by Ian Thomson
Along the way Spiderman identified birds, trees and plants with the knowledge born of a lifetime on the river. At times the jungle’s aerial canopy seemed to shut off the sunlight, cloaking the water in black velvet; at others, the river widened into a flat expanse of apparently stationary water. Spiderman’s skill with the steering-oar and pole was extraordinary as he punted us into a clump of bulrushes to retrieve another trap. (The trap- and boat-handling skills of Black River fishermen, intriguingly, are believed to be identical to those on the River Niger in West Africa today.) This time the trap held a good catch - a tarpon fish - and a big crab. The crab nipped Spiderman with its pincers as he pulled it out along with the fish, and threw them into the boat. ‘I’ll have them for breakfast,’ he said, as the tarpon flapped on the bottom-boards.
After two hours, we turned the boat downriver, heading back for town, the current whispering soft and rock-steady past our hull. The final haul - six fish, three crabs - was respectable, said Spiderman, who had baited each of his eight traps again before submerging them into the mahogany-dark waters of Black River.
Due west of Black River is a seashore village called Bluefields. Philip Gosse, the Victorian naturalist, had lived there between 1844 and 1846, while conducting ornithological excursions into the Jamaican countryside. The books that resulted - The Birds of Jamaica (1847) and A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (1851) - are marvels of West Indian natural history, lyrical as well as informative. Jamaica, with its acacia scrub, forest and mountain, remains attractive to ornithologists, though narcotics and the trade in narcotics have helped to create an edgy atmosphere for them. One British birdwatcher complained in 2005, ‘Even with the most friendly groups, conversations could be marred when our interlocutors were so heavily under the influence of ganja as to be of limited coherence.’ Philip Gosse, in his desire to ‘twitch’ the rarest of Jamaican birds, nevertheless helped to popularise the science of ornithology in Britain’s West Indian dominions, and I was keen to see the house where he had operated.
By the time I got there, stars had begun to stud the sky. The shadowy garden was perfumed and thick with trumpet-orchids and waxy, yellow-spattered lilies. The property had high-pitched gables and shuttered windows; on the sea side was a fretwood portico, and at the back a flight of wooden steps leading to the entrance. I climbed the steps. The house was in darkness except for a light that showed in a room upstairs. I called out ‘Anybody home?’ and the door opened.
A young woman, her hair in curlers, said she was the caretaker. I stated my business and she showed me into the hall.
I was given a room upstairs that overlooked the sea and, to the south-west, the swamplands filmed in Papillon. Gosse had been taken in as a lodger by Moravian Brethren, pietistic English evangelists based in Bluefields. Gosse himself belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, who likewise scorned Catholic ornament and believed (not unlike Rastafari) that the last days of Babylon were nigh. By the time Gosse arrived in 1844, slavery had been abolished definitively six years earlier, yet much work remained to be done in ‘burying the chains’. Jamaica must have appealed to Gosse as a field of lowchurch missionary endeavour; the Moravian evangelists who housed him were opposed to Anglican prejudice against the freed slaves, and tolerant of mixed marriages. Once a week, Gosse preached in the Moravian church up in the hills of Content, a freed-slave village situated six miles north of Bluefields, where the church is still in use.
Gosse, having set sail from Gravesend in October 1844, caught his first glimpse of Jamaica from the southern coast of Haiti. He was entranced; Jamaica appeared to him like a ‘midsummer night’s dream’ - magical. Every Bluefields forest was studded with insect and birdlife: a biblical Eden barely touched by man. Equipped with bottles of embalming fluid and tins of arsenic paste (for preserving bird skins), Gosse began to catalogue Jamaican ornithology, plant and insect life. Beetles were immersed in boiling water and stored in rum. Sacks of bulbs and palm-seeds, nets, traps and specimen boxes lay strewn across the floor of the room where I was now standing. In the course of his excursions, Gosse was swooped on by pelicans and stung by bees and hornets. Yet he managed to collect 1,500 native bird specimens. Shipped to Gravesend, the preserved birds either found their way into natural history collections or ended up as feathers in the hats of fashionable Victorian women. The ‘Father of Jamaican Ornithology’ has now given his name to the Gosse ornithology club of Jamaica (occasionally misspelled the ‘Goose’ Bird Club).
