Ann for maintaining and educating eight poor boys and four poor girls
belonging to the said parish as well as for other charitable purposes:
And, as an endowment to the said charity, the testator made subject
and liable all that his estate in the said parish of St. Ann, called
Shelton; and if that estate be found insufficient, his will was, that
all his, the testator’s, other estates should be made liable for the
deficiency.
It appears from the report that William Beckford, the well-known author
of “Vathek,” had obtained possession of Drax Hall, the principal
property, in a manner “that excited the indignation of every honest man
who became acquainted with the transaction.”
Protracted legal proceedings resulted in Beckford having to disgorge
£5200. A free school, commenced by the vestry of St. Ann in the old
court house in that parish in 1795, was in 1802 by an Act of the
legislature (43 George 3, c. 32) endowed with the sum obtained from the
Drax bequest and called Drax’s Free School; and trustees, consisting of
the president of the Council, the speaker of the Assembly, and
representatives of St. Ann, were appointed. In 1806 the trustees of this
school purchased Walton, the buildings on which had originally been
erected as barracks. In 1807 they expressed their willingness to
surrender their charge for the public good, and new trustees (embodying
many of the old members) were appointed (by 48 George 3, c. 25), and the
name of the school was changed to the Jamaica Free School. At its
formation the school was thrown open to the island, ten nominations to
the school being reserved for the parish of St. Ann in view of the
bequest, and thirteen being for the other parishes on the nomination of
the Governor, this privilege being transferred by Sir John Peter Grant
in later days to the custodes of the thirteen parishes; and on the
school being removed and merged into the Jamaica High School, which was
opened in the newly constructed buildings at Hope in 1885, after a short
sojourn in Barbican great house hard by, the same course was followed,
the thirteen open scholarships being awarded by the Jamaica Schools
Commission, as the trustees and board of management of the College.
The old Jamaica Free School, like other schools in the island at that
period, was somewhat overweighted by trustees, consisting as they did of
the Governor, the president and members of the Council, the speaker and
members of the Assembly, the chief justice, the Attorney-general and
others. In the case of the Jamaica Free School their duties were not
onerous. The law enforced their meeting only “once in every year, during
the annual session of the Legislature of this Island, in the town of
Saint Jago de la Vega, for the purpose of examining into the state of
the said free-school, &c.”
When Bridges wrote his Annals, he said of it:
The total income of the establishment is now about £1700 per annum,
which educates, maintains and clothes ten boys, nominated by the
parish, and six named by the Governor. In the session of 1825, a grant
of £1500 displayed the liberal desire of the public to extend the
means of instruction, and dissemination of Christianity, by the
addition of a chapel to the establishment. The master’s salary is
£300; and he is allowed to appoint an under-master with £150 per
annum. Under the management of the late master, the establishment rose
to be the first in the Island; public examinations took place twice a
year; and besides the objects of the foundation, thirty-one boys were
educated there at £70 per annum each. The present master is permitted
to hold the curacy of the parish; but the chapel being thirty miles
distant, he is under an engagement to the Trustees, not to quit the
school, but to pay half the salary of his cure to an officiating
curate.
It is a curious record, that the estate of Drax Hall still remains
charged with the sum of £500, payable to the same fund, whenever the
old Spanish Abbey at Seville d’Oro shall be rebuilt.
In the Wesleyan church, Brown’s Town, are two recently erected memorials
to the Rev. W.C. Murray, D.D. (d. 1909), for fifty-one years a minister,
and for eighteen years Governor of York Castle, which school, while it
existed, did much for secondary education in Jamaica—in the church a
mural tablet, in the churchyard an obelisk of granite.
IX
TRELAWNY
The parish of Trelawny derives its name from Sir William Trelawny, the
Governor, who died in Jamaica in 1772. It was taken out of part of St.
James in 1770.
=Falmouth= was a town of considerable importance, and is more regularly
laid out than any other town in the island, except Kingston. The court
house, a building erected in the days of Jamaica’s extravagance, is
lofty and spacious and affords accommodation for nearly all the
parochial officers. It contains full-length portraits of General Sir
John Keane, lieutenant-governor from 1827 to 1829, and of Sir Charles
Theophilus Metcalfe, Governor in 1839–42, the former being a replica of
the portrait by Sir Martin Archer Shee in the possession of the family.
