Part 16

By 1745 the road was known as the Ferry Road, and in that year a Committee of the Assembly was appointed to enquire into matters respecting it.

In 1748 the Assembly again considered the state of the Ferry Road, and passed “An Act to empower Commissioners to keep the Ferry, and erect a toll-gate or turnpike, between St. Catherine’s and St. Andrew’s, to commence at the expiration of an Act entitled An Act for empowering William Peete, Esquire to keep the Ferry, and erect a toll-gate or turnpike between St. Catherine’s and St. Andrew’s, and taking up runaway negroes.”

In 1758 an Act was passed for “Vesting in Trustees a toll to keep the ferry, and erect a toll-gate or turnpike between St. Catherine’s and St. Andrew’s ...” and a similar Act was passed in 1761.

In 1777 a Committee reported:

4. On consideration of the motion for £4000 to be applied towards carrying on the road from the church in Spanish Town to the church in Kingston, it appears to your Committee, from accounts solemnly attested and rendered in, and also from vouchers produced, that the sum of £2000 granted last session of Assembly, for carrying on the new road from the town of St. Jago de la Vega to the Ferry, in the parish of St. Catherine, and of £2000 for carrying on the new road from the Ferry, in the parish of St. Andrew, to the Town of Kingston, have been all expended on the said roads; your Committee were therefore of opinion, the sum of £4000 now applied for, should be granted: Your Committee have come to two resolutions respecting this road:

1st. _Resolved_: It is the opinion of this Committee that the road between Spanish Town and Kingston is laid out on too large a scale; that therefore, it ought to be contracted that thirty feet in the centre well paved and gravelled (except in the Salina which ought to be paved forty feet) would answer every purpose to the public, and save a considerable expense.

2nd. _Resolved_: It is the opinion of this Committee that the salaries allowed to the Superintendent, and his assistants, amounting to about £900 per annum, are too large; and that, in future, they ought to be reduced.

In 1778 an Act was passed “for explaining and amending the several Highway Laws now in force, and rendering the said Laws more effectual.” It was repealed and expired by 1792.

In 1799 an Act “for continuing the Act commonly called the Highways Act for a certain time longer,” was passed, but expired in 1812.

In 1801 a Highway law was passed, but was repealed in 1805.

In 1802 a law was passed “for rendering more effectual the several laws relating to the public road from the church in the town of Saint Jago de la Vega to the church in Kingston,” and “the Trustees of the Ferry Road” were thereby appointed.

In 1815 an Act was passed giving “fuller powers to the Trustees of the Ferry Road,” as it was found that “the present state of the Ferry Road requires that their powers shall be extended, and that prompt and efficacious means should be used to repair and keep the same in good order especially by causing it to be frequently examined.”

The oldest tablet in the =Church of St. Thomas-in-the-Vale= at Linstead is that of one Elizabeth Burton, who died in 1742. At the time of the threatened invasion by the French in 1805 the Records of the island were removed to this church, and were protected by a militia guard. The said church was blown down by a hurricane in March 1822, and was shortly afterwards rebuilt. A tower was added to the church in 1830.

The church was destroyed by earthquake on January 14, 1907, and was rebuilt of reinforced concrete with eternit roofing at a total cost of £950 and was consecrated in 1911.

Although the parish of St. Thomas-in-the-Vale dates from 1675, when the author of “The Present State of Jamaica” (published in 1683) wrote his work, its church was not one of the seven churches in the island; the nearest church then being St. John’s, Guanaboa Vale, which had been in existence since 1669. The earliest rector recorded was the Rev. Thomas Garbrand, appointed in 1705. In “The Early English Colonies” (1908), by Mr. Sadler Phillips, is given “A List of the Parishes, Churches and Ministers in Jamaica, April 18th, 1715,” in which is included “St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, a church blown down, Mr. Reinolds.” The Rev. James Reynolds had come out in 1709, sent by the Bishop of London, who since 1702 had had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Jamaica. In 1798 the rector was the Rev. William Williamson. In 1820 and for some years after the rector was the Rev. William Buston.

