forms the frontispiece to the “Naturalist’s Sojourn”; but various
alterations have been effected in the house since the drawing was made,
and the internal re-arrangements have been so numerous that the actual
room used by Gosse—a naturalist’s workroom—cannot now be identified. A
view of Bluefields, entitled “The Torch was lying in Bluefields Bay,”
also forms the frontispiece to one of the many editions of “Tom
Cringle’s Log,” _i.e._ the third volume of “Blackwood’s Standard
Novels,” published in 1842. Gosse gave a copy of this work to his young
son on his request for information regarding the West Indies. Bluefields
River—the “romantic little stream,” as he fondly terms it—still glides
and tumbles down to the sea, its waters as pure and fresh as ever and as
well stocked with mullet, crayfish, and crabs as when the naturalist
wandered along its banks, turned aside its stones or searched its
crevices for specimens, or bathed in its enticing pools. The Bluefields
hills behind stretch upwards, their sides as thickly wooded as when
Gosse first gazed upon them from Bluefields Bay, or, as he himself says
of the Peak, “in the rude luxurious wildness that it bore in the days
when the glories of those Hesperides first broke upon the astonished
eyes of Europeans.”
In August 1694 Sir William Beeston sent home to the Duke of Shrewsbury
“A Brief Account of what passed in Jamaica during the preparations and
duration of the French attacks on it in 1694.” In it, while telling of
the French predatory attacks along the coast before the final landing at
Carlisle Bay, he says: “On the Thursday after their arrival at Cow Bay,
the wind blew hard and the Admiral’s ship and another were blown off
shore to Blackfield Bay at the west end of the Island, where they landed
sixty men. Major Andress, who had been left there with a few men,
engaged them and there was a small encounter in which we had one man
killed and two wounded, and they lost some; but the Admiral firing a gun
to recall them they hurried on board, leaving their food and captured
cattle behind them, and sailed away.”
Although the word is Bluckfield or Blackfield in the original manuscript
(it is printed Blackfield in the “Calendar of State Papers”) there is no
doubt that Bluefields is referred to. The Major Andress is evidently
identical with Lieutenant-Colonel Barnard Andreiss, who was custos and
member of the Assembly for St. Elizabeth, and died at Lacovia in 1710.
Matthew Gregory Lewis—usually known from the title of his most famous
work as Monk Lewis—though he only spent a few months in Jamaica, did
much for the welfare of the negro population, both by precept and
example. On both sides his ancestors had interests in the island. His
uncle Robert Sewell died Attorney-General of Jamaica. Another relative
and namesake, the Hon. John Lewis, was Chief Justice. The husband of one
of his father’s sisters, a Mr. Blake, was a West Indian planter, and his
maternal grandmother lies buried in Spanish Town cathedral, while the
mausoleum which he mentions as being at =Cornwall= points to a resident
proprietorship. Another aunt, it may be mentioned, was married to the
ill-fated General Whitelocke, who, after commanding with distinction in
1793–94 the expedition sent by General Williamson from Jamaica to St.
Domingo, and elsewhere, was cashiered in 1808 for cowardice in the
Buenos Ayres expedition of the previous year.
Lewis was born in London in 1775. His father was the deputy secretary at
war, and his mother the youngest daughter of Sir Thomas Sewell, the
Master of the Rolls. Much of his life and his inner thoughts may be
gathered from “The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis,” published
anonymously—by Mrs. Margaret Baron-Wilson—in 1839, based in great
measure on the letters which he constantly wrote to a mother whom he
adored.
A more precocious child than he was it would be almost impossible to
conceive; but at the same time, though least like her in outward
appearance of all her four children, he inherited much of the
temperament of his mother, a timid and sensitive woman, whose constant
companion he was in early life.
Young Lewis’s histrionic talents were early developed, and at
Westminster he took part in the school plays. Intended by his parents
for a diplomatic career, he afterwards went to Oxford, spending his
vacations on the continent in the study of modern languages.
When he was nineteen, his father’s influence procured him an attachéship
to the British Embassy at the Hague. He stayed but a few months in the
Dutch capital, but in that time, in the short space of ten weeks, he
wrote a work by the publication of which in 1795 he at once sprang into
fame—“Ambrosio, or The Monk.”
