Port Royal. In the good old days of pirates, who made it their headquarters, the depository of their loot, and the scene of their debauchery, this was the most important town in the West Indies, some say the richest and most wicked spot on earth. One must be chary, however, of too hastily granting such superlatives. An earthquake befell it one day, sinking all but a fragment of the town beneath the sea, and a new capital, named Kingston, was founded on what promised to be safer ground across the bay. A later century brought regret that a still more distant site had not been chosen. To-day Port Royal consists of a quarantine station and a small village so isolated from the mainland that servant women brought from it to the capital have been known to shriek with dismay at sight of their first cow. Ships circling the reef on their way in or out of the harbor sail over the very spot where pirates once held their revels, and negro boatmen still assert that on stormy evenings one may hear the tolling of Port Royal's cathedral bell, lying fathoms deep beneath the

waves.

One's first impression of the Jamaicans, as they lounge about the wharf eying every trunk or bundle several minutes before summoning up the energy to tackle it, is that they are far less courageous in the face of work than their cousins, the Barbadians. This is closely followed by the discovery that Kingston is the most disappointing town in the West Indies. With the exception of a few bright yellow public buildings and a scattered block or two of new business houses, it is a negro slum of uncouth shanties, spreading for miles over a dusty plain. Scarcely a street has even the pretense of a pavement, the few sidewalks that exist are blocked by stairways, posts, and the trash of a disorderly population, or degenerate every few yards into stretches of loose stones and earth. The only building worth crossing the street to see is that domed structure sighted from the bay, the Catholic cathedral To be sure, the earthquake wrought great havoc, but that was thirteen years ago, time enough surely in which to have made a much further advance toward recovery.

The insolence of nearly all the British West Indies reaches its zenith in Kingston. Even in the main street clamoring black urchins and no small number of adults trail the white visitor, heaping upon him foul-mouthed taunts, and all but snatching his possessions out of his hands in broad daylight; diseased beggars plod beside him in bare feet that seem never to have known the luxury of a scrubbing, scattering their germs in a fine gray limestone dust that swirls in blinding clouds and envelops everything in a yellowish veil whenever a breath of wind stirs or a street-car sweeps past. Loose-mannered black females ply their trade with perfect impunity, shrieking worse than indecencies at unresponsive passers-by; assaults and robbery are frequent even by day. One must be vaccinated and often quarantined before entering Jamaica, yet it is doubtful whether any island of the West Indies has more evidence of disease than Kingston itself. Those who carry firearms must deposit them at the custom-house, yet with the possible exception of Hispaniola, a revolver is more often needed in the Jamaican capital than anywhere in the Caribbean, as several harmless Chinese merchants learned to their sorrow during our brief stay there. The town is dismal, disagreeable, and unsafe for self-respecting white women at any hour; by night it is virtually abandoned to the lawless black hordes that infest it. Weak gas-lights give it scarcely a suggestion of illumination, swarms of negroes shuffle through the hot dust, cackling their silly laughter, shouting their obscenity, heckling, if not attacking, the rare white men who venture abroad, love-making in perfect indifference to the proximity of other human beings, while the pompous black policemen look on without the slightest attempt to quell the disorder.

The white residents of Kingston seem to live in fear of the black multitude that make up the great bulk of the population. When hoodlums and rowdies jostle them on the street, they shift aside with a slinking air; even when black hooligans cling to the outside of street-cars pouring out obscene language, the white men do not shield their wives and daughters beside them by so much as raising their

voices in protest. When cursing, filthy market-women pile their baskets and unwashed produce upon them and crowd their own women out of their places, they bear it all with humble resignation, as if they were the last survivors of the civilized race wholly disheartened by an invasion of barbarian tribes. The visitor who flees all this and retires is lucky to catch a half-hour of unbroken sleep amid the endless uproar of shouting negroes, the barking of innumerable dogs, and the crowing of more cocks than even a Latin-American city can muster. Port-au-Prince is clean and gentlemanly in comparison. It would be difficult indeed to say anything bad enough of Kingston to give the full, hot, dusty, insolent, halfruined picture. The traveler will see all

he wants, and more, of the capital in the time he is forced to remain there on the way to or from his ship.

