The “Ruin” of Jamaica, Chapter I.—: Historical Introduction.

Perhaps there is not a single delusion more systematically and more perseveringly practised upon the good people of the United States, and of Great Britain too, than the comparison so perpetually brought to their notice of the alleged present economical ruin of the Island of Jamaica, as contrasted with its alleged former prosperity, and with the present prosperity of the neighboring Island of Cuba. And what gives the greater effect to this delusion is, that the instruments for spreading it are frequently men of honest intentions, and, on the generality of subjects, very well informed, but whose total ignorance of the history of Jamaica makes them easy dupes, and who, indeed, are very often blindly led into the ditch by guides in the form of respectable residents of the island, hardly less ignorant than themselves; for it is not among the residents of Jamaica that any thing beyond very superficial ideas of the history of the island is generally to be found.

As the bearing of this matter on grave domestic questions gives to it a high degree of interest, we propose to explain the true state of facts with respect to Jamaica, past as well as present, in order to put our readers in the position to draw legitimate conclusions, and to avoid being deluded by falsehoods, which, though reported by almost every mail from the West Indies, whatever currency and general acceptation they may gain by that repetition, are not rendered thereby any the less groundless and delusive.

The Island of Jamaica has an extent of a little less than six thousand square miles. It is thus about the size of the States of Connecticut and Rhode Island together. Like all the West India Islands, it consists of a central group of mountains, with fertile plains, of no great width, extending from their foot to the coast. Being placed directly south of the east end of Cuba, and thus cut off from the northern breezes, which reach it much in the state of a sponge already once squeezed, it suffers much more from drought than either Cuba, Hayti, or Porto Rico; many of its fertile plains, too distant from the mountains, and unfreshed by summer showers, are, from that cause, rendered worthless; while the rugged character of much of the interior, with the climate and difficulties of transportation, wholly unfits it for the production of sugar and coffee. In natural fertility of soil, it is, or rather was,—for of virgin soil fit for cultivation none is left,—decidedly inferior to the other three islands, and more exposed, also, to storms and hurricanes, by which, occasionally, it suffers very severely.

Columbus discovered Jamaica on his second voyage, in May, 1494. In his fourth voyage, in 1503, he ran his leaky vessel on shore on the coast of the island, and remained there for fifteen months. In 1507, Don Diego, Columbus’s viceroy, sent a colony to occupy it. The natives, as in the case of all the West India Islands settled by the Spaniards, were speedily worn out by unaccustomed labor. Negroes were introduced to supply their places; but the demand for colonial produce was then very slight; and when Jamaica surrendered to Admiral Penn (the father of our William Penn) in 1655, with whom was our Winslow, one of the founders of Plymouth colony, and who, being then in England as agent for Massachusetts, was sent out in the fleet by Cromwell, as one of the commissioners for superintending such conquests as might be made, it contained only a thousand or two of Spanish creoles, and a less number of negroes. The Spaniards submitted to the invaders; most of the negroes fled to the interior mountains, where they became the progenitors of the maroons, recruited from time to time by additional runaways, from whose depredations Jamaica afterwards suffered so much, and of whom she finally got rid, so late as 1796, only by the disgraceful breach of a capitulation into which they had been induced to enter. These maroons, transported by that breach of faith to Nova Scotia, became, along with some of the refugee slaves from Virginia and Maryland, whom the British at the close of the revolutionary war had refused to give up, the first settlers of the colony of Sierra Leone, and some of their descendants are at this day thriving merchants, and among the leading inhabitants of that Anglo-African settlement.

Cromwell, who had expected to get St. Domingo, from which his fleet was repulsed, was anxious to make all he could out of Jamaica. He tried to persuade the settlers at New Haven, who had not prospered altogether according to their expectations, to remove thither in a body, and in a sermonizing letter endeavored to convince them that they had a call from God to that work. They declined this pressing invitation; but among the adventurers who did go to Jamaica was Samuel Vassall, who had been one of the first settlers of Massachusetts, but whom the intolerant spirit prevailing there had induced to leave, and whose large landed estates acquired in Jamaica passed finally, together with his name, into the family of the Foxes, the head of which now bears the aristocratic title of Lord Holland.

