Jamaica
Xaymaca is an Arawak word meaning: land of wood & water
History
1494 approximately 60,000 Arawak greet Columbus
1509 north coast, Seville
1534 Villa de la Vega, Spanish Town
1655 English Revolutionary army seizure
1670s British restoration sugar plantations
1692 earthquake destroys Port Royal
1720 Largest sugar island in the BWI
1831 Insurrection; Slave resistance
1833 U.K. Parliament abolishes slavery
1870s banana plantation exports to USA
1960s bauxite mining; Reynolds Aluminum
2003 estimated population, 2.6 million (2.4 TFR)
Tourism: 3/4s from the USA who is also Jamaica’s
largest trade partner 45% imp. & 28% exp.
16% arable land area (9.2% under crop cultivation)
ethnic origins: 90.9% African, 7.3% mixed, 1.3% E. Indian.
imports 66,000 barrels of oil / day (no domestic production)
Jamaica in the Greater Antilles
Islands exaggerate tendencies in the development of biology and cultures
quite differently leaving a marked impression of distinctiveness in
the mind of all who encounter their wildlife, wilderness, and peoples.
Jamaica is no exception and is remarkable for its complete transformation
by human inhabitants from Europe and Africa since its reconnaissance
by Columbus, in 1494, and subsequent Spanish occupation. The current
situation may best be understood by recognizing the ecological transformation
of the island’s affect on the 2.7 million people currently inhabiting
the island.
Arawak Epoch
Spanish Era
Sugar Era
Insurrection
British Imperialism
Monroe Doctrine
Marcus Garvey
Immigration
Ecological preservation through PARC: Protected Areas Resources Conservation
Jamaican & Caribbean
Definitions | Syllabus | Nations of the region | Jamaica Case Study | Chronology | Vocabulary | Five parts
“The sea, on and offshore, estuaries, streams and lakes were all
harvested for shellfish, fish, turtles, marine mammals and waterfowl
. . . . the abundance of seafood and the skill at taking it impressed
the newcomers. {Oviedo}
“Fishing at sea was carried on by nets and hook and line, and also
by using suckerfish, or remoras, which attached themselves to large
fish, turtles and manatees.
. . . Nets were strong enough to take turtles and manatees, the latter also being taken by harpoon according to Oviedo.”
“These large sea cows pastured freely on plants of the estuaries and were important source of food until they were decimated by the Christians, who were permitted to eat them on fast days.”
“The only other
land mammals other than bats were hystricomorph rodents, especially
the large tasty hutias The majority were ground living and ‘ lived
and reproduced in herbacious vegetation (yerba) and not in the woods
. . . and of them there is infinite number.” { Bartholomew de Las
Casas }
“Enciso thought that Jamaica especially abounded in hutias.. . . were hunted by fire drives, with one group setting fire to the open savannas and the others waiting to knock over the fleeing creatures.”
“Serious depletion of wildlife followed soon upon the settlement by Europeans mainly because of the animals they brought with them, especially the dogs . . . and hogs.”
(Sauer, 58-59)
“Bernaldez had it from the Admiral that the gardens of Valencia
were nothing in comparison to those of this coast, that the canoes were
largest and finest, each cacique having his own, finely decorated fore
and aft with painted pattern; the Admiral having measured one that was
96 feet long and six feet wide. On the south coast they were received
in state by a cacique, his family, and retinue who came out in canoes.
The dignitaries wore elaborate feather headdresses and cloaks. Again
here was mention of finely worked black wood, this time as trumpets.
Peter Martyr understood that the Jamaicans were of more acute genius
and skills than the other islanders. Persuaded that the gold of Jamaica
was fiction, Columbus had no further interest in the island.”
(82-83, Sauer, 1969)
Las Casas said Jamaica was as densely settled as Espanola (3 million)
and Puerto Rico. “all naked and all of one speech.” (179)
Jamaican hammocks
were woven of island cotton [Gossipium Barbadense].
“Cotton, important in all parts was cultivated most extensively
in the province of Xaragua and in Jamaica.”
Bixa (shrub) used
for coloration, another shrub (manzanilla) for purgatives
Conucos - mound agriculture- beans, maize, yucca; or bitter & sweet
manioc [ cassava ], peanuts, squash, sweet potato.
Spanish Era
Hurricane season of 1503 Columbus, during his last voyage, wrote a desperate
letter from Jamaica after a hurricane had wrecked his fleet.
Diego Columbus ordered the occupation of Jamaica in 1509, under the
ruthless military command of Juan de Esquivel
Jamaica was well and favorably known as a pleasant and populous land.It appeared to Peter Martyr “favored by nature beyond the rest.”
He wrote “a fertile island, most fortunate in the benignity of its soil and with only one mountainous part . . . . No one has ever denied its richness.”
“Much of the soil is derived from calcareous beds, fertile & well drained. The sea around it is rich in marine life and was phenomenally so in turtles.”
Santa Gloria, in St. Anne’s Bay was the beach head for a fort.
