Jamaica’s cattle legacy

“A Snapshot of Jamaica’s Surviving Spanish Legacy” is a new mini-exhibition launched by National Museum Jamaica in collaboration with the Simón Bolívar Cultural Centre. It features fragments of Spanish culture that endured the 1655 English conquest and remain present in modern Jamaica.

Colonists were not the only cargo offloaded by Spanish galleons in Jamaica after the island’s annexation in 1494. Alongside the humans came several plant and animal species to support incoming settlers and replenish ships on their way to other parts of the growing Spanish empire. Animals included livestock such as cattle, oxen, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens; beasts of burden and transportation, such as horses, donkeys, and mules; and companion pets, including dogs and cats.

This cattle cranium (cow skull) from the exhibition’s economic Spanish legacy display case symbolises the influx of these new animals into Jamaica’s physical, cultural, and financial landscape. Domestic animals were raised on small-scale Spanish haciendas (cattle ranches), originally by enslaving Jamaica’s indigenous Taíno. Haciendas were not sites for large-scale farming though, producing mainly hides, lard, and beef for ships in transit.

However, as the Taíno population rapidly declined from disease, cruelty, and exhaustion under the exploitative encomienda and repartimento systems, Spain dispatched the first shipment of enslaved Africans to Jamaica in 1513. West Africans were enslaved in Spanish Jamaica as domestic servants, cowboys, hunters, and herders of cattle, pigs, and horses.

Landing in the north at Sevilla la Nueva, this initial consignment of enslaved Africans was expressly requested by Juan de Esquivel, the town’s founder and Jamaica’s first Spanish governor. They were probably sent to the island from the namesake of this colonial base – the Spanish City of Seville, which served as one of Spain’s chief hubs for human trafficking from as early as 1491.

By 1523, Spanish colonists were importing 500 enslaved Africans to Jamaica annually. African slavery would continue to be a defining feature of the Jamaican agricultural economy well after the English invasion, with Sevilla la Nueva being turned over to Captain Richard Hemmings in 1655 as a sugar plantation.

The chaos instigated by the English conquest provided the perfect opportunity for these African hunters, cowboys, and cattle-herders to flee into Jamaica’s hinterland, following in the footsteps of the surviving Taíno. These “escapees”, called the Cimarrones (unruly ones) by the Spanish, formed independent communities in the mountains. Jamaica’s rugged interior terrain allowed the Maroons, as the English now knew them, to wage successful guerilla campaigns against the new colonisers.

With the arrival of the English, new cattle breeds such as the Jersey and Holstein were introduced for draft work on animal pens attached to sugar plantations. Hide production was still prioritised, with beef and milk as secondary products. Interestingly, chocolate milk was first invented in Jamaica, as evidenced by the infamous Irish botanist Sir Hans Sloane. Sloane was on the island in the early 18th century, where he found hot cocoa too nauseating to drink unless mixed with milk. However, historians now believe that Jamaicans brewed a hot beverage from cacao shavings boiled with milk and cinnamon as far back as 1494, during the earliest days of Spanish colonial occupation.

It would take another four centuries for cow’s milk to become an important Jamaican economic commodity. In the meantime, the English faced the problem of these new cattle breeds struggling to acclimate to the tropical heat. As a result, cows yielded poorly during the English colonial period, leading to a years-long search for a better dairy breed.

In 1910, Hope Farm began crossbreeding local cattle with the Indian Sahiwal and more temperate dairy breeds (like the Jersey and Friesian) for tropical adaptation. By 1952, the heat-tolerant “Jamaica Hope” became the island’s dominant dairy breed. Dairy Industries (Ja) Ltd. began processing cheese in 1964, leading to the launch of Tastee Cheese in 1968. Jamaican dairy production peaked in the 1980s at an estimated annual 38 million litres, with the national herd at its largest.

Hurricane Melissa also caused immense structural damage, power outages that prevented milk cooling, and significant cattle fatalities, which forced many farms to dump milk or halt operations. The foyer housing this mini-exhibition also has the official IOJ Hurricane Donation receptacle, currently accepting aid for ongoing relief efforts.

The establishment of livestock on these early haciendas is one of Jamaica’s most enduring legacies of Spanish economic activity. The genocidal toll that colonial agriculture exacted on the indigenous Taíno, together with the high human cost of West African slavery, led to the emergence of the Jamaican Maroons, who also embody one of the most recognisable socioeconomic legacies of Spanish Jamaica.

The exhibition is open to the public in the foyer of the Institute of Jamaica’s (IOJ) East Street address in downtown Kingston.

Contributed by John Shorter, curatorial assistant, National Museum Jamaica, Institute of Jamaica