The West Indies E-Book

John Henderson

• Herausgeber: Charles Fred
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

History of West Indies. West Indies culture, West Indies people, West Indies facts, West Indies location, West Indies information. Introduction; West Indies are Spanish Indias Occidentales, French Indes Occidentales, Dutch West-Indië, are crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north. From the peninsula of Florida on the mainland of the United States, the islands stretch 1,200 miles (1,900 km) southeastward, then 500 miles (800 km) south, then west along the north coast of Venezuela on the South American mainland. “West Indies History” West Indies history book.

Leseprobe

The West Indies

John Henderson

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL

In Britain we have lost the art of correct perspective. We see distant

things through jaundiced eyes; as a nation we are too prone to regard

over-sea lands and peoples with compassion tempered with contempt, or

with envy and timidity. To ensure our respect and sympathy a country

must be successful; we have no room in our Empire for failures. America,

because of her commercial genius and industrial enterprise, we respect

and revere and imitate. We exaggerate the successes of the States and

credit the American with commercial omnipotence. The word American

stands in the unprinted national dictionary as meaning efficient,

successful, up-to-date. I have heard that English tradesmen have

labelled English-made goods “American” in order that a quick sale might

be ensured in Britain’s capital. We refuse to believe that America has

ceased to be related to us by ties of kinship; to the Englishmen of the

homeland Americans are first cousins. And so it is, conversely, with

England and the West Indies.

At home we are apt to think of the West Indies as a scattered group of

poverty-stricken islands, barren of riches, planted somewhere in some

tropical sea, and periodically reduced to absolute desolation by

hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes. The poverty of the Western

Indies is proverbial. Occasionally Imperial Parliament brings forward

some measure, which, in the opinion of some individual, might tend to

relieve the distress and commercial poverty of our West Indian

possessions; at other times a fund is started at the Mansion-House to

help the West Indian victims of some fearful tornado or earthquake. That

is all that is generally known of the great islands of the Caribbean

Sea. In our dreams of Empire we prefer to think of Canada, Africa, and

strenuous Australasia. Commercially and politically our West Indies are,

according to the general idea, more than half derelict, and wholly

without the attractions of wealth and promise. We forget that these

Western islands were at one time the richest of England’s possessions;

we do not realise how rich they, some day, will again become. If Britain

only understood aright she would know that it is only through her own

neglect, through her half-hearted, penurious West Indian policy, that

our Caribbean Empire is not in the front rank of her richest possessions

to-day. The riches of the West Indies played a large part in the

formation of Britain’s greatness. We swept the islands clear of all

their surface wealth at a period when England was most in need of gold.

And because to-day we cannot send ships from Plymouth with empty

[Illustration: LIGHTERMEN, OFF BARBADOES]

holds and crowded quarter-decks, to return from a six months’ voyage in

the Indies crowded with treasure and glory, we count the islands barren.

We forget that West Indian wealth was invested in Britain’s greatness

years before we had an empire. We forget that Britain’s navy was founded

by men who were trained to war and seamanship among those islands of the

West. More than once have these islands seen the pride and glory of

England hanging in the balance, and once, at least, the Indies knew

before the homeland that a blow, which had threatened the very

foundations of British greatness, had been hurled in vain.

That was in the time of Burke and Fox and Rodney. Spain and France and

Holland had combined, and in one great battle threatened to crush the

power of England, and to wrest from her the supremacy of the seas.

England trembled, and the popular party advocated surrender and peace.

France and Spain wanted the Indies. Rodney sailed from England to uphold

the power and dominion of his race. He sailed amidst the sullen silence

of a people whose power he was to uphold. A few weeks after his sailing

a message was despatched from Parliament commanding him not to fight. He

was to strike his colours and surrender the Indies. But the message

arrived too late. Rodney had already fought and won when the craven

message reached him. The battle had happened off Dominica, and the flag

of England remained triumphant in the Caribbean Sea. The English ships

were victorious, and Rodney had saved his country against his country’s

will. And since that day no one has challenged England’s supremacy in

the islands of the West.

