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OpenCV Computer Vision Application Programming
Cookbook 2nd Edition Robert Laganiere Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Robert Laganiere
ISBN(s): 9781782161486, 1782161481
File Details: PDF, 6.79 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
OpenCV Computer Vision Application
Programming Cookbook Second Edition
Table of Contents
OpenCV Computer Vision Application Programming Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
Why Subscribe?
Free Access for Packt account holders
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Downloading the example code
Errata
Piracy
Questions
1. Playing with Images
Introduction
Installing the OpenCV library
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Using Qt for OpenCV developments
The OpenCV developer site
See also
 Loading, displaying, and saving images
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Clicking on images
Drawing on images
Running the example with Qt
See also
Exploring the cv::Mat data structure
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
The input and output arrays
The old IplImage structure
See also
Defining regions of interest
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Using image masks
See also
2. Manipulating Pixels
Introduction
Accessing pixel values
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
The cv::Mat_ template class
 See also
Scanning an image with pointers
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Other color reduction formulas
Having input and output arguments
Efficient scanning of continuous images
Low-level pointer arithmetics
See also
Scanning an image with iterators
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
See also
Writing efficient image-scanning loops
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
See also
Scanning an image with neighbor access
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
See also
Performing simple image arithmetic
Getting ready
How to do it…
 How it works…
There’s more…
Overloaded image operators
Splitting the image channels
Remapping an image
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
3. Processing Color Images with Classes
Introduction
Using the Strategy pattern in an algorithm design
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Computing the distance between two color vectors
Using OpenCV functions
The functor or function object
See also
Using a Controller design pattern to communicate with processing modules
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
The Model-View-Controller architecture
Converting color representations
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Representing colors with hue, saturation, and brightness
 How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Using colors for detection – skin tone detection
4. Counting the Pixels with Histograms
Introduction
Computing the image histogram
Getting started
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Computing histograms of color images
See also
Applying look-up tables to modify the image appearance
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Stretching a histogram to improve the image contrast
Applying a look-up table on color images
See also
Equalizing the image histogram
How to do it…
How it works…
Backprojecting a histogram to detect specific image content
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Backprojecting color histograms
See also
Using the mean shift algorithm to find an object
How to do it…
 How it works…
See also
Retrieving similar images using the histogram comparison
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Counting pixels with integral images
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Adaptive thresholding
Visual tracking using histograms
See also
5. Transforming Images with Morphological Operations
Introduction
Eroding and dilating images using morphological filters
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
See also
Opening and closing images using morphological filters
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Detecting edges and corners using morphological filters
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Segmenting images using watersheds
 How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
See also
Extracting distinctive regions using MSER
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Extracting foreground objects with the GrabCut algorithm
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
6. Filtering the Images
Introduction
Filtering images using low-pass filters
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Downsampling an image
Interpolating pixel values
See also
Filtering images using a median filter
How to do it…
How it works…
Applying directional filters to detect edges
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Gradient operators
Gaussian derivatives
See also
 Computing the Laplacian of an image
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Enhancing the contrast of an image using the Laplacian
Difference of Gaussians
See also
7. Extracting Lines, Contours, and Components
Introduction
Detecting image contours with the Canny operator
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Detecting lines in images with the Hough transform
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Detecting circles
See also
Fitting a line to a set of points
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Extracting the components’ contours
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Computing components’ shape descriptors
How to do it…
How it works…
 There’s more…
Quadrilateral detection
8. Detecting Interest Points
Introduction
Detecting corners in an image
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Good features to track
The feature detector’s common interface
See also
Detecting features quickly
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Adapted feature detection
Grid adapted feature detection
Pyramid adapted feature detection
See also
Detecting scale-invariant features
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
The SIFT feature-detection algorithm
See also
Detecting FAST features at multiple scales
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
The ORB feature-detection algorithm
See also
9. Describing and Matching Interest Points
Introduction
Matching local templates
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Template matching
See also
Describing local intensity patterns
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Cross-checking matches
The ratio test
Distance thresholding
See also
Describing keypoints with binary features
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
FREAK
See also
10. Estimating Projective Relations in Images
Introduction
Image formation
Calibrating a camera
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Calibration with known intrinsic parameters
Using a grid of circles for calibration
 See also
Computing the fundamental matrix of an image pair
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Matching images using a random sample consensus
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Refining the fundamental matrix
Refining the matches
Computing a homography between two images
Getting ready
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Detecting planar targets in an image
See also
11. Processing Video Sequences
Introduction
Reading video sequences
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
See also
Processing the video frames
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
Processing a sequence of images
 Using a frame processor class
See also
Writing video sequences
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
The codec four-character code
See also
Tracking feature points in a video
How to do it…
How it works…
See also
Extracting the foreground objects in a video
How to do it…
How it works…
There’s more…
The Mixture of Gaussian method
See also
Index
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
front of the house, in the hall there is a trap-door leading to the
storey below, cellars half underground, and in the walls in front are
loop-holes through which a man might easily shoot. The second
storey overhangs the first a little and there is not a corner but could
easily be held by a man with a gun. Yes, decidedly it was built for
defence, such defence as might be needed in the end of the
eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The first night
we spent there, my companion, Eva Parsons, and I alone with the
weird black servants who had seen but very few white people and
whose ways were strange to us, we felt the loneliness keenly. Eva
was ill, and she was a Londoner born and bred. There were rats
racing about downstairs, there were bats making curious sounds in
the roof, and when a potoo bird gave vent to its long drawn-out
uncanny cry, Eva abandoned courage and came flying into my room.
And she was no coward. I comforted her to the best of my ability,
and we decided that until we got the house a little more habitable
one bedroom was quite big enough for the two of us.
But what must it have been like on those ranches in the old days
when the Spaniards were few and scattered, and the corsairs,
English and Portuguese and French and Dutch, and a nondescript
crowd that were worse than any, came cruising along the coasts and
landed and attacked the lonely houses? Think of the women who lay
still shivering or crept to each other's rooms and wondered was that
the pirates or was it only a rat, or possibly a bat in the roof? Or that
weird sound?—Was it a potoo bird killing rats? or was it an English
sailor calling to his mate in his harsh, unknown tongue?
“Except in the principal one, Caguya,” says Sedeno de Albornoz,
speaking of the corsairs, “they anchor in the ports without being
disturbed by anyone, and refit and careen their ships with perfect
ease as if in their country. I can certify that, while a prisoner of
theirs, I have heard with much concern many conversations with
regard to colonising this island and fortifying two ports, one on the
north side and one on the south. I always told them that there was a
garrison of ten companies of infantry stationed by the King our
master, besides three in the town, and two of mounted mulattoes
and free negroes armed with hocking knives and half moons, of
whom they are much afraid. They did not like that reply, and though
doubtful contradicted me, saying they knew very well what was in
the island. It is very certain that it is more important to them than
any other, as it is better and more fertile and abundant than all
those they have settled in the Indies; nor is there another like it in
the Indies. Cuba and Espanola are indeed much larger, but Jamaica
in its entirety is more plentiful than these, for it has much horned
stock, and herds of tame swine, and wild ones in great numbers,
from the hunting of which every year is obtained a quantity of lard
that serves instead of oil for cooking.” So much lard that there are
people who declare that Montego Bay, from which much lard was
exported, took its name from a corruption of the Spanish word for
lard.
“Likewise,” goes on Sedeno, “there is a large number of good
horses, donkeys, and mules, fisheries of turtle and dainty fish, and a
very fine climate from its healthy airs and waters.” Indeed he cannot
say enough for the island. He finishes, “there are now a little over
300 colonists, mostly poor people. Nearly 450 men bear arms,” so I
suppose he only counts those as colonists who actually settled on
the land, “including the hunters and country folks, all of whom are
labouring people, strong and suitable for war by reason of their
courageous spirits if indeed lacking military discipline.”