The =Parish Church= contains monuments to John Hodges, who died in 1787,
and James Blake (d. 1753), and to James Stewart (b. 1762, d. 1828),
custos of Trelawny, and member of the Assembly for the parish from 1794
to 1822, and from 1826 till his death. The spacious Baptist chapel was
erected under the auspices of William Knibb.
=Martha Brae=, one and a half miles inland from Falmouth, is supposed by
some to have been the site of the old Spanish settlement of Melilla
(which, however, was probably in St. James), which was abandoned soon
after its establishment owing to the depredations of the French
filibusters. “The secret gold mine” of the Spaniards is said to be in
the neighbourhood of Martha Brae. The origin of the name has puzzled
antiquaries, but Mr. G. F. Judah a few years ago discovered it in Rio
Matibereon recorded in a patent of the year 1674. In the map in “The
Laws of Jamaica” of 1683 the Para Mater Tiberen Rio is marked where the
Martha Brae now flows.
=Bryan Castle=, where Bryan Edwards’s “History of the British West
Indies” was written, was, together with the neighbouring estate of
Brampton (now called Brampton Bryan), acquired by him from Zachary Bayly
in or before 1792. It is within three miles of the port of Rio Bueno. It
afterwards became by purchase the property of Alexander Donaldson, whose
estate went into bankruptcy, and is now in the possession of the heirs
of Mr. A. W. Gordon. A view of the great house is given in James
Hakewill’s “Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica” (London, 1825),
the most artistic work ever published on the island. In 1825 the
property contained 1402 acres of land, 300 of which were in sugar-canes,
600 in pasture and pimento, and the remainder was occupied by negroes
and their provision grounds. The crops had then averaged during the
previous twelve years 300 hogsheads of sugar, with the usual proportion
of rum, and, in good seasons, 300 bags of pimento. There were employed
165 estate negroes, with the addition of extra labour.
[Illustration:
BRYAN CASTLE
]
The great house is a typical Jamaica house of the period, solidly built,
but without any pretensions to architectural beauty, and surrounded on
all four sides by the usual verandah. When Hakewill wrote, Edwards’s
books and furniture were still preserved in his study upstairs, where he
compiled his history. His writing-table is now all that remains. From
the only window of the room that was his study an extensive view is
obtained across the Bryan Castle works and cane-fields in the
foreground, and more cane-fields and woodlands in the distance, to the
open sea in the neighbourhood of Falmouth.
Bryan Edwards, the son of a gentleman of Westbury in Wiltshire, who
tried not very successfully to add to his patrimony by dealing in corn
and malt, was born at Westbury in 1743. On his father’s death in 1756,
his widowed mother, who had great difficulty in maintaining her six
children, was taken under the protection of the elder of her two
brothers, Zachary Bayly, a liberal-minded man of considerable wealth,
custos of St. Mary and St. George, and a member of the Council, who had
come to Jamaica from Westbury. After acquiring some education and a love
of letters at two schools in Bristol, and after spending a few months
with his younger uncle, Nathaniel Bayly, with whom he disagreed, young
Bryan was in 1759 sent out to his uncle, Zachary Bayly. The epitaph on
the monument of the uncle in Halfway-Tree church is from the pen of the
nephew. In Jamaica Edwards resided under the care of his “great and good
uncle,” continuing his studies under the Rev. Isaac Teale, who was
specially engaged by his uncle for this purpose—the T—— of Edwards’s
“Poems.” They evidently lived on one of Zachary Bayly’s properties in
St. Mary, on the banks of the Agua Alta (Wag Water); and the chief
outcome of the instruction seems to have been a love for literature, and
a propensity for writing poetry. In his “Elegy on the Death of a Friend”
Edwards says:
Enamour’d echo bade each mountain hear,
And pleas’d Agualta smoother flow’d along.
Oft round thy banks, sweet stream (now sacred made)
Together we explor’d the classic page.
Teale, who died in 1794, was at his own request buried on its banks.
