remember, I realised my childish dreams and took passage for the West Coast of Africa. I was so interested, found it so well worth while, that I went again to the land to which no man wanted to go, the land that was known as the “White Man’s Grave.” Why I should have taken so keen an interest in the land where the slave trade was born, why I should later have gone to a slave colony, I cannot imagine, but I did, and the result has been a curious light on past and present, a linking up of those old days with the future that lies ahead of Jamaica.

Perhaps in a former life I too was a slave, or perhaps I was one of those careless folk who lived in one of the death-traps they called Castles on the Guinea Coast, and something in me made me wish to see them again, and having seen them, something certainly stronger than myself made me finish with Jamaica, the lovely island where Britain though she does not seem to know it, is experimenting in negro rule.

Yes, surely, some haunting memory of a past life has shaped my career.

And this is how it came about. I was ill and had to go to a warm climate, and as the War had disturbed shipping I could get passage nowhere except to Jamaica. And safe on board the Camito, steaming down the Welsh Coast with the tang of the salt sea breeze in my nostrils, it flashed across me that here at last when I least expected it had come my great chance. Into my hands had been put the opportunity, if I could but use it, to complete a half-finished task. I was indeed going to find out the end of the story that had thrilled my childish years, for this island set in a tropical sea is indissolubly bound up with the Castles on the Guinea Coast. From the swamps at the mouths of the Niger and the Gambia, from the surf-beaten Gold and Ivory and Slave Coasts had come the lumbering little square ships that took to the New World the dark people of the Old, hundreds and thousands of them, and in Jamaica there had grown up under the British Crown a people apart. Call it coincidence if you like, but to me it will always seem that a Greater Power guided my unwilling feet into the ways that brought me in touch with the things I most wanted to know.

And sailing west on that comfortable ship, where ice, beef-tea, fruit, cakes, or any other desired luxury came at a word to the steward, where a question to the captain or one of the officers discovered for me in exactly what part of the world we were, it was impossible not to think of the first man who had dared those seas. The Genoese navigator had come sailing west under the Spanish flag, and he had come slowly, slowly, where we steamed fast. They were only just beginning to believe the world was round in those days, and doubtless many of the sailors shipped for the voyage were ignorant men, not knowing whither they were bound. And their leader felt his way dubiously where we were quite certain of our going. On and on they went into the unknown. How unknown we can hardly conceive nowadays, any more than we can conceive of the dangers they faced. Think of it. There were fish which could swallow a ship, crew and all, there was the “Flying Dutchman,” portent of death, there were mermaids and syrens to lure them to destruction, there were enchantments of all sorts, in addition to the ordinary perils of the sea, and then of course—supposing the world wasn’t round! Suppose they arrived at the place where the water gathered itself together and poured in one mighty waterfall right off the earth into space and nothingness! I am sure as the days went on the crews must have discussed the matter, have talked among themselves of the terrible dangers they were facing, have gone every night and morning to pray before the Virgin and Child on the poop, and at last they came to declare how worse than foolish was Columbus not to turn back when day after day showed still only a blue waste of waters.

And if they had gone over that tremendous waterfall I am sure there would have been those among the crew who would have declared at the supreme moment that they knew it would be so, they had always known it would be so. Had Pedro not met a pig on the way to the ship, had the black cat not died before they reached Madeira, and surely the Admiral should have turned back when the wind shifted so that he saw the new moon for the first time through the glass of the cabin port!

But at last—what a long last it must have seemed to those first voyagers who had dared to leave the coasts—they saw sea-weed and land birds, and at last, at last—not the terrible waterfall they had feared but land, land, land such as they had left behind them. What a moment it must have been for the great mariner! We passed that land, that island. There must linger round it still, I think, some of the wild delight that filled the hearts of the explorers, for still men point it out, “The first land Columbus saw!”

We came into sight of Jamaica in the late afternoon and sailed along the south coast as the shadows were falling. A well-wooded country we saw, as its first discoverer must have seen more than four hundred years before, a land of steep mountains and deep valleys, with here and there patches of vivid green that, those who knew, told us were the sugar plantations that were the gold mines of Jamaica in the sugar boom. And the mists rose up from the valleys, and the shadows grew deeper and the day died in a glory of red and gold, a sight so common that no one takes note of it; and the night with a sky of velvet, embroidered with diamonds, crystal clear, came sweeping down upon us—a cloak of darkness—as we steamed into Kingston Harbour.

Columbus did not land in Jamaica on his first voyage, but he undoubtedly saw it, as we saw it, many and many a time. The memory of him was with me still as we landed. What to me were the comforts of the Myrtle Bank Hotel set right in Kingston, or of the Constant Spring out at the foot of the mountains? No, that is ungrateful. As an old traveller, no one can appreciate better than I the comforts of a good hotel. But as I dreamt on a comfortable steamer, so I dreamt more vividly of the past on the verandah of the Myrtle Bank, looking down the palm avenue to the sea. The night air was heavy with spicy scents, and the fireflies wheeled and danced, living lights in the dark shadows under the greenery, all the voluptuousness of the tropics was here in this land of romance which Columbus found for Spain, and that later was the first great tropical possession of Britain. But Jamaica has been an unlucky land, and I doubt whether Britain has yet realised its value. It might be called the land of lost opportunities, so often have those who governed it let its good things pass by. I doubt whether Spain herself got any great good from this new possession; certainly Columbus found small peace here. With “his people dismayed and downhearted, almost all his anchors lost and his vessels bored as full of holes as a honeycomb, driven by opposing winds and currents, he put into Puerto Bueno, in the parish of Saint Ann’s. But not finding sufficient food or water” (probably water, as it is now known as Dry Harbour), “he sailed east again and put into a cove since known as Don Cristopher’s Cove.” His ships were mere wrecks, those brave “castled” ships that had sailed from Spain with such high hopes, and it was very certain that whatever might happen to them, back to Spain they could not go. It was a terrible situation, an awful strait in which those brave mariners found themselves over four hundred years ago.

