Vladimir Polenov – Jamdown Sundown. My whispered chronicles of the Caribbean (страница 3)

While we were pondering this, the old man, having seen off with his eyes a group of Jamaican children rushing towards the natural bathing pool at the foot of “our” small waterfall, turned around and headed towards his shack. Without letting go of the cigarette from his mouth, he climbed heavily onto a battered hammock stretched between the trees surrounding the hut and froze in a half-reclining position. His face, furrowed with deep wrinkles, gradually acquired an even more philosophical expression, detached from current reality, and seemed to freeze for the nearest haven’t been wearing this mask for half an hour.

By the way, some researchers claim that the hammock was invented in Jamaica. But as far as I know, there is no unambiguously confirmed historical evidence on this matter. Historians agree that the word hammock itself came to the world from the language of the Arawak Indians who inhabited the Caribbean, including, as noted above, Jamaica. So there is some scope for imagination in this regard…

It was time for us to tear ourselves away from contemplating the bright pictures of the waterfalls and seaside and get ready for the return journey to the ship. The “taxi driver” Justin, having driven up to us, had already picked up our friends along the way, deeply impressed by the “Tarzan tour” over the Jamaican jungle, and with a playful, exaggeratedly broad gesture invited us into the car.

This was my very first acquaintance with Jamaica. At that time I did not yet know that three and a half years later I would find myself there again in a completely different, non-tourist capacity and not for one, but for a whole 1450 days.

James Bond’s “Father’s” Favourite Island

One of the most expensive hotels in Jamaica (though, in my opinion, not the coolest) is the aforementioned “GoldenEye” in Oracabessa. On its grounds is a five-room villa (also rented to wealthy guests) where the creator of James Bond, who bought a 15-acre plot on the island’s north coast in 1946, found refuge whenever he wanted to escape London.

In this house were written, beginning in 1952, all 14 Fleming`s novels about the British super agent. In 1995, “Golden Eye” gave the name to the 17th film about James Bond, who was played by Pierce Brosnan – in my opinion, the most suitable actor for this role after Sean Connery. Film fans could see “James Bond Beach”, located not far from Fleming’s residence, in the first of the “Bond” films – “Dr. No”.

Matthew Parker, the author of a book published in the UK in 2014 about the Jamaican period of the life and work of the “father” of agent 007, says, Ian Fleming always enjoyed the view of a small beach behind his villa, the opportunity to catch fish or lobsters for breakfast right there in the sea, challenging barracudas, moray eels and sharks, the privilege of feeling there, literally, at home.

The writer’s hospitality in Jamaica was eagerly used at various times by his colleagues in the literary “workshop”, including Noёl Coward, who eventually became a neighbor of Ian Fleming on the island, Truman Capote – another fan of Jamaica, as well as the once famous movie screen hero-lover, Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, who also bought a land plot in the eastern part of the island (“Navy Island”).

“GoldenEye” even became a kind of temporary “visiting” headquarters for the government in London at the time of the Suez Crisis during the month-long visit of the British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden in 1956.

Few people know that after the death of Fleming in 1976, the “GoldenEye” villa was owned by the king of reggae Bob Marley for a year, and in 1980, after it was bought by local multimillionaire Chris Blackwell, it became part of a hotel complex, which operates and is popular to this day.

As Parker testifies, “Jamaica made Fleming a different man from the man he had been in Britain. In the six years between the building of ‘GoldenEye’ and the writing of his first book, he studied Jamaica as thoroughly as he had explored the sea and coral reefs near his home.”

It is possibly true that Fleming and “GoldenEye” contributed greatly to the fact that the blessed island – “the oldest and most romantic of the former British colonial possessions” – discovered the tourist industry and began to make good money from it.

Christopher Columbus, as we already know, was the first of its overseas visitors. For the famous navigator, if we are to believe the entry in the ship’s log, Jamaica seemed “the most beautiful of the islands ever seen before. It seems that the land here touches the sky!”