Natives were enslaved against Diego’s instructions & were placed
on plantations to grow cassava, maize, & cotton. Women were employed
in making, cloth, shirts, & hammocks. (Sauer, 180)
Goats and pigs, horses, cattle, and dogs regenerated changing the vegetation
and water tables throughout the island.
“By 1519 the indians of Jamaica were nearly extinct.” (181)
“In less than 20 years . . . the impending extinction of the natives
was apparent and in another ten it had occurred.” (204)
Sugar Era
1620s the Europeans used indentured servants to plant tobacco,cotton,
indigo (dye) , & ginger.
1640s were the earliest sugar plantations, in Barbados, Guadeloupe,
& Martinique.
by 1770; 36,000 tons of sugar was produced in Jamaica and it was second
only to the French in Haiti which produced twice that amount.
Barbados Slave Codes
were adopted throughout the British empire including Jamaica
restrictive, forbid teaching of reading & writing, baptism, drinking
allowed division of families, defined matrilineal (mother’s kinship)
1831, Jamaican slave Insurrection
British Imperialism; Jamaica was the richest of the Sugar Isles
Anti - Colonialism
Monroe Doctrine: 1820s US & independence of Latin America.
Marcus Garvey pan African perspective; advocated returning to Africa.
William E. Burghardt Du Bois
“The Pan-African congresses which I called in 1919, 1921, and 1923, were chiefly memorable for the excitement and opposition which they caused among the colonial imperialists.. Scarcely a prominent newspaper in Europe but used them as a text of warning, and persisted in coupling them with the demagogic “Garvey Movement,” then in its prime, as a warning to colonial governments to clamp down on colonial unrest.”
“I believe that revolution in the production and distribution of wealth could be a slow, reasoned development and not necessarily a bloodbath. I believed that 13 millions of people, increasing albeit slowly in intelligence, could so concentrate their thought and action on the abolition of their poverty, as to work in conjunction with the most intelligent body of American thought; and that in the future as in the past, out of the mass of American Negroes would arise a far-seeing leadership in lines of economic reform.”
W.E.B. DuBois (291, Autobiography)
Jamaica today:
Immigration,
largely to UK, Canada and USA; built Panama Canal, 1912.
Ecological preservation through
PARC: Protected Areas Resources Conservation
1) protect the planetary ecological life-support system (water, energy, air, & land).
2) restore the diversity of critical species, habitats, & world biospheric preserves.
3) promote the ecological and sustainable economic development of all nations.
Reforestation, soil conservation, biomass production for medicines and
energy fuels.
Poverty, women’s status, population & health.
Debt for nature swaps; permaculture, education.
HIV Hits Marginal Populations Hardest in Latin America, Leading Cause
of Death for Some Caribbean Nations
by Peter Lamptey, Merywen Wigley, Dara Carr, and Yvette Collymore
(October 2002) At
the end of 2001, approximately 1.9 million adults and children in Latin
America and the Caribbean were living with HIV/AIDS. Approximately 200,000
new HIV infections occurred in the region during 2001.
In most of Latin America, HIV/AIDS has hit the marginal populations
hardest: men who have sex with men, commercial sex workers, and injecting
drug users (IDUs), but heterosexual transmission is increasingly important,
according to UNAIDS. In Argentina and Uruguay, HIV infections are concentrated
among IDUs. In Peru and Mexico, transmission rates are highest among
men who have sex with men. In Brazil, the region's most populous country,
HIV infections are highest among men who have sex with men and among
IDUs. Infection rates have dropped since the late 1990s, presumably
in response to prevention programs that targeted people at high risk
of exposure.
In the Caribbean, heterosexual contact has been the primary path for
HIV transmission, aided by cultural norms that tolerate unprotected
sex and frequent partner exchange among young people. HIV prevalence
rates in the Caribbean are the second-highest in the world, surpassed
only by rates in sub-Saharan Africa. The severity of the epidemic in
the Caribbean is often overlooked because the region's population is
relatively small, but HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death in some
parts of the region. About 2.3 percent of adults in the region are infected.
Haiti has the highest prevalence, with about 6 percent of adults infected,
and is followed by Bermuda, where nearly 4 percent are infected. Migration
and frequent travel among Caribbean islands and the United States also
spread HIV.
Vocabulary
Viceroyalty of New Spain
Viceroyalty of New Grenada
Maya (Lowland & Upland)
Olmec
Toltec
Zapotec
Mixtec
Aztec
Arawak
Carib
Taino
Ciboney
Hispaniola
encomienda system
colonization
plantation agriculture
mercantilism
Triangular trade route
“middle passage”
Le Code Noir
Barbados Slave Code
secularization
patois
mestizo
mulatto
Creole
calypso
biotic community
habitat
coral reefs, fringing, barrier & atolls
endemic species
exotic species
leeward
windward
rain shadow
tropic of cancer
north atlantic gyre & north atlantic oscillation
el nino, el nina & southern ocean oscillation
Contemporary Voices in the Caribbean
