Patricia Green | Time to change Jamaica Coat of Arms

What seems to be a common metaphor being played out on the Jamaica built and natural environment in agriculture and housing sectors affected by ‘informal’ and ‘squatter’ settlements also colluded development breaches inside established neighbourhoods, and others, begs for change. I suggest that this is connected to the Jamaica Coat of Arms and its historic underpinnings. With a new UK monarch, King Charles III, and discussions over becoming a republic with constitutional reform, it may be argued that a new Coat of Arms is long overdue.

Three key events stood out in Jamaica’s history during 1661 when Charles II, King of Britain and France, made Jamaica his personal domain. He: (1) proclaimed grants of his Jamaica Crown lands to freed Britons; (2) founded the royal port on the palisades of the harbour, with its town called Port Royal becoming the major transhipment hub that served the British monarchy in its enterprise of trafficking between 1672 and 1689 around 90,000–100,000 enslaved Africans; and (3) sanctioned a double-sided royal seal [Great Seal of Jamaica] that included its Coat of Arms on which he placed his crown and mantle. Through these, Jamaica blazed a British colonial trail and served as a blueprint copied by other emerging nations at the time. The question is, how much of this history should Jamaica continue to take into its future? Close examination of the Jamaica Coat of Arms and its significance automatically qualifies it as one that should be discontinued in its present form.

STOOD OUT

The National Library of Jamaica records “… in giving consideration to what might be the form of an appropriate Coat of Arms for an Independent Jamaica, both Government and the Opposition reached the agreement that the existing Arms, granted to Jamaica since 1661 by the Royal Warrant and partially revised in 1957, constituted a “badge of great historical significance to the nation and should be retained …”. Both Government and Opposition were impressed that the Jamaica Arms stood out from among others because it was accorded unique distinction through the incorporation of the Royal Helmet and Mantling. The Gleaner report of November 30, 1983, ‘Coat of Arms – no Change’, says that an opinion poll listed that six per cent wanted the Arms replaced; 44 per cent undecided; 50 per cent opposed. Do Jamaicans understand the significance and implications of its Coat of Arms?

The 1661 Jamaica seal incorporating its Coat of Arms has two sides. One side is encircled with the Latin motto ‘Duro de cortice fructus quam dulces’ [How sweet the fruit the hard rind yields]. It shows a representation of “… the King, crowned, in his robes, and on a throne, with a Negro [sic] on his knee, presenting some pine apples to him …”, reports George Vertue in ‘Medals, Coins, Great Seals, and Other Works of Thomas Simon’. It is instructive that the original 1661 image was of a Taino (formerly called Arawak) woman. However, by the 1780 Vertue publication, the image changed because the Jamaica demographics transformed from the Indigenous Taino people to African people under enslavement.

Benjamin Justice remarks, in The Art of Coining Christians: Indians and Authority in the Iconography of British Atlantic Colonial Seals, 1606-1767, that Jamaica was the first instance of what would become the standard depiction of “… Indians in British colonial seals until the mid-eighteenth century: figures kneeling, offering the fruits of their country to the monarch …”. New England followed Jamaica in 1686, and others had similar seals representing the handing over of the raw materials characteristic of each colony – fur in Nova Scotia, lumber and fur in New York, tobacco in Virginia. The allegorical implication of the pineapple from Jamaica, a symbol of welcome, is the land being handed over to the Crown.

Justice continues that the English focused their energies on claims to the land and viewed Indigenous people, with sovereign separation from the settlement process, by “… appealing to the English common law tradition that unimproved land could be taken for proper improvement, and to the pan-European Roman legal concept of ‘terra nullius’ that vacant land could be taken by anyone who would properly occupy it … provided the English with a legitimate legal argument for taking possession of the land in a way that did not violate English law …”.

Fast-forward to understand the appropriation of this bent-knee posture of handing over and taking land in Jamaica. Consider Governor Edward John Eyre and others objecting to post-Emancipation Africans’ land ownerships, reverting these into Crown lands then forcing freed Africans to become hired labourers, that culminated in the 1865 Morant Bay Uprising. Topical are Bernard Lodge and Innswood Estates where lands are being withdrawn from family bequests, also lease-farmers taking judicial actions, because of evictions denying them housing and livelihoods.

A TVJ documentary aired on October 19 highlights ‘Squatting and Informal Settlements in Jamaica’ with the people crying, “…where do we go…”, listing bulldozed settlements in Kingston – Rema 1977; Beeston Street 2012; Lyndhurst Road 2018; and Clifton, St Catherine, October 6, with interviewees suggesting willingness to purchase titles for sugar lands bequeathed to their parents as former estate workers. Ponder the cries from Jamaicans when successive Independence governments use compulsory land acquisition for projects involving divestment, lease and/or sale with overseas partnerships. Contemplate thousands of proprietors relocated because of previous bauxite mining, still waiting over 60 years for titles. Deliberate on judicial review over bauxite mining inside The Cockpit Country possibly appropriating some Maroon Treaty lands. How is government ensuring continued full and free land access rights by all Jamaicans to Bob Marley Beach, St Thomas?

GREAT SEAL

The other side of the 1661 Great Seal depicts the Jamaica Coat of Arms encircled by the Latin “Ecce alium ramos porrexit in orbem nec sterilis crux est” [Behold, the cross hath spread its arms into another world, and beareth fruit], then containing the motto of the Coat of Arms in Latin, “Indus uterque serviet uni” [Both Indies will serve one]. Images of Indigenous people were incorporated into the heraldic tradition as subordinates fixed “… to the resources of the land as vassals … nor was their full integration as civilized participants in emergent notions of British identity …” Benjamin Justice explains. These were later applied to enslaved Africans.

When King Charles II incorporated the 1672 Arms for the Royal African Company that traded enslaved Africans, it copied that of Jamaica, changing the supporters from Taino to African people. Yet in 1962 at Independence, Jamaica only changed the 1661 motto to “Out of many one people”. This 1661 King Charles II Jamaica Coat of Arms with people as subordinate in its heraldic surrounds represents perpetual bent-knee handing over and taking of Jamaica land we love. This should be changed.

Patricia Green, PhD, a registered architect and conservationist, is an independent scholar and advocate for the built and natural environment. Send feedback to patgreen2008@gmail.com.