TEE GREAT TROPICAL FALLACY. 



201 



fore me. But these eminent writers hud too much 

 to tell about birds, beasts, fishes, and all manner 

 of creeping things, to find much leisure for fully 

 exposing the gigantic fraud of those unblushing 

 tropics. They merely brushed aside the fallacy 

 as a thing to be disposed of with a wave of the 

 hand ; whereas I, a humbler wayfarer, find in it 

 an error which has taken deep root in the Euro- 

 pean mind, and can only be extracted by a delib- 

 erate operation. That operation I am here to- 

 day to perform, and I propose to begin by a short 

 account of my first experiences in tropical life. 

 Jamaica was the scene of my disillusionment, and 

 I will therefore convey the reader without more 

 ado to the open mouth of Port Royal Harbor, on 

 the day of my first arrival in the sunny regions 

 of the South. 



We were all up at four bells in the morning, 

 six o'clock by terrestrial time, to see the good 

 ship Tagus sweep round the spit of land known 

 as the Palisades. Our first view of the tropics 

 tended to keep up the delusion so soon destined 

 to a sudden explosion. At the very end of the 

 spit, within a hundred yards of our deck, stood 

 a waving grove of cocoanut - palms. Now, the 

 palm-tree is the making of the tropics, the ulti- 

 mate source of all that misconception which your 

 traveler has religiously set himself to demolish. 

 Take a hideous, sandy plain with a couple of 

 huts and some Arab or negro children, and then 

 stick a palm-tree in the foreground, and there 

 you have them, the beautiful poetical tropics ! 

 But just remove the palm-tree, and what re- 

 mains? — a hideous, sandy plain and a couple of 

 huts. Try this simple experiment at the Acade- 

 my, and you'll be surprised to find how utterly 

 the scene in Egypt disappears, how ridiculously 

 the sunset at Rio collapses, how absurdly the 

 street in Delhi flattens down into a dusty alley. 

 If I had my will, I would exterminate those de- 

 ceptive endogens at one fell blow. For the worst 

 of them all is this, that in real life they always 

 get in the background of your view, whereas 

 every artist knows that their sole pictorial value 

 is to overhang and browbeat the tropical cottage 

 at twenty yards' distance. 



Not long, however, did those theatrical palm- 

 trees impose upon our young credulity. An hour's 

 steaming up a sultry, breathless bay, where even 

 at that early hour the heat proved scarcely sup- 

 portable, landed us alongside the coal-begrimed 

 wooden quay of Kingston. Gracious heavens, 

 what a disenchantment ! At one glance the eye 

 takes in the gloomy panorama, and the beautiful 

 tropics have vanished forever. Not Martinique, 



not Brazil, not Ceylon itself, can ever reinstate 

 that shattered idol. Dead, as hopelessly as the 

 gods of Nepaul, after the rajah had blown their 

 images from the cannon's mouth ; dead, as eter- 

 nally as the great and good Pecksniff after Tom 

 Pinch had woken up in the organ-loft to a sense 

 of his utter meanness and hypocrisy. In three 

 minutes I am ready to cry aloud, " There are no 

 tropics ! " and to hold that negative faith with 

 unshaken confidence until my dying day. 



Before my gaze stretches a shabby wooden 

 town, its long streets running straight inland 

 from the water's edge, unpaved, unwatered, un- 

 tended, thick in lazy dust, which the sea-breeze 

 two hours later will drive with eddying whirl- 

 winds against mouth, and nose, and eyes, in irre- 

 sistible phalanx of penetrating atoms. On either 

 side the street, low, one-storied wooden houses 

 line the road ; once painted white, with bright- 

 green jalousies, but now dingy gray in general 

 hue, broken by windows of dull-olive blinds. 

 The roofs scarcely stick on their mouldering 

 beams, the dirty cedar shingles are overgrown 

 with rank weeds, and give shelter to spurious 

 vulture-looking birds — the John-crow or turkey- 

 buzzard of the colonists — and the whole town 

 has an air of neglected decay, which seems ten 

 times more evident through the blinking, staring 

 sunlight that falls in full force on every squalid 

 detail. Behind the abodes of men a brown, tree- 

 less plain runs back for many miles in unshaded 

 hideousness ; while in the far background masses 

 of hot, basking mountains close the view, their 

 clear-cut peaks shadowed by no cool or fleecy 

 cloud, but standing out in naked contour against 

 the blazing sky overhead. Squalor, dust, sun- 

 light in abundance ; but no trees, no birds, no 

 flowers, no scenery — in short, no tropics. 



I put up my white umbrella, and landed on 

 the quay. Ragged, half-clad negroes in tatters 

 and dust stood along the pathway to the custom- 

 house ; I passed my luggage, waiting meanwhile 

 under the fierce sun ; and, when the peppery of- 

 ficer had satisfied himself that I did not wish to 

 cheat the revenue, and had sworn sufficiently at 

 his underlings — the climate and the use of capsi- 

 cums seem to exert a sort of direct reactive influ- 

 ence on the human temper in these Western isles — 

 I turned into the street to seek my chosen hotel. 

 Drivers with " omnibuses " were near in num- 

 bers. I engaged one for myself and my port- 

 manteau, and, leaving my heavy goods to follow 

 on in a rickety dray, betook myself to Colonial 

 Hall, the leading hostelry of the metropolis in 

 which I stood. 



