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AN EYE FOR THE TROPICS
Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque
By KRISTA A. THOMPSON DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3751-5
Chapter One
FRAMING "THE NEW JAMAICA" Feasting on the Picturesque Tropical Landscape
If you wish to understand that consoling pity with which the islands were regarded, look at the tinted engravings of Antillean forests, with their proper palm trees, ferns, and waterfalls. They have a civilizing tendency, like Botanical Gardens, as if the sky were a glass ceiling under which a colonized vegetation is arranged for quiet walks and carriage rides.... A century looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong light and with the wrong eye. It is such pictures that are saddening, rather than the tropics themselves. These delicate engravings of sugar mills and harbors, of native women in costume, are seen as part of History, that History which looked over the shoulder of the engraver and, later, the photographer.
Derek Walcott, The Antilles, 1995
The photograph as souvenir is a logical extension of the pressed flower, the preservation of an instant in time through a reduction of physical dimensions and a corresponding increase in significance supplied by means ofnarrative.
Susan Stewart, On Longing, 1993
Like butterflies captured and placed behind a pane of glass, several travelers' photographic albums of Jamaica from the late nineteenth century display physical mementoes of the island's flora and fauna pressed into the sleeves of their pages, embalming literally plant clippings from the island in the seemingly timeless and lifeless world of their collections (figure 5). These plant specimens do not solely occupy the pages of these albums but form a decorative border to centrally positioned photographs of Jamaica's natural environment. A photograph of coconut trees, for instance, appears framed by several leaves of fern. The juxtaposition of photographs of nature and natural specimens combine two representations of Jamaica. Both provide visual evidence of having been there and having "taken," by physical removal or through the camera's shutter, the island's natural forms. This doubleness of representation conflated two mementoes of Jamaica, which imaged the island primarily as a place where the earth offered forth a spectacle of "tropical nature." These particular albums, as I will argue, blend visual genres previously used to represent the island, including picturesque plantation landscapes from the late eighteenth century and naturalists' detailed drawings of tropical botanical specimens from the nineteenth century. Moreover, they represent a pivotal moment when travelers, tourism promoters, and local photographers, who aimed to cater to the developing tourism industry on the British colony, turned to the comparatively new medium of photography to reify and transform earlier ways of imagining and representing Jamaica.
The albums, poised almost uncomfortably between representational genres, reflect a wider historical moment in Jamaica at the end of the nineteenth century, when Jamaica's British colonial administrators, mercantile elite, and British and North American business interests very consciously aimed to refashion the image of the island in the eyes of the "modern" or "civilized world," to use terms employed in newspapers in Jamaica at the time (DG, 27 January 1903; DG, 8 December 1904). In the late 1880s these groups optimistically forecast the birth of what they hailed as "The New Jamaica" or "Awakened Jamaica," a new period of economic prosperity and modernization based on the projected success of the burgeoning tourism trade. Tourism supporters predicted that the industry would bring not only temporary sojourners to Jamaica, with their much-needed expenditures, but would inspire capital investment, trade, land acquisition, and the permanent settlement of white migrants. Through tourism, one promoter predicted, the island would "be 'discovered' in the modern sense, and if we succeed in pleasing the fastidious taste of the class [of tourists] that will shortly visit us we may also in the modern sense be 'made'" (DG, 9 January 1893). By creating an image of a "New Jamaica," industry supporters aimed to propel the colony to the forefront of the modern world.
To create a tourism industry on which the New Jamaica hinged, proponents of the tourist trade recognized that the idea of Jamaica would have to be reinvented in the imaginations of North American and British audiences. Photography would play a key role in this process. Since the decline of the sugar plantation system in the colony in the early nineteenth century, in the words of a contemporaneous editorial, "the popular idea of Jamaica at home [in Britain] is of an island ruined by emancipation, a region of derelict estates with a scattered population of negro squatters, paying no rent, living in squalid huts, supporting life on yams and bananas, and indebted to the calabash tree for the household utensils" (DG, 2 February 1892). Tourism promoters enlisted photography in an effort to replace the old image of Jamaica as a landscape and population of ill-repute with a new one. The photographs generated to meet these reimaging needs, more specifically, images created from the beginning of the industry in 1890 to 1914 (when the First World War brought a momentary end to the initial thrust of these extensive campaigns), form the investigative core of this chapter. What particular aspects of the island's natural environment or local populace did image makers seize on, figuratively and literally (in the case of the above-mentioned photographic albums), to project a more desirable touristic image of the island's landscape? How did they visualize the New Jamaica?