“You must see the parish of St Ann,” said a Jamaican lady to me; “it is all green grass and white Indian cattle, and dark green pimento trees.”

In those days there was probably not much green grass, natural grasses grow roughly and in tufts, and there were no Indian cattle; but the dark green pimento trees were there, their fragrance and that of many a tropical flower and tree must have been brought by the land breeze to the sailors in the ships. For Columbus sank his unseaworthy, worm-riddled ships in the harbour, sank them till the water came right up to their decks, a sign of the desperateness of his position, for no leader if he had any hope of redeeming the situation would have sunk the only means he had of returning to his own land.



0026

In a Cove like this Columbus beached his ship a bow-shot of the shore. I don’t know how far that is, but certainly too far to swim easily in a tropical sea, they were sunk side by side and were placed in the “best possible state of defence,” which probably means that every cooling current of air, the pleasant pungent sea breeze in the morning, and the aromatic land breeze in the evening were shut out. It must have had its effect upon the crews this lack of fresh air, though probably they were not greatly concerned about it. They very likely considered as men did long after their time that the land breeze was dangerous and that the sea breeze gave them ague, and I expect they looked out over the shimmering sea and hated it with a bitter hatred and blamed pitilessly the man who brought them there.

And yet in all the world I have not seen a more lovely sea than the sea that rings Jamaica. Sometimes the wind blows it into ripples, sometimes a stronger wind beats it into white foam, the clouds gather, it grows dark, inky black, and the rain comes beating down, rain that must have swirled across the decks and threatened to swamp out the little ships—their prison. But oftenest, I know, that sea was still, lovely, with the shallows like great jewelled opals of tenderest translucent green in a setting of sparkling sapphires and pearls, and entrancing little coves fringed by mangroves where the coconut palms stand up tall and stately as near the water as they can get, and all this against a background of mountains wooded to their very peaks, makes a scene never to be forgotten. There were no coconut palms in the time of Columbus. They came from the mainland, a right royal gift of the Spaniards to the island they made their own, but there were the sea grapes, great straggling bushes with big round leaves and bunches of purple berries so like grapes that it is not till you taste them you find by their slightly acrid savour and the big stone in the middle that they are not. Still, to men after a voyage at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the days of our King Henry VII., those sea grapes must have been a godsend, they and the luscious naseberries, which are sweet and sickly, but good to counteract scurvy.

I can’t like the naseberry. The tree it grows on is large and handsome, but the fruit itself, which is about the size of a russet apple, cannot be eaten ripe from the tree because it is full of a whitish astringent juice, but must be kept like the medlar till it is well on its way to rottenness and then it may be eaten with a spoon. Probably Columbus’s men ate hundreds of them, grumbling that they had come out to find gold and silver, and their leader had brought them to a watery prison where they had to subsist on fish which they grew to loathe, cassava bread and naseberries, occasionally traded by the Indians, sea grapes gathered by themselves—poor substitutes for the wheaten bread and peaches and grapes of their own land.

Day after day, day after day, they looked out on that sea where there was never a sail. They were apparently cut off from all hopes of home, and their leader lay in his cabin crippled with gout. And then the despised food began to give out.

In his despair Columbus sent out the first exploring expedition into Jamaica. Diego Mendez, one of the best and bravest of his officers, and three men, started to walk through Trelawny, St James, and Hanover, visiting the villages and interviewing the native chiefs and making treaties with them by which the forlorn company were to receive regular supplies of food in exchange for fish hooks, knives, beads, combs, and such trifles as all the world over have taken the fancy of primitive man.

I have been through these parishes—in a motor car. There are coconut walks there now, the tall and graceful palms standing out against the sky, sugar plantations, patches of vivid green, pimento groves with trees like great myrtles clothed in glossy dark green, and rows of broad-leaved bananas and plantains, and the air is fragrant with the scent of orange and lemon blossom and hundreds of other growing things. On the hill tops are the Great Houses of the pen keepers and planters set in gardens, with the overseers’ and book-keepers’ houses lower down, and as near the road as they can get, the shacks of the negro helpers and independent cultivators. Strangely enough, in a little island that has been settled by Europeans for over four hundred years, the roads that wander along the entrancing sea shore and by the mountain side often look into gullies, at the bottom of which it seems as if we might find the villages where Diego Mendez made treaties. I should hardly have been surprised if in one of the little lonely coves we had come across the sunken ships of Columbus fastened close together for safety and with little houses thatched over in bow and stern. There are wild places still in this island which, after all, is only 4207 square miles—of hillside—not much larger than a good sized station in Australia, and gullies waiting for man to come and turn to good account their wealth. Here is room, and more than room, for the dwellers in the great cities who have never seen a glorious sunset and know not the scent of a pimento grove.

