228 CUBA AND POBTO 11100 



they ran grow yams, cocoanuts, bananas, and sugar-cane, 

 to supply their meager diet, a kind, by the way, entirely too 

 light to support hard labor. An American contractor who 

 was recently engaged in building the Port Antonio railway 

 informed me that the Jamaican was very unsatisfactory as 

 a laborer, even at the small cost of a shilling per day. He 

 had imported from Alabama a few Southern negroes, each 

 of whom seemed capable of doing ten times as much labor 

 as the Jamaican. He wondered at this difference in the 

 endurance of the two kinds of people of the same race, 

 until he observed that a Jamaican who secured American 

 food while working about the commissary tent increased 

 iu strength each day until his possibilities equaled those 

 of the American blacks. It is remarkable how little food 

 of a substantial character they consume, and how irregular 

 they are in their hours of eating. Nevertheless, Jamaican 

 negroes are sought far and wide throughout the tropics as 

 laborers, and thousands of them have gone to work upon the 

 Panama Canal, the railways of Costa Rica and Guatemala, 

 and the banana-plantations of Honduras and Nicaragua. 



The women of Jamaica, however, perform the hard 

 labor. They do the household work, cultivate the fields, 

 carry the hod of brick and mortar, coal the ships, load the 

 bananas, break stone for the highways, cultivate the fields, 

 and carry the products to market upon their heads, arrayed 

 in a single garment of calico, and without shoes or hats. 

 The men who work at all are the overseers, mechanics, and 

 drivers of teams. On Sunday the women array themselves 

 in neatly laundered dresses, put on their shoes and stock- 

 ings, and in exceptional cases hats or bonnets, and attend 

 the parish churches. They are honest, polite, and indus- 

 trious, but have little regard for the marriage tie. Forty 

 per cent, of the births are illegitimate ; yet no one would 

 wish to see the toilsome life of one of these women still 

 further burdened by having to support a worthless hus- 

 band, who would have authority over the children whom 

 she can now claim as her own. 



