On the 22d of November, 1855, a small company of us—three gentlemen and two ladies—left New York harbor in the schooner Louisa Dyer, of 150 tons burden, bound to the island of Jamaica. By nightfall we had lost sight of the last faint trace of New Jersey soil. New Jersey is sometimes jocularly said to be out of the Union; but on that day the two of us who were leaving our native land for the first time, entertained no doubt of its solidarity with that country of which it afforded us the last glimpse. By morning we found our small and incommodious vessel fairly on her way through the stormy November Atlantic, toiling painfully over the broad convexity of the planet, like a plodding insect, toward the regions of the sun. After a voyage of fifteen days, wrestling with all manner of baffling winds, and with storms attended, I suppose, with some danger, though, from a happy incapacity of apprehending peril at sea till it is over, I suffered no disquiet from them, we came in sight of the two inlets which form the Turk's Island passage. A winter voyage, however unpleasant, has this advantage, that then only can you be sure of meeting with such a succession of storms as shall leave settled in the memory the sullen sublimity of that 'changing, restless mound' of disturbed ocean in which is embodied the mass of its gloomy might.

Very pleasant was it to us, nevertheless, when the softening airs and the steady set of the breeze showed us that we had come into the latitude of the trade winds. The inky blackness of the sea had gradually turned into translucent and then into transparent azure, which looked as if it could be quarried out into blocks of pure blue crystal. The flying fish, glancing in quick, short flights above the sunny waters, now gave the charm of happy, graceful life to our weary voyage out of the tempestuous north. And when at last we saw land, although it appeared only in the shape of the two small islands mentioned above, which seem to be little more than coral reefs covered with a scanty carpet of yellowish grass, yet the few distant cocoanut trees upon them threw even over their barrenness that tropical charm which to those who first feel it seems rather to belong to another planet than to this dull one upon which we were born.

Passing through the narrow channel between the two islands which formed thus the portal of our entrance into the Caribbean, we found ourselves fairly afloat upon the waters of that brilliant sea, which the Spaniards, three centuries and a half before, had traversed with greater astonishment, but not with more delight. Everything now conspired to raise our spirits. The soft air, reminding us by contrast of the winter we had left behind, the deep blue sky, answered by waves of an intenser blue below, whose gentle ripples, unlike the stormy Atlantic surges which we had escaped, only came up to bear us kindly on, and the knowledge that we were but two days' sail from the fair island to which some were returning, and which two of us were about to make our home for an indefinite future, all made us now a very different set from the dull, anxious, seasick group that the Atlantic had lately been boxing about at his pleasure.

Before making Jamaica, however, we came in sight of the negro empire of Hayti, and ran along for a day under its northern coast.

We saw swelling hills, covered on their tops with woods, and sloping down to the shore, but were too far distant to distinguish very plainly any sign of human habitation. By nightfall we had sunk the land, but were astonished in the morning to see looming through the air, at an immense distance, a mountain, which in height seemed more like one of the Andes than any summit that Hayti could afford. Its actual height, I presume, may not have been less than 8,000 feet, but in my memory it shows like Chimborazo.

It was now Saturday, the 8th of December. We held our way westward across the hundred miles of sea that separate Hayti from Jamaica. All eyes were now turned to discover the first glimpse of our expected island home. At last, about the middle of the afternoon, we remarked on the western horizon the distant blot of indigo that showed us where it lay. Another twenty-four hours would pass before we should land, but that distant patch of mountain blue seemed to have brought us to land already. Heavy rain clouds coming up, hid it from us again, but gave ample compensation in the sunset that followed, one of the two grand sunsets of my life. The other was in Andover, Mass., which, is justly celebrated for the beauty of its sunsets. There the banks of white cloud, lying along the west, glowed with an inner radiance, that led the eye and the mind back into the very depths of heaven. Here, on the other hand, an unimaginable wealth of color was poured out on the very face of the sky. The whole western heaven, to the zenith, was one mingled melting mass of gorgeous dyes, rendered the more magnificent by the heavy lead-colored rain clouds which occupied all the rest of the sky.

The inward, spiritual magnificence of that northern sunset, and the unreserved splendor of this southern one, were in correspondence with the different tone which runs throughout nature in each of the two regions.