Years later, when writing of Jamaica in his east London home, Gosse found he was unable to recall the beauty and moonlit nights of Bluefields. Jamaica was an impossibly distant land to him now: he could have spent a lifetime there, he wrote, and ‘still not found the answers to a hundred questions’.
Gosse was later criticised by his son Edmund for having been blindly convinced of the rightness of his Christian faith. His peculiar Creationist beliefs (animals and human beings were in a state of full maturity when God created them) invited the ridicule even of churchmen of that time. Edmund Gosse, having begun his own life ‘puffed out’ with a sense of evangelical holiness, later rebelled, and in Father and Son, that classic Edwardian memoir, he recorded the struggle between his own scepticism and his father’s rigidly certain temperament. Edmund may have written of his father in derogatory terms, yet that does nothing to detract from his father’s achievement, which in Jamaica remains unsurpassed.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, as a bird flew up amid a clump of hibiscus.
‘That’s a rosy spoonbill,’ said Ann Sutton. The bird vanished into the cedar tree forest stretching towards Shooters Hill. We were sitting in the garden of a mossed and crumbling mahogany-pillared Jamaican mansion called Marshall’s Pen on the outskirts of Mandeville. In the 1790s, Marshall’s Pen had belonged to the Earl of Balcarres, commander-in-chief of Jamaica, who imported Cuban blood hounds to track down the island’s runaway slaves. Like many imperial servants in the British West Indies, he was a coarse man. Lady Nugent, visiting Balcarres in 1801, remarked on his dishevelled appearance: ‘the black edges of his nails really make me sick’.
Ann Sutton was an English-born environmentalist who, with her late husband, Robert Sutton, had continued Philip Gosse’s exploration of Jamaica’s endemic bird species, cataloguing John Crow vultures, black-throated grebes and ‘John-to-whits’. In 1997, they acted as consultants to David Attenborough’s ‘Life of Birds’ BBC documentary shot partly in Jamaica. Five years later, in 2002, Robert Sutton was murdered at Marshall’s Pen by intruders. Homicide detectives from Kingston have long since given up on the case owing to lack of evidence.
Ann Sutton put down her teacup and took a cucumber sandwich. ‘Philip Gosse was a marvel,’ she said. ‘Have you seen the bird skins? The ones he prepared at Bluefields? They’re in the British Museum - as fresh as if the birds had been shot the day before.’ In her jeans and a yellow T-shirt she looked younger than her fifty-five years. ‘I came to Jamaica at the age of twenty,’ she said with a dreamy expression, ‘hoping to see the world but I got married and never left.’ Her husband’s family had lived in Jamaica for over two centuries; and, like many settlers of Regency (and earlier) times, they had maintained their plantations against the odds through the boom and bust of cocoa, sugar and citrus. Robert Sutton’s great-great grandfather had founded the London Stock Exchange in 1801.
‘Robert could trace his ancestors back to the first white man born in Jamaica of English parentage,’ Ann claimed. ‘He was a true Creole.’ The word ‘Creole’ usually denotes white or near-white descendants of European settlers in the Caribbean or America. (‘I am a Creole,’ wrote Mary Seacole on the first page of her memoir, ‘and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins.’) Ann Sutton herself was very pale - the Jamaican sun had had no effect on her - and in her paleness one might have detected the marks of strain. ‘Requiem for a Bird Lover’, the Gleaner obituary of her husband, had stated sensationally: ‘Murder is now so common and so frequent in Jamaica that, for many of us, it fails
to shock.’
Until now, Ann Sutton’s face had remained calm, but now her blue eyes flickered with excitement. ‘Oh look!’ She pointed to a cluster of black-and-emerald birds that swirled away across the lawn. Doctor hummingbirds. ‘The doctor’s the gem of Jamaican ornithology,’ she said. ‘Robert loved them.’ Trochilus polytmus, ‘the doctor hummingbird’, is so called because its two black streamer tails suggest the black tail-coat of the Victorian physician. The bird, black-green in colour and ‘no larger than a schoolboy’s thumb’, according to Gosse, is found only in Jamaica.
