SETTLERS AT PORT MORANT

35

To this boiling pot Cromwell sent out 1000 Irish men and 1000 Irish women. I can find nothing but the bare notification that they arrived, and it hardly seems to me those 2000 Irish can have helped matters much, whether they were poor convicts or political prisoners.

Somebody must till the ground, that was clear; and there came along Luke Stokes, the Governor of Nevis, intrigued by the stories of the new conquest; he brought with him 1600 people, men, women, children, and slaves, to settle in the eastern part of the colony round Port Morant on the site of an old Spanish hato. The Jamaican Government hoped much from these new importations.

Nevis is a tiny mountain island only fifty square miles in extent, and the people who came from there came to work and were accustomed to the isolation that is the lot of the pioneer. They settled in a part fertile certainly, with a wonderful and amazing fertility, but where the rainfall was very heavy and the heat far greater than in little Nevis, where the sea breeze swept every corner. There were mosquitoes too in the swamps, and a number of those settlers died, men, women, children, and slaves. Governor Stokes had hardly built himself a house when he and his wife died. If it was lonely in Nevis, ringed by the eternal sea, it was lonelier far in Port Morant, Jamaica, with the swamps around and the mountains, beautiful but stern and inaccessible, frowning down upon them.

We know very little about those first comers, but we do know that after the first decimating sickness that fell upon them, the remainder held on and tried to make good.

There were in 1671, the historian Long tells us, sixty settlements in the Port Morant district.

Probably we should read for the word "settlements "estates," either pens or sugar estates. Now to people who do not understand conditions in Jamaica that sounds quite thickly populated. But Jamaica is all hills and valleys-rather I should say, steep precipices and deep ravines-and, as I cannot say too often, especially in that district the vegetation is dense. A mile in Jamaica, it often seemed to me, is farther than ten in England, much farther than a hundred in Australia. Even now many pens, many sugar estates are cut off entirely from neighbours. I lived for three months a guest of hospitable Miss Maxwell Hall, at her house Kempshot, on top of a steep mountain, from which we could see literally hundreds of hills melting away into the dim distance. We could see Montego Bay 1800 feet below us, but no other habitation of a white man was in sight, and we were so cut off by the inaccessibility of the country that though my hostess is certainly one of the most charming and popular young women in the countryside, no one from the town ever made their way up that steep hill. They were content that she who knew the road should come down and see them when she had the time.

When we talk about the colonising of Jamaica, I think we ought to take into consideration the isolation that was of necessity the lot of almost every colonist.

And I think we may count these men from Nevis the very first agriculturists who did make good, and find a living in the soil of an island that is certainly one of the assets of the Empire. I am lost in admiration of these pioneers. They lived to themselves, they were entirely dependent upon themselves. Were they sick? They must see things through, die, or get well. As the crow flies, help As the crow flies, help might be near

LOOP-HOLED FOR DEFENCE

37

enough, but the steep mountain paths were cut by impassable torrents or blocked by dense vegetation. Their slaves might rise-probably they did-for slavery either for the white man or the black is not conducive to contentment, and they had to face it and bring them to a sense of their wrongdoing without outside aid. And then there was that other danger from the corsairs or pirates who swept the seas and made descents upon the lonely plantations, looking for meat, or rum, sometimes for women, and always for any trifles in gold or silver or jewels that might be picked up, and they were as ruthless as a Sinn Feiner in their methods. No wonder the houses were built stern and strong with thick walls loop-holed for defence. They They might reckon on the slaves to help them here, for the slaves would not have much to hope for if they fell into the hands of the pirates. A slave's lot was probably hard enough anyway, but I think it was perhaps better to belong to a settler, to whom his services were of value, than to a pirate who evidently in those days counted a man's life about on a par with that of a beetle. They must have been a narrow, capable, self-centred people those settlers who came from Nevis and made good at Port Morant.

Cromwell was very anxious that the island should be peopled and both he and Charles II. gave patents for land freely, and though there does not seem to have been much competition for these patents, still some men did come and were planted over the colony.

The need of the island, of course, was women. Some of the old Spanish settlers gave in their submission and they probably had daughters and young sisters to be wooed by the rough English soldiery. I don't know if any of those who took out patents

D

married in this way. Probably they did, especially in the north, but sometimes they brought their wives from the Old Country.

At Little River in 1670 the lands were surveyed by Richard and Mary Rutledge, and other people took to themselves parcels of land there, varying in size from 50 to 200 acres. It is a rich country, this island that the Spaniards held so long, with rivers running down from the wooded mountains and in the rich river-bottoms almost any tropical plant will grow. The farther I went to the north-west the more fertile I found the country, and at Lucea, Lucea with the lovely little harbour well sheltered from storms, they grow yams, yams that are a byword in a land that will always grow yams. All along the road by the sea, that lovely road, came creaking great carts drawn by oxen-yes, even in these days of motors, bullock drays driven by shouting black drivers, piled high with Lucea yams. Yam, I may interpolate, is a

valuable foodstuff. I want butter and milk to it, but the natives, the Creole descendants of the slaves, eat it with coconut oil. The food values of the yam and the potato-the Irish potato, as they quaintly call it in Jamaica-are probably about the same, but you get a great deal more for your money in a yam. It is the food of the common people, while the potato is a luxury. A black man once brought me, as a Christmas present, a cardboard box neatly tied up with pink ribbon, and in it wrapped up in white tissue paper were four "Irish" potatoes! But even potatoes will grow in this goodly land-what will not grow here I believe they cannot raise primroses— and yet these early settlers were not a success.

"In the second generation," says the author of Old St James, "they had all died out or gone, and the only memorials were the graves."

THE ULTRA ENGLISH

39

They used to say in those days, and indeed long after, that unless the population were recruited from the Old Country every white would have gone in seven years. We may take that statement for what it is worth. The Briton, wanderer as he is, has a fixed idea in his own mind that the only place where children can really be reared properly is in those islands in the North Atlantic that he himself quitted in his youth. Even so late as when I was a young woman, I have heard battles royal on the subject of the degeneration of Australia, and there were men from England who held, and held strongly, that Australia cut off from Britain for ten years would degenerate into the savagery of the people the English had found there at the first settlement ! There was no stamina, said these ultra English, in young Australia, in young New Zealand; even the animals became degenerate. But behold, over Australia's plains range the largest flocks of sheep in the world with the very best wool (at least it fetches the highest prices in London), and at Gallipoli the stalwart sons of Anzac proved once for all that they too were Britons, worthy sons of the Empire whose flag they were upholding.

And so it is with Jamaica. Men can live, they can thrive there, but for the first comers, ingrained with British ideas, it was very hard indeed.

We talk about planters, but I fancy some of those first comers were accustomed to live very humbly and had very small intellectual attainments. Of course there were the men of standing and their wives, the men who stood round the Governor, but the men who took out the patents for small parcels of land and lived on their land were probably hardly the equals of the Council School educated labourer of to-day. The only difference would be-and of