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Lindy Woodhead

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

Lindy Woodhead feels the spirit in Jamaica

It’s impossible not to be seduced by Jamaica — the island is a big, lush, verdant paradise, described by Hollywood hell-raiser Errol Flynn as being ‘more beautiful than any woman I have ever known’. This was no mean endorsement. Flynn, whose yacht Zaca ran aground off the north-eastern shore of Port Antonio in 1946, fell so completely in love with Jamaica that he settled there, buying up 2,000 acres of land along the coast where he farmed cattle and coconuts. Flynn also bought himself a ‘hotel with history’ when he acquired the by then decrepit 400-room Titchfield — which in its 1905 heyday had been a sybaritic location for the island’s first glamour tourists who arrived having hitched a ride on the Boston Fruit Company’s banana boats. The Flynn empire was completed when he acquired his very own mini-paradise called Navy Island, won, so legend has it, in a drunken dice game. The Titchfield burned down years ago; Port Antonio is rapidly becoming a hot spot again.

Jamaica has a long history of resident legendary characters ranging from the Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan, through to Flynn, Fleming and Coward, not forgetting the local hero Bob Marley. Neither has the island forgotten its own scary lady, the ‘White Witch of Rose Hall’, aka the 18th-century plantation owner Annie Palmer. Of Irish descent but brought up in Haiti, Palmer’s speciality was sex and voodoo, her greatest pleasure seemingly being to murder the young men who had pleasured her. Today, Palmer’s vast plantation house has been expensively restored as part of a hotel complex complete with tour guides who talk laughingly of hauntings — yet there are locals for whom the legend of the slave-owning murderess is no laughing matter.

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