=Williamsfield=, in St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, on the road between St. Mary and Spanish Town, was first settled by Needham, a large proprietor, but was soon purchased by one Harvey from Barbados, who in turn sold it to Daniel Lascelles, brother to the first Baron Harewood. It remained in the Lascelles’ hands for many years. In 1743, Henry Lascelles went to London from Barbados, and being a wealthy man purchased the Harewood estate, carried on business in London as West India merchants with George Maxwell. His son Edwin was created Baron Harewood in 1790.

At a Council meeting held on July 11, 1692, at St. Jago de la Vega (the first held there after the earthquake) it was “ordered that the Councill meet on Wednesday next at Musqueto Point to view and consider of a place in order to the Building a fortification for to secure the Channell.”

And on August 8 it was “ordered that a fortification be made at Mosquito Point, of the ground &c. fitt to erect the same and that Charles Bouchier, Esq. goe and veiw the same and draw out Plott thereof and the same Returne to this Board.” This was the origin of =Fort Augusta=.

Long gives the following account of the fort in his time. He makes a strong attack on the policy of fortifying a place which he designates a “still unfinished battery stuck into a quagmire at the entrance of Kingston Harbour,” and says that the immense charges incurred on its behalf had by 1757 helped to cripple the island financially. He says:

This fort mounts eighty-six large guns, kept in excellent order. It contains a large magazine, a house for the commandant, barracks to contain three hundred soldiers, with all convenient offices, and casemates. It was projected to mount one hundred and sixteen guns; but it is not yet compleated. The walls and bastions are built upon piles of the palmeto or thatch-pole tree, which is endued with the property of lasting in water without being liable to erosion by the worm. These were driven down through the loose land, until they reached a firm bed. If the same precaution had been used in constructing the houses of Port Royal, it is probable that the greater part of the town would have survived the earthquake. This fort contains an hospital, besides habitations for the officers, and is looked upon to be an healthy garrison. The neck of sand which joins it to the main is not above fifty or sixty feet wide in most places, and so low, that an enemy could not carry on approaches, on account of the water rising near the surface; and it is flanked by a lagoon, or inlet of water from the harbour, of some extent; for these reasons, and because the ships, in passing up the channel towards Kingston, must come within point-blank shot of a whole line of guns, a governor of this island pronounced it impregnable both by land and sea.

During a storm in 1744 a new fort begun at Mosquito Point was entirely destroyed.

The present fort was erected on Mosquito Point in Kingston Harbour in 1753. On September 13, 1782, the magazine, with three hundred barrels of powder, blew up. Amongst the military tombs is that to Major John Sankey Darley, 2nd W.I.R., who was killed in a mutiny of the West India Regiment there in May 1808. Recruits of the 2nd West India Regiment, Chamba and Koromantyn negroes, mutinied on parade, aided by some of the older men. The Lieutenant and Adjutant Ellis was killed on the spot, and Darley died of the wounds he received. The general officer commanding, Carmichael, got into conflict with the House of Assembly by directing his officers not to answer any questions that that body might put to them with reference to the occurrence. Darley was brother to Alderman Darley of Dublin, of Orange notoriety. Carmichael died in 1813 while governor of British Guiana.

=Rodney’s Look-out= on the Heathshire Hills was shaken down by the earthquake of 1907. It was erected by Rodney while he was admiral on the Jamaica station, (1771–74), for the purpose of keeping a look-out to windward. =Port Henderson= hard by, is named after a former owner, John Henderson, colonel of militia, who was presented at Court in February 1784. He died at his estate in Scotland in 1811. It was founded in opposition to Passage Fort, as it afforded better accommodation for ships.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century it was the site of a temporary laboratory of marine zoology for students of the Johns Hopkins University.