The discrepancy to be noticed between the character of Lewis as a man
and the opinions expressed in the book are most curious. Mrs.
Baron-Wilson, evidently a close friend, says of him: “There is nothing
else in English literature so wild, so extravagant, so utterly at
variance with all the ordinary and received rules of art and of
criticism (not to mention the recognised codes of morals), as the chief
writings of ‘Monk’ Lewis. Yet we may tax the whole circle of our
biographical literature to show us a man whose personal character and
conduct—from his earliest youth to the close of his worldly career—were
more strictly and emphatically those which we are accustomed to look for
from a plain, right-thinking, commonsense view of human affairs.” Before
he had passed his majority by many months, Lewis was elected Member of
Parliament for Hindon in Wiltshire, in which borough he succeeded
William Beckford, of Fonthill Abbey, another Jamaica proprietor. But his
parliamentary career was singularly prosaic; he never addressed the
House. Henceforth he devoted himself to literature. From his facile pen
flowed contributions to every branch, from _vers de société_ to funeral
odes—novels, dramas, lyric poems, Scotch ballads, nautical songs,
imitations of classic writers, translations and adaptations from the
German, Italian, Spanish and Danish.
As a reviver of old ballads he paved the way for Hogg and for Scott, the
latter of whom collaborated with him in his “Tales of Terror” and “Tales
of Wonder,” which however were never popular.
The acquisition of wealth and the inheritance of his father’s West
Indian estates enabled him to enter on a larger sphere of philanthropic
work than he had hitherto been able to undertake. His action in this
respect was not a momentary impulse, but a practical outcome of firm
conviction, and he took steps to ensure that its effects should endure
after his death. His object was the amelioration of the condition of the
slaves on his Jamaica properties.
He arrived at Black River on New Year’s Day, 1816, where he found “John
Canoe” and all the rest of negro Christmastide festivities in full
swing. In his first letter home to his mother he told her he was keeping
a regular journal, and this was afterwards published posthumously in
1834, under the title of “The Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, kept
during a residence in the Island of Jamaica,” which Coleridge in his
“Table-Talk” denotes “delightful. It is almost the only unaffected book
of travels I have read of late years. You have the man himself. It is by
far his best work, and will live to be popular.” A new edition appeared
in 1861 under the title of “Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in
the West Indies.”
Lewis spent four months in Jamaica, and so much of his time did he give
to the amelioration of the condition of his slaves on his estate of
Cornwall, within a few miles of Savanna-la-Mar, that he left the island
without having visited Hordley, an estate in the Plantain Garden River
division of St. Thomas-in-the-East, in which estate he had a share. On
Cornwall there were 307 slaves and 287 head of stock, and on Hordley 283
slaves and 130 stock. His friend Lord Holland, it may be mentioned, then
owned Friendship and Greenwich, neighbouring estates in Westmoreland.
Lewis’s principal acts were the abolition of the lash, the acceptance of
negro evidence at enquiries into offences, &c., and an endeavour to
supplement manual labour by mechanical implements and improved stock. He
built better hospitals for the sick, granted extra holidays to his
negroes, and generally did his best to spoil them—not without success,
for he writes: “The negroes certainly are perverse beings. They had been
praying for a sight of their master year after year; they were in
raptures at my arrival; I have suffered no one to be punished, and shown
them every possible indulgence during my residence amongst them, and one
and all they declare themselves perfectly happy and well treated. Yet
previous to my arrival they made thirty-three hogsheads a week; in a
fortnight after my landing their product dwindled to twenty-three;
during this last week they have managed to make but thirteen.”
It is curious to read of the author of “The Monk,” a little lion in
London society, throwing himself heart and soul into the most minute
questions of domestic economy and policy at Cornwall, and adjusting
differences between Cubina and Phyllis.
He drew up rules for the better security of justice for his slaves after
he had left, and by his kindness he so won their hearts that when he
threatened to leave them, they professed to be filled with despair.
So strongly was he impressed with the evil arising from absent
landlordism that in a codicil to his will he made it a condition of
inheritance that the owner, whoever he or she might be, of his estates
should pass three clear calendar months in Jamaica every third year.
He made enemies for himself amongst the local magistrates, by taking
upon himself the part of intercessor with their masters for slaves on
neighbouring properties.
