Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 231

and far away as the plumed headdresses of the Arawaks. Why the Spaniards suddenly abandoned Sevilla
Nueva, their first capital on the north coast, is as mysterious as the sudden departure of the Maya from
their great cities in Central America. Even Sir Hans Sloane, gazing at all that remained of it in 1688, was
unable to determine the cause. Various reasons have been advanced; the total annihilation of the inhab-
itants by an Arawak onslaught, which hardly sounds likely; a mass invasion of ants, or of French fili-
busters, or merely because the position was unhealthy. Nobody knows.
The King's House in Spanish Town, the Governors' residence, still stands. From here a succession of
wigged and fastidious magnates administered Jamaica for the King of England—a sequence whose or-
thodoxy was only interrupted by the governorship of the pirate Morgan. Not far away, a tamarind tree
marks the place where two Cromwellian colonels were shot for mutiny.
Three sides of the main square are formed by a school, the former court house and an old House of
Assembly where the dust thickens over the Royal Arms and the spiders stretch their threads from win-
dow to ceiling. (The town, even in Lewis's day, though still the capital, was in a ruinous state.) The
houses are built of stone and wood, in a classical, almost Palladian style. But the fourth side of the square
is flanked by a really important achievement. Between the two finely proportioned eighteenth-century
houses at either end, a stately Ionian colonnade sweeps in a shallow crescent. It is broken in the middle
by a heptagonal rotunda of Corinthian pillars. This is balustraded round the cornice and enclosed with a
groined cupola which in its turn is crowned by a small heptagonal lantern of the slenderest columns. The
elegance of the building is slightly impaired by the lowness of the Roman arches which spring from the
capitals of pilasters running half way up the flank of the seven great pillars; the expanse of wall between
the arches and the architrave of the rotunda is a shade heavy. It makes the upper part look a little too
enclosed. Above the central semi-circle flaunt the arms of Lord Rodney: a coroneted shield, three eagles
with wings displayed and reversed, and a scroll of stucco with a bellicose device, Non generant aquilae
columbas .
Under this canopy stands a pedestal sculpted with the symbols of triumph in tropical waters. Britannia,
drawn by a team of dolphins in a cockle-shell, travels victoriously through a basrelief of destruction.
Fleur-de-lys banners trail humbly in the water and brigantines and frigates and men-o'-war, the wreckage
of the entire French fleet, litter the marble background; tritons emerge, and a fanfare of conches wafts her
onward while sealions and porpoises and strange sea-monsters gambol beside the vainglorious car. The
fishtails of marine unicorns uncoil through the breakers, and an alligator, anomalously basking here, re-
veals its teeth in subtle approbation. Olympian above his attributes stands Bacon's statue of Lord Rodney
himself. There he postures, the intrepid admiral, brilliant sailor, confirmed gambler and philanderer; fant-
astically dandified, eaten up with vanity, racked by gravel and the gout and bowed down with premature
old age; changed here, by apotheosis, into a Graeco-Roman hero in toga, chlamys and kilt, and a thorax
embossed with the Medusa's head. He points with his baton in a superbly Augustan gesture toward the
drooping palm trees of the square. Two captured cannon from the flag-ship of Count de Grasse, their bar-
rels wreathed with the cipher of Louis Charles de Bourbon, Comte d'Eu, Duc d'Aumale, lie at his feet.
The Jamaicans erected this memorial as a sign of gratitude for the victory of the Saints, a naval triumph
that is, I suppose, subordinate only to the destruction of the Armada and the Battle of Trafalgar. The
sculptural balance between dignity and bombast is brilliantly maintained and the impression of these flak-
ing yellow columns and the derelict and beautiful square in the evening light is reminiscent of the patina
of an Oxford college.