In 1769, Edwards was left heir in tail male to his uncle’s properties,
and four years later he acquired by bequest the great possessions of
Benjamin Hume, of Jamaica, a friend of his uncle’s, and became a
merchant. Hume, it may be mentioned, had been removed from the post of
receiver-general on its being proved that he had embezzled upwards of
£20,000 of public money. In 1765 Edwards had been elected a member of
the House of Assembly for the parish of St. George, now merged in
Portland. In February 1770 he resigned his seat on the plea that his
ill-health necessitated a change of climate, but he apparently did not
leave the island, and in December 1771 he was again elected for St.
George, but in 1772 he was called up to a seat in the Council. As a
member of the Assembly he attacked the restrictions placed by the
British Government on trade between Jamaica and the United States.
In 1782 he returned to England, where he tried, without success, to
enter Parliament as member for Chichester against the Duke of Richmond’s
nominee, losing by eight votes only. In 1787 he came out again to
Jamaica, and in the Assembly which first met in the October of that year
he sat as member for Trelawny. In 1788 he received in his place the
unanimous thanks of the House for his reports on the slave trade.
Soon after the revolt of the negroes in 1791 he paid a short visit to
San Domingo, in the welfare of which island he took a deep interest,
endeavouring to obtain for it a loan from Jamaica. This was recommended
by a Committee of the Assembly; but the matter met with public
opposition, and the loan did not pass the House. In a long letter from
his pen which appeared in the “Royal Gazette,” April 21, 1792, he says:
For myself, I propose shortly to quit the island, and probably shall
never return to it; but my wishes for its happiness, freedom and
prosperity shall never be suppressed, so long as I have life and
recollection. I have exerted myself in its service for the last five
years with unabating zeal and perseverance, and, I hope, on some
occasions, with success.
In 1793 his seat in the Assembly was declared vacant, he having gone to
England the previous year.
While in the Assembly he was often called upon to assist in drawing up
addresses and reports, and he now and then acted as chairman of
committees.
In England he settled permanently at Southampton as a West Indian
merchant and banker. After contesting Southampton in vain in 1794, he
was in 1796 elected M.P. for Grampound. He supported the slave trade
with certain restrictions, and was admitted by Wilberforce to be a
powerful opponent to abolition. He was, however, not unmindful of the
great hardships done in Africa, and he had stated in Jamaica “that if
all the nations of Europe would concur in a determination to relinquish
the slave trade altogether, it ought to be relinquished.”
In 1797 he succeeded Sir Joseph Banks as secretary of the Association
for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa, and he
edited some of Mungo Park’s contributions to its Proceedings. He died at
his residence in the Polygon at Southampton, in July 1800. He was buried
in the catacombs of the church, but there is no recording tablet. His
wife, whom he married in 1774, was Martha, daughter of Thomas Phipps, of
Westbury. His vast wealth was inherited by his only surviving son,
Zachary Hume Edwards, who was not of age when his father died; but he
died on board the _Montague_ packet on his passage from Jamaica to
England in 1812. An elder son had died at Winchester College in his
seventeenth year, in 1794, of a “nervous malignant fever.”
Bryan Edwards’s elder brother, Nathaniel Bayly Edwards, died in 1771,
aged 19, and lies buried at Halfway Tree; his younger brother, Zachary
Bayly Edwards, of Dove Hall, Jamaica, was member of the Assembly for St.
Andrew in 1785–90. He married Catherine, daughter of Rowland
Otto-Baijer, of Antigua and Ffarleigh Castle, Somerset, England. Their
son was Sir Bryan Edwards, chief justice of Jamaica from 1855 to 1869,
and their daughter Eliza married her cousin Samuel Otto-Baijer, a member
of the Council of Antigua. A genealogical table of the Edwards family
will be found in Mr. Oliver’s “History of the Island of Antigua.” What
relation to the historian the Bryan Edwards, special stipendiary
magistrate for the parish of Westmoreland, who died in 1835, aged 29,
was, it is difficult to say. He could not have been a son of his brother
Nathaniel Bayly Edwards (who died at Cheltenham in September 1800). He
may have been a son of his cousin William mentioned below. We know that
the historian was one of a family of six, and that he had two brothers;
whether the remaining two were brothers or sisters is not recorded; but
it would seem from his will that he left but one brother, who only
survived him two months.
