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The veranda was heavy with nostalgia. It was all rather moving and sad.
The hills, next day, gradually subsided as the train carried us eastwards. The sugar cane rose in a flood,
and the Blue Mountains reappeared, heaving into the sky a winding chain of spikes. Hidden among these
peaks lie dark ravines which hang there in the alien gothic shade of pine trees. But seen from the south,
nothing in their steep and wrinkled contours suggested those chill interior regions. We could just descry
the ledge of mountain where Bellevue (which was, without any question, the most beautiful of the old
Jamaican houses that we had seen) lies poised; built above a steep cataract of coffee-wood and forest,
and overshadowed by giant trees in the topmost branches of which the Night-Blowing Cereus, one of the
loveliest and most mysterious of tropical epiphytes, opens its nocturnal corolla of petals. Cool and finely
proportioned eighteenth-century rooms open one from another in a vista which leads through the central
window of a long library into the sky. From here or from the lawn below one can gaze down at a relief
map of the southern Jamaica coast and an astonishing expanse of the Caribbean. During his sojourns at
Bellevue Nelson must also have gazed at that gulf of water. It was from Jamaica that he mounted the Rio
San Juan and raided the Spanish forts of the Nicaraguan interior: an expedition the hazards of which I
was able to appreciate months later when we sailed down the same peculiar river.
The Caribbean sea between the shores of Jamaica to the Venezuelan coast is almost empty of islands.
Thirty-odd miles south-east, however, and forty-odd miles south of the colony, lie the Morant and the
Pedro Cays. The former are three small islets, valuable only for the guano that accumulates there, and
for the vast concourses of birds which assemble in spring and litter the island with their eggs. They are
carefully gathered and despatched to Jamaica by the schooner load.
A hundred and seventy-eight miles north-west of Jamaica floats another minute trinity of islands, the
Caymans. For a long time they were the haunt of the Corsairs and of every kind of picaroon vessel: outlaw
craft which shifted their headquarters northwards to the banks of the Mississippi when the archipelago
became a place of call for warships. Their cannon still remain embedded in the sand. The inhabitants,
who are either pure white or pale mulatto, are nearly all Baptists. They ship turtles and coconuts to Ja-
maica and plant sugar and raise cattle, and, as late as the 'eighties, there was scarcely any money in circu-
lation, nor any need of it. Coral reefs encompass these lonely places, and the sands are encumbered with
the skeletons of sloops and schooners, for the Cayman Islanders are skilful ship-builders. This calling,
according to a Kingston sailor, is charitably fostered by nature, for the steady pressure of the Trade Winds
camber the tree trunks into the exact curve that is needed for the timbers of the hulls.
Another little cluster of coral satellites, the Turks and the Caicos Islands, lie over four hundred miles
to the north-east: outposts, geologically speaking, of the Bahamas, but administratively dependent on Ja-
maica. The population amounts to over five thousand souls, Negroes for the most part, but with a strong
mulatto minority and a sprinkling of whites. The Caicos Islanders are descendants of the slaves of Loyal-
ist landowners who took refuge here from Georgia after the American War of Independence. The whites
soon evaporated, the Negroes sank into a state 'little short of savagery,' and scrub was allowed to run wild
over the plantations. The inhabitants are still reputed to be very much more backward than those of the
mother colony. The Negroes of the Turks Island, which are named after the scarlet fez-like blossom of the
local cactus, subsist almost entirely on the sale of the salt which they gather from the numerous lagoons
and salt-flats. Apart from a few brackish springs where the cattle are watered, there is no drinking-water
but the rain which they husband in catchments. Poultry is scarce on these flat stretches of land and veget-
ables and fresh meat are even scarcer, so the hardy islanders live entirely on fish. Visiting ships are rare,
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