THE DARIEN CANAL

the many, is the beginning and the end Secure this, and you secure everything.

155

of all right action.

Fail to secure it, and

be your liberties as wide as you can make them, no success is possible.

CHAPTER XII.

The Darien canal-Jamaica mail packet-Captain W.- Retrospect of Jamaican history - Waterspout at sea - Hayti - Jacmel - A walk through the town-A Jamaican planter - First sight of the Blue Mountains-Port Royal-Kingston-The Colonial Secretary-Gordon riots-Changes in the Jamaican constitution.

ONCE more to Barbadoes, but merely to change there from steamer to steamer. My course was now across the Caribbean Sea to the great islands at the bottom of it. The English mail, after calling and throwing off its lateral branches at Bridgetown, pursues its direct course to Hayti and Jamaica, and so on to Vera Cruz and the Darien canal. This wonderful enterprise of M. Lesseps has set moving the loose negro population of the Antilles and Jamaica. Unwilling to work as they are supposed to be, they have swarmed down to the isthmus, and are still swarming thither in tens of thousands, tempted by the dollar or dollar and a half a day which M. Lesseps is furnishing. The vessel which called for us at Dominica was crowded with them, and we picked up more as we went on. Their average stay is for a year. At the end of

Half go

a year half of them have gone to the other world. home, made easy for life with money enough to buy a few acres of land and 'live happy ever after.' Heedless as schoolboys they plunge into the enterprise, thinking of nothing but the harvest of dollars. They might earn as much or more at their own doors if there were any one to employ them, but quiet industry is out of joint, and Darien has seized their imaginations as an Eldorado.

If half the reports which reached me are correct, in all the world there is not perhaps now concentrated in any sing'e spot so much foul disease, such a hideous dungheap of

moral and physical abomination, as in the scene of this farfamed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering. By the scheme, as it was first propounded, six-and-twenty millions of English money were to unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to form a highway for the commerce of the globe, and enrich with untold wealth the happy owners of original shares. The thrifty French peasantry were tempted by the golden bait, and poured their savings into M. Lesseps's lottery box. All that money and more besides, I was told, had been already spent, and only a fifth of the work was done. Meanwhile the human vultures have gathered to the spoil. Speculators, adventurers, card sharpers, hell keepers, and doubtful ladies have carried their charms to this delightful market. The scene of operations is a damp tropical jungle, intensely hot, swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, and centipedes; the home, even as nature made it, of yellow fever, typhus, and dysentery, and now made immeasurably more deadly by the multitudes of people who have crowded thither. Half buried in mud lie about the wrecks of costly machinery, consuming by rust, sent out under lavish orders, and found unfit for the work for which they were intended. Unburied altogether lie also skeletons of the human machines which have broken down there.1 Everything which imagination can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that locality just now. I was pressed to go on and look at the moral surroundings of the greatest undertaking of our age,' but my curiosity was less strong than my disgust. I did not see the place and the description which I have given is probably too highly coloured. The accounts which reached me, however, were uniform and consistent. Not one person whom I met and who could speak from personal knowledge had any other story to tell.

This has been angrily denied. A gentleman whose veracity I cannot doubt assured me that he had himself seen a dead body lying unburied among some bushes. When he returned to the place a month after it was still there. The frightful mortality among the labourers, at least in the early years of the undertaking, is too notorious to be called in question.

A WEST INDIAN CAPTAIN

157

We looked again into St. Lucia on our way. The training squadron was lying outside, and the harbour was covered with boats full of blue-jackets. The big ships were rolling heavily. They could have eaten up Rodney's fleet. The great 'Ville de Paris' would have been a mouthful to the smallest of them. Man for man, officers and crew were as good as Rodney ever commanded. Yet, somehow, they produce small effect on the imagination of the colonists. The impression is that they are meant more for show than for serious use. Alas! the stars and stripes on a Yankee trader have more to say in the West Indies than the white ensigns of a fleet of British ironclads.

