Panama and the Canal in Picture and ProseAbbot, Willis J. (Willis John)
History
Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose
Abbot, Willis J. (Willis John)
Panama Canal (Panama) -- History
The town boasts a race course, and the triple pillars of English social
life, cricket, lawn tennis and afternoon tea, are much in evidence. The
Governor is always an Englishman and his home government, which never
does things by halves, furnishes him with a stately official residence
and a salary of £5000 a year. The Episcopal Archbishop of the West
Indies resident there is an Englishman. But most of the heads of
official departments are Jamaicans, which is quite as it should be, for
out of the 850,000 people in the island only about 1660, according to
the census of 1911, were born in England, Scotland or Ireland.
Furthermore the number of “men from home” is relatively decreasing,
although their influence is still potent. Even the native Jamaican of
the more cultivated class speaks of England as home, and as a rule he
spends his holidays there. Yet the keenest observers declare that the
individual Englishman in Jamaica always remains much of a stranger to
the native people. He is not as adaptable even as the American, and it
is asserted that American influence in the island grows even as British
domination is weakened.
One home feature which the English have impressed upon the islands is
good roads. The highways leading from Kingston up into the hills and
across the island to Port Antonio and other places are models of road
making. They are of the highest economic value, too, for in marketing
farm products the one railroad is but little used. Nearly everything is
brought from farm to market on the heads of the striding women, or in
straw panniers slung over the backs of patient donkeys. Amazing are the
loads these two patient beasts of burden--biped and quadruped--bear.
Once in a while a yoke of oxen, or a one horse cart is seen, but in the
main the woman or the donkey furnishes transportation. To the Jamaican
there is nothing wrong with the verbiage of the Tenth Commandment to
which our progressive women take violent exception. To him there is
nothing anomalous in lumping in his or his neighbor’s wife with “his ox
or his ass.” So the country roads on a market day are an unending
panorama of human life, of women plodding to market--often a two days’
journey--with a long swinging stride, burden firmly poised on head, or
returning with smaller loads gossiping and laughing with much gleaming
of white teeth as the stranger passes. The roads are a paradise for
automobilists--smooth, of gentle grade, with easy curves and winding
through the most beautiful scenery of tropic hillsides and rushing
waters. Only the all-pervading dust mars the motorists’ pleasure.
[Illustration: A YARD AND ITS TENANTS
“The huts are inconceivably small, a trifle larger than billiard
tables”]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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