Inside Marshall’s Pen, floral chintz armchairs, brass candlesticks and pieces of chinoiserie created a curiously English atmosphere. A paperback Jane Austen - Mansfield Park - lay open on a table. Up a creaking staircase we came to the drawing room, where glassfronted cabinets contained rare bird feathers along with decaying leather-bound memoirs of Victorian missionaries and traders in the West Indies. The humidity had mouldered the books and mildewed the leather of the chairs. Otherwise Marshall’s Pen looked every inch the halcyon English country house of the high imperial era, transplanted to the West Indies. The only shadow cast across its genteel, book-lined rooms was the killing, on the night of 22 July 2002, of the owner.
It had rained hard during the night but next morning Bluefields harbour was bright with sunshine. Fishing boats were sliding down ramps into the warm Caribbean waters. The fins, head and intestines of a white shark, weighing 400 pounds, were being tossed into the shallows as the fishermen cleaned their catch. The boats, long and lying low in the water, were generally painted with allseeing eyes and representations of the Virgin - a protection against death by drowning. The work is ordinarily hazardous, even more so now that fish stocks have depleted and the fishermen have to venture as far out as Colombian, Nicaraguan or Panamanian waters.
The fishing season - October to November - coincides with the hurricane season, and is therefore dangerous. Most Bluefield fisherman are poor swimmers - or not-at-all-swimmers - so if they ditch in high seas they are likely to drown. During the summer months, with most of the fish harvests in, the fishermen have nothing much to do except drink and sleep around. Havelyn Honeygan, secretary of a Bluefields fishermen’s co-operative, explained that fishing villages were the most densely populated in Jamaica. ‘Out of season it’s either the bar or the bed,’ he explained. He claimed that drugs had never come his way (‘not one ounce or bag of cocaine’) and that the 200 fishermen under his responsibility had been thoroughly vetted. ‘Their characteristics have to be straightforward, otherwise they can’t join the co-op,’ he said.
Yet with 638 miles of coastline and over 100 unmonitored airstrips, Jamaica is wide open to smuggling. The narcotics come in through soporific, under-guarded places like Bluefields which, in 2001, became the site of one of the largest drug hauls in Jamaican history. Cocaine valued at US $37 million was seized by police at Bluefields harbour, along with a speedboat, two satellite telephones and bundles of e-mail printouts in Spanish. Later, two men in neatly pressed white trousers and monogrammed shirts checked in to the Culloden Cove guest house in Bluefields and, having settled the bill, went out with their silenced automatics and shot dead the six Jamaicans who had bungled the operation and been bailed pending trial. The murderers (Colombians operating within the Medellin cocaine cartel) were never caught.
The bulk of narcotics go through Kingston: it is the main transit point in the West Indies and vital to the shipment of cocaine from Latin America to the markets both in North America and - the most highly prized market - Britain. (Cocaine fetches three times as much in Britain as in other European countries.) Kingston opened as a container terminal in 1975; since then container traffic has increased twenty-fold and is now so great that only a percentage of shipments can be inspected. Over 450 acres of harbour lie sprawled out along the west Kingston shoreline, an invitation to smugglers from Liverpool, Miami, Hamburg, Rotterdam and Dover.
Some weeks earlier I had spent an afternoon in Kingston’s container terminal at Port Bustamante, watching vessels unload. An average of 1.5 million containers are handled by Port Bustamante each year. Up to six vessels can be emptied at the South Terminal at any one time; the din caused by the unloading was deafening. Yard tractors, ship-to-shore gantry cranes, forklifts: lifting, shunting, swinging. The harbour waters gave off a powerful smell; ships empty their latrines and clean their holds into the rubbish tip of the sea.
I continued past the north terminal, where seashore cranes loomed tall like prehistoric birds. Stockpiles of unloaded containers - P&O, Hamburg Süd - were stacked like giant Lego blocks along the wharves, among them ‘reefers’ (refrigerated containers) crammed with frozen fish fingers and TV dinners. A container ship from Beijing was unloading ‘reefers’ of meat and the sea’s surface round the ship gleamed and glinted in the afternoon light. To the east of where I stood, the national Petrojam oil refineries belched a red-black fire.
