At Little River in 1670 the lands were surveyed by Richard and Mary Rutledge, and other people took to themselves parcels of land there, varying in size from 50 to 200 acres. It is a rich country, this island that the Spaniards held so long, with rivers running down from the wooded mountains and in the rich river-bottoms almost any tropical plant will grow. The farther I went to the north-west the more fertile I found the country, and at Lucea, Lucea with the lovely little harbour well sheltered from storms, they grow yams, yams that are a byword in a land that will always grow yams. All along the road by the sea, that lovely road, came creaking great carts drawn by oxen--yes, even in these days of motors, bullock drays driven by shouting black drivers, piled high with Lucea yams. Yam, I may interpolate, is a valuable foodstuff. I want butter and milk to it, but the natives, the Creole descendants of the slaves, eat it with coconut oil. The food values of the yam and the potato--the Irish potato, as they quaintly call it in Jamaica--are probably about the same, but you get a great deal more for your money in a yam. It is _the_ food of the common people, while the potato is a luxury. A black man once brought me, as a Christmas present, a cardboard box neatly tied up with pink ribbon, and in it wrapped up in white tissue paper were four “Irish” potatoes! But even potatoes will grow in this goodly land--what will not grow here--I believe they cannot raise primroses--and yet these early settlers were not a success. “In the second generation,” says the author of _Old St James_, “they had all died out or gone, and the only memorials were the graves.” They used to say in those days, and indeed long after, that unless the population were recruited from the Old Country every white would have gone in seven years. We may take that statement for what it is worth. The Briton, wanderer as he is, has a fixed idea in his own mind that the only place where children can really be reared properly is in those islands in the North Atlantic that he himself quitted in his youth. Even so late as when I was a young woman, I have heard battles royal on the subject of the degeneration of Australia, and there were men from England who held, and held strongly, that Australia cut off from Britain for ten years would degenerate into the savagery of the people the English had found there at the first settlement! There was no stamina, said these ultra English, in young Australia, in young New Zealand; even the animals became degenerate. But behold, over Australia's plains range the largest flocks of sheep in the world with the very best wool (at least it fetches the highest prices in London), and at Gallipoli the stalwart sons of Anzac proved once for all that they too were Britons, worthy sons of the Empire whose flag they were upholding.