After sunset hues and rain cloud had both given way to the brilliant night sky of that latitude, we seated ourselves, seven in number, captain and mate included, on the extensive quarter deck of not less than seven feet from cabin house to stern bulwarks, for a final game of 'Twenty Questions;' when our hitherto so amiable friend, the Caribbean, suddenly flung a spiteful wave right over the quarter upon us, and put a very unexpected extinguisher on our pastime. The ladies, who were reclining on the deck, came in for the chief share of the compliment, and were in some danger of an indiscriminate swash down the cabin gangway; but the mate gallantly picked up one, and her husband the other, and saved them from all mischief but the drenching. This sudden interruption of amicable relations with the powers of the wave was followed up by a night of unmerciful rocking, to which, as we had now come under the lee of the land, was added a sweltering heat. I can stand as much heat as any man, but for once I found the cabin too much of a blackhole even for me, and after tossing most of the night in alternate correspondence and contradiction to the pitching of the vessel, I got up and went on deck, to see if a nap were any more feasible there. I found most of our company already recumbent in this starry bedchamber. After awhile admiring the unaccustomed brilliancy of the old familiar constellations of our northern sky, augmented by the effulgent host which our approach to the equator had brought into view, among all which Venus shone like a young moon, I fell asleep also, and we slumbered in concert, until awakened by the streaks of dawn. Soon the sun rose with a serene magnificence, well according with the day of holy rest and cheerful expectation which lay before us. The white haze upon the sky rolled away from the blue, and gathered itself into fleecy masses, which stood like pillars around the seaward horizon, brightening with a cheerful tempered light, until, as the sun grew higher, they dissolved away. Meanwhile, on the landward side of our vessel—which had rounded Morant Point in the night, and was now gliding smoothly on—lay in near view the mountains of Jamaica. Coming from the southeast quarter of the island, we were passing under them where they are highest. They rose, seemingly almost from the water's edge, to the height of seven and eight thousand feet, their towering masses broken into gigantic wrinkles and corrugations, whose fantastic unevenness was subdued into harmony by the softening veil of yellowish green darkening above, which clothed them to their tops. Between their base and the sea actually lies one of the most richly cultivated districts of the island, the Plaintain Garden River district. But we were too far out to distinguish much of it; and what little we did see is in my memory absorbed in the image of the verdant giants which rose behind.

In the forenoon our pilot came on board, a comfortable, self-possessed black man, who toward sunset brought us off the Palisades. This is the name of the narrow spit of land which forms the outer wall of the magnificent harbor of Kingston. Upon it is situated the naval station of Port Royal, the principal rendezvous of the British fleet in the West Indies. Here is that exquisitely comfortable naval hospital, with its long ranges of green jalousies, excluding the blazing light and admitting the sea breeze, in which the officers and crew of our ship Susquehanna were cared for with such generous hospitality a few years ago, when attacked by yellow fever. The heartburnings of the present may be somewhat lessened by reflecting on some of these mutual offices of kindness in the past.

Around the naval station clusters a poor village of perhaps fifteen hundred souls, the miserable remnant of the once splendid city of Port Royal, whose sudden fate I shall relate hereafter.

We rounded the point of the Palisades—which is marked by some unfortunate cocoanut trees, which, having vainly struggled with the sea breeze to maintain the elegant stateliness of their race, have long since given up the contest, and resigned themselves to being stunted and broken into the appearance of magnified splint brooms planted upside down—and found ourselves at last in our desired haven, Kingston harbor. It is a broad and sheltered basin, fully entitled, I understand, to the standard encomium of a harbor of the first rank, namely, that it will float the united navies of the world. Due provision has been made by three strong forts near the entrance that the navies aforesaid shall not enter until the time of such auspicious union. An intelligent correspondent of the Herald states his opinion that no ship and no number of ships could force an entrance under the converging fire of the forts, which bears upon the channel at a point where the least divergence would land a ship upon a dangerous shoal.

Kingston is on the inside of the harbor, six miles across from Port Royal. The city itself lies low, but as we approached it, just as the sun had set, the mountains which rise behind it, a few miles distant, to the height of three and five thousand feet, appeared to close around it in a sublime amphitheatre of massive verdure. High up on the side of the mountains we distinguished a white speck, which we were told was the military cantonment of Newcastle, situated 4,400 feet above the sea, chosen for the English soldiers on account of its salubrity. Formerly the annual mortality among European soldiers in the island was 130 in 1,000, but since the Government has been careful to quarter them as much as possible in these elevated sites, it has diminished to 34 in 1,000.