And even as he wrote the enemy was within the gates, and the
Governor of Jamaica writes despairingly to the King of Spain. He
says 53 ships of war—there were really 38—came in sight of the
island, and they bore 15,000 seamen and soldiers, while the
invaders claim they conquered with 7000 soldiers and a sea
regiment of 1000. But he probably is right when he says “there are
8000 souls scattered about the mountains, children, women, and
slaves, without any hope of protection except from God, with the
enemy's knife every hour at their throats.” We hear so little about
the women and children in these wars of conquest and yet on them
most heavily of all must have pressed the difficulties and the
dangers.
 And the Governor died a prisoner of war, and finally this
Governorship which never seems to have been much sought after
and was worth nothing, now descended upon Christ oval Arnaldo
Ysassi, who was not even a trained soldier.
The rest of the pitiful story is one of flight, flight, flight, the
Spaniards always pressed northward, always begging and praying
help from Cuba, begging for bread and getting a stone.
For we say Jamaica was conquered in 1655, but it takes a long
while for a people who are holding a land by guerilla warfare to
understand that they are beaten, and it was evident that Ysassi was
heartened by many a skirmish that seemed to him a success.
Towards the end of October 1656, however, we find the King of
Spain writing—“The English have a foothold in Jamaica, obstructing
the commerce of all the islands to windward with the coasts of the
mainland and of New Spain. The fleets and galleons run great risk in
passing by Jamaica.”
But even in March of the next year the Viceroy of Mexico writes to
Ysassi congratulating him on his appointment to the Government of
Jamaica, though he himself was beginning to realise what a hollow
farce it was.
However he made it unpleasant for the arrogant invaders. “I now
send a smart English sergeant,” he writes, “who will give your
Excellency lengthy news of the whole state of the island.” Poor
English sergeant, smart even in his captivity! I hope they did not
make things very hard for him in Mexico. That is the worst of history.
The ultimate fate of the pawns is never told, only in these state
papers there is that one entry that pictures for us the upright young
figure with the keen blue eyes and firm set mouth, firm even in
misfortune. God rest his soul! and God bless him for keeping up the
honour of the English nation.
Even when reliefs did come, they brought little comfort to the
harassed Governor. In August 1657, two captains landed at Ochos
Rios, not far from where Columbus spent his weary year. They were
supposed to help the Spanish Governor but, as soldiers, they pointed
out to him the hopelessness of the situation. They said he could not
succeed in the interior, that “it will cost some trouble to capture any
horses from the enemy, and with infantry the risk is manifest.” I
have seen the country and I can't imagine how they thought to use
horses.
But in spite of these Job's comforters, Ysassi kept writing bravely
to the Viceroy that he was harrying the enemy, that still they could
not get any good from the hatos that they held.
“Those who come to get beef, die without anyone being left to
carry the news...” What a picture of bloodthirsty, merciless war it
gives us! When the great golden moon sends her light streaming
through the coconut walks, and the glorious night is heavy with the
scent of the orange flowers and the pimento groves, I cannot but
think of those bloody days in the seventeenth century when the
English drove the Spaniards to the remote corners of the island, and
the Spaniards in their turn killed remorselessly, so that none should
go back to tell the tale.
Again he reports in the middle of September,
“I sallied out upon the road to encounter them with the few troops
I had, which were about 80 men” (Oh, for the might of Spain!)
“because the others are without shoes and not accustomed to the
discomforts of the open country.”
He descants on their ragged condition. “The few soldiers I have
are naked and barefoot and cannot stand the mosquitoes” (I
sympathise with them)—“Please help them.” He has not even paper
to write his reports and the whole history is punctuated with prayers
for provisions, “for soldiers will fight badly if they have nothing to
eat and are badly clothed. I assure your Excellency that some die
reduced to sticks.”
It was evidently a prolonged series of skirmishes, with sometimes
one party conquering, sometimes the other, but the Spaniards seem
to have thought their re-establishment was merely a matter of time.
Once they gave their minds to the matter they must win, and
meanwhile Ysassi was doing useful work holding the place till the
good time came. They could not believe they had lost Jamaica.
“For the love of God,” he prays the Governor of Cuba, “I again ask
you to send me not linen, or a new shirt, because I do not make use
of it” (a gallant of Spain!) “but some old cloth.”
But brave Ysassi was nearing the end. In July 1658 he had
reinforcements from Mexico but is obliged to write sadly—“In fine,
sir, on this 26th June the enemy defeated me with the loss of 300
men although his loss, so far as troops are concerned, was greater.”
(The pitiful pride!) “If they beat me,” he says in effect, “me starving,
short of ammunition, provisions, everything that might enable me to
make good, at least I have given them something better than they
gave me.”
And so he sends the remnant of his army into the mountains to
forage for themselves and he speaks of the negro slaves, the first
mention we have of the Maroons that have figured so largely in
Jamaican history.
“The negroes, Sir,” he writes to his King, “who have remained
fugitives from their masters who have abandoned the island and
your Majesty's arms, are more than two hundred, but many have
died, and I inform your Majesty so that you may command what is
most suitable to your Royal Service to whoever may come to govern
the island. I have not done a small thing in conserving them,
keeping them under my obedience, when they have been sought
after with papers from the enemy. I have promised their Chiefs
freedom in your Majesty's name but have not given it until I receive
an order for it.” As if his gift of freedom could have mattered very
much to the negroes, who already had the freedom of the hills and
the hunted Spaniards much at their mercy.
And here again we are faced with contradictions that make me
glad it is not my business to write history.
 “The Spaniards in their authority over their slaves,” writes the very
verbose Bridges, “appear to have been restrained by no law
whatever; but were sanctioned in every act which could extort their
labour or secure their obedience, so long however as the strength of
the native Indians withstood the execrable cruelties of their Castilian
taskmasters, the negroes were considered as very inferior workmen.
Ovando complained of their continued importation to Hispaniola,
where he found them but idle labourers, who took every opportunity
of escaping into the woods, and assisting the natives in their feeble
attempts to throw off the Spanish yoke. But as Indian life wasted,
negro labour became necessary to supply its place.”
And yet after that he goes on to say: “The British conquerors
profited but little by the negroes whom they found in the island of
Jamaica, and whose services were inseparable from the hard fate of
their expatriated owners.... Not five hundred slaves were employed
in the cultivation containing more than two million acres of the
richest land. The degeneracy of their masters had reduced all classes
to nearly an equality; so that in fact slavery hardly existed in
Jamaica. Poverty had for a series of years forbidden a further
importation of Africans; the negro race had rapidly decayed, and the
few that were left were employed to supply the wants of the
indolent Spaniards in Saint Jago, by the cultivation of their hatos in
the country, and were preserved with the greatest care and
cherished as their own children.... The easy condition of the slaves
was manifested in their attachment to the fallen fortunes of their
masters; and they were confidently left by them to retain possession
of an island which they could no longer keep themselves.” Surely a
curious way to end a paragraph which began by declaiming against
the unbridled cruelty of the Spaniards. So they were not all cruel,
and even troubled Ysassi felt sure that the runaway negroes would
prefer the Spanish rule to the English. Perhaps there was something
in the devil they knew.
