"But there are other aspects to Jamaica than beautiful scenery. Much of the country is undeveloped and that in cultivation in the interior is largely in the hands of negro peasant proprietors, who tend their few fruit trees, their yam gardens, and their patches of the 'root that made Jamaica famous—ginger. Many gaunt chimneys stand in the plains to mark the sites of sugar plantation manor houses of heavily wooded mountains. Some of the island's palmier days. Along the coastal swamps swarms of mosquitoes attack workmen and wayfarers.
"Kingston, the capital, is almost as much a black man's town as Port-au-Prince. The two white persons to every hundred negroes who nominally are a part of the city's population, live in special suburbs and manage shops and the larger enterprises, and the streets are given up almost entirely to negroes. Even the policemen and many of the judges are black.
"Jamaica's history has in many ways been like that of Haiti, but it has shopped short of the Haitian climax. Columbus discovered the island and called it Santa Gloria. For a century and a half it was Spanish; then it fell to a British expedition sent out by Cromwell. Port Royal, its chief port, became the rendezvous of British buccaneers under the leadership of the notorious Sir Henry Morgan. The town, peopled largely by the men and women who lived on pirate gold, and gilded by their easily spent loot, gained the reputation of being the richest and wickedest city of its day."  But like Sodom and Gomorrah, it was struck down. A severe earthquake occurred in 1692 and Port Royal, its very stones steeped in iniquity, slipped into the sea.
Becoming Island of Bananas. 