The rise and fall of Salt River Port

Recently, on my way to see artist/artisan Robert Campbell in Race Course, Clarendon, I stumbled upon a piece of the history of sugar production in, and export from, Jamaica.

Two old, rusting zinc structures along the Salt River main road in the said parish piqued my interest. On the other side of the road, directly in front of these structures, there were the rusting remnants of what seems to have been a waterworks, to pump water from the river into those buildings.

Just before we saw these buildings there was another zinc-looking one, but not rust. It turned out to be much larger than the first two I saw. Across the road again, I saw what looked like a fishing village.

We went over and found out from some men on the scene that it is indeed a fishing village of sorts, but they admitted that they were only “squatting” there as the original fishing village was destroyed by a hurricane, and thus their current circumstances. There was a decadent looking building at the spot, a remnant of the port facilities.

I was told that the place used to be a sugar port. The men pointed to some decomposing metal barges in the water that would take the sugar from the warehouses through a mangrove waterway to Salt River Bay where the ships would dock. That explained the three buildings on the other side of the road. They were actually warehouses, and yes, water was pumped from one side of the road to the other into the two rusting zinc structures.

But, the men could not give me enough information about the place, only to say it was Wisco Wharves that used to operate the port, which they now use as their fishing base. They were right because on the front of the biggest structure, set apart from the two rusting ones, was printed, WISCO WHARVES LIMITED.

My penchant to research things that are not clear to me went into overdrive, and what I found about Wisco, the West Indies Sugar Company, was most revealing, as a historian myself.

Wisco was founded on May 22, 1937, around the Frome Estate in Westmoreland, with an initial capital of 600,000 pounds. It was controlled by Tate and Lyle, who owned 65 per cent of the capital, and with its registered office in London, England, It was to evolve into a sugar giant in Jamaica. The following year it acquired the Monymusk Estate in Clarendon. At February 1938, it controlled 32 per cent of Jamaica’s sugar production. In 1949 Wisco bought the Bog plantation, located near Monymusk, and in that same year, it completed a new factory at Frome.

But, Jamaica had few large ports from which to export the much-sought-after product. This and the poor condition of the road were a challenge to Wisco. At the beginning of the 1950s, at the instigation of Tate and Lyle, which had already been carrying out bulk handling in its refineries, Wisco innovated bulk loading.

To facilitate this, the subsidiary Wisco Wharves limited formed. In 1954, the Salt River bulk shipping terminal and warehouses were set up in Clarendon. In 1956 similar facilities were opened in Savanna-la-Mar, and by 1966, three ports, Bowden in St Thomas, Salt River, and Savanna-la-Mar were managed by Wisco Wharves Ltd. They were said to be the most profitable ports in Jamaica.

In 1966 alone, 78.8 per cent of Jamaica’s sugar export went from these ports. Bull sugar export rose from 11 per cent in 1951 to 93 per cent in 1957, and to 99 per cent in 1961. The sugar was carried away from these ports to Britain and Canada, by the Sugar Line, another subsidiary of Tate and Lyle.

Wisco reigned supreme in the era when sugar was king, and with the decline of the industry in Jamaica the sweet rewards dissipated, and eventually became diluted. The decomposing metal barges at Salt River, which I chanced up, have stories to tell, yet slowly and surely they and the narratives they hold will be buried in the murky depths.