Indeed, the island has many remarkable, specific and unique features. For example, three thousand species of flowers bloom here. There are more than 200 species of orchids alone, 73 of which grow only in Jamaica. There are also more than 1,000 species of different trees, 500 species of ferns, and the famous “Fern Gully” – a three-mile-long road running from north to south along a winding dry riverbed. As for sugar cane, bananas, mangoes, bamboo, breadfruit, trees and even coconut palms, which are common in Jamaica, as in almost every tropical island, are all crops brought by the colonizers. Before they arrived, the Arawak Indians grew mainly maize and sweet potatoes for food.

Jamaica is home to the world’s third-largest beautiful butterfly, the swallowtail, and the second smallest bird on the planet, the pygmy hummingbird (with a total body length of 6—7 cm, including the beak). And the pennant-tailed hummingbird, the symbol of Jamaica, is endemic, it means that it is not found anywhere except this island. There are also 21 endemic species of frogs. As for snakes, only five species of them remain in Jamaica from the former diversity (all of them are completely safe for humans), the rest were entirely destroyed by mongooses, brought to the island by the British in 1872 to protect sugar plantations from rats. If there is anyone to be afraid of here, it is crocodiles. Certainly, they live in only two places in Jamaica, are actively fed by the organizers of tourist routes and are lazy and satiated enough to cause any trouble to visitors. But caution when dealing with them still, of course, does not hurt!

In addition to its impressive nature, Jamaica is also famous for being the first country in the Western Hemisphere to have a railway network (though it has not been operating for almost a decade due to its unprofitability). This happened only 18 years after the first railway appeared in Great Britain. And the local Falmouth got its water supply pipe earlier than in New York.

The island had such a well-established telephone connection that the largest American communications company, as we would now say, AT&T simply copied it. Jamaica was the first of the British colonies to establish a postal service in 1688 (although since then, apparently, little has changed in this department, since mail, including within Kingston, takes an unimaginably long time to reach addressees, often disappears en route or ends up with the wrong person). At the same time, in 1994, Jamaica became the first Caribbean country with its own web page, and with information technology, in general, everything is in order there (in particular, a very cheap, especially by Russian standards, and, in general, quite high-quality and reliable mobile telephone connection has been established).

To complete the picture, it is worth adding that the island was also the first of the Caribbean states to gain independence in 1962, retaining to this day its membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations and the Queen (now King) of Great Britain as the formal head of state (although in recent years, the issue of getting rid of this last attribute of the colonial heritage has been discussed from time to time in political circles in Kingston).

And, of course, it is impossible not to mention the fact that in 1988 Jamaica was the first tropical country to take part with its national bobsled team in the Winter Olympics in Calgary, although without much success. But they certainly captivated fans and TV viewers in many countries around the world. Even Hollywood was impressed by this story, resulting in a movie hit in 1993 called Cool Runnings, which made the Jamaican “Winter” Olympians famous. We will also return to this later.

The island’s inhabitants, who have always been open to the world and have formed their own distinctive culture, are still mostly stuck in their own language environment, especially if they do not belong to the middle and upper classes of Jamaican society. “Colonial” English serves them primarily for external communication and, of course, to ensure mutual understanding with tourists.

The aforementioned Patois, or Jamaican Creole as linguists characterize it, emerged in the 17th century when black slaves from West and Central Africa, taken to the Caribbean, were forced to become acquainted with the English language. Accordingly, Patois contains elements of both “classical” British English and West African languages. Patois is taught in schools as a native language along with English, reggae performers sing in it, and literary works written in “Jamaican” are published. As Wilhelm von Humboldt pointed out, the internal form of language is an expression of the national or folk spirit, the basis for expressing ethnic identity and the way in which national mentality is formed. In my opinion, this is entirely applicable to Jamaicans. Don’t be surprised if, when asked how you are, a Jamaican cheerfully answers, “Mi kuul maan, mi chat Patwah” (“I am fine, and I speak Patois”).