That meant for Columbus a weary time of waiting among dissatisfied men, for what adventurer, who had come out seeking gold and silver and precious stones, would be content to lie sweltering—rotting, I expect they called it—even in the most beautiful cove in the world. Presently the story went round that Columbus had been banished, his prestige was gone, and two brothers named Porras rose as leaders of the mutineers.

Even the life of the veteran was in danger. As I write this on my verandah, looking out over the blue Caribbean, with a little pauperised tingting bird sitting on the rail calling aloud that I have always provided his breakfast and that even little slim black birds with bright yellow eyes can be led astray by too much ease and comfort, I seem to realise with what bitterness the iron entered into the soul of the old man. There was no actual danger, they had enough to eat, and could sleep, sheltered and in peace, and sooner or later he thought help would come. Patience, he preached, patience. But the mutineers would have their way. They built or stole ten canoes and went out along the coast, ravaging and pillaging. The first of the pirates who ravaged the coasts of Jamaica and their victims, were not the white people but the gentle brown folk whom Columbus had designed to make peacefully their slaves. “They wandered from village to village,” says his chronicler, “a dissolute and lawless gang, supporting themselves by fair means or foul, according as they met with kindness or hostility, and passing like a pestilence through the land.”

I can almost understand it and forgive. Almost anything was better than sitting still watching the sun climb over the mountain in the morning and sink into the sea in the evening, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the relief that was so long in coming.

For Mendez having got to Hispaniola had then to make his way to Spain, and it was not till the 28th June 1504 that relief ships came sailing in and Columbus was able to leave Jamaica. He died in 1506, and by way of recompense, I suppose, in 1508 his son Diego was appointed Governor of the Indies, and in 1509 went out to San Domingo, taking with him his wife, who was a cousin of King Ferdinand.

In Jamaica under the Spaniards, a translation by Frank Cundall and Joseph Pieterez of documents found in the archives of Seville in Spain, the curious may read the slow story of the Spanish settling of Jamaica and its gradual evacuation. They did not come in with a rush, for there was no fabulous wealth of gold and silver here. Again and again the Spanish King urges the Governors to seek for gold, but though doubtless, they sought diligently, for the finding would have been the making of them, they found none, and we cannot but feel that the Spanish colonists were poor and of but little account. If you read Hans Sloane on the remains he found round about the old city of Seville, your sense of romance is satisfied, but the cold facts taken from the archives of Seville in Spain speak of a little handful of poor people struggling with an exuberant nature. Here, as I write, there comes to me the smell of very poor tobacco, only fragrant in the open air, and looking up I see a negro woman in leisurely fashion digging up the weeds among the grass of what will, some day I hope, be a lawn under the coconut palms. How leisurely is that fashion I can hardly describe, save by mentioning she only gets 3s. 6d. a week, boards and lodges herself and works accordingly. She has bare feet, a nondescript, drab-coloured garment that calls itself a dress, and a ragged hat made out of a banana trash and bound with a string of bright red. She is of African descent, but not unlike her probably were the Indians who worked in the fields for those first Jamaican colonists. Yes, she is content, fairly content I should say, almost too content, or she would strive a little to better herself.

I should like to have seen the beginnings of the Spanish occupation of Jamaica. How they slowly set up their hatos round the island, choosing out the fertile river bottoms and fencing in their lands lightly, so lightly that soon the lonely parts of the island were overrun with wild cattle and pigs descended from those that escaped. They planted coconut palms and brought over oranges and lemons and limes from their native land which took root and flourished, so that Hans Sloane, writing thirty years after the Spaniards had been driven out, talks of the orange and lime walks, and nowadays if you want orange trees on your land you have only to throw out one or two rotten oranges to have a crop of young seedlings.

“The buildings of the Spaniards,” says Hans Sloane, “on this island were usually one Story high, having a Porch, a Parlour, and at each end a Room with small ones behind for Closets etc. They built with Posts put deep into the ground, on the sides their Houses were plaistered up with Clay on Reeds, or made of the split Truncs of Cabbage Trees nail’d close to one another and covered with Tiles or Palmetto Thatch. The Lowness as well as the fixing the Posts deep in the Earth was for fear their Houses should be ruin’d by Earthquakes, as well as for Coolness.”

Immediately they settled, the Spaniards rounded-up the luckless Indians. Their lot was hard enough, though possibly not as hard as that of those driven to work in the mines, and as labourers on the hatos they soon began to fail their masters. Perhaps that is not to be wondered at. Las Casas, the benevolent bishop, who is responsible for the first introduction of negro slaves into the New World says, “they hanged the unfortunates by thirteens in honour of the thirteen apostles. I have beheld them throw the Indian infants to their dogs; I have seen five caciques burnt alive; I have heard the Spaniards borrow the limb of an human being to feed their dogs and next day return a quarter to the lender.”

It seems a gruesome enough story, and where the mercy came in from Las Casas’ point of view in substituting negroes for the Indians I do not know, especially as they say the negroes were infinitely inferior to the Indians, and as long as the Spaniards could get the latter they preferred them.