=Lawrencefield= is said to have been the residence of Sir Henry Morgan, governor of Jamaica (1673–82). =St. Jago Farm= is said to be the site of the residence of Sasi, the last of the Spanish Governors. =Government Pen= was the residence of former governors, and is frequently mentioned in Lady Nugent’s “Journal.” At Caymanas is an Arawâk kitchen-midden·, at Mountain River, St. John’s, some Arawâk rock-carvings, and at Goat Island (in Old Harbour Bay) is a cave with Arawâk remains. At Point Hill are some old barracks which are now used as a police station.

=Keith Hall= is probably named after Sir Basil Keath, governor in 1774–77, and =Sligoville= after Peter, Marquis of Sligo, governor in 1834–36.

III KINGSTON

That there was a collection of houses on or near the spot where Kingston now stands, some years before its formation into a town and parish, is evident, but it is also evident that Gardner’s application of the name to “the little village of Kingston” in 1673 is based on imagination. In the map of Jamaica in “The English Pilot” of 1689 in the inset of “the draft of the Harbor of Port Royal” is marked Liganea, with seven small houses and one larger one where Kingston now is, and one larger one half-way to The Rock.

In the “Present State of Jamaica,” published in 1683, occurs the following description of the village:—“At Liguania, the inside of the harbour, opposite to Port Royal, about two leagues, is several houses, some of them very handsome, and well built, which place in time is like to become a pretty town.”

On the map which accompanies the “State of Jamaica under Sir Thomas Lynch” (included in the “Laws of Jamaica,” published in London in 1684) the place where Kingston now stands is marked “Beeston.” The original owner of the land was Colonel Samuel Barry, who patented it in 1664 and later sold it to (Sir) William Beeston, who, coming to Jamaica in 1660, represented Port Royal in the first House of Assembly, and was lieutenant-governor of the island from 1693 to 1700, and Governor till 1702: but there is on the map a mark for a “towne” on the harbour to the west, between “Beeston” and Hunt’s Bay, where Greenwich now is.

The site of Kingston was not the first chosen by the English for the commercial capital of the island. Port Royal, as we have seen, flourished as such until 1692, in which year occurred the great earthquake which destroyed that place and caused the death of 3000 of its inhabitants. That dealt it a fearful blow.

On June 24, 1692, a little more than a fortnight after the earthquake which destroyed Port Royal, the Council ordered a “survey of 200 acres of Colonel Beeston’s land in St. Andrews where the Council have resolved to build a new town,” and four days later the Council ordered that £1000 should be paid to Beeston, who was at the moment in England, for the 200 acres: but this was apparently _ultra vires_ on the Council’s part, as they had no power to originate money votes. The first traceable reference to the place by name occurs in the Council minutes of July 21, 1692, when regulations for building “the new town of Kingston in St. Andrews” were drawn up, and it was resolved that every purchaser should within three years build a house worth £50 on forfeiture of that sum. Such forfeiture, it was later decided, should go towards founding a hospital.

The following occurs in the Council minutes for August 9, 1692:

Ordered that no freeholder of Port Royall have laid out for him above one lott by the sea side.

Ordered that none of the Inhabitants of Port Royall have laid out for him above one lott.

Ordered that all the freeholders of Port Royall have laid out for them in the said Towne the same quantity they had on Port Royall provided it Exceed not three lotts.

Ordered that all the freeholders that had land bounding upon the North sea side on Port Royall be Preferred to the sea side land and that their lotts be first cast.

Ordered that all the lotts for the Towne of Kingston be cast on once and that if Claimers doe not appear for all the said land that then blankes be cast to Coll^{ll} Peter Beckford and Coll^{ll} Nicholas Laws or be disposed of by them to the next Pretenders.

Ordered that for every lott of land there be reserved to their Maj^{ties} Tenn Shillings a year as an anuall Quitt Rent.