That Bryan Edwards was, to some extent at all events, a patron of the
arts, is evident from the following extract from the second codicil to
his will:
I give and devise to my wife, Martha Edwards ... the full length
portrait of herself, drawn by Pine,[12] now in my drawing-room in
London, if she thinks proper to accept it. I give and devise to my
brother the portraits of my mother and brother, Nathaniel McHume; and
my own portrait now in London and any six other pictures in my
collection which he may make choice of.
Footnote 12:
Robert Edge Pine, the painter of the picture of Rodney in the
Institute of Jamaica.
One wonders whether the fact that Edwards had employed Pine to paint his
wife’s portrait had any influence in the purchase by the people of
Kingston of that artist’s celebrated portrait of Rodney on board the
_Formidable_.
In an obituary notice of him, a writer in the “Gentleman’s Magazine”
said: “He exercised his literary talents in a memorable way in Jamaica;
for, by the strokes of his pen, he drove Peter Pindar from the Island,
and the bitter satirist never dared to attack his character while he
remained in this country.”
The first time Wolcot left Jamaica it was in order to take Holy Orders,
so that he might be presented to a living in Jamaica by his kinsman the
governor, Sir William Trelawny; the second time he left—never to
return—it was to accompany Lady Trelawny, his patron’s widow, to whom he
was deeply attached. Moreover, Edwards never in his writings, at all
events, gave evidence of satire equal to Wolcot’s; and the latter, one
would think, was too pachydermatous to be driven anywhere by anybody
against his will.
Four later members of the Edwards family have also been famous. Sir
Bryan Edwards, chief justice of Jamaica, died in December 1876. Dr.
William Frédéric Edwards, who was born in Jamaica in 1776, was the son
of a rich English planter—William Edwards by name (a cousin of
Bryan)—who afterwards settled at Bruges, where the younger William was
educated. In early life he became a Frenchman, and won for himself much
fame as a physiologist, dying at Versailles in 1842. William’s younger
brother, Henri Milne Edwards (born at Bruges in 1800 and died in 1885),
the zoologist, and Henri’s son, Alphonse Milne Edwards (born in Paris in
1835 and died in 1900), successively held the post of professor of
zoology at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris.
In 1793 Bryan Edwards published in London, in two quarto volumes, “The
History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West
Indies,” with plates and maps, which has remained the standard work on
its subject—the history of the British West Indies till the close of the
last century—till to-day. A third volume was added in 1801.
He evidently took much pains to collect all the trustworthy information
available, especially about current affairs. But he wrote more as a
politician than as an historian, and the chief value of the work lies in
the large amount of light it throws on the condition of affairs in the
West Indies at his time. The arrangement, it must be admitted, leaves a
good deal to be desired; and it partakes rather of a collection of
essays and articles than of a connected history, and is sadly in need of
editing; but the nature of the subject makes it difficult to treat it as
a whole while at the same time going into details. Edwards himself only
visited San Domingo, and the information about the British islands other
than Jamaica is scanty. For instance, Barbados is dismissed in
thirty-five pages.
The fifth edition was published in London in 1819, many years after the
author’s death. It contains (as did the third and fourth editions) a
“prefatory advertisement” by his friend and collaborator, Sir William
Young, Governor of Tobago, and a brief “sketch of the life of the
author, written by himself a short time before his death.” It also
contains descriptions of colonies ceded after Edwards’s death, a
“History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” and later particulars of
the West Indies generally, which would have been more useful had they
been put in their several places in the work, instead of at the end.
The following is a list of Bryan Edwards’s publications:
1. (_a_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., of the Island
of Jamaica. _London_, 1793. 4to. [With plates and preface to 2nd
edition added afterwards.]
(_b_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., of the Island
of Jamaica. _Dublin_, 1793. 8vo.
(_c_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., of the Island
of Jamaica, F.R.S., S.A., and Member of the American Philosophical
Society at Philadelphia. The second edition, illustrated with maps.
_London_, 1794. 4to.
(_d_) List of Maps and Plates for the History, Civil and Commercial,
of the British Colonies in the West Indies. In two volumes. By Bryan
Edwards, Esq., of the Island of Jamaica, F.R.S., S.A., and Member of
the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. _London_, 1794.
4to. [Issued in order that owners of the 1st edition might add to
their copies the map and plates included in the 2nd edition.]
(_e_) An Abridgment of Mr. Edwards’ Civil and Commercial History of
the British West Indies. In two volumes. _London_, 1794. 8vo.
