Pre-Colombian Jamaica: Caribbean Archeology and Ethnohistory

Environment, Fauna, and Flora / 47
Figure 6. Jamaican topography, elevations, and main mountain ranges.
South of them, and trending north- south, are the Don Figuerero and May
Day mountains, and the mountains of Santa Cruz. At a lesser elevation, on the
south coast, are the promontories of the Hellshire hills, the Braziletto Mountains,
and Portland Ridge, the latter constituting the southernmost tip of the
island. All of these formations, with the exception of the Port Royal and Blue
mountains, are of limestone.
Where there are mountains there are rivers. The National Atlas of Jamaica
(1971) defined 20 drainage basins in the island, and their boundaries as set
out in the Atlas have been adopted in this work, as shown in Figure 7. In most
cases, the major river within each basin is obvious, and it gives its name to the
basin. Moving clockwise around the island starting from the southeast, this is
so with the following major rivers: Plantain Garden, Morant, Yallahs, Hope,
Rio Cobre, Minho, Black River, Cabarita, Great River, Montego, Martha Brae,
Rio Bueno, White River, Wagwater, and Rio Grande. In a few cases, there is no
single dominant stream, and so the choice of a name for the basin concerned has
been somewhat arbitrary: Gut River, Orange River, Spot Valley, Pagee River,
and Drivers River, moving around the coast as before. Most of these rivers
tend to run north or south to the sea, with the exception of the Plantain Garden
and Montego rivers. They generally have steep gradients with many rapids
and waterfalls, although the volume of water varies appreciably throughout the
year. Where the rivers run through impermeable bedrock, as Zans pointed out,
they tend to have a “normal dendritic drainage pattern” (Zans et al. 1962). This