Perhaps if Jamaicans were the descendants of a penal colony like Australians, our country would be orderly and prosperous. Unfortunately, most Jamaicans would not then be as physically beautiful as we are.
I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, usually a close member of the family. But only the decade-long advent of American fast food can alter the incredible beauty of mixed race ancestry and different African tribes who, unlike our Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, English, Scottish, Indian, Chinese and Syrian ancestors, were not permitted to bring any hand luggage when they arrived in Jamaica nearly half a millennium ago.
As every Jamaican knows, the then Arawak indigenous population, themselves travellers from mainland South and Central America, were killed out by the Spanish according to our standard school books. As we also now know, they've been recently resurrected by modern scholarship under a different name "Tainos". Unhelpfully the archaeologists tell us that "Arawak" was the name of the language, and not the race.
The fact remains, however, that earlier scholarship did not say anything about the language dying out. They said the race had been totally exterminated by European diseases, and from overwork by the conquering Spanish and English. Thus any Jamaican claiming over the last 300 years to have been descended from an Arawak Prince or Princess was ridiculed, not least of all because African and Tainos were supposed to have had no royalty, only chiefs.
Now we know from the artefacts in middens in the mountainous backbone of Jamaica, that the indigenous Pre-Columbian Indians interbred with the earliest runaway African slaves. More than that they were a help, probably intimate, to the formation of Jamaica's Maroon colonies. This means that the Tainos were neither decimated by disease, nor cooked for lunch on the beaches and plains by marauding parties of visiting Caribs from the lesser Antilles, another common textbook myth.
Thus those Jamaicans who have fervently believed for the past three hundred years that they had Arawak blood singing in their veins might not be either mad or eccentric. Common sense alone told them what it has taken decades of English-language scholarship to discover.
Scientific dig
Therefore when Mr. Tony Clarke of Paradise Park in Westmoreland was having yet another of those foreign archaeological scientific digs into a Taino midden on his property, I was happy to accept his invitation to watch a little of it. We took the jitney, then walked up into awesome, original rain forest. The scientists got out their gear, and began to dig and sift. I sat on a towel right beside them, waiting for a piece of bone or a tooth. Quickly bored by amulets and earrings, I asked about the bones and teeth and when we might be finding some of those. Nobody answered, so I asked a little louder.
With palpable unease and no great joy, the leader of the expedition said no Taino bones had yet been found in Jamaica, only in Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. This was astonishing, because received wisdom was that a midden was a burial ground, and so I'd come along for a piece of human bone or tooth. I was now told, however, that a midden is the remains of a village, and that the Taino buried their dead by sending the bodies out to sea, or by dropping them in a blue hole.
This was a huge disappointment. So I trekked down the hill and went swimming in the Deans Valley River which runs through the property, and had a much better time.
Until we get some proper archaeologists like the French coming to Jamaica, we will never have scientific proof that Taino blood still runs in anybody's veins. I didn't lose the opportunity to lecture the scientific party mildly before leaving the dig, by reminding them that people believe what they write, and they've been confusing us for 300 years with wrong information, and particularly over the last century.
The current state of available scholarship on the Tainos therefore leaves a lot to be desired. One leading international scientist says no Taino bones have been discovered in Jamaica, yet skeletal remains have been found here not in water, but at White Marl. The archaeological context is pre-Columbian. Did nobody bother to carbon-date the remains?
The only agreed physical evidence we have of the original Jamaicans therefore, are a few shards of pottery, and it was a fortunate African slave indeed who managed to make it to any sugar plantation with even so much as a good-luck charm. But we still have plenty ruins of Spanish walls and British forts, and lush mountains and healthy rivers and many different, great big trees that bloom flowers like a shrub. Which is why tourism does so well for Jamaica.
Australia has the Great Barrier Reef and the most and hungriest sharks in the world. It also has the longest, perfectly straight train tracks on the planet, so long it crosses time zones. But the only historical heritage that country has is aboriginal and British, and latterly Japanese.
We have history here that can make Jamaica rich. Physical history that is the heritage of people all over the world who speak the Romance languages, as well as the languages of the East.
Vision
I therefore congratulate Prime Minister P.J. Patterson for having the vision to do what is proposed for Port Antonio. A cruise ship pier for 250-foot cruise ships is to be completed by June of next year. These smaller vessels carry not the mass market, but the first class individual traveller.
A new marina is also to be built with 32 slips capable of berthing mega yachts, and the Ken Jones aerodrome upgraded to accommodate the private jets owned by the owners and guests of these yachts.
Prime Minister Patterson said the development would re-position "the cradle of Jamaica's tourism" as the up-market haven for the international yachting community.
The poor can do very little for the poor. The rich are often in a better position to help.
The first Duke of Portland, who was the Marquis of Titchfield and Governor of Jamaica in the 18th century, left us the Titchfield High School in Port Antonio and 3,000 children are still going to it. The legendary Hollywood actor Errol Flynn had a yacht in Port Antonio, owned Navy Island once, and invented rafting down the Rio Grande which continues to this day. The model for paradise in Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 50s was the island of Jamaica, and in particular the landscape of Port Antonio.
Jamaica is still internationally perceived as the Rolls Royce of tropical travel destinations, but a Rolls Royce in need of repair and maintenance, and available at a very steep discount. Mainly to people who really should be saving their money, not attempting the luxury of an overseas holiday.
Guests on mega-yachts and smaller European cruise-ships are anxious to go ashore, and spend much more per head than any tourist currently aboard a mega cruise ship, or staying in our finest all-inclusive.
Because they tend to be much better-educated than the usual visitor, their greatest travel interest is heritage tourism. And Jamaica has plenty of that, and Port Antonio in particular. With a market like this, welcomed by a proud and hospitable Port Antonio, the project has the potential to pull upwards the rack rate of every single well-run inn or hotel in Jamaica, wherever it is located, and make the rate financially meaningful again.
We may not have kangaroos, and perhaps our only ancestral criminals were buccaneers. And though someone once said that Jamaicans are "evidence of the unwisdom of miscegenation", there is now real hope that we can be also orderly and prosperous.
FOOTNOTE: I declare an interest. Mr. Earl Levy, chairman of the Portland Heritage Foundation lives across the road from me. As a neighbour, I am helping him pull together his life's work in "The Restoration and Re-Development of Port Antonio, Jamaica, West Indies: A Community-Based Comprehensive Heritage Tourism Development Plan" completed in July 2000, and funded by the Organisation of American States, and of which the up-market cruise ships and world-class marina form part.
