Jamaica--Its marvellous beauty--The bewildered Guardsman--Little trace
of Spain left in Jamaica--The Spaniards as builders--British and
Spanish Colonial methods contrasted.


Since the earliest days of my boyhood, the West Indies have exercised
a quite irresistible fascination over me. This was probably due to my
having read and re-read _Peter Simple_ and _Tom Cringle's Log_ over and
over again, until I knew them almost by heart; indeed I will confess
that even at the present day the glamour of these books is almost as
strong as it used to be, and that hardly a year passes without my
thumbing once again their familiar pages. Both Captain Marryat and
Michael Scott knew their West Indies well, for Marryat had served on
the station in either 1813 or 1814, and Michael Scott lived for sixteen
years in Jamaica, from 1806 to 1822, at first as manager of a sugar
estate, and then as a merchant in Kingston. Marryat and Scott were
practically contemporaries, though the former was the younger by three
years, being born in 1792. I am told that now-a-days boys care for
neither of these books; if so, the loss is theirs. What attracted me in
these authors' West Indian pictures was the fact that here was a
community of British-born people living a reckless, rollicking, Charles
Lever-like sort of life in a most deadly climate, thousands of miles
from home, apparently equally indifferent to earthquakes, hurricanes,
or yellow fever, for at the beginning of the twentieth century no one
who has not read the Colonial records, or visited West Indian churches,
can form the faintest idea of the awful ravages of yellow fever, nor of
the vast amount of victims this appalling scourge claimed. Now,
improved sanitation and the knowledge that the yellow death is carried
by the Stegomyia mosquito, with the precautionary methods suggested by
that knowledge, have almost entirely eliminated yellow fever from the