But that the Spaniards destroyed all the Indians there is no doubt. They were a mild and indolent brown people, very like those now to be seen in British Guiana, but historians differ as to their numbers: one man says that “in Jamaica and the adjacent islands within less than twenty years the Spaniards destroyed more than 1,200,000,” but later researches have brought the figure in Jamaica down to about 60,000, a much more likely number, and after all quite enough to destroy in twenty years.

They lived, these Spanish conquerors, on the island for over one hundred and fifty years, a poor little company, or so I gather, but rich in the fruits of the earth. And the people at home took a fatherly interest in them. If an emigrant left his wife at home, he had to have her written consent to his going and give security that he would return for her within three years. And this security was evidently very necessary, for among the archives at Seville there is a note touching a lady of Ciudad Rodrigo complaining to the Queen in 1538 that her husband had deserted her twenty-five years before to go to the Indies and had married another lady in Jamaica, where he was settled. But though the Queen ordered that the matter should be looked into and justice done, there is no end to the story.

Though we talk about the Spanish towns in Jamaica, they were really very small. In July 1534 there were but eighty citizens in the town of Seville, and of these soon after only twenty remained, the others having died of “diseases and pestilences”! And we are told that in twenty years they had not reared ten infants, a pitiful return. In the first record we get of Spanish Town, it had only one hundred inhabitants. In 1597 a Governor named Fernando Melgarejo de Cordova came out for six years. He brought with him by permission four servants, jewels to the value of 200 ducats (roughly worth ￡40), a black slave, four swords, four daggers, and four of each kind of other arms, and his salary was 300,000 maravedis, which sounds a great deal, but as a maravedi was equal to half a farthing he only had ￡156 a year, surely a small sum even for those times when money was worth so much more, and Jamaica, too, as his advisers were never tired of impressing on the King of Spain, was a valuable colony, and if it fell into the hands of the King’s enemies none of the other colonies would be safe.

When Melgarejo arrived, he found the Englishman Sir Anthony Shirley had sacked and held to ransom the Villa de la Vega, the city of the plains, the capital, guided thereto by a native Indian, and proud as we are of our old-time mariners, still the times were rough and merciless, their ways matched the times, and we may pity the people who waked up that hot August morning in 1597 to find that their hereditary enemies the English were upon them. Sir Anthony Shirley claimed that while he was in Jamaica he was “absolute master of the whole,” and he seems to have made arrangements for his return with the comfortable conviction that he could certainly provision his ships with beef and cassava, to say nothing of the cooling fruits which by this time were plentiful and must have been of inestimable value to these wanderers upon the seas.

Sir Anthony Shirley was only one of many. For these corsairs who soon came to Jamaica regularly were drawn from all the nations of Europe and “they rob and they trade,” wrote the worried Governor.

And when they didn’t trade and they didn’t rob they helped themselves not only to wood and water but to beef and pork, that was running wild it is true, but naturally the Spaniards considered it theirs, and then sometimes, when they had raided a little too often, the tables were turned and they left their bones there.

Don Fernando goes at length into his prowess in going out in a boat to defend a frigate—a frigate was a very small ship in those days—that two English launches had boarded and he says he retook that frigate and made them retire. More, he sent Captain Sebastian Gonzalez—there is a swagger in his name—with troops by land to Port Negrillo, there “to wait till the Captain of the English corsair should go to obtain water and capture him; and they lay in wait for him and killed those who landed and brought back their ears, broke the jars to pieces and burnt the boat.”

And so the story of Jamaica goes on in the Seville archives, a tale of a small people with stocks of horses and cattle and pigs, a tale of struggles to build churches, and to hold the island, because though no gold or silver had been found, it was yet too central to allow any other nation to settle there.

But it rose in value, for the next Governor, Alonzo de Miranda, had his salary increased to close on ￡400 a year. He was much worried by a Portuguese corsair named Mota, who “with two launches and a tender was going along the whole coast sacking and plundering the ranches and seizing the inhabitants and doing many other injuries, to remedy which I was obliged to assemble a fleet by sea, and go myself by land with soldiers to defeat the design of the enemies and they went away from the coast. With all that, I have had information that in the remote cattle hunting places they land, and with some of the cow catchers who have run away from Espanola, whom they bring, they dress hides and supply themselves with meat.” This, he goes on to say, “cannot be remedied without much cost and expense.”

When first I went to Jamaica, a friend, Mr Clarence Lopez, with kindness I can never forget, lent me a house in the northern part of the island in the parish of Trelawny. It was the Great House on the Hyde, a pen about eight miles as the crow flies from the sea. Jamaica is 144 miles long at the longest portion and 49 miles broad at the broadest, it is little more than half the size of Wales, but when I went to that house set on the side of a mountain with a glorious view of hill and valley, coco-palm and banana, I went to the very loneliest place I have ever lived in in my life, and I have been in many lands. It is one of the loveliest too. Behind are the mountains, clothed to their peaks in woodland, bound together with all manner of creeping vines and the mountains fling their arms round, so that they seem to guard the old house from the winds of the south, and all in the ground grow pimento and orange and lemon trees, handsome, broad-leaved bread-fruit and tall naseberry trees, while the little garden on a plateau just behind the house is a wilderness of roses, pink and white, and red and yellow, and fragrant as the first roses that ever grew in a Persian garden. The house is two storied, and though it has many annexes the main building stands by itself. Much money has been expended upon it. Two great flights of stone steps lead up to the porch at the front door, the floor of which is tessellated as carefully as if it had been done in Italy; all the handles of the doors are of heavy cut glass and so are the door plates, while gilded beading decorates what they call in Jamaica the two great halls, that is the dining room downstairs and its fellow upstairs. The floors are of polished mahogany and so is the staircase; but no one had lived in it for years and “Ichabod” was written over everything.

