Category: Travel Writing
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 curi...
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 Jam...
2. CHAPTER II--THE WHITE BONDSMENIn this year of Our Lord, 1922, there are still people who regard Jamaica as a far, far distant country, and when it was conquered in 1660 it must have been farther from the Bri...
3. CHAPTER III--Jamaica's first historianIt is fascinating to read up the old books that have been written about Jamaica. Wearisome sometimes naturally, because for one illuminating remark you must wade through a mass...
4. CHAPTER IV--The Castles On The Guinea CoastJamaica is a thickly populated country. The last census taken in 1911 gave a population of 197 to the square mile, and this is mostly black, for the same statistics give somethi...
5. CHAPTER V--THE MIDDLE PASSAGEAll up and down the roads of Jamaica tramp ceaselessly the dark people. In the towns now, I notice many of the men, when they have anything to carry, carry it in their hands, un...
6. CHAPTER VI--THE PLANTATIONI can hardly say it too often--in reading about the slaves and their sufferings we must remember that past ages had different standards, and that, although undoubtedly the slave...
7. book I found specially interesting. It was an old brown leather-coveredbook, 18 inches long by 1 foot broad, and round it clung--or so it seemed to me--an unrestful emanation, as if the men who wrote in it were discontented and found life a vexatio...
8. CHAPTER VII--SLAVE REBELLIONSConsidering that every Great House was surrounded by hundreds of these alien dark people, most of them dumbly resentful of their condition, it is to me a little surprising that...
9. mill. It is what Zachary Bayley feared when he tore across the countryBy noon he had collected 130 men, “white men and trusty blacks.” We do not know the proportion of white men to “trusty blacks,” but we do know that the white men were all imbued...
10. CHAPTER VIII--THE MAROONSConsidering the size of Jamaica, it seems strange to say that in the fastnesses of its mountains there lived a body of men, just a handful of them, who actually defied the Briti...
11. CHAPTER IX--THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARSIt is very difficult to understand the attitude towards trivial offences of people who lived in a time when the death penalty was legally inflicted for breaking down the banks o...
12. CHAPTER X--THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS“The imported Africans were wild, savage and barbarous in the extreme; their untractable passions and ferocious temperament rendered severity necessary. They provoked the iron r...
13. CHAPTER XI--THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE“The higher classes are in the utmost alarm at rumours of Wilberforce's intention to set the negroes entirely free; the next step to which would be in all probability a general...
14. CHAPTER XII--JAMAICA AS I SAW ITDorinda came home from church. She had on a neat, blue cotton dress, a snow-white handkerchief was wrapped round her head, her pretty black feet were bare, and her comely dark f...