VALLEY OF THE HOPE RIVER 193 genius of the age, and must be content with such other blessings as it has been pleased to bring with it. Why should I murmur thus and vainly moan? The earth is patient also, and allows the successive generations of human creatures to play their parts upon her surface as they please. She spins on upon her own course; and seas and skies, and crags and forests, are spiritual and beautiful as ever. Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range underneath Newcastle. Colonel J—— had a villa there, and one afternoon he took me over to see it. You pass abruptly from the open country into the mountains. The way to Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river, which cuts its way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders in the bed were round as cannon balls, and, weighing hundreds of tons, show what its power must be in the coming down of the floods. Within the limits of the torrent, which must rise at such times thirty feet above its winter level, the rocks were bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow there. Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory:、 ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds, gum trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts of the crags, and hanging out over the abysses below them. Aloes flung up their tall spiral stems; flowering shrubs and creepers covered bank and slope with green and blue and white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we drove along, frowned the great limestone blocks which thunder down when loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides, where the slopes are less precipitous, the forest has been burnt off by the unthrifty blacks, who use fire to clear the ground for their yam gardens, and destroy the timber over a dozen acres when they intend to cultivate but a single one. The landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is 'Euripides. merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates, become bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines are marked more sharply against the sky. Introduced among scenery of this kind, we followed the river two or three miles, when it was crossed by a bridge, above which stood my friend Miss Burton's lodging house, where she had designed entertaining me.. At Gordon's Town, which is again a mile farther on, the valley widens out, and there are cocoa and coffee plantations. Through an opening we saw far above our heads, like specks of snow against the mountain side, the homes or prisons of our unfortunate troops. Overlooking the village through which we were passing, and three hundred feet above it, was perched the Colonel's villa on a projecting spur where a tributary of the Hope river has carved out a second ravine. We drove to the door up a steep winding lane among coffee bushes, which scented the air with their jessamine-like blossom, and wild oranges on which the fruit hung untouched, glowing like balls of gold. We were now eleven hundred feet above the sea. degrees cooler than at Kingston. house was levelled for a garden. trellis work, and scarlet geraniums and sweet violets and roses which cannot be cultivated in the lower regions, were here in full bloom. Elsewhere in the grounds there was a lawn tennis court to tempt the officers down from their eyrie in the clouds. The house was empty, in charge of servants. From the balcony in front of the drawing room we saw peak rising behind peak, till the highest, four thousand feet above us, was lost in the white mist. Below was the valley of the Hope iver with its gardens and trees and scattered huts, with buildings here and there of higher pretensions. On the other side the tributary stream rushed down its own ravine, while the breeze among the trees and the sound of the falling waters swayed up to us in intermittent pulsations. The air was already many The ground in front of the Ivy was growing about the The place had been made, I believe, in the days of plantation prosperity. What would become of it all, if Jamaica drifted after her sisters in the Antilles, as some persons TO BE OR NOT TO BE 195 thought that she was drifting, and became, like Grenada, an island of small black proprietors? Was such a fate really hanging over her? Not necessarily, not by any law of nature. If it came, it would come from the dispiritment, the lack of energy and hope in the languid representatives of the English colonists; for the land even in the mountains will grow what it is asked to grow, and men do not live by sugar alone; and my friend Dr. Nicholl in Dominica and Colonel Duncan in Grenada itself were showing what English energy could do if it was alive and vigorous. The pale complaining beings of whom I saw too many, seemed as if they could not be of the same race as the men who ruled in the days of the slave trade. The question to be asked in every colony is, what sort of men is it rearing? If that cannot be answered satisfactorily, the rest is not worth caring for. The blacks do not deserve the ill that is spoken of them. Colonel J's house is twelve miles from Kingston. He told me that a woman would walk in with a load for him, and return on the same day with another, for a shilling. With such material of labour wisely directed, whites and blacks might live and prosper together; but even the poor negro will not work when he is regarded only as a machine to bring grist to his master's mill. CHAPTER XIV. Visit to Port Royal-Dockyard-Town-Church-Fort Augusta-The eyrie in the mountains-Ride to Newcastle-Society in Jamaica-Religious bodies-Liberty and authority. A NEW FORT was being built at the mouth of the harbour. New batteries were being armed on the sandbanks at Port Royal. Colonel J-- had to inspect what was going on, and he allowed me to go with him. We were to lunch with the commodore of the station at the Port Royal dockyard. I could then see the town-or what was left of it, for the story went that half of it had been swallowed up by an earthquake. |