Omar Williams, chief of the port’s anti-narcotic security force, carries a pair of binoculars and a licensed firearm. He is on the lookout for ‘high-risk containers’ from Colombia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. As Colombia is Jamaica’s nearest neighbour south, Kingston is a key passageway and warehouse for drug smuggling. X-ray equipment installed by US security experts in 2006 works only intermittently because ‘certain employees’ (Omar Williams would not say who) ‘keep pulling the plug’. In return for bribes, that is, personnel turn off the cargo scanning equipment; Jamaica’s ‘gunsfor-drugs’ trade with Haiti is thought to be facilitated in this way.
The contraband comes by air, too. ‘Mules’ board planes at Kingston and Montego Bay, having ingested up to 100 condoms or (more dependably sturdy) latex surgical glove fingers filled with cocaine. Most ‘mules’ are single mothers in need of money to feed their families. On average they are paid between £2,000 and £5,000 for each trip - more money than some Jamaicans will see in a year. A rupture in just one of the latex packages can kill. Not that the drug dons care: the women are expendable. More than 300 Jamaican women are currently serving sentences in British prisons for carrying drugs.
I said to Omar Williams, ‘Should Jamaica tighten its border controls?’
‘You could say that. But it’s not just Jamaica. The United States are part of the problem.’ America’s liberal gun laws have eased the transfer of firearms into Jamaica. ‘American guns are dropping into Kingston like mangoes off a tree,’ said Williams. ‘To be truthful,’ he went on, ‘I don’t see how the situation can improve.’ The sun was now low in the horizon, and the rasping of cicadas in the grounds of the container terminal announced the beginning of Jamaica’s short-lived dusk.
24
Investors in People (‘Cargo’)
The guest house where I was staying in Black River had a white picket fence and a breadfruit tree that rustled in the breeze. At night I could hear the sea folding across the rocks where a tanker carrying drugs had run aground in 2002; its hull lay rusted in shallow waters just beyond the fence.
At a little distance from the wreck was another hotel, grandly named the Invercauld Great House. With its baronial turrets and towers, the building reflected the confidence of Black River during the 1880s, when the town was lit by electricity, traversed by trams and bore names like Victoria Avenue and Jubilee Lane. Queen Victoria’s new-look Empire, in all its imperial vigour and righteousness, had presented emancipation as the irrefutable proof of its virtuous motives. The crusade for the slave trade’s abolition had taken place in an atmosphere suffused with self-congratulation.
Given Britain’s role in shipping Africans to the New World, rhetoric celebrating ‘British liberty’ rang a bit hollow. In the eighteenth century, Britain had been the world’s leading slave trader; slavery had, moreover, survived in the British Empire until the 1830s. Forgotten amid all the self-satisfaction was the mistreatment - sexual, mercantile - of the slaves. Over the course of 400 years, beginning in the late fifteenth century, eleven million Africans are estimated to hav
e arrived in the New World. About three million more perished in the process of capture and enslavement in Africa, or on board ships.
The Zong - a Liverpool slave ship - was perhaps the most spectacular example of atrocity in the history of the British slave trade. In 1782 it sailed with a ‘cargo’ of 470 tight-packed Africans from the Gold Coast to Black River. Owing to headwinds alternating with spells of calm, however, the voyage took twice the expected time. After three months at sea more than sixty of the slaves were dead and many of the others looked set to die soon.
Dead slaves could bring a trader no profit. Before the Zong put into Black River harbour, the captain ordered his crew to throw the dead and sickest slaves into the sea and told them to say, if they were later asked, that because of the unfavourable winds, the ship’s water supply had run out and caused shipboard death with a risk of disease. In British maritime law a captain was allowed to jettison some of his ‘cargo’ - slaves were included in the category - in order to save the remainder. Insurance would cover the loss because the slaves had died from ‘perils’ beyond the captain’s control.
So the dead slaves were jettisoned along with fifty-four of the sickest survivors. Two days later, a further forty-two slaves were thrown overboard still alive. When a third group was selected, the slaves had begun to fight back; twenty-six of them were pushed over the side with their arms still shackled. The entire remainder, according to one eye-witness, ‘sprang disdainfully from the grasp of their tyrants, and leapt to their death’.