The

At Barbadoes there was nothing more for me to do or see. The English mail was on the point of sailing, and I hastened on board. One does not realise distance on maps. Jamaica belongs to the West Indies, and the West Indies are a collective entity. Yet it is removed from the Antilles by the diameter of the Caribbean Sea, and is farther off than Gibraltar from Southampton. Thus it was a voyage of several days, and I looked about to see who were to be my companions. There were several Spaniards, one or two English tourists, and some ladies who never left their cabins. captain was the most remarkable figure: an elderly man with one eye lost or injured, the other as peremptory as I have often seen in a human face; rough and prickly on the outside as a pineapple, internally very much resembling the same fruit, for at the bottom he was true, genuine, and kindly hearted, very amusing, and intimately known to all travellers on the West Indian line, in the service of which he had passed forty years of his life. In his own ship he was sovereign and recognised no superior. Bishops, colonial governors, presidents of South American republics were, so far as their office went, no more to him than other people, and as long as they were on board were chattels of which he had temporary charge. Peer and peasant were alike under his orders, which were absolute as the laws of Medes and Persians. On the other hand, his eye was quick to see if there was any personal merit in a man, and

if you deserved his respect you would have it. One particular merit he had which I greatly approved. He kept his cabin to himself, and did not turn it into a smoking room, as I have known captains do a great deal too often.

All my own thoughts were fixed upon Jamaica. I had read so much about it, that my memory was full of persons and scenes and adventures of which Jamaica was the stage or subject. Penn and Venables and the Puritan conquest, and Morgan and the buccaneers; Port Royal crowded with Spanish prizes; its busy dockyards, and English frigates and privateers fitting out there for glorious or desperate enterprises. The name of Jamaica brought them crowding up with incident on incident; and behind the history came Tom Cringle and the wild and reckless, yet wholesome and hearty, planter's life in Kingston; the dark figures of the pirates swinging above the mangroves at Gallows Point; the balls and parties and the beautiful quadroons, and the laughing, merry innocent children of darkness, with the tricks of the middies upon them. There was the tragic side of it, too, in slavery, the last ugly flash out of the cloud being not two decades distant in the Eyre and Gordon time. Interest enough there was about Jamaica, and things would be strangely changed in Kingston if nothing remained of the society which was once so brilliant. There, if anywhere, England and English rule were not yet a vanished quantity. There was a dockyard still, and a commodore in command, and a guardship and gunboats, and English regiments and West Indian regiments with English officers. Some representatives, too, I knew were to be found of the old AngloWest Indians, men whose fathers and grandfathers were born in the island, and whose fortunes were bound up in it. Aaron Bang! what would not one have given to meet Aaron? The real Aaron had been gathered to his fathers, and nature does not make two such as he was; but I might fall in with something that would remind me of him. Paul Gelid and Pepperpot Wagtail, and Peter Mangrove, better than either of them the likeness of these might be surviving, and

VOYAGE TO JAMAICA

159

They

Even

it would be delightful to meet and talk to them. would give fresh flavour to the immortal 'Log.' another Tom was not impossible; some middy to develop hereafter into a frigate captain and to sail again into Port Royal with his prizes in tow.

Nature at all events could not be changed. The white. rollers would still be breaking on the coral reefs. The palms would still be waving on the sand ridge which forms the harbour, and the amber mist would be floating round the peaks of the Blue Mountains. There were English soldiers and sailors and English people. The English language was spoken there by blacks as well as whites. The religion was English. Our country went for something, and there would be some persons, at least, to whom the old land was more than a stepmother, and who were not sighing in their hearts for annexation to the American Union. The governor, Sir Henry Norman, of Indian fame, I was sorry to learn, was still absent; he had gone home on some legal business. Sir Henry had an Imperial reputation. He had been spoken of to me in Barbadoes as able, if he were allowed a chance, to act as Viceroy of all the islands, and to set them on their feet again. I could well believe that a man of less than Sir Henry's reputed power could do it-for in the thing itself there was no great difficulty-if only we at home were once disenchanted; though all the ability in the world would be thrown away as long as the enchantment continued. I did see Sir Henry, as it turned out, but only for a few hours. Our voyage was without remarkable incident; as voyages are apt to be in these days of powerful steamboats. One morning there was a tropical rain storm which was worth seeing. We had a strong awning over the quarter-deck, so I could stand and watch it. An ink-black cloud came suddenly up from the north which seemed to hang into the sea, the surface of the water below being violently agitated. According to popular belief, the cloud on these occasions is drawing up water which it afterwards discharges. Were this so the water discharged would be salt, which it never