He made one more visit to Jamaica. In October 1817 accompanied by Tita,
an Italian valet, he set out for Jamaica in the same ship and with the
same captain as in 1815. He reached Black River in February 1818, and
this time he visited Hordley, but, as we have seen in the account of St.
Thomas, had hardly sufficient time to effect such drastic changes as he
had done at Cornwall.
On his way he stopped at Kingston, where he saw performed at the theatre
his own tragedy “Adelgitha,” whom the author meant only to be killed in
the last act, but whom the actors murdered in all five.
On May 4, 1818, he left Black River for England, and ten days later he
was committed to a watery grave, having succumbed to yellow fever, which
had broken out on board the _Sir Godfrey Webster_. He died in the arms
of the faithful Tita who was afterwards present at Byron’s death.
The following is Lewis’s description of Cornwall great house as it then
was:
The houses here are generally built and arranged to one and the same
model. My own is of wood, partly raised upon pillars; it consists of a
single floor: a long gallery, called a piazza, terminated at each end
by a square room, runs the whole length of the house. On each side of
the piazza is a range of bedrooms, and the porticoes of the two fronts
form two more rooms, with balustrades, and flights of steps descending
to the lawn. The whole house is virandoed with shifting Venetian
blinds to admit air; except that one of the end rooms has sash-windows
on account of the rains, which, when they arrive, are so heavy, and
shift with the wind so suddenly from the one side to the other, that
all the blinds are obliged to be kept closed; consequently the whole
house is in total darkness during their continuance, except the single
sash-windowed room. There is nothing underneath except a few
store-rooms and a kind of waiting-hall; but none of the domestic
negroes sleep in the house, all going home at night to their
respective cottages and families.
Cornwall House itself stands on a dead flat, and the works are built
in its immediate neighbourhood, for the convenience of their being the
more under the agent’s personal inspection (a point of material
consequence with them all, but more particularly for the hospital).
This dead flat is only ornamented with a few scattered bread-fruit and
cotton trees, a grove of mangoes, and the branch of a small river,
which turns the mill. Several of these buildings are ugly enough; but
the shops of the cooper, carpenter and blacksmith, some of the trees
in their vicinity, and the negro huts, embowered in shrubberies and
groves of oranges, plantains, cocoas and pepper-trees, would be
reckoned picturesque in the most ornamented grounds. A large spreading
tamarind fronts me at this moment and overshadows the stables, which
are formed of open wickerwork; and an orange tree, loaded with fruit,
grows against the window at which I am writing.
On three sides of the landscape the prospect is bounded by lofty,
purple mountains; and the variety of occupations going on all around
me, and at the same time, give an inconceivable air of life and
animation to the whole scene, especially as all those occupations look
clean—even those which in England look dirty. All the tradespeople are
dressed in jackets and trousers, either white or of red and sky-blue
stripe. One band of negroes are carrying the ripe canes on their heads
to the mill; another set are conveying away the “trash,” after the
juice has been extracted; flocks of turkeys are sheltering from the
heat under the trees; the river is filled with ducks and geese; the
coopers and carpenters are employed about the puncheons; carts drawn
some by six, others by eight, oxen, are bringing loads of Indian corn
from the fields; the black children are employed in gathering it into
the granary, and in quarrelling with pigs as black as themselves, who
are equally busy in stealing the corn whenever the children are
looking another way: in short, a plantation possesses all the movement
and interest of a farm, without its dung and its stench and its dirty
accompaniments.
The following inscriptions occur at Cornwall:
Here lieth the Body of
Mrs. Jane Lewis
Late wife of the Honourable William Lewis Esq.
and elder daughter of Matthew Gregory Esq.
who departed this life
on the 19th day of February 1765.
Aged 39 years and 10 months.
She was married 22 years and 5 Days During which time
She devoted herself entirely to her God and her Family.
She lived the inimitable Pattern
of Conjugal Affection and Goodness,
of Filial Love and Duty,
And of Maternal Care and Tenderness.
Oh Death Thou hast Shewn thy Sting
Oh Death Thou hast Obtained thy Victory.
Also the Body of
William Lewis
who died the 27th of April 1774
Aged 53 years
His Remains were brought from England
according to His own request
and Deposited in this Place
near those of his
Affectionate and beloved Wife.
