Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 215

of flamingoes—elegant and princely birds, now also extinct, like the alcos and the Arawaks themselves.
The island teemed with agoutis, peccaries, opossums, racoons, alligators, iguanas and armadilloes. Plen-
tiful fresh-water fish swam in the mountain streams and the landcrabs whose habits Father du Tertre, so
minutely observed were a food that never failed them. In April and May they leave their clefts and hollow
tree stumps in the highlands and set off, several million strong, on a pilgrimage to the coast. So direct is
their course that if they encounter a house they attempt to scale it. At the approach of danger, their claws
are raised in the air like the swords of a mighty army. Lying up during the sunny spells and marching only
in the rain or the dark, their journey may take them two or three months. Safely arrived in the shallow
water, they scatter their spawn; then, reinforced by several more tiny millions, the long anabasis back to
the mountain begins. Once in their fastnesses, each crustacean immures itself in the darkness to change
its shell. The seams of the carapace unlock, the plates are shed, the soft carcase hardens and at last the
crab emerges again in full armour. This is the period when they are best to eat.
The hunting technique of the Arawaks was as ingenious as that of the Caribs and even more peculiar.
For salt-water fishing they trained the murderous remora, or sucking-fish, as falconers train their hawks.
Putting to sea in dug-out canoes, they launched these finny hunters on the end of a long line, and, pad-
dling swiftly after them, retrieved their prey, catching turtles, on some occasions, that were too heavy
for a single man to carry. Their method of hunting wild fowl was also engagingly simple. Lurking near
the ponds and the meres where the waterbirds congregated, they scattered calabashes on the water and
waited until the birds became accustomed to the floating globes. Then, sawing one of them in half and
drilling two holes for their eyes, they crammed them over their heads, and waded into the deep water un-
til only their innocent-looking helmets were visible among the other calabashes. Working their way into
the crowded waterfowl, they seized them one by one by the legs and, jerking them deftly under water,
tied them to their girdles 'and so, without creating the least alarm among the remainder of the flock, they
loaded themselves with as many as they could carry away.'
Hardly a trace remains of these gentle savages. Nothing but half a dozen clumsy rock carvings, a few
utensils, a kitchen midden or two, and a random heirloom of flattened skulls.
The stigmata of elderly villeggiatura are detectable at many points of the northern shore of Jamaica. And
no wonder. Long stretches of the coast-road are only divided by a balustrade and a few rocks from the
sea, and the country that lies along it is all that a stranger, bred on tropical visions and adventure stories in
sterner climates, could hope for. Here, at last, are the creeks plumed with palm trees, the sleeping islands
lying a furlong out to sea, the extravagant profusion of tropical vegetation, the beautiful rivers pursu-
ing a wild course through crags and forests. Collecting in pools beneath a penumbra of leaves they spill
in white and foaming waterfalls down rocky staircases to the sea. The hotels and the rest houses, built
among trees on the edge of the water, only very slightly dispel this authentically romantic atmosphere.
At Ochorios, east of Oracabessa, the bather swims under water through a complex submarine wood of
coral where the great blue fish and the vast shoals of small fry striped like convicts or wasps are only just
learning to swim away at the sight of black and yellow goggles and a harpoon gun.
Here, on a headland, Commander Ian Fleming has built a house called Goldeneye that might serve as
a model for new houses in the tropics. Trees surround it on all sides except that of the sea which it almost
overhangs. Great windows capture every breeze, to cool, even on the hottest day, the large white rooms.
The windows that look towards the sea are glassless, but equipped with outside shutters against the rain: