Bryan Edwards says the Spaniards left 1500 slaves behind them. Bridges is sure that every Spanish slave was killed or taken within eight years of the conquest of the island. But this parson of the Church of England is a gentleman whom the more we read him the less we like him. He was a time-server and a sycophant on his own showing. His evident intention was to please the planters, and though that in itself is not a crime, it is certainly a sin, when a man undertakes to write a history, to look only for the good on one side, and to be very sure of the evil on the other. In the days of Bridges (he wrote in 1828), the island was divided into planters and slaves, and the man who drank the planters' punch, who was entertained in their houses, who laid himself out to be so invited--“sucked up” as Australian school-boys used to say--was hardly likely to consider the slaves anything but the dregs of humanity. It flattered the vanity of the planters to think that within eight years of the driving out of the Spaniards their slaves were subdued as well. It is hardly likely they were. It seems to me that that little band of men, hidden away among the cockpit country of St James and Trelawny, and in the mountains of Portland and St Thomas, probably began with the slaves left behind by the Spaniards, and were recruited by all the more adventurous spirits who managed to escape from their loathed bondage. For I do not believe that the black people, as some people say, were happier as slaves. Rather do I agree with Burke who, in the great debates on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, said: “That nothing made a happy slave but a degraded man.” The cockpit country of Jamaica is an amazing country still. I paid it a visit by the courtesy of Mr Moralez, the father of the lovely girl who owned the little canoe, and she came with me to show me points of interest, for she had lived in Montego Bay all her life. It was a glorious morning in December, and December mornings in Jamaica are more likely to be delicious than a May morning in England or Australia. There is something in the soft, cool air that no mere pen can describe. Everywhere is green, dark green of pimento, light green of akee or dogwood, vivid green of cane. Crushing in the sugar mills has begun, and all is activity as you pass the works on the estates. On the roads, marching along with loads on their heads, mostly of green banana for it happened to be a Monday, were throngs of people, mostly women. They tramp miles--old women, young women, boys, and little girls who step out on sturdy little black legs and swing their short and scanty frocks, and are smiling under a load that surprises me, for they are proud that they, too, may join the throng of wage-earners, small wage-earners when we compare results with other labourers in the outside world, but still, slaves no longer, and earning money that is their very own.