In Spain the enquiries into the state of the country appear to have
been endless. It was easier to hold the north side of the island, the
fleeing Spaniards wrote them, and one man tells how his hunting
slaves were enabled to help the unfortunates who had abandoned
their hatos on the south and fled into the mountains in the north. I
see those frightened women and children, toiling along through the
mountain passes, perhaps taking it in turns to ride a mule or donkey,
afraid of the hunting slaves, savage men with little clothing and yet
thankful for the meat and wild fruits they gave them. And they said
that in the first three years they had killed nearly 2500 of the
enemy's men, “while on our side very few were lost. The enemy also
suffered from a pestilence from which more than 6000 died.” And so
they buoyed themselves up with false hopes. But whether they were
killed or wounded or died of pestilence these persistent English came
on and pushed them farther and farther towards the north. Even the
mountains were no refuge, and we read how sick men, women and
children, Spanish colonists and slaves, “embarked in one of his
Majesty's smacks,” that made several trips by order of the Governor
of Cuba who charged (the wretch! to take such advantage of their
desperate straits) “for each person removed from Jamaica, even
infants, at the rate of ten and twelve pesos” (about thirty shillings).
One family even paid him more than three times that, so evidently
there were pickings attached to a Spanish Governorship.
And at last in February 1660 even brave Ysassi must have seen,
and seen thankfully, I should think, that the end was approaching.
He was defeated at Manegua (Moneague)—it is a pleasure resort up
among the hills nowadays, where the tourists come from England
and America—and at a Council of War the abandonment of the
island was recommended.
Slowly, slowly, it had come to that, after all the hopes, all the
sacrifices, all the fighting, all the long, long struggle and suffering,
after nearly five years of it they must go. The English offered terms,
but the Spanish were proud and haggled, and though the English
seem to have been more than kindly and courteous the Spaniards
were loth to give in, and finally we find D'Oyley, the English
Governor, writing “the time for capitulating has expired.” The English
would have sent them to Cuba, sent them with all honour, but the
Spanish Governor, who had never been more than the shadow of a
Governor of Jamaica, could not give in. He complains that the
English only undertook to send away the Spaniards to Cuba, “as the
greater part of the force were Indians, Negroes, and Mulattos,
without counting Slaves and Coloured domestic servants.... I
determined to die sooner than abandon or leave the meanest of
those who had been with me... the troops,” he goes on pathetically,
he had advised the Governor of Cuba, “were very dejected and weak
from want of food and eaten up with lice, for not even the Captains
had more clothes than what they wore.” So he decided to build two
canoes and in fifteen days they were finished and provided with
sails, “from some sheets belonging to the hunters who had
escaped.” We can see those canoes building, the careful watch that
had to be kept lest the English should catch them, the subdued
triumph when they were all complete, the despair when it was found
they would only hold seventy-six people, and so, after all his
protestations, “I was obliged to leave in the island thirty-six under
the charge of one of the Captains who was assisting me.”
And they call the cove where he embarked Runaway Bay. It is a
misnomer, and a slur on the memory of a brave man. Surely no man
ever turned his back on the enemy more reluctantly.
They came in safety to Cuba and no mention is ever made of the
thirty-six left behind and the captain who stayed with them. I like to
think that Ysassi sent for them when he could.
The road that runs right round the island passes close to that little
bay now, and the waters of the blue Caribbean, calm and still, mirror
the blue skies above as they did on that long ago May day when the
last Spanish Governor of Jamaica embarked in a frail canoe and
waving his hand to those he left behind set sail for Cuba to the
north. This was the end of the high adventure. The very end! The
Spanish rule was over, the valued island that lay right in the fairway
of commerce—it lies so still—was lost for ever to the Spanish Crown
and its last Governor was going away a broken and discredited man.
And bitterly the Spaniards regretted the loss. Pedro de Bayoha,
“Governor of the City of Cuba,” wrote to the King setting forth its
many advantages, “any fleet however large can lie and careen its
ships, and any army can march, as food is very plentiful and the
island abounding in tame and wild cattle as well as swine, the
quantity of which is so great that every year twenty thousand head
are killed for the lard and fat and no use is made of the meat.” So
we gather that Ysassi was not very good at the commissariat.
Perhaps the English harried him too much.
It has been said with some surprise that there are few relics of the
Spaniards in the island. For me, I marvel that there is after all these
years still so much. The oranges and the limes, the pomegranates
and the coconut palms are a monument to them, and still at
Montego Bay is to be seen the outlines of a dark stone fort that
overlooked the beautiful bay and guarded the town. And though
Indian corn has been sown in the courtyards for many a long day,
some of the old cannon that belonged to his Spanish Majesty still lie
about. The climate of Jamaica is against the preservation of relics of
the past. “Tis a very strange thing,” says Hans Sloane, accustomed
to the slow growth of Northern climes, “to see in how short a time a
plantation formerly clear of trees and shrubs will grow foul, which
comes from two causes; the one not stubbing up the roots, whence
arise young sprouts, and the other the fertility of the soil. The
settlements and plantations of not only the Indians but even the
Spaniards being quite overgrown with tall trees, so that there is no
footsteps of such a thing left were it not for the old palisadoes,
buildings, orange walks, etc., which show plainly the formerly
cleared places where plantations have been.” And Sloane, who was
physician to the Duke of Albemarle, the Governor, writes of 1688,
not thirty years after the last Spanish Governor had fled.
Even now in Jamaica there are tales of buried treasure. In 1916
the “Busha” or superintendent of an estate in Westmoreland was
engaged in pulling down a stout stone wall, evidently built in the old
days by slave labour. Each stone was well and truly laid, and
tradition said the wall was Spanish. One of the workmen said he had
come to a hollow place. And sure enough there was a large jar
stuffed full of old Spanish gold and silver coins, hidden I suppose
when the Spanish owner of the hato fled before the incoming of the
English. Tradition says there are many more, but within the last year
or two the Crown, I hear, has insisted on its right of treasure trove,
so that it is exceedingly unlikely anyone finding such will proclaim
the fact aloud. The Spanish colonists it is true were but a poor
people, but even the poorest have need of some little money, and in
the days when banks were not much in vogue, cash that would not
go into the breeches pocket had to be kept somewhere.
Bridges tells how “a miniature figure of pure gold representing a
Spanish soldier with a matchlock in his hand was lately found in the
woods of the parish of Manchester. How it came there remains a
mystery; for those extensive forests bear no marks of having ever
been opened, or even penetrated until lately.” And Bridges wrote
about 1828.
But gold is not to be lightly worn or washed away. I can imagine
the young Spanish wife who owned that little golden soldier and
counted him a very precious possession. And so, when she fled with
her baby in her arms and her little daughter clinging to her skirts,
she carried it with her. And then came the day when the English
pressed them hard, and perhaps her husband, perhaps the head
slave, called to her to hurry, they must get away, and the baby cried
because she had so little to give it, and the little maid whimpered
when she fell among the leafy thorns and rough stones on the steep
mountain path, and her mother bending over to comfort her
dropped the little golden Spanish soldier that was her treasure from
her bundle and never knew of her loss till it was too late to go back
to look for it, and there he lay for close on one hundred and sixty
years till some Englishman found him and reported the find to
verbose, moralising, Bridges.
The author of Old St James too tells a tale of Spanish treasure. He
says that sometime in the eighteenth century two Spaniards visited
“Success,” an estate in the north of the island not far from the sea-
shore. They showed a plan said to have been copied from one held
by a Spanish family locating the position of valuable documents
buried upon the estate. There were the remains of an old fort, and
using the walls as a starting-post the point fixed upon was the
centre of the estate's mill-house. Not unnaturally, the visitors wanted
to take down the mill-house, undertaking to rebuild it and leave
everything as they found it. But the owners objected, perhaps also
not unnaturally, for the mill-house was the most important part of
the estate and an owner who would live in any tumble-down
makeshift himself would often spend large sums upon his mill-house
and machinery. Permission was refused, though tradition was with
the Spaniards. For all I know those papers may be there still. The
mill was one of the last to use cattle as power, and when
excavations were being made for the new steam mill, two wells were
found, one with water and the other in which water had obviously
not been found. It was filled with soil of a different character from
that surrounding it. “The water,” says the author, “was evidently that
which supplied the fort and it is natural to think that valuables or
other papers might have been buried in the other.”
There is still among the older people a certain faith in enchanted
jars buried in the earth or left in caves by the Spaniards when they
fled the country. In the Rio Cobre there is a table of gold which rises
up at noon every day, but though it has been seen by more than one
person no one yet has succeeded in getting it before it sinks back
under the waters. This, I am credibly informed—you may believe it
or not as you please—is because the Spaniards killed a slave to
watch over the treasure and no one has been quick enough to throw
their hat, knife, or handkerchief over it and so break the
enchantment.
There was a poor slave woman once who was ill and unable to
finish her task, so the driver made her stay behind and do what she
had left undone. She worked all night, and weary and worn, the task
was not yet done when her hoe struck something that gave out a
jingling sound. She looked carefully and found a Spanish jar, and
with such important information dared even approach the high and
mighty master himself. On going to inspect, he found so large a jar it
had to be pulled out by oxen and was full to the top with golden
doubloons. So he rewarded the woman with her freedom and gave
her enough to live on all her life. At least that is the story that was
told to me. It is a comfort to read of Spanish Gold which for so long
has stood in my mind for fanciful treasure, really materialising to
some one's advantage.
More especially in the north of the island is this faith in hidden
treasure strong. I was told seriously by a young man once that just
beyond Montego Bay some very handsome brass cannon were dug
up and so curiously wrought were they that they were polished and
set up close to where they were found on the shore. But they did
not stay there long. One night a Spanish sloop was seen off the
coast, next morning she was gone, so were the guns, and no one
knows what has become of them.
They tell much the same story about a great jar of gold which was
supposed to have been buried in a cane piece in St Thomas. One
night the Spaniards came, gagged and bound the watchman—I did
not know every cane piece had a watchman, but so the story runs—
and dug up the jar leaving a sum of money for the watchman and
the hole so that the owners of that field might have some idea of
what they had missed.
I am afraid these two last stories are purely apocryphal, but many
people believe in them and they serve to show how fixed in Jamaica
is the faith in Spanish Gold.
At Kempshot, on top of a high hill, Miss Maxwell Hall two or three
years ago was roused night after night by the tramping of feet along
the hillside. At first the noise was a mystery of the night then it
ceased, but a week or two later she found that some great caves on
the estate had been entered and extensive digging had gone on. It
was impossible that anything could have been found, for the
Maxwell Halls themselves had dug out those caves thoroughly
searching not for Spanish treasure but for Arawak remains. It was
evident that a large company had gone there nightly. The place had
an evil reputation and she knew that not two or three men would
have lightly dared its dangers even for promise of gold, and broken
and discarded rum bottles showed how the investigators had been
bucked up with “Dutch courage.”
A little treasure will go a long way in making stories, and one jar
of coin found will supply material for a dozen. But it is interesting to
think that if you buy a plot of land in Jamaica, especially in the
north, you may just chance to buy with it a jar of gold.
 CHAPTER II—THE WHITE
BONDSMEN

I
n this year of Our Lord, 1922, there are still people who regard
Jamaica as a far, far distant country, and when it was conquered
in 1660 it must have been farther from the British Isles than any
spot now on this earth. Indeed, few people would know where it
was and fewer still cared. But some—the wise ones, the Great
Protector among them, rejoiced over this new possession. It seemed
as if the wild tales the seamen told of adventure on the Spanish
Main were now put into concrete form. Spain had drawn great
wealth from these new lands; was some of that great wealth to
come to the northern isle?
But the beginning was very difficult.
Here was an island, a beautiful island truly, but a rugged and
heavily timbered land, a fertile land, but the mountains so
entrancing and so inaccessible, were full of dangers, known and
unknown. And the known were deadly. The Spaniards still lurked in
their leafy depths, and even when they left they encouraged their
abandoned slaves to keep up the feud, and no man could stray from
the armed shelter of his comrades without risking death, often a
painful and cruel death.
Among the English themselves it was not all peace, because they
were unhappily divided into Roundheads and Cavaliers, fanatics and
men of license if we take extremes, and the two parties again and
again were at each other's throats.
And even if there had not been two parties, the soldier as a
colonist was a dead failure. He did not want to try and develop the
land that fell to his lot. He was an adventurer, a fine adventurer
often, but on the whole more given to destruction than to the
building up of a colony. What the first settlers looked to find was
literally gold and silver, pearls, and precious stones. They felt their
work was done when they had conquered the land. They thought
they had a right to sit down and reap the harvest of their labour.
And of course there wasn't any harvest. That wealth lay hidden in
the soil they did not and could not understand. Indeed they did not
want to understand. For if the land was to produce they must labour,
labour under a tropical sun and under conditions that to them were
strange. And even if they did labour to get results, there must be a
market and as yet there was no market. All they could hope for was
to get enough to keep themselves alive. Added to this, their pay was
in arrears.
No money, a climate that because they were unaccustomed to it
they regarded as pestilential, and idle hands, no wonder these
conquerors of Jamaica were discontented, no wonder they roamed
through the savannahs slaying ruthlessly the cattle and horses than
ran wild in what seemed to the newcomers countless numbers. And
so presently it happened that the cattle that had amply supplied the
buccaneers for many decades were all slain and the men who had
declined to plant were starving. They did not want to settle on the
land. They wanted a little more excitement in their lives. In the end,
I think, the average inhabitant of Jamaica had plenty of that
commodity.
To this boiling pot Cromwell sent ont 1000 Irish men and 1000
Irish women. I can find nothing but the bare notification that they
arrived, and it hardly seems to me those 2000 Irish can have helped
matters much, whether they were poor convicts or political
prisoners.
Somebody must till the ground, that was clear; and there came
along Luke Stokes, the Governor of Nevis, intrigued by the stories of
the new conquest; he brought with him 1600 people, men, women,
children, and slaves, to settle in the eastern part of the colony round
Port Morant on the site of an old Spanish hato. The Jamaican
Government hoped much from these new importations.
 Nevis is a tiny mountain island only fifty square miles in extent,
and the people who came from there came to work and were
accustomed to the isolation that is the lot of the pioneer. They
settled in a part fertile certainly, with a wonderful and amazing
fertility, but where the rainfall was very heavy and the heat far
greater than in little Nevis, where the sea breeze swept every corner.
There were mosquitoes too in the swamps, and a number of those
settlers died, men, women, children, and slaves. Governor Stokes
had hardly built himself a house when he and his wife died. If it was
lonely in Nevis, ringed by the eternal sea, it was lonelier far in Port
Morant, Jamaica, with the swamps around and the mountains,
beautiful but stern and inaccessible, frowning down upon them.
We know very little about those first comers, but we do know that
after the first decimating sickness that fell upon them, the remainder
held on and tried to make good.
There were in 1671, the historian Long tells us, sixty settlements
in the Port Morant district.