Winslow, who died shortly after landing, was succeeded by Sedgwick, another New England man, who had served in the parliamentary army, and whose posterity are very honorably distinguished among us. But this new commissioner, on arriving in Jamaica, did not find things in a very promising condition. The soldiers left there had been principally drawn from the Island of Barbadoes, which had then a much larger white population than at present—being, in fact, at that time (just two hundred years ago) the most populous and wealthy of the English colonies in America. But these troops by no means came up to the standard of our good Puritan, parliamentary soldier, who was afterwards major general of Massachusetts; and in his official letters he described them very much as our letter writers of to-day describe the Jamaica negroes, “so lazy and idle as it cannot enter into the heart of any Englishman that such blood should run in the veins of any born in England.” To recruit this rather unpromising population, Cromwell ordered a thousand girls and young men to be enlisted in Ireland, and he directed the administrators of the Scottish government to apprehend all “known idle, masterless robbers and vagabonds” for transportation thither. A certain number of prisoners of war were also disposed of in the same manner.

The best thing that offered to these first English settlers in Jamaica was privateering against the Spaniards; and even after the establishment of amicable relations between Spain and England, they still kept it up. So far did Sir Thomas Modyford, who was governor in 1668, carry his notions of colonial rights,—a man after the heart of our nullifiers, whom he anticipated by almost two centuries,—that he declared war on behalf of the island against Spain, merely for the sake of being able to give commissions to the cruisers; for it is to be observed that the buccaneers of those times, like the kidnappers of ours, always preferred, when it was possible, to act under a commission. The prosperity of Jamaica, like that of the neighboring colony of French St. Domingo, (the present empire of Hayti,) thus took its start from buccaneering. Such was the source of the wealth, luxury, and profligacy, no doubt exaggerated by tradition, of Port Royal, now become an English town. But Sir Thomas Modyford was not, by any means, a man of one idea. Besides granting commissions to the buccaneers, it was he too who introduced the cultivation of sugar; and when buccaneering began to grow less profitable, and more dangerous,—though till the last moment Port Royal afforded them a market for their prizes and entertainment for their money,—the richer and more stable-minded of the old buccaneers began to import and buy negroes, and to turn their attention to sugar planting—the introduction into Europe of the use of tea and coffee having opened an enlarged market, and created a new demand for that article. From buccaneering to sugar planting—such was the second step in the career of population and prosperity alike in Jamaica and in French St. Domingo.

Jamaica, however, still retained its interest in navigation; and from fighting and plundering the Spaniards began now to trade with them. This trade, in fact, had in it something of the excitement, the risks, and the profits, too, of buccaneering; for the Spanish colonial system allowed no commerce with strangers, and the traffic actually carried on had either to be forced, in spite of the Spanish guarda costas, or insinuated by vessels that anchored off the coast under pretence of leaks, injury by storms, or lack of supplies, the eyes of the Spanish officers being closed with gold; or else worked through under cover of the assiento treaty, by which Spain had ceded first to France, and afterwards to England, the privilege of introducing, annually, a certain number of negro slaves into her colonies, with whom the vessels admitted for that purpose contrived also to smuggle in a great many other kinds of goods.

Port Royal was ruined by an earthquake in 1722, but Kingston succeeded it, and grew to be the largest town in the West Indies—not at all as a mere port for shipping sugar and landing plantation supplies, but as the entrepot of the entire British trade with Spanish America. And this entrepot it remained till the revolt of the Spanish colonies, first against the Bonaparte family and afterwards against the restored Bourbons, by opening the Spanish American ports to legitimate commerce, made any such smuggling entrepot unnecessary. Kingston, also, while the slave trade lasted, was the grand British entrepot for that traffic; and Bryan Edwards calculates that, besides the import for domestic supply, Kingston had, during the eighteenth century, the profits on half a million of negroes furnished to other colonies, foreign and British.

The city of Kingston was thus built up by smuggling and slave trading. Both these occupations are now gone, and no other has yet been created to supply their places. This simple statement of historical facts will serve to explain the decay, dilapidation, and houses to let, observed by correspondents at Kingston, the general stopping-place of travellers, and the source whence come so many Jeremiads about ruin, decay, and insolent free niggers that won’t work. The very same result from similar causes might have been seen twenty years ago in many dilapidated New England seaport towns, such as Newport, Salem, and Newburyport, into which manufacturing industry has again introduced bustle and prosperity. Jamaica, however, so far from having any protective policy to aid her in contending against the revolutions of commerce, after having been for years the spoilt child of Protection, having been as a slave colony always sustained by the close monopoly (in common with the other British sugar islands) of the British sugar market, and by occasional large parliamentary grants of money direct, has been exposed as a free colony, with its lands exhausted, its credit greatly diminished, and its supply of labor curtailed, to a thorough-going free-trade competition, not only with the virgin soil, resident proprietors, and large slave importations of Cuba, but with British capital and skill also newly employed to aid in bringing these advantages into most effectual play.