June 2021 Polo Players' Edition- Book Review

Player Danny Melville Pens Book

As the title unabashedly proclaims, this 242-page book traces a quirky family history that first appears in Scotland, thence to the United States, and finally ends up in Jamaica, only to be dispersed once again.

A pivotal period in this family’s journey begins when ancestor Thomas Arnold Briggs, originally of Little Compton, Rhode Island, did invent—in the period of industrial innovation and expansion that marked American society in the latter half of the 19th century—the wire stapling machine. This device in its scaled-down form eventually became a commonplace item on every office desktop on the planet. His efforts gave birth to the Boston Wire Stitcher Company, a name later shortened to Bostitch. The wealth this ingenuity produced endowed the Melville family’s descendants for generations to come.

Spoiler alert: The main character in this book (as author Danny Melville declares at its end) is Jamaica itself; its extraordinary historical journey of violence, greed, war and slavery is the background. All this and more is brought into focus as the narrative reveals the kaleidoscopic diversity of a Caribbean island of lush and sultry climate, 11,000 square kilometers of breathtaking vistas and—incredibly—an ongoing blending of its disparate inhabitants into a culture known for its optimism and irrepressible spirit.

The first inhabitants of the island were the Taino or Arawak people who migrated from South America about 2500 years ago. Nice folks, by most accounts, who did nothing to deserve the ill treatment they received from Christopher Columbus in 1494 and the Spanish settlers who followed him. Soon these aboriginals were gone, leaving only the name they had called their island paradise: Xamayca.

The Spanish invaders were disappointed in not finding the gold they sought there. In their dispirited mood they failed to establish a strong enough presence to fend off the English who hovered dangerously nearby. Under the leadership of Adm. Sir William Penn (whose wayward eponymous son became a Quaker and founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania), the The author’s father, Limeys routed the Spanish from the island in 1655 and banished John Melville, circa all of those they could find to Cuba and beyond. Some others fled 1950. into the mountains of the interior along with many runaway African slaves where they became known as Maroons. Slavery was finally abolished by the British on Aug. 1, 1834, a holiday still celebrated by Jamaicans the evening before as “Watch Night.”

The author's father John Melville, circa 1950.

Some Sephardic Jews who had fled Portugal to the Caribbean also ended up on Jamaican soil and centuries later became a branch of the extended Melville family. The Spanish tried vainly to recapture Jamaica—even France had a go at it—but the English colony was there to stay and endured until Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley led the island to full independence in 1962.

Which brings us to the latter’s granddaughter, Rachel Manley, the co-author of this very book. An accomplished writer and poet, Manley was a schoolmate and lifelong friend of Mrs. Danny Melville (née Carole Anne Brennan). Her voice in the narrative is a rock steady counterpoint to main protagonist Danny Melville’s