Ordered that the chiefe Justice be desired to order the Drawing of Conveyances for the severall parcells of land laid out in the said Towne.

Ordered that the forfeiture of fifty pounds for not building a house upon the Premises of the Value of fifty Pounds within the time appointed by this Board shall be applied to the building of an Hospital in the said Towne.

Ordered that the Councill meet at the house of Mr. Ann. Lowder in the Towne of Kingston on Tuesday next to Receive the claims of the freeholders and Inhabitants of Po^t Royall & all others that are Desireous to Erect and build in the said Towne & that notice be given thereof accordingly.

After the Calamity of the Earthquake we had appointed a place for y^e building of a Towne w^{ch} we then thought by its Scituation would have been equall if not Exceeding Port Royall where we had ordered all ships and vessells arriveing here to unlade and also ordered the severall offices to settle there for Enterey of the same—

But may it pleas y^r Lordships Since to o^r no small greif we are made sensible of the unhealthyness of the place. By the great Mortality that there happened & finding a Greater difficulty then we Expected in fortifying the harbour Have been forst to order the withdrawing of those offices to the Remains of Port Royall where there is firme Rock enough left for fortifying that neither the Earthquake nor the sea hath distroyed or made Unhabitable.

On August 16 the Council itself met at Kingston. Orders were given for the erection of a market to be held daily, Edward Yeamans to be clerk. Thomas Clarke was provisionally appointed naval officer and collector of customs, and Deodatus Stanley was appointed bellman of Kingston. Kingston was not represented in Sir William Beeston’s first Assembly, which met in 1693; of his second, which met in the following year, the names of the members are not recorded; so it is impossible to give the names of those who probably represented the new town for the first time. But in Beeston’s third Assembly, which met on March 5, 1694–5, Kingston was represented by Josiah Hethcott, James Bradshaw and Samuel Foxley. Of these Bradshaw was a relative (probably son) of the regicide of that name. According to a document in Fulham Palace, recently quoted by Mr. N. Darnell Davis in “Notes and Queries,” “in 1723–4 Bradshaw, the son of President Bradshaw, came frequently to Liguania and received the sacrament there.”

A letter, dated Port Royal, July 3, 1693, quoted by Sir Hans Sloane in his account of the great earthquake already alluded to, contains the following information about Kingston:

Others went to the place called Kingston (or by others Killcown) where from the first clearing of the Ground, and from bad Accommodations, then Hutts built with Boughs, and not sufficient to keep out Rain, which in great and an unusual manner followed the Earthquake, lying wet, and wanting Medicines, and all Conveniences, etc., they died miserably in heaps. Indeed there was a general sickness (supposed to proceed from the hurtful Vapours belch’d from the many openings of the Earth) all over the Island so general that few escaped being sick; and ’tis thought it swept away in all Parts of the Island 3000 Souls; the greatest part from Kingston only, yet an unhealthy Place.

Many people remained at Port Royal, but most of the survivors removed to the lower part of Liguanea. The Council paid Beeston on June 28, £1000. A plan for the town was drawn up by Colonel Christian Lilly, “Her Majesty’s engineer-general,” under the direction of the Government.

In his plan Lilly adopted the chessboard fashion of all Spanish cities in the New World—a plan which is at least as old as the Romans. If one omits the lanes, the plan of Kingston as laid down by Lilly in the seventeenth century is precisely the same as that of the recently unearthed Roman city of Calleva (Silchester) of thirteen centuries earlier, with its insulæ, prototypes of the American blocks. Kingston consisted then of a parallelogram one mile in length from north to south, and half a mile in breadth, regularly traversed by streets and lanes, alternately crossing each other at right angles. When Long wrote it contained “sixteen hundred and fifty-five houses, besides negro houses and warehouses; so that the whole number of its buildings, including every sort, may be computed at between two and three thousand, and thirty-five spacious streets and sixteen lanes.” At present there are in Kingston 171 streets and sixty-nine lanes and about 9000 houses.

