Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 230

and only the hurricanes, sweeping northwards on their way to Florida and Carolina, make an occasional
change.
Sponge-diving into the rich underwater forests that surround the reefs is one of the chief sources of
livelihood among the Caicos Islanders. The work is carried on under the instruction and example of the
most expert of sponge divers, the Greeks from the small Dodecanesian Island of Kalyminos, who, for
countless generations have made their living in the southern waters of the Libyan Sea. The Caiconians'
other submarine quarry are the conch shells, in about one out of a thousand of which the valuable pink
pearl forms. Prices are high, and one pearl suffices to buy the fishing-boat which is the final crown of
every islander's ambition. The labour involved in the discovery of a single pearl is not wasted, points out
a Jamaican writer in the 1890's, for the conch is a universal article of diet among them 'and when cur-
ried, it is not to be despised even by more educated palates.' Patronizing ass! Not to be despised indeed!
Lambi is one of the most delicious things in the world.
The Venezuelan coast used to be the most profitable hunting-ground for pearls. In the early days of
Santo Domingo, vast quantities were fished and they were unloaded in the sea-ports of Spain 'as though
they were hay.' Hawkins lost four hundred-weight of them at the battle of San Juan de Ulua. The islands
are the rumoured hiding-place of immense quantities of treasure and elaborate expeditions have been
mounted in the attempt to discover it; so far, fortunately, perhaps, for some adventurer of the future, in
vain.
The train was bowling along through the flat cane-fields and every turn of the wheels bore us closer to
the tramlines of Kingston. Our Jamaican journey was almost over.
But not quite. Before traversing by road the last thirteen miles to Kingston, via Bog Walk and then
past a monumental and duppy-haunted ceiba tree, we got out at Spanish Town: Santiago de la Vega, the
ancient capital of the Spaniards, and for two centuries the seat of the British government in Jamaica.
The streets were almost empty of citizens. But they were full of sunlight and heavy with that late-after-
noon atmosphere which is peculiar to towns that have lost their importance. For Kingston, with its outlet
to the sea, its docks and its trade, was too much for the old island capital. The languid mechanism of
Spanish Town came to a halt and the government was reluctantly transferred to its urchin usurper.
A minute's walk from the central square stands the Cathedral of Saint Catharine. Although it is no
bigger than an English parish church, it is the oldest in the British colonies, and every passing decade has
contributed something to its architectural character. The recurrent earthquakes and even the restorations
have failed to destroy its charm. Grandiloquent Georgian epitaphs to dead governors and administrators
have thickly silted up the walls of the interior. Bulging and inadequately pinioned brats in marble pine
over torches reversed, or shrouded urns, and pale sibylline figures mourn in attitudes of pensive mel-
ancholy beside the stately eighteenth-century obituaries. The floor of the nave is virtually paved with
memorial slabs of black and white marble. The charges on the shields that nest there in a whirlwind of
carved mantelling have been rubbed smooth by the tread of generations, and the seventeenth-century let-
tering of the brief biographies beneath them, telling the tales of early colonists from York or Somerset or
Connaught, is all but indecipherable. Many of the tombs in the churchyard have been fissured or smashed
by earthquakes and tossed into restless attitudes. They lie there under the branches like ships on a tem-
pestuous ocean of grass.
There are few vestiges of the grandees that once ruled the island for Spain. Indeed, the brocade and
the Velasquez-moustaches of those figures—Diego Colón, the son of the great admiral Columbus him-
self; Don Juan de Esquivel, de Ganay, and the last governor, Don Cristoforo Arnaldo—now seem as dim