never met a wider and a kinder hospitality than I did in Jamaica, but I neither ate nor drank in any house in Kingston except my hotel, nor, as far as I can remember, did I enter any house except in the way of business. And yet I was there—necessarily there, unfortunately—for some considerable time. The fact is, that hardly any Europeans, or even white Creoles, live in the town. They have country seats, pens as they call them, at some little distance. They hate the town, and it is no wonder they should do so.
That which tends in part to the desolation of Kingston—or rather, to put the proposition in a juster form, which prevents Kingston from enjoying those advantages which would naturally attach to the metropolis of the island—is this: the seat of government is not there, but at Spanish Town. Then our naval establishment is at Port Royal.
When a city is in itself thriving, populous, and of great commercial importance, it may be very well to make it wholly independent of the government. New York, probably, might be no whit improved were the National Congress to be held there; nor Amsterdam, perhaps, if the Hague were abandoned; but it would be a great thing for Kingston if Spanish Town were deserted.
The Governor lives at the latter place, as do also those satellites or moons who revolve round the larger luminary—the secretaries, namely, and executive officers. These in Jamaica are now so reduced in size that they could not perhaps do much for any city; but they would do a little, and to Kingston any little would be acceptable. Then the Legislative Council and the House of Assembly sit at Spanish Town, and the members—at any rate of the latter body—are obliged to live there during some three months of the year, not generally in very comfortable lodgings.
Respectable residents in the island, who would pay some attention to the Governor if he lived at the principal town, find it impossible to undergo the nuisance of visiting Spanish Town, and in this way go neither to the one nor the other, unless when passing through Kingston on their biennial or triennial visits to the old country.
And those visits to Spanish Town are indeed a nuisance. In saying this, I reflect in no way on the Governor or the Governor's people. Were Gabriel Governor of Jamaica, with only five thousand pounds a year, and had he a dozen angels with him as secretaries and aides-de-camp, mortal men would not go to them at Spanish Town after they had once seen of what feathers their wings were made.
It is like the city of the dead. There are long streets there in which no human inhabitant is ever seen. In others a silent old negro woman may be sitting at an open door, or a child playing, solitary, in the dust. The Governor's house—King's House as it is called—stands on one side of a square; opposite is the house of the Assembly; on the left, as you come out from the Governor's, are the executive offices and house of the Council, and on the right some other public buildings. The place would have some pretension about it did it not seem to be stricken with an eternal death. All the walls are of a dismal dirty yellow, and a stranger cannot but think that the colour is owing to the dreadfully prevailing disease of the country. In this square there are no sounds; men and women never frequent it; nothing enters it but sunbeams—and such sunbeams! The glare from those walls seems to forbid that men and women should come there.
The parched, dusty, deserted streets are all hot and perfectly without shade. The crafty Italians have built their narrow streets so that the sun can hardly enter them, except when he is in the mid heaven; but there has been no such craft at Spanish Town. The houses are very low, and when there is any sun in the heavens it can enter those streets; and in those heavens there is always a burning, broiling sun.
But the place is not wholly deserted. There is here the most frightfully hideous race of pigs that ever made a man ashamed to own himself a bacon-eating biped. I have never done much in pigs myself, but I believe that pigly grace consists in plumpness and comparative shortness—in shortness, above all, of the face and nose. The Spanish Town pigs are never plump. They are the very ghosts of swine, consisting entirely of bones and bristles. Their backs are long, their ribs are long, their legs are long, but, above all, their heads and noses are hideously long. These brutes prowl about in the sun, and glare at the unfrequent strangers with their starved eyes, as though doubting themselves whether, by some little exertion, they might not become beasts of prey.
The necessity which exists for white men going to Spanish Town to see the Governor results, I do not doubt, in some deaths every year. I will describe the first time I was thus punished. Spanish Town is thirteen miles from Kingston, and the journey is accomplished by railway in somewhat under an hour. The trains run about every four hours. On my arrival a public vehicle took me from the station up to King's House, and everything seemed to be very convenient. The streets, certainly, were rather dead, and the place hot; but I was under cover, and the desolation did not seem to affect me. When I was landed on the steps of the government-house, the first idea of my coming sorrows flitted across my mind. "Where shall I call for you?" said the driver; "the train goes at a quarter past four." It was then one: and where was he to call for me? and what was I to do with myself for three hours? "Here," I said; "on these steps." What other place could I name? I knew no other place in Spanish Town.
The Governor was all that was obliging—as Governors now-a-days always are—and made an appointment for me to come again on the following day, to see some one or say something, who or which could not be seen or said on that occasion. Thus some twenty minutes were exhausted, and there remained two hours and fifty minutes more upon my hands.
How I wished that the big man's big men had not been so rapidly courteous—that they had kept me waiting for some hour or so, to teach me that I was among big people, as used to be done in the good old times! In such event, I should at any rate have had a seat, though a hard one, and shelter from the sun. But not a moment's grace had been afforded me. At the end of twenty minutes I found myself again standing on those glaring steps.
What should I do? Where should I go? Looking all around me, I did not see as much life as would serve to open a door if I asked for shelter. I stood upon those desolate steps till the perspiration ran down my face with the labour of standing. Where was I to go? What was I to do? "Inhospitalem caucasum!" I exclaimed, as I slowly made my way down into the square.
When an Englishman has nothing to do, and a certain time to wait, his one resource is to walk about. A Frenchman sits down and lights a cigar, an Italian goes to sleep, a German meditates, an American invents some new position for his limbs as far as possible asunder from that intended for them by nature, but an Englishman always takes a walk. I had nothing to do. Even under the full fury of the sun walking is better than standing still. I would take a walk.
I moved slowly round the square, and by the time that I had reached an opposite corner all my clothes were wet through. On I went, however, down one dead street and up another. I saw no one but the pigs, and almost envied them their fleshlessness. I turned another corner, and I came upon the square again. That seemed to me to be the lowest depth of all that fiery Pandemonium, and with a quickened step I passed through but a corner of it. But the sun blazed even fiercer and fiercer. Should I go back and ask for a seat, if it were but on a bench in the government scullery, among the female negroes?
Something I must do, or there would soon be an end of me. There must be some inn in the place, if I could only find it. I was not absolutely in the midst of the Great Sahara. There were houses on each side of me, though they were all closed. I looked at my watch, and found that ten minutes had passed by since I had been on my legs. I thought I had wandered for an hour.
And now I saw an old woman—the first human creature I had seen since I left the light of the Governor's face; the shade I should say, meaning to speak of it in the most complimentary terms. "Madam," said I, "is there an inn here; and if so, where may it be?" "Inn!" repeated the ancient negress, looking at me in a startled way. "Me know noting, massa;" and so she passed on. Inns in Jamaica are called lodging-houses, or else taverns; but I did not find this out till afterwards.
And