The history of the West Indies is filled with chapters as strong even as

this; in no corner of the world have so many brave deeds been done for

“England, home, and beauty.” Stories of mighty Spanish galleons sunk by

British ships of war; of pillage and bloodshed and treasure; of the

battles of France and Spain and England; of the wealth of the Spanish

main, intercepted among these islands, and stored in some West Indian

port for convenience of British merchant adventure houses, are

encountered at every step on our journey through the records of the

Caribbean group. We read of buccaneers and filibusters; of Morgan, the

last of the tribe, knighted and made Vice-Governor of Jamaica; of the

doings of the redoubtable Kidd; of the bloodiness of Blackbeard; of the

countless list of names, some high-sounding, which at last were painted

in crimson splashes on the gallows slip at Port Royal headland. Port

Royal itself deserves a niche in the temple of fame. The richest and the

most vicious town the world ever knew; so it was before the clean ocean

washed away its vice and corruption, and buried it deep in the pure

water of the blue Caribbean. When Morgan knew it, when the prizes of

Kidd and the others were moored alongside its treasure-laden wharves,

the strip of land contained the richest city in the world.

Bearded seamen, bronzed and weather-stained, but decked with priceless

jewellery and the finest silks of the Orient, swaggered along its quays,

and gambled with heavy golden coins whose value no one cared to

estimate. The drinking shops were filled with cups of gold and silver,

embellished with flashing gems. Each house was a treasure store. The

place was a gilded hell, and mammon held sovereign sway over its people.

Such wealth and vice and debauchery had never been dreamed of. Common

seamen bathed in the richest wine, and hung their ears with heavy gold

rings studded with the costliest gems. Dagger thrusts were as common as

brawls, and the body of a murdered man would remain in a dancing-room

until the dancing was over. Gold and precious stones were cheap, but

life was cheaper. And every man in that crowd of pirates lived beneath

the shadow of the gallows.

Finer it is to remember the Western voyages of Drake and Hawkins and all

the old sea-dogs who first proclaimed the might of British seamen.

Picture them, scurvy-stricken, reduced by disease and famine, resting

and recruiting in the wide bays of any West Indian isle. Imagine their

joy at finding luscious fruits and sweet, health-giving water. Then see

them in their tiny ships darting from behind the cover of some wooded

neck of land, surprising a galleon ten times their weight, scuttling the

little vessel and manning the Spanish leviathan with British seamen. How

many little English barques lie beneath the dark blue waters of the Gulf

of Mexico! Having found their prize and tasted the joy of victory, the

British captains thirst for more. They sail the Spanish seas in a

Spanish ship, and sack the coast towns, levying heavy toll; they fight

great battles and pound the deeply laden treasure ships with Spanish

cannon trimmed by British gunners. They select the richest spoil and

fling the rest to the waves. How many bars of gold and silver, how many

crates of silks, and iron boxes filled with gems; how many sacks of

doubloons have sunk in these Western waters, and lie there now, buried

amidst the skeleton of a rotting vessel!

All these things were done in these seas by Englishmen in the days of

old, done for greed of gain and the lust of bloodshed. Done also in the

name of religion, and because two sects, worshipping the same God,

quarrelled in regard to ritual; and because one sect put a sword at the

throat of the other and said, Do as we do, or die. Just as the

Inquisition proved to be the undoing of the might and wealth of Spain,

so did the Inquisition, indirectly, give the West Indies to the English.

The West Indian waters formed the training school of Drake and

Frobisher, Hawkins and Raleigh; and these men founded the navy. In later

days Rodney revived the Caribbean school, and there Nelson learned how

to outwit the French in ocean battles. Because of these things, but not

only because of these things, do we owe a great debt to these Antillean

islands.

So far as we are concerned the history of the Indies is a medley of

romance, the romance of British greatness. There we laid the foundation

of our Empire; the Caribbean Sea is the font of the temple of our

greatness.

But, for the islands themselves, there is little record

[Illustration: SUNRISE OVER THE HILLS, JAMAICA]

of history save where their existence first influenced the politics of

Europe. The Spaniards were the first white men to tread their fragrant

shores and bring destruction to a race of wild red men whose first

instinct was that of fear. Columbus, the Genoese mariner, first and

greatest of all explorers, anchored his tiny vessels in Morant Bay,

Jamaica, on his second voyage to America. The beauty of the place

bewildered him, and when his patron, the King of Spain, asked for a

description of the island, the artistic Genoese crumpled a piece of

paper, and presented that as a picture of the rugged formation of the

Queen of the Antilles. Four times did Columbus journey to the Indies,

which were annexed by him to the Spanish Crown. The horrors of the early

Spanish rule can only be imagined. Millions of the gentle Caribs were

transported to the mainland, and worked to death in the Spanish gold

mines. Those that were permitted to remain were, if they survived the

Inquisition, pressed into slavery.