For Beckford Town, now little more than a name, the land was given by
Richard Beckford, one of the family of that name, which numbered in it
some of Jamaica’s most wealthy planters.
Under date January 5, 1660–61, Pepys wrote: “The great Tom Fuller come
to me to desire a kindness for a friend of his who hath a mind to go to
Jamaica with these two ships that are going, which I promised to do.”
The friend, Peter Beckford, quitted England in search of adventures, and
settled in Jamaica, where he rose to considerable wealth as a planter.
He did not, as Bridges suggests, fly from Cromwell’s tyranny, for the
Restoration had taken place before he left England. In 1663 the name of
Beckford appears amongst the planters of St.-Thomas-in-the-Vale. Colonel
Peter Beckford, a son of the immigrant, was elected member of the
Assembly under Lord Carlisle, who must have been—if we are to believe
Nichols in his “Herald and Genealogist” and Burke in his “History of the
Commoners”—a man of somewhat humble estate in spite of his high
ancestry, for they tell us that Sir Thomas Beckford, sheriff of London,
and Colonel Peter Beckford, governor of Jamaica, were brothers—both sons
of a tailor of Maidenhead. Lord Braybrooke, in his notes to Pepy’s
Diary, says that Sir Thomas and Colonel Peter were uncle and nephew, the
former being a son of the tailor. Colonel Beckford was elected member
for St. Catherine in the Assembly which met on April 26, 1675. He
afterwards served in several Assemblies for the parishes of St. James,
Clarendon and St. Dorothy. He was then called to the Council and became
its president. On the death of the Governor, Major-General Selwyn, on
April 5, 1702, when the Legislature was sitting, Colonel Beckford, who
had a dormant commission of old date, caused himself to be proclaimed
lieutenant-governor. In his speech to the Assembly he said, “I have gone
through most of the offices of this Island, though with no great
applause, yet without complaint.” The manner of his death has been
already narrated in the account of St. Catherine. His personal wealth,
which was said to have amounted to £478,000, and his real estate to as
much more, gained for him great influence with the planters. This wealth
was inherited by his son Peter, the speaker of the Assembly above
mentioned. His second son, Thomas, married “en secondes noces” Mary
Ballard (apparently a cousin) and had three sons; the eldest, Ballard
Beckford, who married a daughter of John Clark, Governor of New York,
was expelled from the House “during the continuance of this Assembly” in
1739, for adultery with the wife of another member, Manning, the member
for Kingston. At his death his estate was in debt, and an Act was passed
to enable certain properties to be sold. The second, Thomas, married a
daughter of Robert Byndloss, the brother-in-law of Sir Henry Morgan, of
buccaneering fame, and their daughter and sole heiress married firstly
John Palmer, and secondly Edward Long, the historian. Thomas Beckford
himself, who sat in the Assembly for St. Catherine, and was elected
speaker in 1727 and 1728, died in 1731, “slain, it is believed, in an
encounter with one Cargill,” probably Captain Richard Cargill, member
for Vere.
[Illustration:
FORT WILLIAM—AQUEDUCT
]
Peter Beckford, the speaker, married Bathshua, daughter and co-heiress
of Colonel Julines Herring, of Jamaica. He was elected member of
Assembly for Port Royal in 1704, and in the next Assembly of 1705 was
chosen for three parishes, St. James, Westmoreland and St. Elizabeth,
but elected to sit for the last named. He continued to serve as a member
in every Assembly of the island until his death—in the early part of the
time generally for St. Elizabeth, in the later for St. Catherine. As
member for the former parish he was five times chosen speaker—in 1707,
1708–9, 1711, 1713, 1716. At this time he applied to be deputy secretary
of the island, under a deputation from William Congreve, but the
Governor (Lord Archibald Hamilton) refused to accept him on the ground
that he was “the chief actor in all the unhappy differences in the
country.” He was comptroller of her Majesty’s customs. He died in 1735,
aged 61. From the votes of the Assembly we learn that he bequeathed the
sum of £1000 to the poor of the parish of St. Catherine. This sum was
used in the formation of a school: it is now merged with the Smith
bequest in the Beckford and Smith School at Spanish Town. In the
“Gentleman’s Magazine” for December 1735 he is said to have left nearly
£300,000. Besides mortgages and similar investments, he had no less than
twenty-four plantations and twelve hundred slaves of his own in the
island.