The electric street-cars, manned by ill-mannered crews and rocking like ships in a storm over the earthquakeundulated ground, run far out of town. They must, in order to reach anywhere worth going. Beyond Half-Way Tree the sloping Liguanea plain grows green, and the rain, which seems never to descend to Kingston, gives the vegetation a fresher coat, yet the way is still lined for a long distance by negro shacks. Only when one reaches the open meadows of Constant Spring, or the residence portion served by another branch of the line, does anything approaching comfort, cleanliness, and peace appear.

With the exception of Barbados, where special conditions exist, Jamaica has remained a possession of the British crown longer than any other land, and the influence of the English on the African race can perhaps nowhere be better studied. It is not particularly flattering.

The Jamaican has all the faults of his rulers and his own negro delinquencies to boot. He is slow-witted, inhospitable, arrogant when he dares to be, cringing when he feels that to be to his advantage. The illegitimate birth-rate is exceedingly high, sexual morality extremely shaky among the masses. Though the country

Trinidad has many Hindu temples

people are sometimes pleasing in their simplicity, they quickly take on the unpleasant characteristics of the towndwellers when they come into contact with them, the most conspicuous of those being an unbridled insolence and a constant desire to annoy what may quite justly be called their betters. Part of this rudeness is due, no doubt, to the same cause as that of our own laboring classes a misguided attempt to prove their equality by scorning the amneities of social intercourse. A large percentage of it, however, is easily recognizable as native African barbarism, which increases by leaps and bounds as the suppression of former days weakens. If he is working for you or selling you something, the Jamaican can be softly courteous; when he has no such reasons to repress his natural brutality, his impudence is colossal. impudence is colossal. On the Canal Zone, where a stern hand was held over him, we found him vastly less offensive than at home. Even more than in the other British islands he was "spoiled"

by the war. Official reports credit the "B. W. I." regiments with "excelling in many acts of bravery" and assert that "their officers almost universally testify to their courage and loyalty"; but private information, even from some of those same officers or the very men who dictated the official reports, has a totally

On the "asphalt lake"

different tenor. According to this, they were utterly useless in actual warfare, not a man of them having died facing the enemy. Even as labor battalions they were not worth their keep, and their conduct was such that both the French and the Italians protested against their being stationed within reach of the civil population. Whichever of these reports is more trustworthy, there is no doubt that the hospitality shown these crudeminded blacks by a certain class of European women, and the fuss made over them upon their return, have given their rulers a problem which will scarcely be solved during the present generation.

The Jamaican is much given to "teefing" small articles, particularly food. One might almost say that the chief curse of the island is the stealing of growing crops. Newspapers, public reports, and private conversations contain constant references to this crime, prosecutions for which nearly doubled in

the year following the war. Many people no longer take the trouble to plant a crop of ground provisions, knowing that they will almost certainly be stolen by black loafers before the owners themselves can gather them. The chief faults of the masses-insolence, lying, illegitimacy, slackness in work, and

thieving can scarcely be laid to drink; for though Jamaican rum is famous and drunkenness is on the increase, the women, who drink comparatively little, are as bad as the men in all these things.

A friendly critic finds little to praise in the Jamaican except his cheerfulness, his loyalty within limits to those he serves, and his kindness to his own people, and he admits that the first of these qualities is often based on lack of ambition, "though it is nevertheless pleasant

to live with." On the other hand, lack of equal opportunity is not without its effect on the negro character. Jamaica suffers from the same big estate and primogeniture troubles that hamper the masses in England. Slightly larger than Porto Rico, with half a million acres still held by the crown, and with only half of what remains under cultivation, the rest being wooded or "ruinate," as they call it in Jamaica, the island is chiefly in the hands of the whites. These strive to keep their estates intact and hold the negro in economic subjection. "Negroes who come back from Panama or Cuba with in some cases hundreds of pounds are seldom able to buy property," complained one of their sponsors. "It is only when the white man becomes very poor or the negro very rich that we can get a chunk of some big estate. The big owners, too, often pasture rather than plant their best land, and rent out the worst to the small peasants at one pound an acre a year.

If the rented lands turn out to be too stony or otherwise useless, that is their loss and the owner's gain." One difficulty in bettering this condition, however, is the disinclination of the peasantry to pay rent regularly. On the whole, the planters show little generosity toward their laborers, thereby increasing the feeling between the

two races.

