Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
white-duck elegance of the swarms of English winter-visitors. Caps with the two sphinx-badges of the
Gloucestershire Regiment lay about on tables. The Sam Brownes and shorts and swagger-canes and the
rumour of forgotten military terminology lent to this hotel a savour of Shepherd's, the Cecil or the King
David. But strangest of all were the musicians. For, against a background of palm trees, deck-chairs,
lawns and the noisy transports of a swimming pool—Egyptian scenery, in fact, that is all too famili-
ar—appeared a group of Negroes attired as Janissaries and Bashi Bazouks and Grand Eunuchs. Their
plum-coloured tarbooshes were bound, turban-wise, with thick cords of yellow and white. Waistcoats and
Moroccan boleros of brilliant canary and scarlet were frogged and braided in elaborate Eastern designs,
and, below striped sashes, blue trousers piped with yellow spread their oriental volume, while the calves
of their legs and their ankles were covered with dazzling white pipe-clayed spats. Some of them—the
'cello, the violins, the clarinet, oboe, fife, bassoon, and trombone—were seated. The big drum and the
double bass players attacked their enormous instruments standing up. Here and there a pair of spectacles
reflected the Sunday morning sunlight. It was the most surprising vision, and one that I contemplated with
absolute mystification until a knowledgeable acquaintance explained it. The musicians, I learnt, were the
band of the Royal West Indian Regiment. Queen Victoria, in the middle of the last century, was consulted
about a suitable uniform for this distant corps. She had just returned from a state visit to Paris, and, after
a few moments thought, she said: 'You know, like those French ones with red hats and baggy trousers.'
'Zouaves, ma'am?'
'Yes, yes, that's it.' And Zouaves they have remained ever since, puffing away very adequately, in this
particular moment, at
Orpheus in the Underworld
.
Kingston is not altogether to blame for its unpleasant appearance. It was intended to be neither the prin-
cipal port nor the capital of the island. History, the exigencies of trade and the violence of nature have
turned it into both.
The original capital which the English inherited from Spain when the island was captured by Penn
and Venables during the Commonwealth, was Spanish Town, thirteen miles inland and westwards from
Kingston. And the port of the island lay at the tip of the Palisadoes, the slender filament of land down
which we had driven from the aerodrome; a barrier which almost separates the harbour and the Bay of
Kingston from the Caribbean.
Port Royal, of which only a few buildings subsist, must have been an extraordinarily wicked and ab-
sorbing town in the last half of the seventeenth century. 'Babylon of the West' is the epithet of one writer,
and 'A gilded Hades where Mammon held sway' another. Its central position between the Caribbean and
the Gulf of Mexico turned it into the market and warehouse of the New World and a species of fair in
constant session. Merchandise was landed here and bartered to all the races of the Caribbean for 'bars
and cakes of gold,' a contemporary records 'wedges and pigs of silver, Pistoles, Pieces of Eight, and sev-
eral other Coyns of both Mettles; with store of wrought plate Jewels, rich Pearl Necklaces, and of Pearl
unsorted and undrilled several Bushels … beside which … the purest and most fine sorts of Dust Gold
from Guiney, brought by the Negro ships who first come to Jamaica to deliver their Blacks.' Goldsmiths
turned these precious raw materials into plate, and sold them to the burghers, all of whom, it appears,
were accustomed to eat off nothing but gold and silver. Cups of silver and gold were the ordinary ware
of the drinking shops where seamen and buccaneers 'gambled with heavy gold coins whose value no one
cared to estimate.' The cups were embellished with 'gems torn from half a hundred cathedrals.' Ordinary
'bearded seamen,' the same writer declares, were dressed in the finest silks and loaded with jewelry, and
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