Portland’s Monkey Island and Pellew Island: Two love stories, two different places

AT FOLLY Point, near Portland’s capital town of Port Antonio, there are ruins of a 60-room mansion, commonly referred to as ‘Folly Mansion’, and located on a small peninsular.

There are several stories about how the place came to be called Folly. The most romantic is that the young wife of the original owner, American Alfred Mitchell, fled to America after exclaiming, “What a folly!” upon seeing the crumbling building when she arrived in the island to join her beloved.

It is said that after the wife fled, a dejected Alfred Mitchell simply allowed the mansion to continue to fall into ruins. The argument is that the building rapidly deteriorated because the steel embedded within its structures corroded as a result of seawater that was used to mix the cement.

Seawater, the research has disclosed, might have indeed been used to mix the cement because of the shortage of fresh water at the time. However, the mansion, whose construction started in 1904, could not have crumbled so fast, so that the ‘What-a-folly’ story doesn’t cut it.

In fact, Mitchell and his wife actually lived together in fine style in the mansion for a while, and the headland was called Folly Estate decades before Alfred Mitchell bought it.

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Ship captain Alfred Mitchell was a mining engineer and businessman who married Annie Tiffany, the daughter of Charles Tiffany, then owner of Tiffany Jewellery store in New York. The Mitchells were part of the upper echelons of New York’s social circles whose members would spend the winter in Port Antonio, which was then a thriving banana export town.

The Mitchells, married in 1897, were regular visitors to Jamaica. In 1901 they bought the 90-acre Folly Estate, where the mansion was built near the sea. The first building on the property, to the south, was a cottage, where Alfred lived until the mansion was completed. It was made of imported pitch pine and Douglas fir wood. Not far from the mainland is an island then known as Woods Island.

Mitchell’s two-storey mainly concrete luxury Romanesque abode was an architectural masterpiece with a single row of rooms in the middle, sandwiched by verandahs at the front and back. It had exterior and outer columns, and huge windows. The doors, windows and jalousies were made of wood. The palatial residence had running water, a windmill which pumped seawater into an indoor pool, a power station and a water reservoir.

On Woods Island, to which a causeway was said to be connected, peacocks and monkeys, brought to Jamaica by Hiram Bingham, Mitchell’s son-in-law, were kept, thus the current name ‘Monkey Island’. Alfred Mitchell died at Folly in 1911. His wife stayed until 1914 when World War I started.

The property was sold to the sons of banana magnate Lorenzo Dow Baker. The Bakers eventually deserted Folly, and vandalism set in. The upper floor collapsed in 1936/7.

Apart from the ruins of the mansion (a shelter for roaming animals), the entire peninsular has remnants of the original buildings, which included a coachman’s house, a horse stable, two pavilions, a power plant, a water reservoir, a 30-foot stone causeway, and a gate lodge.

Alfred Mitchell was buried on the property, but his remains were reinterred in New York. Tourists used to travel to see his abandoned mansion, from which Monkey Island can be seen.

Now, there is another island that locals have been calling, and telling outsiders/visitors that it is Monkey Island. However, it is not. It’s Pellew Island or Princess Nina Island, located off the exclusive San San coast. It is even more picturesque than Monkey Island, especially when viewed from Goblin Hill.

This huge piece of forested rock, originally called Pellew Island, was an extravagant wedding gift from Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza of Alligator Head, a seaside property, to his second wife Nina Sheila Dyer. The property is a piece of rock, shaped like an alligator’s head, jutting into the sea to help frame San San Bay.

Nina Sheila Dyer was an Indo-British fashion model and heiress who later married Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, an international civil servant of Iranian and French descent. Fraught with personal problems, not even that ostentatious gift could prevent her from committing suicide in 1965 at age 35.

Princess Nina Island is surrounded by a mesmerising blue sea, and has a little white-sand beach to which people can be boated from the Blue Lagoon. If only Princess Nina Sheila Dyer could have conquered her own demons, she would have realised she was given paradise on Earth.

Incidentally, at low tides, you can cross the sea on foot to Monkey Island, but it is not a trek for the faint of heart. The view from there of the land and the sea? No words … .