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Page 60
Although no part of the island is peculiarly favorable to constitutions
of the European race, yet with prudence and temperance foreigners find
this midland region reasonably healthy. The missionaries, who have
mostly resided in the uplands, have but seldom fallen victims to fevers.
Foreigners must not expect to live here without occasional attacks of
fever; but with care, there need be little apprehension of a fatal
result, except to those of a sanguine temperament or of a corpulent
habit. And the general exemption from the dreadful ravages of
consumption may well be thought to compensate the somewhat greater risks
from fever. Even on the plains, that immense mortality of whites from
the mother country which once gave to Jamaica the ominous name of 'The
Grave of Europeans,' was caused as much by their reckless intemperance
as by any necessity of the climate. Or, rather, habits which in Great
Britain might have been indulged in with comparative impunity, in
Jamaica were rapidly fatal. It is said that another cause of the
excessive mortality among the overseers was that they were often
secretly poisoned by the blacks. On some plantations, I have heard it
said, overseer after overseer was poisoned off, almost as soon as he
arrived. In most cases, I dare say, it would be found that over-liberal
potations of Jamaica rum were the poison that did the mischief. But the
reports have probably some foundation in truth. An oppressed race,
seldom daring to strike openly, would be very apt to devise subtle ways
of vengeance. It will be remembered that one of the most frequent items
in our own Southern newspapers used to be accounts of attempts made by
slave girls to poison their masters' families. Arsenic, which they
commonly used, is a clumsy means, almost sure to be detected; but in the
West Indies, where the proportion of native Africans was always very
large, the African sorcerers, the dreaded Obi-men, who exercise so
baleful a power over the imaginations of the blacks, appear also to have
availed themselves of other than imaginary charms to keep up their
credit as the disposers of life and death, and to have often gained such
a knowledge of slow vegetable poisons as made them formidable helpers of
revenge, whether against their own race or against the race of their
oppressors. In a recent Jamaica story of Captain Mayne Reid's, the plot
centres in the hideous figure of an old Obi-man, who wreaks his revenge
for former wrongs in this secret way, destroying victim after victim
from among the lords of the soil. The piece is stocked with horrors
enough for the most ravenous devourer of yellow-covered literature, but
nevertheless it is so true to the conditions of life in the old days of
Jamaica, that it is well worth reading for a lively sense of the time
when the fearful influences of savage heathenism, slavery, and tropical
passion were working together in that land of rarest beauty and of
foulest sin. Evil enough remains, but, thank God, the hideous shadows of
the past have fled away forever.
But these tragical remembrances and suspicions belong rather to the
plains, into which we are about to descend. Here we feel distinctly that
we are in the tropics. The sweltering heat, tempered, indeed, by the
land and sea breezes, but still sufficiently oppressive, and almost the
same day and night, leaves no doubt of this fact. Vegetation, too,
appears more distinctly tropical. The character of the landscape in the
two regions is quite different. In the uplands the wealth of glowing
green swallows up peculiarities of form, and presents little difference
of color except the endless diversity of its own shades. There are,
however, some distinct features of the landscape. Conspicuous on every
hillside are the groves 'where the mango apples grow,' their mass of
dense rounded foliage looking not unlike our maples, and giving a
pleasant sense of home to the northern sojourner. The feathery bamboo,
most gigantic of grasses, runs in plumy lines across the country. Around
the negro cottages, here and there, rise groups of the cocoanut palms,
giving, more than anything else, a tropical character to the landscape.
On a distant eminence may perhaps be seen a lofty ceiba or cotton tree,
its white trunk rising sixty or seventy feet from the ground without a
limb, and then putting out huge, scraggy arms, loaded with parasites.
Every lesser feature is swamped in verdure, except that here and there
the whitewashed walls of a negro cottage of the better sort gleam
pleasantly forth from embowering hedges and fruit trees. I do not know
how Wordsworth's advice to make country houses as much as possible of
the color of the surrounding country may apply among the gray hills of
Westmoreland; but among the green hills of Jamaica, the white which he
deprecates forms a welcome relief to the splendid monotony of glowing
emerald. It is not amiss to call it emerald, for there are so many
plants here with glossy leaves, that under the brilliant sunlight the
lustre of the green is almost more than the eye can bear. To the
southward of Oberlin station, formerly belonging to our mission, rises a
range of verdant hills, which in some lights has so much the pure,
continuous color of a gem, as almost to realize Arabian fables to the
eye. Indeed, I have gazed at it sometimes with such a feeling as Aladdin
had when the magician had left him confined in the Hall of Jewels, and
have almost wished for an earthquake to cleave its oppressive superbness
and give a refreshing sight of the blue sea beyond.
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