by Cruise liners outnumber the skyline of the town of Falmouth in Jamaica as holidaying passengers stop being eager for the sun and sand, which have a huge impact on tourism on the island.
But under the shadow of the Royal Caribbean ships are the harbors where African slaves once landed, never to board again, along with the crumbling houses and offices where the brutal business of slavery was built.
Most of Jamaica’s three million annual visitors will pass by these Georgian remnants of the British slave economy, and the history that accompanies it.
Plans are now in place to attract “dark tourists” who seek out sites that are suffering – and could save decaying architectural heritage in the process.
The “grief tourism” industry has drawn visitors – and cash – to sites from Cambodia’s Killing Fields to the crowded streets of Sarajevo, and the growing taste for the sight of horrors known from the see news or history books. gone unnoticed in Jamaica.
Edmund Bartlett, the country’s tourism minister, has written a book entitled Decoding the Future of Tourism Resiliencewhich includes a chapter on the possibility of more morbid destinations.
He has said it The Telegraph that he sees the potential of Jamaica as a destination for those who want to see and understand the injustice of slavery. The country’s slave economy flourished during the 300-year British rule.
The politician told the Labor Party of the Right that he is working closely with the Ministry of Culture and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust to ensure “conservation work and restoration of historical monuments” related to the colonial era.
In Falmouth, one project is already underway. The Port Authority, a Jamaican government agency, is paying to restore a dockside house owned by John Tharp (1744-1804), the island’s largest slave owner, with about 2,500.
The ruined 230-year-old townhouse is being restored to its original Georgian splendor, with the express purpose of becoming a museum telling the story of Tharp’s business and the impact of slavery on the island, where tourists and locals alike could be happy to forget it. .
This preservation process has pleased groups like the Friends of the Georgian Society of Jamaica, who have long advocated the preservation of the architectural gems of 18th century Falmouth and Jamaica in general. And conservation and tourism profit can go hand in hand.
Tharp’s slaves would be transported from the docks to his large upland estate of Good Hope inland, where an elegant plantation residence sits above the cloud forest, and where there are Georgian bridges, sugar works, a water mill and existing bridge.
Good Hope’s sugar cane has given way to a 2,000-acre citrus and coconut farm purchased by Jamaican businessman Tony Hart and inherited by his son Blaise, who has worked to preserve and make the historic site profitable.
“There were six people working here when my father bought it, and now there are close to 100,” he says. “Good Hope needed a lot of renovations, that was a trip in itself.”
Now a lucrative destination for weddings and psychedelic mushroom retreats, the estate founded in 1744 also includes an almost unique example of a surviving slave village: crude settlements that have largely disappeared without a trace anywhere else on the island
The “grief tourist” can view the buildings that defined the lives of the slaves: the squat foundations of their tiny houses, the burned ruins of the hospital where they were treated, the boiling house where they processed sugar cane into crystals. , and the offices of those who direct their labors.
At the “big house” – where Tharp once lived – verandahs, jalousies and sash windows show how houses were designed to keep the plantation cool in the tropical heat.
Mr Hart has suggested that the appeal of grief tourism to surviving and potentially uninhabitable plantation houses – many of which were burned by rebel slavers led by Sam Sharpe in 1831 – could help the elements. preserve this decaying architecture.
“There are definitely spots that have potential,” he said. “There are great places there.”
Mr Hart counts as a neighbor conservation expert Christopher Ohrstrom, son of the late Mary, Viscount Rothermere and former head of the World Monuments Fund, who has invested in preserving Falmouth’s colonial heritage.
The US investor told The Telegraph that it’s hard to stray from Jamaica’s offering of “rum and reggae”, but said Bartlett was a “smart guy” and that heritage tourism focused on British slavery has “potential” to make money and the historic buildings of Great preservation that could otherwise exist. fall into ruin.
However, he admits that it can be difficult to defend the preservation of what some in Jamaica see as “monuments of oppression”, and Jamaican conservation architect Peter Francis claims: “There is a stigma attached to certain types preserve heritage. There’s a whole debate going on about reparations, and there’s more interest in preserving things that have to do with Jamaica’s immediate heritage, Bob Marley and so on.”
Peregrine Bryant, a British architect working to support conservation in Jamaica, believes that, like the Colosseum, “there are many shameful buildings of the past that are valuable around the world today” and can be a “tourism resource” .
The tourism potential has been demonstrated in a number of projects currently underway which will center around Jamaica’s dark history. When captured from the Spanish in the 1650s, the island was first a piracy hotbed and then Britain’s largest sugar producer, which required the importation of 600,000 African slaves before the trade was abolished in 1807.
Port Royal, a former capital and the first point of entry for many slaves until an earthquake in 1692, is to become the site of a £3 million state-of-the-art museum space which can display the artefacts of colonial rule face. display, with funding coming again from the Port Authority.
“Today people go to Port Royal for rum and fish,” says Jonathan Greenland, the British director of the National Museum of Jamaica. “But it was the center of British colonial life. Slaves worked the docks there.”
He added: “Slavery is seen in everything here, in relationships, in culture, in health, in humour. He had an impact. It is important that people learn about this history, in Jamaica, and in Britain. This story could be told here, where slavery was once so central.”
Mr Greenland’s office in downtown Kingston will oversee future stages of this project which will aim to preserve the potential sights of the British Naval Hospital which served sailors holding the colonies, and a 17th century women’s prison.
A new museum focusing on another dark episode in Jamaican history will be housed in the restored remains of the Morant Bay courthouse.
It was here, in 1865, that the rebels led by the preacher Paul Bogle burned down the courthouse, which started a rebellion that governor Edward John Eyre controversially put down at the cost of 400 people, including women and children.
Mr Bartlett believes visitors, who bring in £3 billion to Jamaica’s economy, can face the past when presented with it, be it in ruins, mansions or new museums.
He said: “They didn’t see the values of that period as evil, but they saw it as an entrepreneurial activity, in the same way we see manufacturing and buying a smartphone. The next generation may see us as terrible people. So we have to be careful sometimes about how we make that characterization, and how we make claims from the past.
“The other thing is that the past makes the future and helps define you. You can’t change that definition, what you can do is improve it, and make it better for the next generation.”
