POSTCARDS TO HISTORY 33

exhibitions and at ports of call, especially from places with direct steamship
services to the islands, cities like New York, Miami, Palm Beach, Boston,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Liverpool, Glasgow, Southampton, and London.
 Postcards provided not merely a means of making the islands "better
known" to prospective holiday makers, as the Colonial Office specified, but
served to radically reinvent the West Indies' much maligned image. At the
turn of the twentieth century, within Britain and the United States the West
Indies were widely stigmatized as breeding grounds for potentially fatal
tropical diseases (Curtin and Stepan). As one industry supporter
recognized in 1891, "[t]o many old-fashioned people at home [Britain] to
book a passage for Jamaica is almost synonymous with ordering a coffin"
(Gardener qtd. in Hanna, 19). In addition to potentially natural hazards,
fears of the islands' rebellious black inhabitants also cast a cloud over
the burgeoning tourist trade.6 Thus, image makers had to transform the
islands drastically, from their association with disease and rebellion into
spaces of touristic desire.
 Postcards played an essential role in this refashioning process by
presenting the region as a picturesque tropical locale, the picture of a tropical
Eden. "Picturesque," as I have argued elsewhere, in the context of the
Anglophone Caribbean often referred to displays of "tropical" or exotic
nature, which appeared ordered and cultivated, and representations of
society as orderly and disciplined (Thompson).7 The miniature photographs
thus featured artfully-designed tropical botanical gardens, impeccably
manicured hotel landscapes, orderly fruit plantations, and clean palm-lined
streets. A postcard of Nassau's Victoria Avenue, a road fringed with
equidistantly-positioned palm trees, by photographer James Sands,
epitomized the ideal of ordered tropical nature (fig. 2). The view cards
portrayed an island landscape, in essence, which had been tamed, one devoid
of "tropical" hazards. The postcards also presented an image of a black
society that had been successfully colonized. Images of blacks, which
pictured them as peaceful, "civilized," and loyal British subjects assured
travelers of their safety among the natives. As curator of the Barbados
Museum and Historical Society, Kevin Farmer, concluded after perusing his
institution's collection of postcards of Barbados, many postcards represented
the island as "an exotic location without danger."

6 The Haitian Revolution of 1798 and Jamaica's Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 loomed
large in the imaginations of prospective travelers to the island. The more
contemporaneous Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898) and riots that took place
in Montego Bay, Jamaica (1902) likely revived fears of insurgency.
7 At the time, tropical nature did not so much signify the geographical derivation of
a plant form as it did a speciesis with strange or 'prehistoric' characteristics ...
prized as exotic, regardless of [its] actual geographical or climatic requirement"
(Preston 195).