Probably we should read for the word “settlements” “estates”
either pens or sugar estates. Now to people who do not understand
conditions in Jamaica that sounds quite thickly populated. But
Jamaica is all hills and valleys—rather I should say, steep precipices
and deep ravines—and, as I cannot say too often, especially in that
district the vegetation is dense. A mile in Jamaica, it often seemed to
me, is farther than ten in England, much farther than a hundred in
Australia. Even now many pens, many sugar estates are cut off
entirely from neighbours. I lived for three months a guest of
hospitable Miss Maxwell Hall, at her house Kempshot, on top of a
steep mountain, from which we could see literally hundreds of hills
melting away into the dim distance. We could see Montego Bay 1800
feet below us, but no other habitation of a white man was in sight,
and we were so cut off by the inaccessibility of the country that
though my hostess is certainly one of the most charming and
popular young women in the countryside, no one from the town ever
made their way up that steep hill. They were content that she who
knew the road should come down and see them when she had the
time.
When we talk about the colonising of Jamaica, I think we ought to
take into consideration the isolation that was of necessity the lot of
almost every colonist.
And I think we may count these men from Nevis the very first
agriculturists who did make good, and find a living in the soil of an
island that is certainly one of the assets of the Empire. I am lost in
admiration of these pioneers. They lived to themselves, they were
entirely dependent upon themselves. Were they sick? They must see
things through, die, or get well. As the crow flies, help might be near
enough, but the steep mountain paths were cut by impassable
torrents or blocked by dense vegetation. Their slaves might rise—
probably they did—for slavery either for the white man or the black
is not conducive to contentment, and they had to face it and bring
them to a sense of their wrongdoing without outside aid. And then
there was that other danger from the corsairs or pirates who swept
the seas and made descents upon the lonely plantations, looking for
meat, or rum, sometimes for women, and always for any trifles in
gold or silver or jewels that might be picked up, and they were as
ruthless as a Sinn Feiner in their methods. No wonder the houses
were built stern and strong with thick walls loop-holed for defence.
They might reckon on the slaves to help them here, for the slaves
would not have much to hope for if they fell into the hands of the
pirates. A slave's lot was probably hard enough anyway, but I think it
was perhaps better to belong to a settler, to whom his services were
of value, than to a pirate who evidently in those days counted a
man's life about on a par with that of a beetle. They must have been
a narrow, capable, self-centred people those settlers who came from
Nevis and made good at Port Morant.
Cromwell was very anxious that the island should be peopled and
both he and Charles II. gave patents for land freely, and though
there does not seem to have been much competition for these
patents, still some men did come and were planted over the colony.
 The need of the island, of course, was women. Some of the old
Spanish settlers gave in their submission and they probably had
daughters and young sisters to be wooed by the rough English
soldiery. I don't know if any of those who took out patents married
in this way. Probably they did, especially in the north, but sometimes
they brought their wives from the Old Country.
At Little River in 1670 the lands were surveyed by Richard and
Mary Rutledge, and other people took to themselves parcels of land
there, varying in size from 50 to 200 acres. It is a rich country, this
island that the Spaniards held so long, with rivers running down
from the wooded mountains and in the rich river-bottoms almost any
tropical plant will grow. The farther I went to the north-west the
more fertile I found the country, and at Lucea, Lucea with the lovely
little harbour well sheltered from storms, they grow yams, yams that
are a byword in a land that will always grow yams. All along the road
by the sea, that lovely road, came creaking great carts drawn by
oxen—yes, even in these days of motors, bullock drays driven by
shouting black drivers, piled high with Lucea yams. Yam, I may
interpolate, is a valuable foodstuff. I want butter and milk to it, but
the natives, the Creole descendants of the slaves, eat it with coconut
oil. The food values of the yam and the potato—the Irish potato, as
they quaintly call it in Jamaica—are probably about the same, but
you get a great deal more for your money in a yam. It is the food of
the common people, while the potato is a luxury. A black man once
brought me, as a Christmas present, a cardboard box neatly tied up
with pink ribbon, and in it wrapped up in white tissue paper were
four “Irish” potatoes! But even potatoes will grow in this goodly land
—what will not grow here—I believe they cannot raise primroses—
and yet these early settlers were not a success.
“In the second generation,” says the author of Old St James, “they
had all died out or gone, and the only memorials were the graves.”
They used to say in those days, and indeed long after, that unless
the population were recruited from the Old Country every white
would have gone in seven years. We may take that statement for
what it is worth. The Briton, wanderer as he is, has a fixed idea in
his own mind that the only place where children can really be reared
properly is in those islands in the North Atlantic that he himself
quitted in his youth. Even so late as when I was a young woman, I
have heard battles royal on the subject of the degeneration of
Australia, and there were men from England who held, and held
strongly, that Australia cut off from Britain for ten years would
degenerate into the savagery of the people the English had found
there at the first settlement! There was no stamina, said these ultra
English, in young Australia, in young New Zealand; even the animals
became degenerate. But behold, over Australia's plains range the
largest flocks of sheep in the world with the very best wool (at least
it fetches the highest prices in London), and at Gallipoli the stalwart
sons of Anzac proved once for all that they too were Britons, worthy
sons of the Empire whose flag they were upholding.
And so it is with Jamaica. Men can live, they can thrive there, but
for the first comers, ingrained with British ideas, it was very hard
indeed.
We talk about planters, but I fancy some of those first comers
were accustomed to live very humbly and had very small intellectual
attainments. Of course there were the men of standing and their
wives, the men who stood round the Governor, but the men who
took out the patents for small parcels of land and lived on their land
were probably hardly the equals of the Council School educated
labourer of to-day. The only difference would be—and of course it is
a tremendous difference—those planters, however small their
educational attainments, were accustomed to look upon themselves
as the salt of the earth.
Each and all had slaves, and the gulf between the slave and his
owner was so wide and so deep that there was no bridging it. It
remains to-day in the colour question that is for ever cropping up,
and it made one class arrogant as it made the other cringingly
submissive.
 “If an average planter of 1720,” says Planter's Punch, “and his
wife and daughters could be brought back to life and could live for a
day now as they lived in times long passed, and if we could witness
their manners and have a glimpse of their daily customs, it is little to
say that we should be inexpressibly shocked.... There is a planter's
house of the first century of colonisation still standing in St
Elizabeth, but there are scarce a dozen in the colony. It has a broad
verandah in front, which you approach by a low flight of stone steps,
the walls are from 2 to 3 feet thick, there are shutters for the
windows, you see at once that the place was originally built for
defence. It is of one storey only; there is no ceiling; so that the
heavy rafters are exposed. It may contain in all some six
apartments; it would not be disturbed by a hurricane, hardly by an
earthquake, and it could have withstood for sometime an assault
from slaves.... It was in houses of this sort that the country planter
lived for a hundred years or more in those fabled 'good old times' of
which we sometimes speak.”
And these houses were naturally very plainly furnished. There
were great mahogany beds, one probably even in the sitting-room if
the posts happened to be well carved, there were mahogany chairs
and tables, perhaps a cupboard or great box or two, all made on the
estate, for they all prided themselves upon having a carpenter. They
had mattresses and quilts and of necessity mosquito curtains, but
they had no pictures—the days of the pictorial calendar were not yet
—and never a book, save perhaps the Family Bible, wherein to
record the births and deaths of the family. If the house mistress
were house proud, having as many servants as she pleased, she
perhaps saw to it that her mahogany floors were kept in a high state
of polish and the pieces of family silver brought from the Old
Country and set out on the country-made sideboard reflected the
faces of its owners, but otherwise there was not much ornament.
