Mary Gaunt

“ All round the walls from their embrasures grinned those eighteen guns that defended the castle and terrorised the negroes. And round them is piled up the shot that has never been used and will never be used now. On the west side the coconut palms have grown up, the wind whispers among the fronds that overshadow the guns, whispers that though their day is done the problem that they started still remains, and has only been taken with blood and bitter tears to the other side of the Atlantic. By the sea-shore of this lovely island I hear its echo crying mournfully. ”

“ When the tropical day drew swiftly to its ending, and the sun sank gorgeous into the sea, when the purple and gold changed to bands of seashell pink and delicate nile green, and the shadows swept up and the stars, gleaming crystals, came out in a sky of velvet, then for me those dead-and-gone slaves, trapped in a web of circumstance, rose from their graves and walked along the shore. Ignorant, toil-worn, insolent, cringing by turns, with all the vices of their unwilling servitude upon them, they cry to high heaven for vengeance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Look at the people, white people all, industrious, thrifty, admirable in many ways—and about as far advanced in civilisation as they were at the end of the eighteenth century! Their women are worn with toil, they are haggard and old, toothless crones, before they are thirty. All the joy and loveliness has gone out of their life. Up in the mountains they are devout enough, but they have no use for modern science, and as I saw them they are not as far advanced as many a negro I have met in Jamaica, even as the negroes are far behind the farmers of Australia and New Zealand. ”

“ They might be met any day, a band of stalwart black savages clad only in loin cloths, the women, apart with their babies seated on their hips, leading older children by the hand, marching along the white roads, clambering up the steep mountain paths to the estate that was to be their destination, with a white man on horseback following slowly, and one, or two, or three black drivers, according to the number of the new slaves, with whips, old slaves who could be trusted, marshalling them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the house slaves listened round-eyed and passed on the news to the field labourers and the streets of the town—those shamefully shadeless streets were thronged with people half-fearing, half-comforted with the reflection that soon the hills above the town would no longer be occupied by the savage Maroons. And, indeed, one hundred and four great dogs, even though muzzled and held by great rattling chains, ferociously making at every strange object and dragging the chasseurs after them, must have made a formidable array. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There came into the harbour at Kingston, the lovely harbour which is not half appreciated, a warship with the Stars and Stripes at her peak, and the black men in the streets and all along the harbour shores looked on with the greatest interest, More than one man took off the ugly tourist cap with the deep peak which seems a speciality of Jamaica, and scratched his wool thoughtfully and then one was found to voice the thoughts of the rest. ”

“ And I say that deliberately, knowing all the hardships that the white man has inflicted, for when I talk of the time of servitude of the blacks in the West Indies, you, my readers, will do me the justice to own that I have by no means glossed over the crudities and the foolishness and the brutality of men of my own colour. But the world is changing, changing fast. It is a better place to live in in this twentieth century, it will be a better place still as the years roll on, and the black man like the white will come into his own. ”

“ This is what the white people feared subconsciously all the time. What the girls feared when they let down their hair and undressed for the night, when they drew together the shutters and shut out the gorgeous tropical moonlight, what the master of the house feared when he stirred in his sleep, uneasily, roused because the dogs were barking, what the mother feared as she hushed her baby's crying to listen, and wonder if that were the tramp of unshod feet over in the direction of the breeze mill. ”

“ With whip and chain the white man taught the black—drove the thought into him with the branding iron—that manual labour was a despicable thing, something only to be undertaken by those who could do no better, and we cannot undo that teaching in a few years. Indeed it is only in the last few years, only since the cruel war which has made us all so wise, that Britain herself learned the lesson.
I have always been keenly interested in openings for women, and inclined to be wrathful when other women talk as if matrimony were the only career for a woman. ”

“ I have thought of it many a time since I came to Jamaica, for always the slave risings—and the risings were many—were headed by the Koromantyns. Even now, guarding nothing, for the courtyard is overgrown with tropical vegetation, its ruined walls rise up tall and steep and straight, and at their foot among the rubble and coarse grass, lie rusting the cannon that once made them formidable. ”

“ They must have been a forlorn and ragged crew of savages the book-keepers saw out into the fields every morning at daybreak. They evidently made them work in the hot and glaring sunshine, holeing for canes, cutting canes, and carting manure on their heads, this last a job much hated, and the whites never remembered, if they ever knew, that no black man or woman works of his own free will in the glare of the tropical sun. On the Gold Coast I have heard the people going out into the fields long before daylight, but I have never seen men or women working hard during the midday hours. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Would not the men and women who had been driven so unwillingly through that long-tunnelled entrance, been shut up in those dark dungeons on the ground floor, come back mourning and wailing? Would not the white man, who had looked out over the sea with longing eyes, come tramping those stones again, heedless of dark mistress or coffers slowly piling with gold, counting the days, as he had counted them so often, when in his own pleasant land again he would enjoy the fruits of his labour? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most men went there to make their fortunes, with every intention of returning to spend them. Only Hans Sloane, a wise and far-seeing man, saw the glory of the land, and left behind him a record of its wealth and its beauty and fertility. Lady Nugent, writing more than one hundred years later, was much more swayed by public opinion, and saw what she was told she would see, a deadly climate where men died like flies, though even she does arrive at the poignant fact that the women who lived with less licence, bore this climate far better than their mates. ”

“ Here was an island, a beautiful island truly, but a rugged and heavily timbered land, a fertile land, but the mountains so entrancing and so inaccessible, were full of dangers, known and unknown. And the known were deadly. The Spaniards still lurked in their leafy depths, and even when they left they encouraged their abandoned slaves to keep up the feud, and no man could stray from the armed shelter of his comrades without risking death, often a painful and cruel death. ”

“ It was an uncomfortable job, as the Dutch Skipper Clause found, but there was money in it, men were not very tender even of each other in olden days, and they counted as little the pains suffered by the luckless people whom they held in bondage. Says Montesquieu, who was before his time, “Slavery is not good in itself. It is useful neither to the master nor the slave. Not to the slave because he can do nothing from virtuous motives. Not to the master, because he contracts among his slaves all sorts of bad habits, and accustoms himself to the neglect of all the moral virtues. ”

“ To me it is a strange thing that I cannot explain to myself, that our pity is more easily aroused by the story of one individual case than by the tale of suffering in the mass. It was an awful thing to leave those helpless people confined and shackled, and at the mercy of the winds and waves; it was still worse to shoot them down when by their own pluck and intrepidity they had succeeded in saving themselves. There were little children amongst them, and they too must have been shot down; they too must have raised despairing little hands to brutes who knew not the meaning of the word pity. ”

“ They tramp miles—old women, young women, boys, and little girls who step out on sturdy little black legs and swing their short and scanty frocks, and are smiling under a load that surprises me, for they are proud that they, too, may join the throng of wage-earners, small wage-earners when we compare results with other labourers in the outside world, but still, slaves no longer, and earning money that is their very own. ”