So the Spaniards ruled for a century and a half; for one hundred and

sixty years they claimed the bulk of the West Indian islands as their

own. This claim was uncontested by the powers of Europe, but the

Spaniards were harassed always by the buccaneers, French and English,

whose ships swept the main in search of prey. Whether England was at war

with Spain or not, the English sea-dogs were always at the throats of

Spaniards in the western hemisphere.

The Protector Cromwell essayed to break the Western power of Spain, and

sent Penn and Venables to crush them out of the Indies. In an

engagement off Domingo the British were defeated, but the doughty

English captains retired on to Jamaica, which they annexed to England.

Then the French filibusters drove the Spaniards out of Hayti, and gave

it to the crown of France. The French had held the smaller

Antilles--Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Antigua. In

times of war with France, Britain had taken these islands, but they had

been retaken by the French. It was in Rodney’s time that they all came

permanently under the English flag. Nowadays the British hold all the

larger islands, the French retain the smaller lands of Martinique,

Guadaloupe, Deserva, Marie Galante, Les Saints, St. Bartholomew, and

part of St. Martin, the Dutch hold five, the Danish three, and Spain

still holds three. One or two are part of the Venezuelan Republic,

Puerto Rico belongs to the U.S.A., and several are independent.

JAMAICA

[Illustration: CASTRIES BAY, ST. LUCIA]

CHAPTER II

JAMAICA

Sitting under the shade of a verandah, watching the brilliant

butterflies and many-coloured birds fluttering and wheeling among the

sweet-scented flowers of Jamaica, it is difficult for one to remember

how one passed out of England--I had almost written out of the

world--and reached this land, which surely should be called God’s

Island. But, I remember, a day or two ago we reached Turk’s Island, and

after handing a few bags of mails to a black, buccaneer-like boatman,

who said he was the postmaster, we glided along the shore--a few miles

of low-lying, palm-treed coral-land--and sailed into the Caribbean Sea.

And so we reached the tropics--the other side of the world. At last we

were among the hundred isles of the West Indies, and in the full glare

of the tropic sun. The paint blistered and bubbled on the handrail, and

the sea seemed a giant mirror, on which the sun flashed silver-white,

with never-ceasing, blinding force. There seemed to be no air; the space

it should have occupied was transparent, and, apparently, empty. It was

difficult to move; truth to tell, I remember feeling a little

uncomfortable; but, all the same, it was heavenly.

By Turk’s Island it rained. There was a sudden darkness, the blinding

sun disappeared, the air became cooler, and then down came the rain. The

deck of the ship became a waterfall, and for thirty minutes or so we

were enveloped in a furious deluge.

But ten minutes after the rain had ceased, the deck, the sails, and the

canvas deck-awnings were dry as though sun-scorched for centuries. That

was our weather. We lived on fruit and tepid baths. It was too hot for

sleep, too hot for work, too hot for conversation. In the tropics the

only thing possible is “nothing"--and a long, iced drink.

Lolling on deck in the daytime, we could watch the flying fish, the

dolphin, the drifting nautilus, and the hungry shark; or view the

islands as slowly they glided backwards into impenetrable haze. To the

right Cuba, a thin irregular line on the horizon, glistening gold above

the blue-white of the sea; to the left Hayti, the land in which the

black man is supreme, and where, in spite of science and the twentieth

century, cannibalism and child murder exist. The white patches, which

show above the green of the plantations as you crawl along the shore,

are houses. They stand as monuments to the French, who once were masters

of the land--masters until, by order of their Government, the

French-owned slaves were free--when, by way of exercising their

new-found freedom, the niggers slaughtered every white on the island.

Since then Hayti has been a republic--a republic with many presidents

and many disturbances.

At night there was the wonderful moon and the cool, fresh air. It was

pleasant to watch the sea; astern, we left a living, toiling, twisting

thread of silver foam; ahead, our bows struck the water, and it flashed

fire. Sometimes all was dark; sometimes the sea blazed with

phosphorescent light. But always overhead the yellow moon and the golden

stars were studded in the blue-black dome of night.