[Illustration:
PORT WILLIAM ESTATE
]
He had thirteen children. The eldest, Peter, was member of the Assembly
for Westmoreland in 1728, while his father was sitting for St.
Catherine, and his uncle for Port Royal. He died unmarried in 1737, aged
31. On his death his fortune went to his brother William, afterwards
Lord Mayor of London, whose son was the celebrated William Beckford, of
“Vathek” and Fonthill fame.
A younger brother of the Lord Mayor, Richard Beckford, who was M.P. for
Bristol, had a natural son, William Beckford, who visited his father’s
Jamaica estates. His mother was Elizabeth Hay. He married his cousin,
Charlotte Hay, daughter of Thomas Hay, formerly Island Secretary of
Jamaica; and he impaled with his father’s arms those of the Hays—on a
field argent, three escutcheons gules: but in preference to the bend
sinister, the usual mark of illegitimacy, he added the less-known badge,
the fimbria or border. Richard Beckford by his will trusted to the
justice of his brother Julines to convey—to trustees in trust for his
reputed son William—Roaring River and such other estates in Jamaica as
had come into Julines’ possession by virtue of an agreement between
them, and accordingly he bequeathed these properties to his reputed son
William, who, on his coming of age, executed a deed in 1765, which was
registered at Spanish Town in 1766, a deed to bar the entail in favour
of another, who, however, subsequently re-conveyed it to him. He is
therein described as “of Balls, in the County of Hartford (_sic_), Esq.”
In a later deed, recorded in 1773, he is described as late of Balls, but
now of Summerley (_sic_) Hall.
One of his earliest works was “Remarks on the Situation of Negroes in
Jamaica,” 1788; and he published in 1794 a “History of France from the
most early records to the death of Louis XVI,” the early part of which
is by Beckford, and the more modern by an anonymous Englishman who had
been some time resident in Paris. But the work by which he is best known
is “A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica; with remarks upon
the cultivation of the Sugar-cane, throughout the different seasons of
the year, and chiefly considered in a picturesque point of view; also
observations and reflections upon what would probably be the
consequences of an abolition of the slave-trade and of the emancipation
of the Slaves,” published in two volumes in London in 1790. The title
fully describes the contents. It is a work of no considerable merit, and
displaying none of the genius which might have been expected of a near
relative of the author of “Vathek.” From the dedication we learn that
the author enjoyed the friendship of the Duke of Dorset, to whom it is
addressed, and from the preface that the work was written in the Fleet
prison—a strange residence for one who would claim kinship with the
owner of Fonthill. His position was, he says, the consequence of
“imprudences which I might have prevented, and of misfortunes which I
could not foresee”—a subject which is constantly referred to throughout
the book. Besides suffering from the great hurricane of 1780, he was
evidently deceived by some friend for whom he had become security.
He intended to illustrate his work with engravings from “some particular
views of the island that were taken on the spot” by George Robertson,
but pecuniary reasons obliged him to desist. He devotes several pages to
the praises of this artist’s work, comparing him—with an enthusiasm
which does more credit to his kindness of heart than to his faculties as
an art critic—to Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Poussin and Salvator Rosa, and
he concludes: “It is a pity that more of his drawings are not engraved;
of the numerous and interesting views he took in Jamaica, only six have
met the public eye, although there are many that richly deserve to be
removed from dust and oblivion. The names of Robertson and Earlom, to
the same plate, could not fail to render them immortal.”
In 1778 John Boydell published a series of six engravings from paintings
by George Robertson, by Thomas Vivares, James Mason and David
Lerpiniere. They are all dedicated to William Beckford, Esq. They
represent: (1) Part of the Rio Cobre, near Spanish Town; (ii) Roaring
River Estate; (iii) Fort William Estate, with part of Roaring River
belonging to William Beckford, Esq., near Savanna-la-Mar; (iv) Bridge
crossing Cabarita River; (v) The Spring Head of Roaring River on the
Estate of William Beckford, Esq.; (vi) The Bridge crossing the Rio
Cobre, near Spanish Town.
Two of the original paintings are in the possession of Mrs. C. E. de
Mercado, of Kingston.