It had been built with a view to defence, there was no doubt about it. On the porch a couple of men with guns could hold the front of the house, in the hall there is a trap-door leading to the storey below, cellars half underground, and in the walls in front are loop-holes through which a man might easily shoot. The second storey overhangs the first a little and there is not a corner but could easily be held by a man with a gun. Yes, decidedly it was built for defence, such defence as might be needed in the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The first night we spent there, my companion, Eva Parsons, and I alone with the weird black servants who had seen but very few white people and whose ways were strange to us, we felt the loneliness keenly. Eva was ill, and she was a Londoner born and bred. There were rats racing about downstairs, there were bats making curious sounds in the roof, and when a potoo bird gave vent to its long drawn-out uncanny cry, Eva abandoned courage and came flying into my room. And she was no coward. I comforted her to the best of my ability, and we decided that until we got the house a little more habitable one bedroom was quite big enough for the two of us.

But what must it have been like on those ranches in the old days when the Spaniards were few and scattered, and the corsairs, English and Portuguese and French and Dutch, and a nondescript crowd that were worse than any, came cruising along the coasts and landed and attacked the lonely houses? Think of the women who lay still shivering or crept to each other’s rooms and wondered was that the pirates or was it only a rat, or possibly a bat in the roof? Or that weird sound?—Was it a potoo bird killing rats? or was it an English sailor calling to his mate in his harsh, unknown tongue?

“Except in the principal one, Caguya,” says Sedeno de Albornoz, speaking of the corsairs, “they anchor in the ports without being disturbed by anyone, and refit and careen their ships with perfect ease as if in their country. I can certify that, while a prisoner of theirs, I have heard with much concern many conversations with regard to colonising this island and fortifying two ports, one on the north side and one on the south. I always told them that there was a garrison of ten companies of infantry stationed by the King our master, besides three in the town, and two of mounted mulattoes and free negroes armed with hocking knives and half moons, of whom they are much afraid. They did not like that reply, and though doubtful contradicted me, saying they knew very well what was in the island. It is very certain that it is more important to them than any other, as it is better and more fertile and abundant than all those they have settled in the Indies; nor is there another like it in the Indies. Cuba and Espanola are indeed much larger, but Jamaica in its entirety is more plentiful than these, for it has much horned stock, and herds of tame swine, and wild ones in great numbers, from the hunting of which every year is obtained a quantity of lard that serves instead of oil for cooking.” So much lard that there are people who declare that Montego Bay, from which much lard was exported, took its name from a corruption of the Spanish word for lard.

“Likewise,” goes on Sedeno, “there is a large number of good horses, donkeys, and mules, fisheries of turtle and dainty fish, and a very fine climate from its healthy airs and waters.” Indeed he cannot say enough for the island. He finishes, “there are now a little over 300 colonists, mostly poor people. Nearly 450 men bear arms,” so I suppose he only counts those as colonists who actually settled on the land, “including the hunters and country folks, all of whom are labouring people, strong and suitable for war by reason of their courageous spirits if indeed lacking military discipline.”

And even as he wrote the enemy was within the gates, and the Governor of Jamaica writes despairingly to the King of Spain. He says 53 ships of war—there were really 38—came in sight of the island, and they bore 15,000 seamen and soldiers, while the invaders claim they conquered with 7000 soldiers and a sea regiment of 1000. But he probably is right when he says “there are 8000 souls scattered about the mountains, children, women, and slaves, without any hope of protection except from God, with the enemy’s knife every hour at their throats.” We hear so little about the women and children in these wars of conquest and yet on them most heavily of all must have pressed the difficulties and the dangers.

And the Governor died a prisoner of war, and finally this Governorship which never seems to have been much sought after and was worth nothing, now descended upon Christ oval Arnaldo Ysassi, who was not even a trained soldier.

The rest of the pitiful story is one of flight, flight, flight, the Spaniards always pressed northward, always begging and praying help from Cuba, begging for bread and getting a stone.

For we say Jamaica was conquered in 1655, but it takes a long while for a people who are holding a land by guerilla warfare to understand that they are beaten, and it was evident that Ysassi was heartened by many a skirmish that seemed to him a success. Towards the end of October 1656, however, we find the King of Spain writing—“The English have a foothold in Jamaica, obstructing the commerce of all the islands to windward with the coasts of the mainland and of New Spain. The fleets and galleons run great risk in passing by Jamaica.”

But even in March of the next year the Viceroy of Mexico writes to Ysassi congratulating him on his appointment to the Government of Jamaica, though he himself was beginning to realise what a hollow farce it was.

However he made it unpleasant for the arrogant invaders. “I now send a smart English sergeant,” he writes, “who will give your Excellency lengthy news of the whole state of the island.” Poor English sergeant, smart even in his captivity! I hope they did not make things very hard for him in Mexico. That is the worst of history. The ultimate fate of the pawns is never told, only in these state papers there is that one entry that pictures for us the upright young figure with the keen blue eyes and firm set mouth, firm even in misfortune. God rest his soul! and God bless him for keeping up the honour of the English nation.