A few hours after leaving Turk’s Island we found Jamaica. Afar off,

through the brilliant air of the morning, we saw a tiny pepper-box,

which presently turned into a sugar-caster, and gradually, by many

complicated but interesting evolutions, developed into a full-fledged

lighthouse. The lighthouse is on Morant Point, and Morant Point is the

beginning of Jamaica. Columbus named the island Santa Gloria; he was the

first European to be bewitched by that low coast-line, all gold shot

with green and darker green, stretching back from the sea to the foot of

the great Blue Mountains; the Blue Mountains, whose peaks, shrouded in

white mist, are buried deep in the hazy sky. Along the shore we sailed,

past cane plantations, banana groves, white houses, snow-white roads,

and great everlasting clumps of graceful palm-trees. Ahead, standing out

at the end of a neck of land, we saw Port Royal--the real, wonderful,

most romantic Port Royal, doubly robed in glory by fiction as well as

history. Here came Nelson, Rodney, Jervis, Collingwood, and every mighty

sailor England ever had.

Moored to these wharves have lain prizes, rich beyond compare, newly

snatched from Spain and France. Here England’s flag, proudly flung from

masts of wooden warships, has proclaimed victory; and here also English

ships, battered and war-stained, have lain under the dread banner of the

buccaneer. For Port Royal was a pirate stronghold centuries before it

became a British naval base.

Sailing along the six miles of narrow coral ridge which connects the

town with the land, it is not difficult to conjure up the Port Royal

Nelson knew. The palm-trees and the luxuriant tropical foliage still

abound; the native craft and the nigger boatmen do not seem to belong to

to-day, and Kingston, hidden and guarded by this strip of land, seems

somehow to suggest romance and mystery. The sea all round is studded

with treacherous coral reefs, some of which, just showing above the

water, are thickly grown with palm-trees. The effect is beautiful in the

extreme; the clumps of trees, planted apparently on nothing, are growing

straight out of the sea.

As you round Port Royal you discover Kingston, a large, white,

straggling town, on the land side entirely hemmed in by the Blue

Mountains, and seawards washed by the waters of a lagoon seven or eight

miles long, and nearly half as wide. Slowly we steamed to the town,

passing an ancient, dismantled and deserted fort, which once mounted its

hundred guns.

[Illustration: KINGSTON HARBOUR AND PORT HENDERSON]

I remember that our good ship was at last made fast to the wooden quay,

and the black-faced, white-coated labourers grinned us greeting as we

stepped ashore. After some excitement with many half-castes representing

the Customs, the hotels, and the buggies, who each and all claimed a

portion of our baggage, we safely emerged from the dock district into

the dusty main road of Kingston. It was strange to find up-to-date,

twentieth century, American, electric cars screaming along roads which,

if they were ever built at all, were certainly completed two centuries

back; and it was even more strange to learn that these cars have not

entirely depopulated Kingston.

I remember being possessed of a great idea of walking to my hotel. A

fresh sea breeze was blowing, and the prospect of a stroll through the

town was peculiarly inviting. But unfortunately the dock gates were

barricaded with buggies, and to successfully evade the manœuvres of

one only meant falling into the clutches of another. Passage between the

vehicles there was none, and when I attempted to step through one

carriage to get clear of the others, the fiendish driver whipped his

ponies and whirled me out of the dockyard before I could regain my

presence of mind. Outside, the delighted man claimed me as a passenger,

and when I found that I was sitting on a singularly pompous and

overheated Britisher, who had been captured in the same enterprising

manner, I forgot to be angry, and began to apologise. The result was

entirely satisfactory--the pompous Britisher never forgave me. We

dropped him, I remember, the first time the ponies took it into their

heads to slow up, but the worthy man seriously offended our driver by

refusing to pay. For half an hour they wrangled in the crowded main

street, and frequently I feared the sudden death of my white friend.

However, the storm came to a sudden and dramatic finish by the skilful

capture of the weary Englishman by another buggyman. We left him cursing

Jamaica and buggies, and particularly all black men. After a series of

adventures and narrow escapes we at last reached the Constant Spring

Hotel. The driver suggested that I should pay him a sovereign, but he

accepted ten shillings with the utmost cheerfulness. Afterwards I

discovered that the fare was certainly not more than a dollar.