The weather was hot, it was always hot to these men from
England, and at first they wore their heavy English clothes, their
long coats, their waistcoats, their breeches and heavy woollen
stockings; and their hair too was long until they took to wearing
wigs, which must have been worse. Well, of course, it was utterly
out of the question that a man should go clad like that in a Jamaican
August even when the rain came down in torrents and every leaf
held a shower of water. He shed his clothes by degrees, and went
about his house, where he was only seen by his women, often about
his fields, where he was only seen by his slaves, who did not count,
in thread stockings, linen drawers and vest, with a large
handkerchief tied round his head. Out of doors he would wear a hat
on top of this kerchief. Of course there were occasions when he
graced some state function with his presence, or twice or thrice in
his life on some very important occasion he may have felt impelled
to attend church, and then he would adorn his head with a wig.
Then, too, he would blossom out into a silk coat and a vest
trimmed with silver.
Lesley, speaking of his arrival in Jamaica in the beginning of the
eighteenth century says, “the people seem all sickly, their
complexion is muddy, their colour wan and their bodies meagre,
they look like so many corpses and their dress resembles a shroud.”
It must be remembered that yellow fever was rampant, and that
not till the very end of the nineteenth century was the cause known.
“However,” he goes on to say, “they are frank and good-humoured
and make the best of life they can. If Death is more busy in this
place than in many others, his approach is nowhere received with a
greater unconcernedness. They live well, enjoy their friends, drink
heartily, make money, and are quite careless of futurity.”
I suppose he meant the Future Life, that life beyond the Grave, of
which we know nothing; but it seems to me it was the present that
those past colonists played with so lightly. Many of the gentlemen
were very fine and treated their inferiors—those with less of this
world's goods—with a condescension that then was the admiration
of their historian, but which nowadays would make us smile. One
and all, it seems, however small reason they had for it, were very
haughty and insisted upon being bowed down to. If a man wished to
do business with them he might get much more favourable terms if
he knew how to “apply to their humour; but they who are so
unhappy as to mistake it, may look for business in another place.”
It is very difficult for us to understand the feelings of the people of
those times. Only after reading Mr and Mrs Hammond's books on
Labour in England between 1760 and 1830, have I dimly understood
what the poor in those times suffered, what it was that filled the
ships that brought bondsmen to the plantations in the West and
later convicts to the colonies of the unknown South.
Meditate on this description of the upbringing of a boy in Jamaica
and think what it was to trust men's lives in such hands.
“A boy till the age of seven or eight diverts himself with the
negroes, acquires their broken way of talking, their manner of
behaviour, and all the vices which these unthinking creatures can
teach. Then perhaps he goes to school. But young Master must not
be corrected. If he learns 'tis well, if not, it can't be helped. After a
little knowledge of reading he goes to the dancing school and
commences Beau, learns the common topics of discourse and visits
and rakes with his equals. This is their method.”
Here is a little bill presented at a first-rate tavern in Kingston in
the year 1716 which throws a little light on the way in which one of
these beaus dined. A bit, I may say, seems to have been about 7 1/2
d.

Dinner for one......5 Bits

Small beer..........1 Bit
Bottle of ale.......4 Bits
Quart of Rum punch..4 ”
Coffee..............1 ”
Lodging............23 Bits

The bill does not mention how the gentleman got to his bed, but I
presume he was carried there, or maybe he slept undisturbed under
the table for which they charged him “lodging.”
In Lady Nugent's time, over eighty years later, she says: “I am not
astonished at the general ill-health of the men in this country, for
they really eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises.... Almost
every man of the party was drunk, even to a boy of fifteen or
sixteen, who was obliged to be carried home. His father was very
angry, but he had no right to be so as he set the example to him.”
Surely there must be something very good in human nature, for
we know there were fine men in past times. Evidently in spite of
their upbringing.
Life for the women was little better. If Madam could read and
write it was as much as she could do. Whatever might have been
the opinion of society in the Elizabethan era, undoubtedly, until but
quite a few years ago, a learned woman was looked upon askance,
and a gentleman—how the word is going out of use—ever feared
that he might be thought to be in any way connected with trade.
Even I can remember my grandmother saying to me that no
gentleman wished to write a clear hand lest people should think he
had been a clerk, and as for a woman very little reading and writing
was good enough for her. Reading she regarded as “waste of time”
for a woman, and my grandmother was born in the end of the
eighteenth century and died an old, old woman in the last quarter of
the nineteenth. She prided herself—with justice—on her courtly
manners, and like one of Jane Austen's heroines, was a lady of
leisure, never did I see her doing anything. She must have worked,
for she was a poor woman and her house was nicely kept, but it
would have been derogatory to allow even her granddaughter to see
her sweeping or dusting, or cooking or washing up the crockery. I
fear the ladies of the planters and their daughters had less education
than even my grandmother would have thought necessary and the
courtly manners were left out.
If young Master made free with the better-looking negro wenches,
or, as time went on, with the mulattoes and quadroons, it made life
exceedingly dull for his sisters and his neighbours' sisters. Nay,
more, it absolutely ruined their lives, and it was a cross they must
bear with a smile, pretend indeed that it was a thing to which they
never gave a thought. Yet these girls were brought up to think that
marriage was the be-all and end-all of a woman's life. It was, of
course. Nowadays, when most careers are open to her, it is hard on
a girl if she may not have the hope of marrying, and she may marry
any time between twenty and forty. But if she does not marry, she
may still have an important place in the world. Then if she did not
marry young she was at once counted a nonentity, she had little
chance of marrying at all, her life must needs be empty and she had
no standing in the world.
And maturity comes so quickly in the tropics. Her time was so
woefully short. Shorter than it was in the Old Country, and it was
short enough there. “She had passed her first bloom,” writes Jane
Austen on one occasion—and she meant it always—“she was nearly
twenty.” If she had not a beau by the time she was sixteen, or were
not married by eighteen or nineteen, a girl was branded as a failure,
and I think there must have been many heart-burnings among the
white women of Jamaica in these long ago days. The twentieth
century has given women better fortune, taken away the bitterness
that is the portion of the woman who, being as it were on show, is
passed by as worthless.
But in the early days, because work was the portion of the slave,
the lady must needs sit with idle hands. The long hot hours were
interminable.
She lounged about in a loose white garment, bareheaded,
barefooted, she did absolutely nothing from morning to night. The
slaves brought in food, highly-spiced food, to tempt a languid
appetite, and she ate it on the floor, because so it was considered
more appetising; if she felt amiable she asked the slaves to share, if
not, a blow or many stripes was their portion. Only when there was
a chance of meeting a young man, or at least an unmarried man, did
she give time and attention to her toilet and lay herself out to
please. By reason of her training or lack of it, she had nothing in
common with that man but thoughts of passion or pleasure. Of
pleasure she might speak, though pleasure taken without work
behind it, shared or understood, is very unmeaning; of passion she
was supposed to know not even the meaning of the word. She must,
so she thought, appear utterly ignorant on most subjects. Many and
many a time a girl put on her fine clothes, tried first this colour and
then that, curled her hair and powdered her face, put a touch of
rouge here and a patch there, pinned down a ribbon or fluffed out a
bow and went out with a sigh and a smile and ogled and coquetted
as might any more fortunate dame at Bath or Tunbridge Wells.
And she hoped—for what? That perhaps at last she might find
favour in some young buck's eyes, and so be able to talk to her
sisters and her friends, and above all to her brothers, as if it were
she who were conferring the favour and this young man had fallen a
victim to her charms. When he came awooing in earnest he likely
had, for the odds were heavy against her. Marriage was out of
fashion. The young planter did not wish to marry. It was an age of
so-called gallantry—of intrigue, and once the negro slaves were
introduced, he formed connections with his own women slaves that
gave him entire satisfaction.