Even when reliefs did come, they brought little comfort to the harassed Governor. In August 1657, two captains landed at Ochos Rios, not far from where Columbus spent his weary year. They were supposed to help the Spanish Governor but, as soldiers, they pointed out to him the hopelessness of the situation. They said he could not succeed in the interior, that “it will cost some trouble to capture any horses from the enemy, and with infantry the risk is manifest.” I have seen the country and I can’t imagine how they thought to use horses.

But in spite of these Job’s comforters, Ysassi kept writing bravely to the Viceroy that he was harrying the enemy, that still they could not get any good from the hatos that they held.

“Those who come to get beef, die without anyone being left to carry the news...” What a picture of bloodthirsty, merciless war it gives us! When the great golden moon sends her light streaming through the coconut walks, and the glorious night is heavy with the scent of the orange flowers and the pimento groves, I cannot but think of those bloody days in the seventeenth century when the English drove the Spaniards to the remote corners of the island, and the Spaniards in their turn killed remorselessly, so that none should go back to tell the tale.

Again he reports in the middle of September,

“I sallied out upon the road to encounter them with the few troops I had, which were about 80 men” (Oh, for the might of Spain!) “because the others are without shoes and not accustomed to the discomforts of the open country.”

He descants on their ragged condition. “The few soldiers I have are naked and barefoot and cannot stand the mosquitoes” (I sympathise with them)—“Please help them.” He has not even paper to write his reports and the whole history is punctuated with prayers for provisions, “for soldiers will fight badly if they have nothing to eat and are badly clothed. I assure your Excellency that some die reduced to sticks.”

It was evidently a prolonged series of skirmishes, with sometimes one party conquering, sometimes the other, but the Spaniards seem to have thought their re-establishment was merely a matter of time. Once they gave their minds to the matter they must win, and meanwhile Ysassi was doing useful work holding the place till the good time came. They could not believe they had lost Jamaica.

“For the love of God,” he prays the Governor of Cuba, “I again ask you to send me not linen, or a new shirt, because I do not make use of it” (a gallant of Spain!) “but some old cloth.”

But brave Ysassi was nearing the end. In July 1658 he had reinforcements from Mexico but is obliged to write sadly—“In fine, sir, on this 26th June the enemy defeated me with the loss of 300 men although his loss, so far as troops are concerned, was greater.” (The pitiful pride!) “If they beat me,” he says in effect, “me starving, short of ammunition, provisions, everything that might enable me to make good, at least I have given them something better than they gave me.”

And so he sends the remnant of his army into the mountains to forage for themselves and he speaks of the negro slaves, the first mention we have of the Maroons that have figured so largely in Jamaican history.

“The negroes, Sir,” he writes to his King, “who have remained fugitives from their masters who have abandoned the island and your Majesty’s arms, are more than two hundred, but many have died, and I inform your Majesty so that you may command what is most suitable to your Royal Service to whoever may come to govern the island. I have not done a small thing in conserving them, keeping them under my obedience, when they have been sought after with papers from the enemy. I have promised their Chiefs freedom in your Majesty’s name but have not given it until I receive an order for it.” As if his gift of freedom could have mattered very much to the negroes, who already had the freedom of the hills and the hunted Spaniards much at their mercy.

And here again we are faced with contradictions that make me glad it is not my business to write history.

“The Spaniards in their authority over their slaves,” writes the very verbose Bridges, “appear to have been restrained by no law whatever; but were sanctioned in every act which could extort their labour or secure their obedience, so long however as the strength of the native Indians withstood the execrable cruelties of their Castilian taskmasters, the negroes were considered as very inferior workmen. Ovando complained of their continued importation to Hispaniola, where he found them but idle labourers, who took every opportunity of escaping into the woods, and assisting the natives in their feeble attempts to throw off the Spanish yoke. But as Indian life wasted, negro labour became necessary to supply its place.”

And yet after that he goes on to say: “The British conquerors profited but little by the negroes whom they found in the island of Jamaica, and whose services were inseparable from the hard fate of their expatriated owners.... Not five hundred slaves were employed in the cultivation containing more than two million acres of the richest land. The degeneracy of their masters had reduced all classes to nearly an equality; so that in fact slavery hardly existed in Jamaica. Poverty had for a series of years forbidden a further importation of Africans; the negro race had rapidly decayed, and the few that were left were employed to supply the wants of the indolent Spaniards in Saint Jago, by the cultivation of their hatos in the country, and were preserved with the greatest care and cherished as their own children.... The easy condition of the slaves was manifested in their attachment to the fallen fortunes of their masters; and they were confidently left by them to retain possession of an island which they could no longer keep themselves.” Surely a curious way to end a paragraph which began by declaiming against the unbridled cruelty of the Spaniards. So they were not all cruel, and even troubled Ysassi felt sure that the runaway negroes would prefer the Spanish rule to the English. Perhaps there was something in the devil they knew.