I sat in a comfortable wicker chair in the commodious entrance hall of

the hotel and tried to collect my scattered senses. The excitement of my

buggy journey, and the interest of my first glimpse of the capital of

the Queen of the Antilles, had somewhat unstrung my thinking faculties.

I was alone in a strange hotel in a strange country. My luggage was

heaven knows where, and my companions, Forrest and the others, were left

on a crowded quay somewhere down in the dock district.

I called for a cooling drink and mentioned my trouble to the coal-black

waiter.

“That’s al’ light, sah. They come soon, sah.”

So I remained in that comfortable chair in the vestibule of the hotel

and waited. A ragged, disreputable-looking

[Illustration: CONSTANT SPRING, JAMAICA]

John crow, perched on a bush of scarlet blossoms just in front of where

I sat, regarded me with a look of thoughtful contempt. As my nerves got

more settled I became conscious of the rich perfumes of the flowers; the

insects were buzzing and chirping outside, and the strong sun gave to my

shaded resting-place an air of quiet coolness. Graceful negresses were

watering the flower-beds; they carried the watering-cans on their heads

until they found the particular plant they wished to sprinkle with the

refreshing liquid. Their movements were slow and deliberate and very

graceful.

It was a peaceful summer day; from where I sat I could see, afar off, a

thin edge of blue beyond the distant confines of the town, and I made

out the white patches of the sails of little vessels. I lit my pipe and

waited. Suddenly there was a jangle and a crash, and a buggy stopped at

the hotel door; in it the head of my friend Forrest appeared from amidst

a heap of sketch-books, easels, portfolios, and virgin canvases. I could

see by the agonised expression on his flushed countenance that he was

very angry. I called the waiter and told him to help the poor struggling

artist to disentangle himself from the debris of his paraphernalia.

Poor Forrest came to where I sat and sank into another wicker chair. He

seized my cooling drink and emptied the glass at one gulp.

“Where am I?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Where’s Large and the Colonel?”

I shook my head.

“Seen my luggage?”

I shook my head again.

He glanced through the doorway and caught sight of the disreputable John

crow perched on the bank of scarlet blossoms, and, fumbling for a

pencil, made his first Jamaican sketch there and then. I ordered another

cooling drink, and so we waited for our luggage and our friends.

Jamaica is the largest and most important island in the British West

Indies. It contains an area of some two thousand odd square miles, and

supports a population of three quarters of a million people, only two

per cent of whom are white. The blacks claim the predominating

proportion of seventy-seven per cent, the “coloured” people represent

nearly twenty per cent, and the remainder of the population is made up

of whites, Indian coolies, and Chinese. The ten thousand coolies at work

on the plantations in the interior have become a force in the island,

and they are destined to play a considerable part in the commercial

salvation of the country. The negroes are, of course, the descendants of

the slaves imported from Africa in the days of the slave trade; the

coloured class are the offsprings of the union of the whites with the

blacks, or of the half-breeds with the negroes. The coolies are of

recent importation from India, and the Chinese have come, no one knows

how, to trade with the negroes in up-country districts.

In the days of old, Jamaica waxed fat on the profits of her sugar

estates and the rich prizes of her rum trade. Fortunes were made almost

without effort or exertion by old-time planters. Sugar was sold at

absurdly high prices, and the planters cultivated their plantations

entirely by slave labour.

The Emancipation Act of 1834 flung the industries of the island out of

joint, and although the Imperial Government granted compensation to the

extent of nearly six millions sterling to the owners of the three

hundred thousand slaves they had liberated, the dry rot of decay set in,

and Jamaica fell from her high position among commercial communities.

The richest planters sold out their plantations and returned to the old

country; the poorer planters who remained in the island were terribly

handicapped for lack of labour. The freed slaves refused to work for

their late masters, and the labour difficulty set in. Factories were

forced to stop work; fields lay unplanted and untended for lack of

workers. And this labour difficulty has remained more or less acute from

that day to this. It was believed by the authorities that the

introduction of the ten thousand coolies would help to solve the

difficulty. The negroes had built for themselves little huts, and were

content to live on the native fruits and vegetables. The pleasant

indolence of their new life suited their tastes to a nicety; the rewards

offered in return for their labour were neither sufficient nor in any

way attractive. The warm climate and rich soil were all the Jamaican

African required to make his life all that he desired. Sugar

plantations were abandoned and rum factories were shut down, and poverty

came to the land of wood and water. Naturally the white people resented

the idleness of the blacks, and several eruptions occurred; the Gordon

riots, and other disturbances less notorious, were directly caused by

the impatience of the whites and the impertinence of the blacks.

