We came into sight of Jamaica in the late afternoon and sailed along the south coast as the shadows were falling. A well-wooded country we saw, as its first discoverer must have seen more than four hundred years before, a land of steep mountains and deep valleys, with here and there patches of vivid green that, those who knew, told us were the sugar plantations that were the gold mines of Jamaica in the sugar boom. And the mists rose up from the valleys, and the shadows grew deeper and the day died in a glory of red and gold, a sight so common that no one takes note of it; and the night with a sky of velvet, embroidered with diamonds, crystal clear, came sweeping down upon us--a cloak of darkness--as we steamed into Kingston Harbour. Columbus did not land in Jamaica on his first voyage, but he undoubtedly saw it, as we saw it, many and many a time. The memory of him was with me still as we landed. What to me were the comforts of the Myrtle Bank Hotel set right in Kingston, or of the Constant Spring out at the foot of the mountains? No, that is ungrateful. As an old traveller, no one can appreciate better than I the comforts of a good hotel. But as I dreamt on a comfortable steamer, so I dreamt more vividly of the past on the verandah of the Myrtle Bank, looking down the palm avenue to the sea. The night air was heavy with spicy scents, and the fireflies wheeled and danced, living lights in the dark shadows under the greenery, all the voluptuousness of the tropics was here in this land of romance which Columbus found for Spain, and that later was the first great tropical possession of Britain. But Jamaica has been an unlucky land, and I doubt whether Britain has yet realised its value. It might be called the land of lost opportunities, so often have those who governed it let its good things pass by. I doubt whether Spain herself got any great good from this new possession; certainly Columbus found small peace here. With “his people dismayed and downhearted, almost all his anchors lost and his vessels bored as full of holes as a honeycomb, driven by opposing winds and currents, he put into Puerto Bueno, in the parish of Saint Ann's. But not finding sufficient food or water” (probably water, as it is now known as Dry Harbour), “he sailed east again and put into a cove since known as Don Cristopher's Cove.” His ships were mere wrecks, those brave “castled” ships that had sailed from Spain with such high hopes, and it was very certain that whatever might happen to them, back to Spain they could not go. It was a terrible situation, an awful strait in which those brave mariners found themselves over four hundred years ago. “You must see the parish of St Ann,” said a Jamaican lady to me; “it is all green grass and white Indian cattle, and dark green pimento trees.”