In Spain the enquiries into the state of the country appear to have been endless. It was easier to hold the north side of the island, the fleeing Spaniards wrote them, and one man tells how his hunting slaves were enabled to help the unfortunates who had abandoned their hatos on the south and fled into the mountains in the north. I see those frightened women and children, toiling along through the mountain passes, perhaps taking it in turns to ride a mule or donkey, afraid of the hunting slaves, savage men with little clothing and yet thankful for the meat and wild fruits they gave them. And they said that in the first three years they had killed nearly 2500 of the enemy’s men, “while on our side very few were lost. The enemy also suffered from a pestilence from which more than 6000 died.” And so they buoyed themselves up with false hopes. But whether they were killed or wounded or died of pestilence these persistent English came on and pushed them farther and farther towards the north. Even the mountains were no refuge, and we read how sick men, women and children, Spanish colonists and slaves, “embarked in one of his Majesty’s smacks,” that made several trips by order of the Governor of Cuba who charged (the wretch! to take such advantage of their desperate straits) “for each person removed from Jamaica, even infants, at the rate of ten and twelve pesos” (about thirty shillings). One family even paid him more than three times that, so evidently there were pickings attached to a Spanish Governorship.

And at last in February 1660 even brave Ysassi must have seen, and seen thankfully, I should think, that the end was approaching. He was defeated at Manegua (Moneague)—it is a pleasure resort up among the hills nowadays, where the tourists come from England and America—and at a Council of War the abandonment of the island was recommended.

Slowly, slowly, it had come to that, after all the hopes, all the sacrifices, all the fighting, all the long, long struggle and suffering, after nearly five years of it they must go. The English offered terms, but the Spanish were proud and haggled, and though the English seem to have been more than kindly and courteous the Spaniards were loth to give in, and finally we find D’Oyley, the English Governor, writing “the time for capitulating has expired.” The English would have sent them to Cuba, sent them with all honour, but the Spanish Governor, who had never been more than the shadow of a Governor of Jamaica, could not give in. He complains that the English only undertook to send away the Spaniards to Cuba, “as the greater part of the force were Indians, Negroes, and Mulattos, without counting Slaves and Coloured domestic servants.... I determined to die sooner than abandon or leave the meanest of those who had been with me... the troops,” he goes on pathetically, he had advised the Governor of Cuba, “were very dejected and weak from want of food and eaten up with lice, for not even the Captains had more clothes than what they wore.” So he decided to build two canoes and in fifteen days they were finished and provided with sails, “from some sheets belonging to the hunters who had escaped.” We can see those canoes building, the careful watch that had to be kept lest the English should catch them, the subdued triumph when they were all complete, the despair when it was found they would only hold seventy-six people, and so, after all his protestations, “I was obliged to leave in the island thirty-six under the charge of one of the Captains who was assisting me.”

And they call the cove where he embarked Runaway Bay. It is a misnomer, and a slur on the memory of a brave man. Surely no man ever turned his back on the enemy more reluctantly.

They came in safety to Cuba and no mention is ever made of the thirty-six left behind and the captain who stayed with them. I like to think that Ysassi sent for them when he could.

The road that runs right round the island passes close to that little bay now, and the waters of the blue Caribbean, calm and still, mirror the blue skies above as they did on that long ago May day when the last Spanish Governor of Jamaica embarked in a frail canoe and waving his hand to those he left behind set sail for Cuba to the north. This was the end of the high adventure. The very end! The Spanish rule was over, the valued island that lay right in the fairway of commerce—it lies so still—was lost for ever to the Spanish Crown and its last Governor was going away a broken and discredited man.

And bitterly the Spaniards regretted the loss. Pedro de Bayoha, “Governor of the City of Cuba,” wrote to the King setting forth its many advantages, “any fleet however large can lie and careen its ships, and any army can march, as food is very plentiful and the island abounding in tame and wild cattle as well as swine, the quantity of which is so great that every year twenty thousand head are killed for the lard and fat and no use is made of the meat.” So we gather that Ysassi was not very good at the commissariat. Perhaps the English harried him too much.

It has been said with some surprise that there are few relics of the Spaniards in the island. For me, I marvel that there is after all these years still so much. The oranges and the limes, the pomegranates and the coconut palms are a monument to them, and still at Montego Bay is to be seen the outlines of a dark stone fort that overlooked the beautiful bay and guarded the town. And though Indian corn has been sown in the courtyards for many a long day, some of the old cannon that belonged to his Spanish Majesty still lie about. The climate of Jamaica is against the preservation of relics of the past. “Tis a very strange thing,” says Hans Sloane, accustomed to the slow growth of Northern climes, “to see in how short a time a plantation formerly clear of trees and shrubs will grow foul, which comes from two causes; the one not stubbing up the roots, whence arise young sprouts, and the other the fertility of the soil. The settlements and plantations of not only the Indians but even the Spaniards being quite overgrown with tall trees, so that there is no footsteps of such a thing left were it not for the old palisadoes, buildings, orange walks, etc., which show plainly the formerly cleared places where plantations have been.” And Sloane, who was physician to the Duke of Albemarle, the Governor, writes of 1688, not thirty years after the last Spanish Governor had fled.