At last our vessel came to anchor at the wharf. We took a kind leave of the pleasant-tempered captain and crew, who had been shut up with us in the little craft during our seventeen days' tossing, and gave a farewell of especial warmth to the fatherly mate, whose rough exterior covered the warm heart of a seaman and the delicate feelings of a native gentleman.

When we landed, the short tropical twilight was fast fading into night, but light enough remained to show us into what a new world we had come. The gloomy, prisonlike warehouses, the long rows of verandas before the dwellings, the dusky throngs in the streets, the unintelligible patois that came to our ears on every side, occasional glimpses of strange vegetation, and, above all, the overpowering heat in December, all gave us to feel that we were at last in that tropical world, every aspect of which is so unlike our northern life.

After a hospitable reception from Mr. Whitehorne, the principal of the Nuco Institute, I went up to the rooms of the American Mission, and, ensconcing myself behind the mosquito curtains, proceeded to make critical observations upon the buzzings outside, to satisfy myself whether an insular range fed up these tormentors to the formidable vigor of their continental brethren. Concluding from their timid pipings that they were by no means an enemy so much to be dreaded—a conclusion which subsequent experience happily confirmed—I fell asleep.

CHAPTER II.

KINGSTON.

Having satisfied myself, by a sound night's rest, that the laws of my physical constitution had undergone no essential revolution by a change to the torrid zone, I began in the morning to look curiously around to note what the differences might be in the outer world. The quaint old lodging house itself first drew my attention, with its thick walls and heavy brick arches on the ground floor, built to guard against earthquakes, of which few years pass without several shocks, though none especially memorable have taken place since the dreadful one of 1692. Cracks in the walls here and there, however, show that it is not useless to make provision against them.

While I was seated at a most comfortable breakfast of bread and butter and the excellent fish which abound in Kingston harbor, flanked by huge oranges of enticing sweetness, a shrivelled old negro woman, who was on her knees giving the uncarpeted floor its morning application of wax, and rubbing it into a polish with a cocoanut shell, suddenly rose to her feet and kissed her hand to me with a grace worthy of a duchess. Somewhat startled at this unexpected salutation from the fairer, or the softer sex—I am in some doubt as to the proper adjective in this case—I gazed rather blankly at her without replying; but she dropped on her knees again and went on with her work, satisfied doubtless that she at least knew the proprieties. It is this submissive respectfulness of the blacks that makes it pleasant living among them, notwithstanding all their faults and vices. At home we are no better than our neighbors, but here, if we only have a white complexion, we belong to the undisputed aristocracy, and carry our credentials in our faces. It is that which has bewitched so many Northern people living at the South with slavery. But what is wanted is not a community of slaves, but only a community of blacks.

After fortifying myself against the sweltering heat of the December morning by copious draughts from the unglazed earthen coolers, which look so refreshing in this climate that you often see their coarse red pottery on handsomely laid tables, looking quite as well entitled to a place as anything else, I sallied out to see what daylight would show in the chief city of Jamaica, a city of nearly 30,000 people. I must say that for appearance' sake the best thing for Kingston would be to have perpetual moonlight. Under the flood of silver light which the full moon here pours down, even its forlorn shabbiness is softened into something of romantic indistinctness. But daylight is dreadfully disenchanting. The rows of tumble-down houses, the sandy, unpaved streets—through which you flounder as in the deserts of Sahara, unless you choose to try sidewalks that have as many ups and downs as a range of mountains, each man building to the height that pleases himself—the large parade, without armament or shade, a dreary common of sand, the crowds of noisy, slouching, dirty negroes, the burnt districts, filled with the rubbish of houses and with unwholesome vegetation growing up, do not combine to form a very engaging whole. One would think it impossible to exaggerate such a picture of comfortless neglect. Yet bad as it is in itself, Mr. Sewell has mercilessly exaggerated it. One would think from his description that there was not a decent house in the place, and that he had never seen the rows of excellent dwellings on North street and East street. Then he speaks of the inhabitants as being, 'taken en masse, steeped to the eyelids in immorality.'

Now, if he meant that the great numerical majority of the inhabitants bear this character, he spoke truly, inasmuch as the great numerical majority of the inhabitants are negroes, among the most depraved in the island. Kingston is like the slough of Despond, a place whither all the scum and filth of the negro population in the east end of the island do continually run, and make it a very sink of wickedness. But are the white families and the large number of thoroughly respectable colored families to be confounded with this mass of negro depravity, because they are fewer in number? It is true they are fewer in number, but they are so thoroughly distinct in standing and character that Mr. Sewell is justly chargeable with cruel recklessness in confounding them together as he does. It may concern the world little to distinguish among the people of Kingston, but it does very vitally concern the morality of authorship, that a traveller should not, by a careless and sweeping sentence, leave a cruel sting in the minds of hundreds of refined and virtuous women.