(_f_) Beschreibung der Brittischen Kolonien in Westindien. [Translated
from the English of Bryan Edwards by Matthias Christian Sprengel in
“Auswahl der basten ausländischen geographischen und statistischen
Nachrichten zur Aufklärung der Volker und Länderkunde.” _Halle_,
1794–1800. 8vo.]
(_g_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies: To which is added a Survey of the French Colony in
the Island of St. Domingo. Abridged from the History written by Bryan
Edwards, Esq. Illustrated with a map. _London_, 1798. Small 4to.
(_h_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies. To which is added an Historical Survey of the French
Colony in the Island of St. Domingo. Abridged from the History written
by Bryan Edwards, Esq. Illustrated with a map. _London_, 1799. Small
4to.
(_i_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies. Vol. 3. Edited by Sir William Young. [Issued to be
added to the two volumes of the 1st edition of 1793.] _London_, 1801.
4to.
(_j_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., F.R.S., S.A. In three
volumes. Third edition, with considerable additions. Illustrated with
Plates. _London_, 1901. [With “Prefatory Advertisement,” by Sir
William Young, Bart.; a brief “Sketch of the Life of the Author,
written by himself a short time before his death”; and “A Tour through
the several Islands of Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Antigua, Tobago, and
Grenada, in the years 1791 and 1792.” By Sir William Young, Bart.,
M.P., F.R.S., &c.] 8vo.
(_k_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in
the West Indies. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., F.R.S., S.A. Fourth edition,
with considerable additions. Illustrated with Plates. In three
Volumes. _London_, 1807. [With “Prefatory Advertisement” by Sir
William Young, Bart., and a brief “Sketch of the Life of the Author,
written by himself a short time before his death.”] 8vo.
(_l_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British in the West
Indies. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., F.R.S., S.A. Illustrated by an Atlas
and embellished with a portrait of the Author. To which is added a
general description of the Bahama Islands by Daniel M’Kinnen, Esq. In
four Volumes. _Philadelphia_, 1805–6. 8vo.
(_m_) Another edition. 4 Vols. _Baltimore_, 1810.
(_n_) Another edition. 4 Vols, and Atlas. _Philadelphia_, 1810.
(_o_) The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies.
By Bryan Edwards, Esq., F.R.S., S.A. With a continuation to the
present time. Fifth edition, with Maps and Plates. In five Volumes.
_London_, 1819. Five Volumes of Text, 8vo, and one Volume of Plates,
4to. The title-page of the plate is as follows: “History of the
British West Indies. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., F.R.S., S.A. With a
continuation to the present time. Illustrated by Maps and Plates. In
four Volumes. _London._ Printed for the Proprietors, 1818.”
(_p_) Burgerlyke en Handelkundige Geschiedenis van de Englische
Volkplantingen in de West-Indiën. Door Bryan Edwards, Schildkn. Uit
het Engelsch. _Haarlem_, 1794–99. 6 Vols. 8vo.
(_q_) Extracto do livro quinto da Historia Civil e Commercial das
colonias occidentales Inglezias, por Bryan Edwards. [Translated by
José Mariano la Conceicao Velloso in “O. Fazendeiro do Brazil.”]
_Lisbon_, 1798. 8vo.
(_r_) Histoire civile et commerciale des Colonies Anglaises dans les
Indies occidentales: depuis leur découverte par Christophe Colomb
jusqu’a nos jours; suivie d’un Tableau historique et politique de
l’ile de Saint-Domingue avant et depuis la revolution française;
traduit de l’anglais de Bryan Edouard (_sic_), par le traducteur des
Voyages d’Arthur Young en France et en Italie. Orné d’une belle carte.
_Paris_, An. IX. [1801.] 8vo.
2. (_a_) An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of
St. Domingo: Comprehending a short account of its ancient government,
political state, population, productions, and exports; A Narrative of
the calamities which have desolated the country ever since the year
1789, with some Reflections on their causes and probable consequences;
and a detail of the military transactions of the British Army in that
Island to the end of 1794. By Bryan Edwards, Esq., M.P., F.R.S., &c.,
Author of the History of the British Colonies in the West Indies.
_London_, 1797. 4to.