Fine as is the picture of those three hundred thousand Africans climbing

the mountain sides of their island prison-home in order that they might

face the sun on the morning of the emancipation, we must not ignore the

prospect of the valleys, lying in the deep shadows of those mountains,

which were to be half desolated by the glory of that sunrise. If the

black men were willing to work as hard now, or even half as hard, as

their fathers once were forced to work, we should hear no dreary stories

of Jamaica’s poverty. The island has got an ideal climate, a

marvellously productive soil, and labourers in plenty; it lacks but the

spirit of labour. The natural wealth of the country is vast enough, but

the harvesters are idle and unwilling to work. The fact that the

Government was forced to bring ten thousand coolies from distant India

to work in the plantations and factories is a lasting disgrace to most

of the five hundred thousand black men and many of the hundred and fifty

thousand coloured folk. The pity of it is that neither of these classes

seems to feel the sting of the disgrace. The negro has in his being no

instinct for labour; the women only are willing workers.

[Illustration: A NEGRO]

Solve the Jamaica labour problem and the commercial problem will solve

itself.

The climate of the island is as nearly perfect as any climate can hope

to be. It is a country of perpetual sunshine and blue skies. The heat of

the day is tropical, but it is always tempered by cool sea breezes; and

when the sun has gone the evenings and the nights are deliciously cool

and refreshing. The island is really possessed of many different

climates. The towns and villages among the hills on the mountain slopes

are always cooler than the cities of the plains. The climate of the

place has always been grossly maligned by people of the homeland. On my

first journey out to Jamaica I imagined that I should find the place

filled with yellow fever and malaria; I thought of it as a sort of West

Africa--only a little worse. And I found it the most pleasant and

healthy place imaginable. In spite of all the statements and statistics

to the contrary, the conservative people of England still believe that a

journey to the Queen of the Antilles includes the risk of yellow jack.

Fevers there are, of course, just as in England there are coughs and

colds; and I would choose a Jamaica fever before an English cold. Yellow

fever is a disease which attacks you when you least expect it, and

leaves you quite dead, or nearly so. It is an uncanny, unwholesome

thing, and is not a respecter of persons. Really, for all practical

purposes, Jamaica is free of yellow fever; the disease has been stamped

out. People die of it even to this date; but even England is not

entirely free from smallpox. Yet one cannot describe smallpox as one of

the characteristics of our little island. In the same way it would be

foolish to associate Jamaica with yellow fever.

The Jamaicans discuss the disease with dispassionate, respectful dread.

It is a thing to be avoided; if met face to face it must be combated

with heroism, and a particular remedy peculiar almost to every

inhabitant. Many there are alive on the island who have had the yellow

jack and lived; many more there are who still mourn the loss of those

who bowed before its malignant power. The younger colonists--those

people who have lived there only ten or fifteen or twenty years--talk of

the ’97 outbreak; the old inhabitants speak of the last real epidemic,

the ’77 affair. So and so went down then, and poor old what’s-his-name

died in two hours. I met one man who told me of a picnic he gave in the

mountains some seven years ago. Sixteen guests sat down; eight died of

yellow fever before the year closed down. That would be in the ’97

outbreak. But these are rare cases.

Malarial fever is common in the towns and some parts of the country in

Jamaica, but it is a little fever without strength; it is not dangerous.

There is no malignant malarial. Though Jamaicans contract malarial as

frequently perhaps as Englishmen catch cold in London, the malarial is

not so dangerous as the cold. So it is not of much account. Jamaica is a

pleasanter place to live in than London, but new arrivals should adapt

themselves to the condition of things. Clothes and habits admirably

adapted for the English climate are generally out of place in a tropical

island.

The staple products of the island are entirely agricultural. Jamaica has

embraced the fruit trade. Half the total value of her exports is

represented by her over-sea trade in bananas, oranges, grape fruit, and