At night there was the wonderful moon and the cool, fresh air. It was pleasant to watch the sea; astern, we left a living, toiling, twisting thread of silver foam; ahead, our bows struck the water, and it flashed fire. Sometimes all was dark; sometimes the sea blazed with phosphorescent light. But always overhead the yellow moon and the golden stars were studded in the blue-black dome of night. A few hours after leaving Turk’s Island we found Jamaica. Afar off, through the brilliant air of the morning, we saw a tiny pepper-box, which presently turned into a sugar-caster, and gradually, by many complicated but interesting evolutions, developed into a full-fledged lighthouse. The lighthouse is on Morant Point, and Morant Point is the beginning of Jamaica. Columbus named the island Santa Gloria; he was the first European to be bewitched by that low coast-line, all gold shot with green and darker green, stretching back from the sea to the foot of the great Blue Mountains; the Blue Mountains, whose peaks, shrouded in white mist, are buried deep in the hazy sky. Along the shore we sailed, past cane plantations, banana groves, white houses, snow-white roads, and great everlasting clumps of graceful palm-trees. Ahead, standing out at the end of a neck of land, we saw Port Royal--the real, wonderful, most romantic Port Royal, doubly robed in glory by fiction as well as history. Here came Nelson, Rodney, Jervis, Collingwood, and every mighty sailor England ever had. Moored to these wharves have lain prizes, rich beyond compare, newly snatched from Spain and France. Here England’s flag, proudly flung from masts of wooden warships, has proclaimed victory; and here also English ships, battered and war-stained, have lain under the dread banner of the buccaneer. For Port Royal was a pirate stronghold centuries before it became a British naval base. Sailing along the six miles of narrow coral ridge which connects the town with the land, it is not difficult to conjure up the Port Royal Nelson knew. The palm-trees and the luxuriant tropical foliage still abound; the native craft and the nigger boatmen do not seem to belong to to-day, and Kingston, hidden and guarded by this strip of land, seems somehow to suggest romance and mystery. The sea all round is studded with treacherous coral reefs, some of which, just showing above the water, are thickly grown with palm-trees. The effect is beautiful in the extreme; the clumps of trees, planted apparently on nothing, are growing straight out of the sea. As you round Port Royal you discover Kingston, a large, white, straggling town, on the land side entirely hemmed in by the Blue Mountains, and seawards washed by the waters of a lagoon seven or eight miles long, and nearly half as wide. Slowly we steamed to the town, passing an ancient, dismantled and deserted fort, which once mounted its hundred guns. [Illustration: KINGSTON HARBOUR AND PORT HENDERSON]