But I cannot vindicate Kingston society against the charge of surpassing dulness. In an insular colony, under the enervating influence of a tropical climate, the pulse of intellectual life beats very faintly, at its strongest. Still, if whatever of education and refinement there is in Kingston would cordially combine it might make a pleasant society. But it is divided into little cliques, each mortally afraid of the rest, and producing, in their division, a paradise of tediousness.

Kingston, however, resembles New York in one important particular—it is one of the worst-governed cities in Christendom. The Jews and the mulattoes divide municipal honors between them, and rival, not unworthily on a small scale, the united talents of Mozart and Tammany for misgovernment and jobbery.

The stores of Kingston are well supplied with excellent English goods at reasonable prices, and are served by numbers of fresh and fine-looking British clerks. But of these much the greater number, I fear, fall under the temptations of the prevailing immorality, and habits of drinking, not to be indulged with impunity in such a climate, hurry multitudes of them to speedy graves. What little sobriety and desire of improvement exists among the young men is chiefly confined, I am told, to the browns.

With the decline of exportations, the once flourishing trade of Kingston has, of course, decreased. But it marks the eagerness of some to turn everything to the discredit of emancipation, that this decline is commonly attributed entirely to that event, no notice being taken of the fact that Kingston was once the entrepot of a flourishing trade between Europe and the Spanish Main, which, having, in 1816, shipping to the amount of 199,894 tons, and having risen in 1828 to 254,290 tons, had in 1830, four years before the abolition of slavery, sunk to 130,747 tons. The growing use of steam, making direct shipment to Europe more convenient than transhipment, and changes in commercial relations, may account for this falling off; but dates show that emancipation has nothing to do with it. Of course the main cause of decline in the trade of the city has been the decline in the prosperity of the island, but such a change in the channels of trade as is indicated above was an independent cause.

The statistics of illegitimacy, of infant mortality, of ignorance and irreligion, and of destitution in Kingston, are shocking. Churches are numerous, and congregations flourishing, but the vast mass of the negroes are scarcely affected by them. This is very different from the state of things in the country, and nothing could be more preposterous than to judge of the rural population by Kingston. The Kingstonians themselves are laughably ignorant of the country parts. One of them assured a clergyman of my acquaintance, with all the gravity imaginable, that the country negroes lived principally upon fruits! No doubt he has had the chance of telling some American touching at the port the same story, who has been able to attest it at home on the authority of a 'Jamaica gentleman of great intelligence.' The Kingston people may be intelligent, but a good many of them know little more about the interior of their own island than they do about the interior of Africa.

But ignorant and depraved as the negroes of Kingston are, besides being three times as numerous as the trade of the place requires, I do not see that they particularly deserve the reproach of laziness. Mr. Sewell remarks that he was puzzled to know how they had incurred it when he saw them crowding around him, all wild for a job. The negro women certainly, who coal the vessels, appear anything but indolent as they go to and fro erect under their heavy burdens: if the men let them do more than their share of the heavy work, it is precisely as in Germany,[C] and for just the same reason, namely, that the common people of neither country are sufficiently civilized to treat women as much more than a superior sort of beasts of burden. That even the Kingston populace have felt the quickening benefit of freedom, is shown by a little fact related by a shipmaster who has traded to the port for many years. He says that now he can always get his ship loaded and unloaded in quicker time than he could then.

As to security of life and property, there are few cities where both are safer than in Kingston. I have gone long distances though its unlighted streets late at night, with as little sense of danger as in a New England country road. There is a good police of black men, whose appearance is quite picturesque in their suits of spotless white, and a force of black soldiers quartered in barracks in the heart of the town, besides a part of a white regiment a few miles distant. The conduct of the black troops, however, at an extensive fire some two years ago, which destroyed a large district in the business part of the town, was an illustration of what seems a curious peculiarity of the African character, namely, that while docile and amenable to discipline in the highest degree in common, the negroes are apt in critical moments to break out into uncontrollable license. On this occasion, the black men, soldiers and all, instead of assisting to put out the fire, broke into the liquor shops, and having maddened themselves by drinking, fell to indiscriminate plundering. If it had not been for the women, who, to their great credit, rendered energetic assistance in working the engines, the city might have been consumed.

