The West Indies

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 comp...

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 diffi...

The town of Kingston is made up of mean streets crammed with little bungalow houses, filled to overflowing with people coloured in all the shades of black and yellow. If the pla...

At one time Jamaica was peopled by a race of red men whose beauty and timidity were the wonder and convenience of the little band of Europeans who were the first whites to tread...

In the day-time it is good to sit on one of the jutting piers which fringe the bay of Kingston, and, lolling under the deep shade of a heavy roof, give the sea breeze free play...

The native of Jamaica flies to religion as an ant creeps to the honey-pot. Give a nigger a few catch-words and a ritual in which he can take a leading part, and there is no more...

“Turtles or tortoises constitute one of the orders of reptiles, the _Chelonia_. They are characterised by having the trunk of the body incased in a more or less ossified carapac...

Wild Man Street is the central place of Jamaican gaiety. In the day-time it seems an ordinary street, white in the roadway and green in its walls of painted houses. The evening...

In Jamaica the Army is mainly considered as a prop to society. Among the whites the officers are in great request as dancing men, players at the game of tennis and possible husb...

A square room painted white and fitted with dull red benches and a raised platform; on the platform the magistrate, a weary-looking man with faded hair and wrinkled face, and ey...

In the streets of Kingston I had frequently seen companies of one or other of the brilliant West Indian Regiments swinging along to the music of their drums, and on dance and di...

Foremost in the list of a negro’s recreations should be placed the game of love. The black man makes love with the persistency of a Don Juan and with the fervour of a Mexican. H...

You can see him in the market-place or in the drinking-shops. Sometimes he lolls about with his thin cigarette on the Kingston tram cars, but more frequently he is to be found l...

Jamaica, the land of wood and water, is rich in the possession of countless streams of clear, rushing water. Each of its mountains and rocky hills contains at least one or two f...

I met him in a country road a few miles out of Spanish Town. He was a well-dressed black, and had that air of sanctity about him which immediately suggests the church of Nonconf...

I have given at length a political conversation I had with an intelligent and well-informed negro. May I add the record of the talk I had with an important servant of the Govern...

In Jamaica there is a railway which carries passengers of the first and second class in carriages that would not necessarily disgrace even the London, Chatham, and Dover line in...

Jamaica is a land of perpetual peace and sunshine. The hills and valleys of this, the most beautiful of all the fair islands of the West Indies, are always clothed in a great pr...

Those sanguine friends of the West Indies who think that the abolition of the beet bounties necessarily means the industrial salvation of Jamaica, forget that the beet bounties...

Because Jamaica is famous for its woods and plants and scented blossoms, one may be pardoned for roughly cataloguing a few of the three or four thousand different species of flo...

We drove to the race-course through a tropical heat haze. The narrow Jamaica lanes and the wider roads were stunned into reverberating silence by the power of the heavy sun. We...

The white inhabitants of Jamaica swear by the hill stations: Newcastle, Mandeville, Malvern, Belle Vue and the rest. The description of the journey to Newcastle will stand as an...

I went to tea with some people who were neither white, nor black, nor yellow. They were not half castes, not even quadroons. Octoroons they would be called if they were very poo...

If I have not mentioned all the names of the places in Jamaica dear to the hearts of tourists, and of towns which are the pride and glory of Jamaicans, it is because I do not th...

Do not believe every story you hear which makes against the character of the Governor or his wife. It is difficult for a high official, for the direct representative of H.M. the...

Because I have exhausted so much space on a description of Jamaica, and the people of Jamaica, it must not be imagined that the shadow of the Queen of the Antilles clouds all th...

Hayti is a black republic--a place where the negro race is predominant. No white man may claim any plantation or even an acre of land in the Haytian republic as his own. The neg...

It may be that I am entirely unfitted to deal at any great length with that most complicated, most difficult of all problems, the negro question. The problem is a matter which m...