[Illustration:

HARBOUR STREET, KINGSTON, IN 1820

From a coloured engraving in Hakewill’s “Picturesque Tour of Jamaica” ]

Unfortunately Lilly when he planned Kingston, when land was cheap, omitted to leave room for lines of trees down each principal street. Had this been done, shade would have been afforded to drivers and pedestrians alike, and a picturesque feature would have been assured for the town. Moreover, the chessboard plan of laying out a town, naturally from its regularity dear to the heart of an engineer, is fatal in the interests of picturesqueness, however suitable it may be for progression.

There was not at first much progress in its settlement, the recollection of the former wealth and greatness of Port Royal giving the colonists a continued preference for that place; but the fire of 1703 completely destroyed the favourite town, and the disheartened inhabitants went in large numbers to Kingston, which the Assembly caused to be divided into lots and given to those who had lost their houses. A law was also passed directing the slave-owners in the parish of St. Andrew to send one out of every twenty of their slaves to build temporary huts for the refugees, and, as an encouragement for the early settlement of the new town, every house built within the year (1703) was exempted from taxes for seven years. Soon after this another law was passed declaring Kingston to be “the chief seat of trade and head port of entry” of the island.

From this time the prosperity of the town was assured, and in the year 1713 it was declared by law that the place should “for ever be taken and esteemed as an entire and distinct parish, with all the powers of any other parish,” and, further, that it should “have the right of sending three representatives to the Assembly.”

So rapidly had the town grown that in 1716 it was thus described by a historian of the time:

Within the harbour and about six miles from the town of Port Royal lies the town of Kingston, first laid out and partially settled after the great earthquake.... It is now become greatly increased in houses, stores, wharves and other conveniences for trade and business, so that it is by much the largest town in the island; and if the island shall increase in people and new settlements (the consequences of trade and riches) it is likely to be much the fairest town in all the Indies for ’tis most commodiously laid out, happily and beautifully situated, has many spacious houses in it, and more are daily building, is the residence of the greatest merchants and traders, and has resorting to it most of the ships or vessels that come to the island, and in it is managed the greatest part of the trade of Jamaica.

In 1721 an Act was passed empowering the inhabitants to erect a court house and exchange; and for nearly half a century the town continued to grow in size and opulence, and so important had it become in 1755 that the attempt was then made to constitute it the seat of government. The Governor (Admiral Knowles) twice proposed and the Assembly twice rejected a bill for that purpose; but at length the Assembly gave way and a law was passed giving effect to the arrangement. Soon after the public archives were removed to Kingston and the superior courts were established there. But the change was unpopular throughout the island, and numerous petitions against it were sent to the King. On October 3, 1758 (after Knowles had left), the disallowance of the law was proclaimed and the records were returned to Spanish Town, escorted by “a considerable body of military.”

In 1780, and again in 1782, the town was severely stricken by a fire. In the former year the large and closely built portion of the town lying between King and Orange streets was burnt down, the destruction of property being estimated at £30,000. But the town soon recovered from the effects of the conflagrations, and prospered to such an extent that in 1802 it was granted a corporation under the style of “The Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council of the City and Parish of Kingston.” The Court of Common Council was given a seal and empowered to make and ordain bylaws, ordinances and regulations for the good order of the city, not repugnant to prerogative or to the laws of the island. The following is a description of the city seal: On the obverse the island arms, crest, supporters and mottoes. Legend, _Sigi Commune Civit: Kingston in Jamaica_. Reverse, Britannia, in the dress of Minerva, holding a trident in one hand, and in the other a mirror, reflecting the rays of the benign influence of Heaven on the produce of the island; behind her the British Lion, supporting her shield, a conch shell at her feet, and at a distance a ship under sail. Legend, _Hos fovet, hos curat, servatque, Britannia Mater_.