Black people -- Jamaica; Jamaica; Slavery -- Jamaica
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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