Though it is the most populous of the British West Indies, and the largest, unless one follows the English habit of including British Guiana, Jamaica is much less densely inhabited than Porto Rico, and it is natural that two islands so nearly alike in size, situation, and formation should constantly suggest comparison. When the British took the island from the Spaniards in 1655, it had only forty-two hundred inhabitants.

person." By her last census, which is nearly ten years old, Jamaica claimed 831,383 inhabitants, of whom 15,605 were white, 17,380 Hindus, and 2,111 Chinese. The fact that she has barely two hundred to the square mile as compared with twelve hundred in Barbados, is probably not without its bearing in

Half a century later the population was more than two thirds negro. In 1842, four years after the abolition of slavery, the first ship-load of indentured EastIndians arrived, though this practice had almost ceased long before the Indian Government put a legal end to it. Chinese coolies were tried for a time, but only in small numbers, and their descendants now confine themselves almost entirely to keeping what we would call grocery stores. Both the Hindus and the Chinese speak the slovenly Jamaica dialect, and there remains little of the Oriental garb and racial mixture conspicuous in Trinidad. The visitor is apt to be astounded by the blackness of the great bulk of the population. The percentage of full blacks is in striking contrast to the mulatto majority in the French islands, where the mixture of races is not very sternly frowned upon, and still more so to the Spanish-American tropics, where miscegenation is so common that nearly every one is a "colored

the visible difference of energy between the two islands.

The color line in Jamaica, and it is more or less typical of that in all the British West Indies, falls somewhere between our own and the rather hazy one in vogue in the French islands. "I think the English individually," said a Jamaican sambo, a three-fourths negro, who had worked on the Canal Zone, "like us black people still less than you Americans do; but governmentally they treat us as equals, and you do not." I might have reminded him that no negro in the "B. W. I." regiments reached the rank of sergeant major, while we have black colonels. "Yet in some ways I prefer the American system," he went on. "An Englishman says you are his equal, but you had better not act as if you were. The American says, 'You 're a damned nigger and you know it,' and there is no hypocrisy in the matter."

Strictly speaking there are two color lines in the British West Indies. Unlike

the United States, where black and colored are synonymous terms when applied to the negro race, there is a middle class of "colored people," as there are Eurasians in India, though actual membership in it implies a certain degree of education, culture, wealth, or influence. There are "colored" men who rank them

Two Hindus of Trinidad

selves and are ranked as negroes, working shoulder to shoulder with them in the fields; there are others who sit side by side with their white brethren on the judicial bench and reach high rank in church, politics, medicine, law, and commerce. Within limits, color may almost be said to be no bar to promotion in official life. This middle set is extremely assertive in its pride, and on the whole is more disliked by the negroes than are the whites themselves.

The Jamaica Government Railway is one of the oldest in the world, having

been first opened to traffic in 1845. It is almost two hundred miles long, running diagonally across the island from Kingston to Montego Bay, and north and eastward to Port Antonio, with two other small branches. The fares are high, being about seven cents a mile for first class and half as much for second. The latter is really third class in all but name, with hard wooden benches and scanty accommodations, and carries virtually all the traveling population. All the trainmen are full blacks, as are virtually all the passengers. The "trainboy" is a haughty negro woman in near-silk garb, enormous ear-rings, and a white nurse-like cap, who sells chiefly beer and never calls out her wares. In the island dialect a local train is a "walkin' train," and all Jamaican trains fall into this category, as do all those in the West Indies except Cuba and, to a slight degree, Trinidad. There are no train manners. In a Spanish country, if you put so much as a cane in a seat, your possession of it is assured and respected to the end of the journey. Put all your baggage, and your coat and hat in addition, into a Jamaican train-seat, and you will probably come back to find your possessions tossed on the floor

and some impudent black wench occupying your place. Why the "J. G. R." is so ungodly as to run Sunday trains on its Port Antonio branch I do not know. They are about the only things that do move in the British West Indies on the Sabbath.

From Kingston the train jolts away through the swirling dust across a flat, Arizona-like plain studded with cactus, though moderately green. Soon come broad stretches of banana-fields, with bananas planted in endless rows down which one can look as through archways,