Let us go with the steamer as it returns to the land of bananas for another load. It takes us all day to go from New Orleans to the gulf. We pass the lighthouse, and go out between two long piles of stone.
These are jetties, put there at great expense to keep the water at the mouth of the river from spreading out. The jetties make the channel narrow and the current swift, so that it scoops out the mud, carries it out to deep water, and thus keeps the river mouth deep enough for big ships to enter. Many harbors have jetties.
In three days we see the tops of the forested mountains of the island of Jamaica. We sail into the harbor of Kingston, the capital of this British colony. The ship is tied to the wharf, and black men begin to load her with green bananas. We go ashore, take a carriage, and drive out into the country. We meet scores, hun dreds, of black women and girls, trudging down to Kingston, each with a bunch of bananas on her head. Some of the women are leading donkeys, each of which carries two bunches on his back. These people have little groves of banana plants in the patches of ground around their grass huts. The small bananas they eat at home, hut when they hear that a steamer has come, they walk off to the town to sell all the good bunches they have. With the money they will buy some of the corn meal, flour, bacon, and clothes, that the banana steamer brings down from the United States.
Next to the sugar of Cuba and Porto Rico, bananas are the chief thing we get from the countries around the Caribbean Sea. In several of the Central American countries many large plantations, with little railroads running through them, have recently been made in the thick forest along the western shore of the Caribbean. The
wind blows from the sea and brings plenty of rain to this coast plain. Most of the work is done by the Jamaica negroes, who go over and work a few months for the banana companies, and then go back to their little homes. you see a banana, you can think of the black men working among the tall green leaves, where mosquitoes and many other bit ing insects abound.
About a hundred steamships are busy all the time carrying bananas from Ja maica, Haiti, and the Central American countries, including Panama. Some even come from Colombia, one of the countries of South America. Look at the banana trade map (Fig. 273) and see the cities to which bananas go, and the countries from which they come.
267. Central America, general view.— Most of the people of the countries of Central America are Indians, negroes, and half-breeds. The few white people who rule speak Spanish, for these countries also were Spanish colonies. In each country there have been many civil wars to see who shall be president of that country.
When a man gets to be president there he does as he pleases. All the Central Ameri can countries are like Mexico, in that most of the people live on the cool plateau, which is the southern part of the North American mountain system reaching from Alaska to the Isth mus of Panama.
This plateau is a beautiful region of mountain and forest. The people live in villages of one-story stone houses, sur rounded by gardens, in which grow many fruits and vegetables that are strange to us. Many of the hill sides are green with the coffee trees, from which the plateau people get a valuable export. Later we shall read more about coffee trees.
a SOUTH AMERICA