The most curious feature in the life of a city where there are many blacks is the incessant chatter in the streets. Chaffering, quarrelling, joking, there seems to be no end to their volubility. In the country it is the same, and you will sometimes hear two shrews scolding each other from a couple of hilltops a quarter of a mile apart, with an energy and unction only equalled by an angry Irishwoman. Men and women fortunately quarrel so much that they fight very little. Notwithstanding the heroic deeds of valor performed by black soldiers, I incline to think that they are, what some one describes the Arabs as being, cowardly, or at least timid, as individuals, and brave only through discipline and number.

I know of no reminiscences connected with Kingston of any essential note, unless it be a horrible incident mentioned by Bryan Edwards, the distinguished historian of the West Indies, as witnessed by himself in 1760. This was the execution of two black men, native Africans, convicted of the murder of their master. They were exposed in the parade, in the centre of the town, in an iron frame, and starved to death! Free access was allowed to the crowds who wished to talk with them, and with whom they kept up conversation, apparently supremely indifferent to their fate. Mr. Edwards himself, after they had been exposed some days, addressed them some questions, but could not understand their reply. At something he said, however, they both burst into a hearty laugh. On the morning of the ninth day one silently expired, and the other soon followed. Punishments so barbarous strike us with horror, but they are no gratuitous addition to slavery—they are one of its necessary features. A relation founded purely on force can be maintained only by terror. And where the proportion of whites is very small, as in most of the West Indies, they must compensate by the atrocity of their inflictions for the weakness of their numbers. On the 20th of April, 1856, there fell a rain of uncommon violence in the parish of St. Andrew, in which I was then residing. For six hours it seemed as if Niagara were rushing down upon our heads. The river Wagwater, which is commonly about knee deep, ran the next morning thirty feet high. The effect of this terrible visitation of nature was heightened by the disclosure through it of one of the monuments of ancient cruelty. At Halfway Tree, a few miles from Kingston, the seat of justice for the parish of St. Andrew, and the place of sepulture for many of the old aristocracy of the prouder days of the island, the rain washed up an iron cage, just of size to contain a human form, and so arranged with bars and spikes as to make it certain that the wretched victim could only stand in one long agony of torture. Along with it were found the bones of a woman, who had to appearance perished in this hideous apparatus. This dreadful revelation of the past struck horror throughout the island. The cage, with its sad contents, is still preserved in the collection of the Society of Arts.

The remarkable religious movement of 1861, which produced fruits so excellent in some parts of the island, in Kingston appears to have degenerated wholly into froth and noise. But there are some agencies of spiritual and temporal good working among the lower classes with happy effect. If they do not operate appreciably in changing the general character of the feculent mass, at least they rescue from it many who in the great day of account will call their authors blessed. I may mention particularly the charitable institutions of the excellent rector, Rev. Duncan Campbell, the reformatory for girls under the special patronage of the Rev. Mr. Watson, United Presbyterian, the vigorous efforts of Rev. William Gardner and his people, and many others less familiar to me, but doubtless not less worthy of mention. But Kingston offers such attractions to the very worst of the negro population, which, at the highest, has so much of barbarism and ignorance, that it will long continue a most forbidding and certainly a very unfair specimen of an emancipated race.

But, forlorn as Kingston is in itself, it is magnificently situated. Before it stretches for six miles in breadth the noble harbor, the sight of whose brilliant blue waters, sparkling in the sun, imparts a delicious refreshment as the eye catches a glimpse of them at the end of the long sandy streets. Inward stretches, sloping gently up to the mountains, the beautiful plain of Liguanea, about eight miles in breadth, scattered over with fine villas, and here and there a sugar estate. I remember with delight a view I once enjoyed just after sunset from St. Michael's church tower, toward the eastern end of the city. From that height the numerous trees planted in the yards, and which are not conspicuous from the streets, appeared in full view, and every mean and repulsive feature being hidden, the city seemed embowered in a paradise of verdure. On the right spread out the pleasant plain of Liguanea, bounded by the massive corrugations of the dark green mountains, while on the left the lines of cocoanut trees skirted the tranquil waters of the harbor, over which the evening star was shining. I wished that those foreigners who touch at Kingston, and, disgusted with its wretched squalor, go away and give an evil report of the goodly island, could be permitted to see the city from no other point than St. Michael's church tower.

FOOTNOTE: