Jamdown Sundown. My whispered chronicles of the Caribbean

In addition to its impressive nature, Jamaica is also famous for being the first country in the Western Hemisphere to have a railway network (though it has not been operating for almost a decade due to its unprofitability). This happened only 18 years after the first railway appeared in Great Britain. And the local Falmouth got its water supply pipe earlier than in New York.

The island had such a well-established telephone connection that the largest American communications company, as we would now say, AT&T simply copied it. Jamaica was the first of the British colonies to establish a postal service in 1688 (although since then, apparently, little has changed in this department, since mail, including within Kingston, takes an unimaginably long time to reach addressees, often disappears en route or ends up with the wrong person). At the same time, in 1994, Jamaica became the first Caribbean country with its own web page, and with information technology, in general, everything is in order there (in particular, a very cheap, especially by Russian standards, and, in general, quite high-quality and reliable mobile telephone connection has been established).

To complete the picture, it is worth adding that the island was also the first of the Caribbean states to gain independence in 1962, retaining to this day its membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations and the Queen (now King) of Great Britain as the formal head of state (although in recent years, the issue of getting rid of this last attribute of the colonial heritage has been discussed from time to time in political circles in Kingston).

And, of course, it is impossible not to mention the fact that in 1988 Jamaica was the first tropical country to take part with its national bobsled team in the Winter Olympics in Calgary, although without much success. But they certainly captivated fans and TV viewers in many countries around the world. Even Hollywood was impressed by this story, resulting in a movie hit in 1993 called Cool Runnings, which made the Jamaican “Winter” Olympians famous. We will also return to this later.

The island’s inhabitants, who have always been open to the world and have formed their own distinctive culture, are still mostly stuck in their own language environment, especially if they do not belong to the middle and upper classes of Jamaican society. “Colonial” English serves them primarily for external communication and, of course, to ensure mutual understanding with tourists.

The aforementioned Patois, or Jamaican Creole as linguists characterize it, emerged in the 17th century when black slaves from West and Central Africa, taken to the Caribbean, were forced to become acquainted with the English language. Accordingly, Patois contains elements of both “classical” British English and West African languages. Patois is taught in schools as a native language along with English, reggae performers sing in it, and literary works written in “Jamaican” are published. As Wilhelm von Humboldt pointed out, the internal form of language is an expression of the national or folk spirit, the basis for expressing ethnic identity and the way in which national mentality is formed. In my opinion, this is entirely applicable to Jamaicans. Don’t be surprised if, when asked how you are, a Jamaican cheerfully answers, “Mi kuul maan, mi chat Patwah” (“I am fine, and I speak Patois”).

The national motto of Jamaica, inscribed on its coat of arms, is “out of many, one people”, reflecting the diversity of national and racial groups of the island’s population – Africans, Chinese, Indians, people from Syria and Lebanon, and, of course, the British, as well as, for example, Germans.

The latter arrived in Jamaica between 1835 and 1850, at which time they founded Seaford Town, a “German village,” in the central part of the island. The name was given to it by a local planter, Lord Seaford, who found suitable workers in northwestern Germany. This is how 350 Germans unexpectedly ended up in Jamaica, many of whom, however, soon died of malaria or yellow fever. At that time, the Germans, of course, did not have vaccines or pills for these tropical diseases.

For many decades, the surviving Teutons tried to prevent mixed marriages. But time took its toll, customs changed, and the villagers stopped monitoring the “purity of the race.” Since then, one can often meet blue-eyed, blond Jamaicans there, who, with their appearance, understandably, stand out somewhat from the general dark-skinned and dark-haired mass of local residents. However, this does not bother them at all. The “German village,” where none of its inhabitants speak the language of their ancestors from Europe, is is also located far from the sandy beaches of the northern part of the island. Tourists, including those from Germany, practically never show up there, and only once a year the German Embassy organize cultural events there to give the Jamaican elite and diplomatic corps the opportunity to experience the local exotica “with a German accent.”

When we visited Seaford Town one Sunday afternoon out of curiosity, we were unable to get into the local museum, which reflects the village’s Germanic roots. The provost of the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, founded by the first German settlers and very similar in its architecture to the North German “Kirchen” (restored to its original form after it was half destroyed by a hurricane in 1912), a Pole by origin, greeted us warmly at his “object”.

He explained that the museum is located in the school premises, occupying one of the classrooms, and the educational institution is, naturally, closed on Sundays. The museum displays household items of the first settlers, as well as paintings and drawings. In the future, in order to attract tourists, it is planned to expand the exhibition, relying on the help of sponsors – wealthy people from this village, who have lived mainly, in the U.S. and Canada and come to visit here from time to time. The German Embassy in Kingston also contributed to the improvement of Seaford Town, paying, for example, for the construction of public toilets there, intended primarily for use by future crowds of tourists…

Searching for the school directors, organized by the holy father, came to no results, and all that was left for us was to stroll through the sleepy village, surrounded by green hills. Its streets were deserted, from somewhere far away came the dog barking, occasionally replaced by the crowing of a cock. Idyll, in a word…

The role of Jamaica and its place in the big world, which is not limited to the horizons of the island-born literary character in the person of agent 007, can be discussed at length. You already know some of it from previous pages. But it is worth remembering that Jamaica was once the first country to impose economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The “backwater” Kingston became the headquarters of an authoritative specialized organization of the UN system – the International Seabed Authority, in which Russia also actively works (the author of these lines even had the opportunity to be the first Russian representative to serve as the President of the Assembly – the highest body of the ISA. In July 2025, at the kind invitation of the ISA General Secretary, I attended the 30th-anniversary Assembly session in Kingston). Jamaica was also the first country to sign an agreement to create the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The island with a population of less than 3 million people can boast the largest number of Olympic medals and top awards at world championships after the United States with a population of more than 300 million people.

As was indicated, for example, in an extensive article in the Canadian Toronto Star in one of the June 2013 issues (in Canada there is a considerable diaspora of people from the island), Jamaican workers helped build the Panama Canal, jobbed on sugar plantations in Cuba, harvested apples in the U.S. and Canada, and even helped speed up the post-war recovery of UK by actively participating in the establishment of public transportation and health care there. Jamaicans have served in cabinets in Canada and the U.S. (four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell comes from the island), and in parliament in UK.

However, the list does not end there. Jamaica ranks third worldwide in the number of major Miss World titles won after Venezuela, India and UK. The golf club in Jamaican (not English!) Manchester, founded in 1865, is the oldest in the entire Western Hemisphere. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Jamaica ranks first in the world (!) in the number of churches per square mile. There is even a suggestion that the island holds the world record for the number of bars. In any case, it was there that the world’s first commercial rum production was established. So, Jamaica is doing just fine with bars.

In fact, the Jamaicans themselves are not too happy with the way the Jamaican “brand” is treated abroad, which, as I think, is clear from the above-mentioned merits of the islanders, has a very significant and unique sound. A classic example, in their understanding, is the drink “Jamaican Energy”, produced and widely sold in Croatia, of course, without any licenses, using the successes of Usain Bolt and his fellow Olympic athletes as marketing, a kind of Jamaican favorite non-alcoholic “hit” – ting (a grapefruit-based lemonade), which goes well with rum. In Kingston, they remember how hard it was for them to get ting into the US market, where it was not allowed for a long time, including the argument that “ting” was too consonant with “tang” – a fruit-flavored drink, often sold in powder form.

I can tell you from personal experience that tang is a far cry from ting! So when you come to the island, buy and drink Jamaican!

Pirates of the Caribbean

In general, Jamaicans do not like to remember the pirate past of their island. Especially since they immediately have unpleasant reminiscences of the earthquake of 1692, which took 5 thousand lives and completely destroyed Port Royal – the main refuge of filibusters on the southern coast of the island and a once flourishing port city nearby Kingston.

Today, Port Royal is a quiet, trash-strewn place, where the main historical attraction is the island’s oldest Fort Charles. (originally Fort Cromwell), built by the English in 1656 in the shape of a ship, at that time almost completely surrounded by water. The fort is the only one of the six such fortifications in Port Royal, which, although damaged during the earthquake, was restored in 1699. There is a small maritime museum on the fort grounds, which includes the office and apartment of Horatio Nelson, the famous British naval commander and vice-admiral, who arrived in Jamaica in 1777 at the age of 19 and was appointed commandant of the fort two years later.

Nowadays (information for gourmets) Port Royal is also famous for its very good (though not fancy) restaurant with fish dishes and seafood “Gloria`s”. In fact, there are two of them under the same name, each located on two floors, open to all winds, with a view of the sea. The only thing you need to remember before going to “Gloria`s” is that you can’t show up hungry, since the wait for a dish after ordering is usually 1—1.5 hours. For me, this was, as far as I remember, the first, by no means pretentious, but well-known to guests, including those from abroad, restaurant whose cuisine I got acquainted with on the island. Despite the long wait, I was not disappointed – the lobster, skillfully grilled with Jamaican spices and skillfully cut, was amazing in taste.

I don’t know whether and how often the Caribbean pirates indulged themselves in lobsters, but they could afford it, since they “earned” quite well by robbing the Spanish both at sea and on land. In fact, the “successes” of the pirates prompted the British to take them into their service as soldiers of fortune to protect their new possessions in the Caribbean that had been recaptured from the Spanish and to strengthen their own military force. Some researchers believe that it was thanks to the pirates who fought for the British crown that Jamaica remained in its possession, and did not suffer the fate of being one of the Spanish-speaking islands in the Caribbean.

The pirates who settled in Port Royal, led by the notorious Henry Morgan, were so successful in robbing heavily laden Spanish galleys sailing between Europe and the colonial possessions of the New World that Port Royal quickly became the most lively and “sinful,” as the Catholic Church rightly believed, port city in the entire American region.

They say, for example, that tipsy young filibusters gave women in the port huge sums of money just wanted them to simply bare themselves before them. The “business acumen” of the pirates and corsairs contributed to the growth of the city’s prosperity. There trade in stolen treasures, sugar, timber and other natural resources flourished, and the portside “tavern” infrastructure developed accordingly. The slave trade and smuggling of goods from Europe began to occupy an increasingly important place in the “economy” of Port Royal.

The image of perhaps the most famous pirate of the Caribbean – Henry Morgan – is inextricably linked with Jamaica (these days, for example, a hotel located near Port Royal bears his name; many are familiar with the rum “Henry Morgan”, which, in my opinion, is significantly inferior in quality to the famous Jamaican “Appleton”).

Morgan, who first appeared in Jamaica in 1662 and by that time had earned the reputation of a desperate cutthroat, quickly stole so much goods that he could afford to buy his own ship, and at the age of 29 he became its captain. Impressed by the fighting qualities of Morgan the Governor-General of Jamaica made him admiral of the Jamaican fleet, giving the “pirate king” 10 ships and 500 crew members under his command. And at 34 years old, he already had 35 ships and 2,000 sailors under him.

Henry Morgan’s most outstanding battle was considered to be his campaign against Panama City in 1671, which, however, cost him his freedom with extradition to London in April 1672, since the pirate commander essentially ignored the peace treaty concluded shortly before between England and Spain. The pirate also had to give up a considerable part of the stolen treasures, which went to the British crown in exchange for his pardon. Ultimately, when the fragile Anglo-Spanish peace was broken two years later, Charles II knighted Henry Morgan and sent him back to Jamaica, this time as lieutenant governor.

There he lived out the rest of his life as a planter in wealth, honor and respect. When Henry Morgan died in 1688 at the age of 52, the guns of the warships in the port fired in his honour, the body of the deceased was laid out for farewell in the residence of the Governor-General, and then placed on a gun carriage and thus, with a large concourse of the population, was delivered to the place of rest. Sir Henry Morgan was buried, of course, in Port Royal, but his grave has not survived, since it was apparently washed out to sea by the tsunami generated by the earthquake, like many other burials in the coastal part of the island.

