Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 216

enormous quadrilaterals surrounded by dark wooden frames which enclose a prospect of sea and cloud
and sky, and tame the elements, as it were, into an ever-changing fresco of which one can never tire.
East of here, our road lay through country that a recent hurricane had strewn with the broken trunks of
palm trees. Only the gigantic silk-cotton trees—whose trunks when excavated sometimes furnished the
Arawaks with a boat capable of holding a hundred mariners—had resisted its violence. Their vast and
whirling branches, all spiked with parasites and roped with wild vine, gesticulated indestructibly above
the wreckage of their frailer neighbours.
Half an hour's drive away from our new headquarters at Port Antonio ('The most exquisite port on
earth', writes Ella Wheeler Wilcox with excusable over-statement), the Rio Grande unwinds through the
hills. This river offered us one of the most delightful experiences in the West Indies. At a little riverine
port, a silent Negro embarked us on a long, Japanese-looking raft of bamboopoles which slowly carried
us downstream through a willow-pattern landscape. We slid overboard and drifted with the current under
the branches and the lianas and climbed on board again to bump innocuously over the miniature rapids;
to dive, half an hour later, into deep and shadowy pools. Then we clung once more to the raft as it fer-
ried us through whispering vistas of wild cane. Herons perched ibis-like on the shore or circled languidly
overhead until the craft reached the bridge and the flat country that ended this watery adventure.
Scattered along this northern coast lie some of the most important places in Jamaican history: Dry
Harbour, where Columbus landed in 1494, and the point where Penn and Venables invaded the island in
1655, and Runaway Bay, whence the defeated Spaniards escaped to Cuba. The whole coast-line is fretted
with the secluded creeks which were the refuges of the pirates who tormented the Spanish towns of the
isthmus and the Main and lay in wait for the returning Plate Fleet.
In the centre of this region lies the beautiful little town of Falmouth—a town that forces one straight-
way to retract any hasty strictures on the former planters of Jamaica that the hideousness of Kingston
may have prompted. The early-nineteenth century law courts—allowing for the usual time-hiatus of the
Antilles—are fine examples of English provincial architecture at the period when solidity and elegance
united with their greatest success. From this magnificent stone building, with its branching staircases and
its pediment resting on a row of Doric columns, the streets radiate seawards, full of old wooden, or stone
and wooden houses that also pursue, as far as the medium allows, a classical mode of columns and pi-
lasters and wrought-iron balconies, many of them of great delicacy.
In a Falmouth shop called Antonio, the shelves are filled with the most brilliant and uninhibited shirts
in the world; shirts of which even the Saga boys of Trinidad cannot have dreamt. Flaming colours are
printed on light summer materials in patterns of leaves, drums, African dancers, sunsets, castles on fire,
sunflowers and marching grenadiers. These amazing garments make Montego Bay an exhilarating sight.
This Jamaican pleasure-resort, lying some miles farther west than Falmouth, is dominated by several
luxurious hotels and built over golden beaches and an incredibly blue sea. It succeeds in capturing much
of the atmosphere of ease and gaiety for which the French Riviera is so highly prized. It is the world
of barracuta- and bonita-fishing, sunburn lotion, striped umbrellas, expensive motor-cars and yachts, and
it draws to itself a steady airborne stream of holidaymakers from America, Canada and England, from
European capitals even, and from palaces in Europe that have been emptied by unrest and revolution. The
atmosphere is a compound of Wall Street, the Tatler, Vogue, Tout Paris and the Wiener Salonblatt anom-
alously transplanted in a background of palm trees and blazing sunlight. The Daily Gleaner capably fills
the function of all these publications, and, in winter, the pages are full of social news and the photographs