How often I wonder did the girl take off the gown put on with
such high hopes with a bitter sense of failure, a failure that might
not ever be put into words, and all the bitterer for that. And the
oftener she did it, and the fainter her hopes, the more dreary would
be her feelings. Her own helplessness, her own uselessness, though
she would not put it that way, made her hard on the luckless girl
who waited on her, made her curtail her scanty liberty, beat her, or
starve her ruthlessly.
But there were not always white women in a planter's household.
Even now in Jamaica there is a proverb that says rudely that the two
worst things on a pen are a goat and a white woman—that is what
made these girls' chances so poor.
Of course I am describing extreme cases. There were girls who
were wooed and won, as there were women, I expect, who never
neglected their toilet even when they were alone. But considering
the climate, it was not unnatural they should pass the day in a
dressing-gown which has been described as a sort of nightgown
wrapped round them. In all the world there are born slatterns, and I
can easily imagine the women of those first settlers drifting into very
easy-going ways. In my own household we two women wakened at
dawn and stood on the porch in our nightgowns wondering what the
new day would bring. A nightgown and loose hair and bare feet
seemed the proper costume. It is not too cool when the fresh
morning air plays around you, it is quite enough when the heat of
the day is upon you. Jamaica calls for some loose and airy costume.
I have always been curious about the indentured white servants
who were brought to the plantations in the West Indies and America
to do the work of artisans and labourers, and I have been able to
find little about them.
The first were evidently those Irish sent out by Cromwell. And
after that beginning almost every ship brought its quota of servants,
as they called them, in contradistinction to the slaves.
“Scarce a ship arrives,” says Lesley, “but has passengers who
design to settle, and servants for sale. This is a constant supply and
a necessary one,” meaning that they considered the white race must
die out unless constantly renewed. Servants in those days were
always aplenty. Sometimes these servants were convicts, sometimes
they were only prisoners for debt, sometimes they were political
prisoners, sometimes, I am afraid, they had been kidnapped, and
sometimes like a well-known man, Sir William Morgan, they had sold
themselves into slavery to get away from a life in England grown
intolerable. That any men should have done so throws a sinister light
on the life of many men in those times, for if the life of a negro slave
was hard—and God knows it must have been—in no sense can it
have approached the hardships of the lot of the white bondservant.
“Another ship brought in a multitude of half-starved creatures,”
writes Lesley on another occasion, “that seemed like so many
skeletons. Misery appeared in their looks, and one might read the
effects of sea tyranny by their wild and dejected countenances. 'Tis
horrid to relate the barbarities they complained of. A word or a
wrong look was constru'd a design to Mutiny, and Hunger, Handcuffs
and the Cat o' Nine Tails was immediately the punishment.” True, he
adds, “'tis only aboard a few vessels such cruelties are practised.”
When they arrived, they were not landed at once; they must not
leave the ship for at least ten days after she had entered the port.
The master of the ship, merchant or importer of the white servants,
had not the right to sell any before that time had elapsed under a
penalty of £10 for every one so sold, and their keep was paid by the
factor or seller. Why this was, I do not know. It might have been to
give the most distant planters a chance to buy or it may have been
in the interests of the servants themselves, so that any man who
had been unlawfully smuggled aboard might have time in which to
have his case investigated. Still, we may pity those poor bondsmen
sweltering in their cramped quarters, but I suppose we may give the
authorities credit for some little effort to do them justice.
Once they were landed their hard lot had begun, a path which
often led straight to the grave.
There was always a shoal of buyers. Roystering Cavaliers and prim
Roundheads crowded down to the ship and the servants passed
before them and were examined, men and women, as if they had
been so many horses or cattle. It must have been a bitter pill for the
gentlemen of Monmouth's following, fallen from their high estate
and passed from hand to hand by these men whom once they would
have regarded as far below them, only fit to sit at table with their
servants, and bitterer still must it have been for the women. And
though there was competition for them you might buy a good
artisan for £40, an ordinary labourer for £20, and I am afraid the
higher rank a man had held in England the lower would be his value
in Jamaica, at least before negro slaves became numerous.
Every servant had to serve according to contract, if there was no
contract, for four years, but if he was under eighteen he had to
serve seven years, and convicted felons, of course, for the time of
their banishment. Fancy buying the services of a good carpenter for
£10 a year and his keep! It must have been cheap even when
money was worth so much more.
 All authorities agree that these bondservants were cruelly ill-used.
It was generally understood that while a man looked after his black
slave, who was his for life, it was to his interest to get as much as he
could out of his bondservant whose services were his only for a
limited period. Thus it was that they were worked very hard indeed,
so hard that often in sheer self-defence when the end of his time
was approaching, a man would prevail upon his master to re-sell him
for a further term of years to some other man. And often the servant
died before the years were passed. I have found no record of what a
woman brought, but I expect that Madam often commissioned her
husband to bring her a quiet, middle-aged woman, not too good
looking—though she probably didn't put it quite in those words—to
tend the children and do the sewing. And the younger men, I
expect, looked at the girls and suggested the propriety of a new
waiting-maid to their fathers, or possibly, if they had houses of their
own, bought them themselves. Oh, I can see bitter depths of
degradation that lay in wait for some of those younger bondwomen.
One might think, considering how valuable was the worker, it
would have been easy to escape and work as a free labourer. But
the authorities had provided for that. At the expiration of his time his
master had to give the servant £2 and a certificate of freedom, and
whoever employed any free person without a certificate from the
last employer forfeited £10. Who then would take any risk when for
so little more he could have a servant of right?
Each servant was to receive yearly three shirts, three pairs of
drawers, three pairs of shoes, three pairs of stockings, and one hat
or cap, little enough in a climate like Jamaica where the need is for
plenty of clothes, washed often. The women were supplied
proportionately. As a matter of fact the men often had no shoes, and
were dressed, says Lesley, in a speckled shirt, a coarse Osnaburg
frock (Osnaburg seems to have been a coarse sort of linen,
something, I take it, like the dowlas of which we make kitchen
towels), buttoned at the neck and wrists, and long trousers of the
same, and they had bare feet unless they could contrive sandals.
The women wore generally a striped Holland gown with a plain cloth
wrapped about their heads, such as every negro maid wears
nowadays.
There were regulations for their feeding too. By these, each
servant was to have 4 lbs. of good flesh or good fish weekly, and
such convenient plantation provisions as might be sufficient. Most
plantations had a “mountain” attached where the slaves grew their
provisions, the cattle were turned out to recruit, and hogs were
raised, and in a country like Jamaica there should have been no
difficulty in supplying plenty of meat. But practically, I am afraid, it
was not often supplied, and the 4 lbs. of good flesh became Irish
salt beef, which was admittedly very coarse, and as it had often
been months on the way, was probably a great deal nastier than it
sounds.
The poor bondsman found himself hemmed in by all manner of
regulations. No one could trade with a servant—or slave for that
matter—without the consent of the master on penalty of forfeiting
treble the value of the thing traded and £10 in addition. Human
nature was frail, and if a freeman got a woman servant with child he
had to pay £20 for the maintenance of the woman and child or serve
the master double the time the woman was to serve. If he married
her though, lucky woman, after he had paid that £20 she was free;
if they married without the master's consent the man had to serve
two years.
