And every man in that crowd of pirates lived beneath the shadow of the gallows.
Finer it is to remember the Western voyages of Drake and Hawkins and all the old sea-dogs who first proclaimed the might of British seamen. Picture them, scurvy-stricken, reduced by disease and famine, resting and recruiting in the wide bays of any West Indian isle. Imagine their joy at finding luscious fruits and sweet, health-giving water. Then see them in their tiny ships darting from behind the cover of some wooded neck of land, surprising a galleon ten times their weight, scuttling the little vessel and manning the Spanish leviathan with British seamen. How many little English barques lie beneath the dark blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico! Having found their prize and tasted the joy of victory, the British captains thirst for more. They sail the Spanish seas in a Spanish ship, and sack the coast towns, levying heavy toll; they fight great battles and pound the deeply laden treasure ships with Spanish cannon trimmed by British gunners. They select the richest spoil and fling the rest to the waves. How many bars of gold and silver, how many crates of silks, and iron boxes filled with gems; how many sacks of doubloons have sunk in these Western waters, and lie there now, buried amidst the skeleton of a rotting vessel!
All these things were done in these seas by Englishmen in the days of old, done for greed of gain and the lust of bloodshed. Done also in the name of religion, and because two sects, worshipping the same God, quarrelled in regard to ritual; and because one sect put a sword at the throat of the other and said, Do as we do, or die. Just as the Inquisition proved to be the undoing of the might and wealth of Spain, so did the Inquisition, indirectly, give the West Indies to the English. The West Indian waters formed the training school of Drake and Frobisher, Hawkins and Raleigh; and these men founded the navy. In later days Rodney revived the Caribbean school, and there Nelson learned how to outwit the French in ocean battles. Because of these things, but not only because of these things, do we owe a great debt to these Antillean islands.
So far as we are concerned the history of the Indies is a medley of romance, the romance of British greatness. There we laid the foundation of our Empire; the Caribbean Sea is the font of the temple of our greatness.
But, for the islands themselves, there is little record
of history save where their existence first influenced the politics of Europe. The Spaniards were the first white men to tread their fragrant shores and bring destruction to a race of wild red men whose first instinct was that of fear. Columbus, the Genoese mariner, first and greatest of all explorers, anchored his tiny vessels in Morant Bay, Jamaica, on his second voyage to America. The beauty of the place bewildered him, and when his patron, the King of Spain, asked for a description of the island, the artistic Genoese crumpled a piece of paper, and presented that as a picture of the rugged formation of the Queen of the Antilles. Four times did Columbus journey to the Indies, which were annexed by him to the Spanish Crown. The horrors of the early Spanish rule can only be imagined. Millions of the gentle Caribs were transported to the mainland, and worked to death in the Spanish gold mines. Those that were permitted to remain were, if they survived the Inquisition, pressed into slavery.
So the Spaniards ruled for a century and a half; for one hundred and sixty years they claimed the bulk of the West Indian islands as their own. This claim was uncontested by the powers of Europe, but the Spaniards were harassed always by the buccaneers, French and English, whose ships swept the main in search of prey. Whether England was at war with Spain or not, the English sea-dogs were always at the throats of Spaniards in the western hemisphere.
The Protector Cromwell essayed to break the Western power of Spain, and sent Penn and Venables to crush them out of the Indies. In an engagement off Domingo the British were defeated, but the doughty English captains retired on to Jamaica, which they annexed to England. Then the French filibusters drove the Spaniards out of Hayti, and gave it to the crown of France. The French had held the smaller Antilles—Martinique, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Antigua. In times of war with France, Britain had taken these islands, but they had been retaken by the French. It was in Rodney’s time that they all came permanently under the English flag. Nowadays the British hold all the larger islands, the French retain the smaller lands of Martinique, Guadaloupe, Deserva, Marie Galante, Les Saints, St. Bartholomew, and part of St. Martin, the Dutch hold five, the Danish three, and Spain still holds three. One or two are part of the Venezuelan Republic, Puerto Rico belongs to the U.S.A., and several are independent.
JAMAICA
CHAPTER II
JAMAICA
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 difficult for one to remember how one passed out of England—I had almost written out of the world—and reached this land, which surely should be called God’s Island. But, I remember, a day or two ago we reached Turk’s Island, and after handing a few bags of mails to a black, buccaneer-like boatman, who said he was the postmaster, we glided along the shore—a few miles of low-lying, palm-treed coral-land—and sailed into the Caribbean Sea. And so we reached the tropics—the other side of the world. At last we were among the hundred isles of the West Indies, and in the full glare of the tropic sun. The paint blistered and bubbled on the handrail, and the sea seemed a giant mirror, on which the sun flashed silver-white, with never-ceasing, blinding force. There seemed to be no air; the space it should have occupied was transparent, and, apparently, empty. It was difficult to move; truth to tell, I remember feeling a little uncomfortable; but, all the same, it was heavenly.
By Turk’s Island it rained. There was a sudden darkness, the blinding sun disappeared, the air became cooler, and then down came the rain. The deck of the ship became a waterfall, and for thirty minutes or so we were enveloped in a furious deluge.
But ten minutes after the rain had ceased, the deck, the sails, and the canvas deck-awnings were dry as though sun-scorched for centuries. That was our weather. We lived on fruit and tepid baths. It was too hot for sleep, too hot for work, too hot for conversation. In the tropics the only thing possible is “nothing"—and a long, iced drink.
Lolling on deck in the daytime, we could watch the flying fish, the dolphin, the drifting nautilus, and the hungry shark; or view the islands as slowly they glided backwards into impenetrable haze. To the right Cuba, a thin irregular line on the horizon, glistening gold above the blue-white of the sea; to the left Hayti, the land in which the black man is supreme, and where, in spite of science and the twentieth century, cannibalism and child murder exist. The white patches, which show above the green of the plantations as you crawl along the shore, are houses. They stand as monuments to the French, who once were masters of the land—masters until, by order of their Government, the French-owned slaves were free—when, by way of exercising their new-found freedom, the niggers slaughtered every white on the island. Since then Hayti has been a republic—a republic with many presidents and many disturbances.
At night there was the wonderful moon and the cool, fresh air. It was pleasant to watch the sea; astern,