I argue that photographs created by tourism promoters in this period perpetuated an image of the island as primarily a place of nature and, more specifically, as a landscape in which nature displayed the charms of a "picturesque tropical garden." Photographs and written accounts of the New Jamaica frequently described, visualized, or fetishized parts of the island's vegetation that displayed signs of cultivation-generally aspects of the landscape that had been overhauled and transplanted by various colonial regimes and North American and British business interests for profit. Such images naturalized the island's past and present plantation landscapes and attendant agricultural products of colonial cultivation as indigenous, aesthetically pleasing, and characteristic parts of the island's environment.
Many benefactors of Jamaica's tourism industry at the beginning of the twentieth century were simultaneously involved in the developing fruit trade (primarily in bananas and citrus fruits); hence many of the photographic images disseminated by these companies in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth had dual aims. They sold the picturesque (the seemingly naturally ordered) landscape to tourists, while proffering the products of the land (borne from the cultivated plantation environment) to potential consumers in British and North American metropoles. These competing representational aims often found resolve in photographic representations that portrayed the island as a tropical picturesque Garden of Eden, with its paradisiacal qualities attributed to the natural aesthetic orderliness of its banana and coconut plantations or citrus groves. The New Jamaica was also refashioned as a touristic landscape of desire by presenting the island as a place where the "fruits" of colonialism, both the "benefits" derived from British colonial rule and American enterprise, could be observed and certain agricultural products cultivated on the island could be visually and literally consumed.
The New Jamaica: "Discovering" Jamaica's Picturesque Scenery The new way of representing the New Jamaica or "The Awakening of Jamaica" was intrinsically bound to a new economic vision for the island at the turn of the twentieth century. The New Jamaica was partly the rallying cry of Henry Blake, the island's British governor (from 1889 to 1897), who aimed to inject a new spirit of enterprise and optimism into the economically depressed British colony of Jamaica. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the sugar plantation system, the former economic lifeline of the island, had been in sharp decline. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, Emancipation in 1834, and the Sugar Duties Act of 1846 had all hammered the final nails into the coffin of an ailing sugar industry. To revive the fledging economy, Blake supported hosting an international exposition in Jamaica. Commentators writing years later about the New Jamaica traced its beginnings to the exhibition, which opened on 27 January 1891 (DG, 27 January 1903).
The exhibition was financed by public subscription, an indication of the faith and investment in the event and the promise and possibility of the New Jamaica. It was an impressive affair, drawing participation from as far away as Russia, Holland, and India, along with displays from across the Caribbean. Since the 1860s, colonial exhibitions had provided forums through which many European colonial powers staged spectacles of nationalism, industrialization, and modernity (Maxwell 1999). Colonial administrators on Jamaica, on the fringe of imperial metropoles, also wagered that the colony could purchase currency in the modern world by hosting such an affair. By some accounts the exhibition was successful in this regard. "It was The Exhibition," one commentator reflected in 1903, "which first brought the colony to the notice of the modern world, and since that date there has been a constant accession of interest in the island" (DG, 27 January 1903).
The exhibition's organizers had several primary goals, which encapsulate the wider aspirations of the New Jamaica campaigns. In addition to encouraging tourism, the exhibition would bolster the trade of new agricultural products (especially bananas) that the island offered for sale. The exhibition's organizers also aimed to inspire the island's majority black population in the ways of industry and enterprise and, according to a contemporaneous editorial, "open their eyes to the fact of their backward condition" (JP, 12 February 1891). They reasoned, "It has been found that an Exhibition of the resources of a country is not only the best advertisement for business purposes, but is the most valuable industrial education for the people" (DG, 20 January 1889; DG, 12 February 1891). Despite these efforts (or because of them) many black Jamaicans steered clear of the exhibition. One newspaper censured the absence of blacks, claiming that "illiterate people are simply too ignorant to come to the Exhibition, [and] their untrodden minds will be dead weight in the development of a New Jamaica" (DG, 19 February 1891). Such statements attest that the New Jamaica was both descriptive of the image the ruling elite aimed to project to the outside world and prescriptive, an ideal that proponents hoped to see realized or materialized both on the social landscape ("all classes of Jamaica") and on the physical space of the island.
The New Jamaica, in addition, also entailed a new way of seeing, representing, and marketing Jamaica's landscape. As an editorial, entitled "The New Jamaica" outlined, "there is another new thing connected with Jamaica. The character of its scenery is not new. So far from that, it is as old as the hills. But the recognition of it and of the character of the climate is new" (DG, 29 January 1891; emphasis added). The article continued, "as Walter Scott was said to have discovered Scotland in respect to scenery, so recent travellers have been discovering the truth of the Governor's [Blake's] words, that Jamaica is one of the loveliest islands in the world." The editorial went on to prescribe that "those who have eyes to see" should take a fresh look at "what is beautiful in [the island's] scenery." The New Jamaica, then, marks a crucial moment in the history of visual culture on the island, when persons in the colony newly reappraised the island's beauty, "discovering" it "in respect to scenery" for the first time.