True, he had some privileges this luckless bondservant. He could
not be whipped on the naked back without the order of a justice of
the peace under a penalty of £5; less, you see, than a man had to
pay for trading with him without the consent of his master. And
sometimes, of course, he was a favourite; Lesley says he has known
servants to dine “on the same victuals as their master, wear as good
clothes, be allowed a horse and a negro boy to attend them.” But to
me this only emphasises how much the unfortunate servant was
dependent for his comfort, his happiness, his success in life, not
upon his worth but upon the caprice of the fine gentleman who was
his master. If he were “stupid or roguish” he was hardly used, often
put in the stocks and beaten severely, and he got nothing to eat but
the salt provisions and the ground food the law insisted he should
have, and at the end of his four years naturally, if his master would
not give him a character, nobody could be found to employ him. His
lot was worse than that of the black slave, whom custom and public
opinion decreed should not be cast off in his old age whatever his
record.
How low was the status of a bond-servant is told by a chance
remark of Lesley's, who says that Sir Henry Morgan was at first only
a servant to a planter in Barbadoes, and “though that state of life be
the meanest and most disgraceful, yet he caused to be painted
round his portrait a chain and pothooks, that marked the
punishment to which he was like to be subjected in those days.”
That little story made me change my opinion of Sir Henry Morgan.
He climbed by piracy, and then he put down piracy with a high hand,
hanging the less fortunate of his fellows. But since he was not too
proud to be reminded of the lowly position from which he had
sprung, there must have been reason in what he did.
The colony desired bond-servants or, more probably, white
inhabitants. Any shipmaster importing fifty white servants was freed
from port charges on the ship for that voyage, but they had,
observe, to be male servants. They didn't think much of women in
the days of gallantry.
And others were welcome besides servants. “All tradesmen and
others not able to pay their passages, except Jews, cripples, and
children under eleven years of age, willing to transport themselves
to this island shall be received on board any ship, and were free
from any servitude.” The master received for anyone coming from
England, £7, 10s.; from Ireland, £6; from New England, Carolina,
and other parts of America, £3, 10s.; from Providence and the
Windward Isles, £2. These sums were evidently paid to the
shipowner through the master, for Lesley goes on to say that, for
every person brought from Europe, the master “should have for his
encouragement and to his own use the further sum of £1 per head,
while those brought from America brought the master in 10s. ahead
apiece.” And evidently these willing emigrants were set to work at
once, for all rogues and vagabonds and idle persons refusing to work
were to be whipped on the naked back with thirty-nine lashes, when
presumably they took their place among the bondservants.
It wasn't very easy to get out of this country that was so lavish
with its invitations to come and settle. Every shipmaster had to give
security of £1000 not to carry off any person without leave of the
Governor, and anyone wishing to get leave had his name set up for
twenty-one days, and had to bring a witness who had known him or
her for at least a year. It was even difficult to hide, for if a servant or
hired labourer hid another man's servant or slave, he forfeited one
year's service to the master or had thirty-nine lashes on the bare
back.
And that is all I can find about these unwilling immigrants. Not
one person that ever I heard of owns to having descended from
them, and what is more extraordinary still, tradition does not point
at any man as having among his forebears one who so arrived in the
colony. All trace of them is lost. Naturally, perhaps. No one owns to a
convict grandfather or great grandfather, even if the conviction were
only for knocking down a rabbit.
Still, in after years, no one would have been ashamed at having a
follower of Monmouth for an ancestor. But I have heard of none
such. If these bond-servants died they were forgotten, and if they
made good, as some must have done, they were absorbed into the
population.
As the black slaves became commoner the value of the white
bondsmen was enhanced, for the slaves were always a menace, and
there was a law by which every owner of slaves had to keep one
white man, servant, overseer, or hired man, for the first five working
slaves; for ten slaves, two whites, and two whites for every ten
more, and these had to be resident on the plantation, so that these
bondsmen became either overseers or book-keepers, if they had not
skill enough to be blacksmiths or carpenters. And then, I think, it
was that the bondsman had his chance.
Book-keepers or artisans were not supposed, even when they
were free men, to speak to the planter's daughter. Their social
standing was by no means good enough, and it was a time when
class differences were very marked.
But youth is youth, and if the girl had no hope of a lover among
her own class, and indeed even if she had, I expect the good looking
young bondsman was often encouraged by an arch look or a melting
glance to a closer acquaintance. It ended—well in one way. She ran
away with him, or possibly there was nowhere to run to, and a man
cannot go far without money, so—the tropical nights are made for
love-making. Presently, if the father and the mother were not wise,
there was a scandal and some poor servant had ill-merited stripes.
But sometimes, I think, the planter was wise. Quite likely the
bondsman, especially if he had been a political prisoner, was far
better educated and better mannered than the girl running wild on
the estate. Some provision would be made for the young couple, the
lad would get his freedom, and in some house a little more
sequestered in the hills, they would start housekeeping with a cane
patch and black servants of their own.
This is entirely my own idea. I can find no record whatever of such
a marriage. All trace of the bond-servants has vanished as
completely as though they had never been, but this is the way I
interpret Lesley's remark, “At last for the most part run away with
the most insignificant of their humble servants!”
But that lucky man was only one out of hundreds.
Many and many an unhappy being, I am afraid, crawled away
from a servitude grown too hard, and died beneath the tangle of
palms and tropical greenery among the mountains of Jamaica.
For they died prematurely—we know they died. Even the ruling
class died like flies often before they had reached their prime, and
each and all set down the abnormal death rate to the pestilential
climate. Really Jamaica has a beautiful climate, but they did not
understand in those days the danger of the mosquito, and they
thought the night air was deadly. All classes drank, the masters
“Madera” and rum, and the servants rum that was doubtless not of
the best. It is easy to sneer, but human nature needs some
relaxation, and living on beef that was like brine, sleeping all night in
a room from which the night air was carefully excluded, the
gorgeous divine night of Jamaica, and overworked in the burning
sun, we can hardly blame these bondsmen for drinking. They
watered the cane pieces with their sweat and blood, and they died—
died—died! They were not even pioneers. They were simply bond-
servants on whom no one wasted pity.
It seems to me that pity, that true pity which is not half-sister to
contempt, but has eyes for suffering humanity, and the will to better
things was hardly born among the majority till after the Great War.
Now at last is the worker coming into his own, and if he wax fat and
kick like the gentleman in Holy Writ, I think we must forgive him, for
long has he served.
 CHAPTER III—JAMAICA'S FIRST
HISTORIAN

I
t is fascinating to read up the old books that have been written
about Jamaica. Wearisome sometimes naturally, because for one
illuminating remark you must wade through a mass of turgid
stuff.
I confess even to having skipped occasionally Hans Sloane, and I
read Hans Sloane—in the original edition with the long “s's”—sitting
on the verandah of my house looking over the Caribbean Sea, and
when I had finished I felt I had known him, so charming is he. I was
sorry I could not write and thank him for his book. It is a very
strange thing how personality creeps out in writing. No one surely
ever talked less of himself than Hans Sloane, but we somehow get a
picture of a kindly, interesting man, patient and tactful, whom it
must have been a privilege to know, and he manages to give us a
very clear picture of life in Jamaica little more than thirty years after
the first landing of the English. He was Physician to the Duke of
Albemarle and lived in Jamaica for a year, 1687-88, and he looked at
the country he had come to with seeing eyes, and described
thoughtfully what he saw.
“The Swine come home every night in several hundreds from
feeding on the wild Fruit in the neighbouring Woods, on the third
sound of a Conch Shell, when they are fed with some few ears of
Indian corn thrown in amongst them, and let out the next morning
not to return till night, or that they heard the sound of the Shell.
These sort of remote Plantations are very profitable to their Masters,
not only in feeding their own Families, but in affording them many
Swine to sell for the Market. It was not a small Diversion to me, to
see the Swine in the Woods, on the first sound of the Shell, which is
like that of a Trumpet, to lift up their Heads from the ground where
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