The scenes among the banana palms of the beautiful island of Jamaica are singularly picturesque. A powerful negro armed with a long knife or "machete" passes quickly through the grove lopping off the fronds with their heavy hunches of ...See moreThe scenes among the banana palms of the beautiful island of Jamaica are singularly picturesque. A powerful negro armed with a long knife or "machete" passes quickly through the grove lopping off the fronds with their heavy hunches of bananas. After him come a motley assembly of men and women who pick up the great bunches and bear them off. The bunches of bananas are wrapped in straw and loaded on ox teams for transportation to Port Antonio. The entire process from picking the bananas to loading them on the ships at Port Antonio is shown. The most interesting single feature of the cocoanut picking is the inhuman way in which the negro boys walk up the palms with no other aid than bare hands and feet. Arrived at the top, they use their feet in an extremely dexterous manner to detach the thickly clustered cocoanuts. The fallen nuts are robbed of their thick outer shell by the sharp machete, and the picture closes with a kindly old scallywag of a negro taking a drink of that famous beverage of the tropics, cocoanut milk. Written by
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