The Magic Lantern: Projecting Jamaica's New Image Proponents of the tourism industry, however, had not only to see their landscapes with new eyes but to convince would-be travelers to do the same, to "recognize" Jamaica as a landscape filled with "the loveliest scenery in the world." One means tourism promoters employed to initiate this reimaging process was the lantern lamp or magic lantern, a precursor to the slide projector. Originally viewed in Britain as a "magical instrument," by the late nineteenth century lecturers throughout Britain's colonies and the United States commonly used the lantern lamp to project photographic images from glass slides for entertainment and educational purposes. Capitalizing on the popularity of these lectures, tourism industry supporters in Jamaica identified the format as "a splendid way" to bring images of Jamaica's new scenery to light (DG, 1 February 1904). Through a succession of flashing photographic images, coupled with an engaging spoken commentary, lecturers on Jamaica aimed to place prospective tourist audiences "into something like living touch with the scenery and people [of Jamaica]" (DG, 1 February 1904). The luminous largerthan-life photographic images of the island created a tactile sense of being in Jamaica, as "living touch" implies, inspiring lecture audiences to want to inhabit the landscape so tantalizingly presented before them.
At the beginning of the twentieth century hundreds, if not thousands, of these promotional lantern lectures on Jamaica illuminated the faces of audiences throughout Britain, the United States, and Canada (DG, 1 February 1904). Local newspapers hailed the men and women who "boomed" the island through these presentations as the island's "ambassadors" and avidly reported (and vicariously traveled with them) on their global ventures (DG, 9 December 1899). Some of the best-known ambassadors included James Johnston, James Gall, Bessie Pullen-Burry, W. H. Hale, W. G. M. Betton, T. H. Wardleworth, and H. C. Cobbold. Frequently colonial authorities and companies involved in both the tourism and fruit trades sponsored these "ambassadors" and the products (sometimes photographs) they handed out as souvenirs to lecture audiences. In particular, the United Fruit Company (an American company started by Captain Lorenzo Baker) and Elder, Dempster and Company (a corporation based in Liverpool and directed by Alfred Jones [later, Sir Alfred Jones]) were instrumental in promoting the island through lantern lectures. Through these companies' efforts, as a member of the Legislative Council in Jamaica reflected in 1904, "she [Jamaica] has been advertised of late-within the past 10 years-more than she had ever been advertised in her social history in every way" (DG, 8 December 1904).
One of the most avid lantern lecturers and promoters of the New Jamaica was James Johnston (1854-1921), a Scottish-born missionary, doctor, and, later, photographer, who settled in Brown's Town, Jamaica, in 1874. Originally a traveler who ventured to the island to escape the winter for health reasons, Johnston, convinced of the pulmonary benefits of the island's climate, decided to stay in the island. He eventually set up the Jamaica Evangelistic Mission, which grew into nine different supplementary churches. Subsequently, he became a legislative representative for his parish, St. Ann. In addition to his efforts to convert the island's inhabitants, the doctor embarked on another type of crusade, preaching to would-be travelers about the virtues of visiting Jamaica, which he billed the "New Riviera" in his lantern lectures. Johnston, under the auspices of Elder, Dempster and Company, delivered these lectures for well over a decade, reaching, by his own account, "large masses of the best class of people-those likely to come to this country" (Johnston, quoted in DG, 30 January 1904).
Johnston and other lecturers emphasized Jamaica's "picturesque qualities" through their commentaries, slides, and the overall presentation format of the lantern lecture. Johnston, for instance, would rally at the conclusion of his lectures, "It is only they who have witnessed the manifold glories, become entranced by the thousand and one perfect pictures from Nature's most delicate brush, and refreshing influences of her climate, who can best endorse the justness of her claim to be 'Jamaica, the New Riviera'" (Johnston 1903b, 28). He presented the island as a series of "Nature's perfect pictures," usurping the picturesque mantel from the French Riviera. The very form of his lantern lecture, composed of 75 slides, reinforced Johnston's description of the island as "one thousand and one pictures." He and other lecturers precisely presented the island as and through a series of photographs. In addition to the more ephemeral form of lantern lectures, tourism promoters also used colonial exhibitions, books, and postcards to exhibit and emphasize the island's picturesque qualities. Through these various photographic means the medium became the message: that the island was like a succession of picturesque views.
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Excerpted from AN EYE FOR THE TROPICS by KRISTA A. THOMPSON Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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