Even now in Jamaica there are tales of buried treasure. In 1916 the “Busha” or superintendent of an estate in Westmoreland was engaged in pulling down a stout stone wall, evidently built in the old days by slave labour. Each stone was well and truly laid, and tradition said the wall was Spanish. One of the workmen said he had come to a hollow place. And sure enough there was a large jar stuffed full of old Spanish gold and silver coins, hidden I suppose when the Spanish owner of the hato fled before the incoming of the English. Tradition says there are many more, but within the last year or two the Crown, I hear, has insisted on its right of treasure trove, so that it is exceedingly unlikely anyone finding such will proclaim the fact aloud. The Spanish colonists it is true were but a poor people, but even the poorest have need of some little money, and in the days when banks were not much in vogue, cash that would not go into the breeches pocket had to be kept somewhere.

Bridges tells how “a miniature figure of pure gold representing a Spanish soldier with a matchlock in his hand was lately found in the woods of the parish of Manchester. How it came there remains a mystery; for those extensive forests bear no marks of having ever been opened, or even penetrated until lately.” And Bridges wrote about 1828.

But gold is not to be lightly worn or washed away. I can imagine the young Spanish wife who owned that little golden soldier and counted him a very precious possession. And so, when she fled with her baby in her arms and her little daughter clinging to her skirts, she carried it with her. And then came the day when the English pressed them hard, and perhaps her husband, perhaps the head slave, called to her to hurry, they must get away, and the baby cried because she had so little to give it, and the little maid whimpered when she fell among the leafy thorns and rough stones on the steep mountain path, and her mother bending over to comfort her dropped the little golden Spanish soldier that was her treasure from her bundle and never knew of her loss till it was too late to go back to look for it, and there he lay for close on one hundred and sixty years till some Englishman found him and reported the find to verbose, moralising, Bridges.

The author of Old St James too tells a tale of Spanish treasure. He says that sometime in the eighteenth century two Spaniards visited “Success,” an estate in the north of the island not far from the sea-shore. They showed a plan said to have been copied from one held by a Spanish family locating the position of valuable documents buried upon the estate. There were the remains of an old fort, and using the walls as a starting-post the point fixed upon was the centre of the estate’s mill-house. Not unnaturally, the visitors wanted to take down the mill-house, undertaking to rebuild it and leave everything as they found it. But the owners objected, perhaps also not unnaturally, for the mill-house was the most important part of the estate and an owner who would live in any tumble-down makeshift himself would often spend large sums upon his mill-house and machinery. Permission was refused, though tradition was with the Spaniards. For all I know those papers may be there still. The mill was one of the last to use cattle as power, and when excavations were being made for the new steam mill, two wells were found, one with water and the other in which water had obviously not been found. It was filled with soil of a different character from that surrounding it. “The water,” says the author, “was evidently that which supplied the fort and it is natural to think that valuables or other papers might have been buried in the other.”

There is still among the older people a certain faith in enchanted jars buried in the earth or left in caves by the Spaniards when they fled the country. In the Rio Cobre there is a table of gold which rises up at noon every day, but though it has been seen by more than one person no one yet has succeeded in getting it before it sinks back under the waters. This, I am credibly informed—you may believe it or not as you please—is because the Spaniards killed a slave to watch over the treasure and no one has been quick enough to throw their hat, knife, or handkerchief over it and so break the enchantment.

There was a poor slave woman once who was ill and unable to finish her task, so the driver made her stay behind and do what she had left undone. She worked all night, and weary and worn, the task was not yet done when her hoe struck something that gave out a jingling sound. She looked carefully and found a Spanish jar, and with such important information dared even approach the high and mighty master himself. On going to inspect, he found so large a jar it had to be pulled out by oxen and was full to the top with golden doubloons. So he rewarded the woman with her freedom and gave her enough to live on all her life. At least that is the story that was told to me. It is a comfort to read of Spanish Gold which for so long has stood in my mind for fanciful treasure, really materialising to some one’s advantage.

More especially in the north of the island is this faith in hidden treasure strong. I was told seriously by a young man once that just beyond Montego Bay some very handsome brass cannon were dug up and so curiously wrought were they that they were polished and set up close to where they were found on the shore. But they did not stay there long. One night a Spanish sloop was seen off the coast, next morning she was gone, so were the guns, and no one knows what has become of them.

They tell much the same story about a great jar of gold which was supposed to have been buried in a cane piece in St Thomas. One night the Spaniards came, gagged and bound the watchman—I did not know every cane piece had a watchman, but so the story runs—and dug up the jar leaving a sum of money for the watchman and the hole so that the owners of that field might have some idea of what they had missed.

I am afraid these two last stories are purely apocryphal, but many people believe in them and they serve to show how fixed in Jamaica is the faith in Spanish Gold.

At Kempshot, on top of a high hill, Miss Maxwell Hall two or three years ago was roused night after night by the tramping of feet along the hillside. At first the noise was a mystery of the night then it ceased, but a week or two later she found that some great caves on the estate had been entered and extensive digging had gone on. It was impossible that anything could have been found, for the Maxwell Halls themselves had dug out those caves thoroughly searching not for Spanish treasure but for Arawak remains. It was evident that a large company had gone there nightly. The place had an evil reputation and she knew that not two or three men would have lightly dared its dangers even for promise of gold, and broken and discarded rum bottles showed how the investigators had been bucked up with “Dutch courage.”

A little treasure will go a long way in making stories, and one jar of coin found will supply material for a dozen. But it is interesting to think that if you buy a plot of land in Jamaica, especially in the north, you may just chance to buy with it a jar of gold.