Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 206

heiresses, a Miss Phipps, that Charles Fox, ruined by racing and gambling debts, was packed off by his
friends to pay his court; but only as a practical joke, for they assured him that the lady, coming from the
West Indies, had a horror of all but the fairest complexions. Poor Fox, cursing his matted black eyebrows,
swarthy Stuart complexion and permanently blue chin, arrived in her presence under stifling layers of
rice-powder…. The marriage did not take place.
I found it hard to stay away from the Institute of Jamaica. It possesses the best library in the West
Indies, far better, even, than that of the priests of St. Louis de Gonzaque in Haiti: nearly thirty thousand
volumes, all of them beautifully kept, and also, it appeared, every existing work concerning the Carib-
bean, —a far larger and more imposing array than one might think. Stuffed animals and birds and cases
of botanical and geological specimens fill another part of the building, and the walls of the basement are
covered with portraits of island dignitaries. The old maces of the island's Chamber and the bell of the
drowned church of Port Royal are preserved here, and a fine exhibition of old prints of the island. Best
of all, I thought, was a series of coloured engravings of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century,
depicting, in the manner of Rowlandson or Gilray, the perils and pleasures that beset a subaltern stationed
in Jamaica: the routs, the rum, the yellow-fever and the unsuitable sentimental imbroglios.
I could return to the bosky shelter of the South Camp Road by a roundabout route past the Good Tid-
ings Chapel, the Synagogue, the Chinese Club and the Catholic Cathedral, which is a reinforced-con-
crete version of St. Sophia. The Synagogue, though nothing much to look at, is alone of its species in
the whole world, for the fire of 1882 destroyed both the Sephardic Synagogue of the Spaniards and Por-
tuguese—who, impelled by the Inquisition, arrived here in the same fashion as in the other Caribees—and
the English-German Synagogue of the Ashkenazim. The two communities, driven together by adversity,
pooled their funds and built a synagogue in which they now both worship. So these two branches of Jewry
which separated so many centuries ago in the Levant—the Ashkenazim travelling northwards through
Russia, and westwards through Poland and Germany to England, and from England here, and the Seph-
ardim migrating westwards with the Moors into Spain, and then, driven forth by Ferdinand and Isabella
to Amsterdam, eastwards to the Ottoman Empire or across the Atlantic to Brazil, and then north to the
Antilles—have at last met and amalgamated in this West Indian Island. Only here, among the coconut
palms and the mangoes, does a Henriquez or a de Cordova bow down in worship beside an Eisenstein or
a Weintraub. Rothschild and Sidonia unite.
But the shorter way back led through Hanover Street, down the smouldering length of which a dejected
and unconvincing brothel-quarter damply blossoms. Here, on the balconies of bars and ramshackle hotels
with jaunty names, strapping West Indian girls diffidently conjure the passers-by with their artless bland-
ishments: a dumb crambo of soft whistles and inexpert winks. Some were veterans, others were bluff
viragoes, and yet others quite young, but nearly all, for an island with such a high standard of good looks,
surprisingly plain. Under the trees that line this milder Babylon of the West a straggling population of
sailors or dock workers indecisively moons. The filibusters of Port Royal would not have tolerated any-
thing so dismal as this. Not architecture only, but everything, even these humble delights, has gone down-
hill.
A number of rum-shops do busy trade round this quarter. In one of them, of which the customers were
mostly middle-aged black sailors, I made a habit of halting on my homeward walks. I discovered that it
is wiser to choose one place and to stick to it, so that the initial distrust of an alien complexion might
with familiarity be gradually relaxed. Though, indeed, colour difficulties were far less inhibiting in Ja-
maica than in many other islands. I remarked on this to an old sloop-captain who had travelled widely