Jamaican history knows furthermore other “outstanding” pirates: Edward Teach, nicknamed Blackbeard (who is said to have served as the prototype for the pirate Flint in R.L. Stevenson’s novel “Treasure Island”), Jack Rackham (better known as Calico Jack, since he preferred to wear clothes made of printed calico), and Charles Vane, who were rampant in the Caribbean Sea in the first third of the 18th century.

All of them came to a bad end in one way or another, being executed by hanging by the British authorities on the island. Calico Jack’s lifeless body, imprisoned in an iron cage, was put on public display on a sandbank near Port Royal (now called Rackham’s Cay) as a deterrent to his fellow pirates.

Calico Jack became famous off the coast of Jamaica for his extreme cruelty, especially his atrocities against merchant ships and fishing schooners and their crews. But he entered the world history of piracy, first of all, as the author and designer of the “Jolly Roger” – a pirate flag with a skull and crossed swords under it on a black background (there were, as is known, other, more frightening modifications, where the swords “in harmony” with the skull were replaced by bones).

Jack’s crew – and this is also a historical fact – included two women – Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who hid their female gender under male pirate attire until the very end of their “career”. Both were, as they say, extremely cruel and ruthless and were ready to fight their enemies to the death. But they, too, were eventually captured by the British law enforcement agencies of that time, and only pregnancy saved them both from the death penalty..

There is much to be said about Jamaica’s pirate past (much has been written on the subject, including by the infamous Daniel Defoe), most closely linked to Port Royal, which is worth visiting, especially since the former filibuster “main base” is just a few minutes’ drive from Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston.

You’ll probably now automatically think of Jamaica when you hear that somewhere someone is celebrating “International Pirate Day” (September 19) – so much for our tolerant world. As they say, a couple of years ago this cheerful holiday reached Moscow, and it is annually paid tribute to in one of the capital’s beer bars.

Today, the Caribbean Sea is free of piracy. But piracy, as we know, has not been eradicated to this day in other parts of the world. Regional conflicts, civil wars and poverty give birth to new generations of buccaneers. So those who enjoy sea voyages far from the big ocean “roads” should really be careful.

Thank God, this warning does not apply to Jamaica. Therefore, we will remember the pirates who ruled here only in a historical context.

The Long Road to Accompong

When we decided to visit the maroons in the village of Accompong, truly lost in the mountains in the southwestern part of Jamaica, where, in order to get there, you need not only patience, stress resistance, but also an SUV instead of a limousine, we consoled ourselves with the illusion that we would be perhaps the first Russians who would literally and figuratively find the way there.

It turned out not to be: back in 1977, when visitors from our country were rare on the island and a visa regime was in effect, a correspondent from the magazine “Around the World,” which is still popular among domestic travel and adventure enthusiasts, visited the island. The journalist’s detailed story about the Jamaican “mountain freemen” introduced then mostly “travel banned” Soviet people to the descendants of runaway slaves (there are currently about 7,000 of them on the island, of whom about 600 live in Accompong, named after the “ruler of heaven”, worshiped by the first Maroons), who retained their administrative autonomy and distinctive culture for centuries.

Their history began in the 16th century, when the Spaniards, who had taken possession of Jamaica (called Santiago for a time, but the name did not stick) in 1509, brought the first African slaves to the island a few years later to work on sugar cane, tobacco and cocoa plantations. In 1655, the black slaves (at that time the number of those who chose freedom was approximately 1,500 people) had to flee to the inaccessible mountains for the first time, but not from their Spanish masters, who themselves were forced to take refuge in Cuba from the English who had landed on the island, near the current capital of Kingston, following the orders of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. The first slave rebellion on the Sutton plantation in St. James dates back to 1690. Almost from this time, the Jamaicans began their struggle for independence until 1962, when Jamaica finally gained it.

It is quite interesting that the first slaves brought there by the British were not Africans, but… Irish. Thus, in 1656, Cromwell ordered the “shipment” of 2,000 children from poor Irish families to Jamaica in order to sell them there to the first British settlers. Until the 18th century, Irish slaves coexisted on the island in parallel with their African comrades in misfortune. Moreover, according to researchers of this topic, slave owners treated the European “commodity”, numbering hundreds of thousands of people, was much worse off than the people from Africa, and was valued much less. Thus, an African in the Caribbean slave markets was asked for 50 pounds sterling, and an Irishman – no more than 5.

But let’s return to the Maroons. The British rulers, of course, were not happy with the fact that someone on the island refused to obey them and was hiding in the wild jungle and mountain wilderness. But all attempts by the British expeditionary corps to reach the rebels ended in failure. Not only the military valor of the Maroons, their well-mastered skills in conducting guerrilla warfare, but also the well-organized work of their reconnaissance groups, which promptly recorded the approach of army units to the areas where the “resistance fighters” were located, played a role here.

As a result, the British had to sign peace treaties with two groups of Maroons in 1739—1740 (January 6 became a memorable date for those events). These documents guaranteed their safe residence in five main traditional places of deployment and fairly broad independent administrative rights. In return, however, the Maroons were obliged to no longer accept runaway slaves into their ranks and even had to participate, along with the colonizers, in their capture. For each slave returned to the owner, they were entitled to a “fee”, which, of course, did not contribute to strengthening the relations of the “mountain freemen” with their enslaved fellow tribesmen. Today, the “special” rights of the Maroons are still in effect, with the exception of participation in slave hunting, of course.

In truth, the Maroons receive virtually no support from the state. 90% of men are employed in agriculture, their wives, as a rule, do not work and take care of the household and children. Unemployment (16%) and illiteracy among the population are high in Accompong. Their living conditions are therefore the simplest and quite difficult.

At the head of the Maroons in each of their settlements is a “colonel”, who heads a council of 14 of the most respected citizens, where all issues of life and everyday life of the community are discussed and decided. At the same time, the colonel is, despite the collective nature of local self-government, an absolute authority. They say that the Maroons had colonels who did not hesitate to use obeism – black magic, in order to force individual rebels from their “area of responsibility” to submit to the authority of the community leader.

Obviously in such relatively small and homogeneous communities, everyone knows each other. There is practically no crime there, unlike in most of Jamaica. Certainly sometimes, as the residents told us, minor offenses, mainly thefts, do happen. But the criminal is quickly found, and then, of course, he will no longer live among the Maroons.

Colonel F. Williams (a retired police officer), dressed in a multi-colored, tunic-like “dress” suit, the head of the Maroon community in Accompong (he was re-elected in 2015 for another five-year term), personally led us around the village, showed us a kind of club where the council meets and community meetings are held, the local primary school, where funny-looking children with big round eyes diligently listened to the teachers’ explanations, casting a curious glance at the “newcomers from the big world,” and we, despite our curiosity, still tried not to disrupt the educational process too much.

Historians, describing the life and daily routine of this special caste of former slaves and their descendants, noted that the Maroons, who practiced polygamy in the old days, supposedly did not care much about their children. But such an attitude, if it existed, apparently remained in the distant past. We were able to see this for ourselves during the few hours we spent in Accompong.

F. Williams and other members of the council, who invited us to dinner at their club (the meal consisted of a variety of delicious dishes, which women brought from their homes within a radius of several hundred meters and placed before us like a magic tablecloth), talked a lot about the role of education in ensuring the future of the community and its well-being. The Colonel asked that we should possibly take influence on the authorities in Kingston to allocate one of the scholarships annually granted as our country’s support for studying at Russian universities, for a young man or woman from Accompong. Even there, far from the Jamaican capital, according to F. Williams, it is well known what great practical benefit professionals who received higher education in our country in the specialties most in demand in their homeland, have brought to Jamaica over the decades.