state of alarm by a runaway negro called _Plato_, who had established
himself among the Moreland Mountains, and collected a troop of banditti,
of which he was himself the chief. He robbed very often, and murdered
occasionally; but gallantry was his every day occupation. Indeed, being
a remarkably tall athletic young fellow, among the beauties of his own
complexion he found but few Lucretias; and his retreat in the mountains
was as well furnished as the haram of Constantinople. Every handsome
negress who had the slightest cause of complaint against her master,
took the first opportunity of eloping to join _Plato_, where she found
freedom, protection, and unbounded generosity; for he spared no pains
to secure their affections by gratifying their vanity. Indeed, no Creole
lady could venture out on a visit, without running the risk of having
her bandbox run away with by Plato for the decoration of his sultanas;
and if the maid who carried the bandbox happened to be well-looking, he
ran away with the maid as well as the bandbox. Every endeavour to seize
this desperado was long in vain: a large reward was put upon his head,
but no negro dared to approach him; for, besides his acknowledged
courage, he was a professor of Obi, and had threatened that whoever
dared to lay a finger upon him should suffer spiritual torments, as well
as be physically shot through the head.
Unluckily for Plato, rum was an article with him of the first necessity;
the look-out, which was kept for him, was too vigilant to admit of
his purchasing spirituous liquors for himself; and once, when for that
purpose he had ventured into the neighbourhood of Montego Bay, he was
recognised by a slave, who immediately gave the alarm. Unfortunately
for this poor fellow, whose name was Taffy, at that moment all his
companions happened to be out of hearing; and, after the first moment’s
alarm, finding that no one approached, the exasperated robber rushed
upon him, and lifted the bill-hook, with which he was armed, for the
purpose of cleaving his skull. Taffy fled for it; but Plato was the
younger, the stronger, and the swifter of the two, and gained upon him
every moment. Taffy, however, on the other hand, possessed that one
quality by which, according to the fable, the cat was enabled to save
herself from the hounds, when the fox, with his thousand tricks, was
caught by them. He was an admirable climber, an art in which Plato
possessed no skill; and a bread-nut tree, which is remarkably difficult
of ascent, presenting itself before him, in a few moments Taffy was
bawling for help from the very top of it. To reach him was impossible
for his enemy; but still his destruction was hard at hand; for Plato
began to hack the tree with his bill, and it was evident that a very
short space of time would be sufficient to level it with the ground.
In this dilemma, Taffy had nothing for it but to break off the branches
near him; and he contrived to pelt these so dexterously at the head of
his assailant, that he fairly kept him at bay till his cries at length
reached the ears of his companions, and their approach compelled the
banditti-captain once more to seek safety among the mountains.
After this Plato no longer dared to approach Montego town; but still
spirits must be had:--how was he to obtain them? There was an old
watchman on the outskirts of the estate of Canaan, with whom he had
contracted an acquaintance, and frequently had passed the night in his
hut; the old man having been equally induced by his presents and by
dread of his corporeal strength and supposed supernatural power, to
profess the warmest attachment to the interests of his terrible friend.
To this man Plato at length resolved to entrust himself: he gave him
money to purchase spirits, and appointed a particular day when he would
come to receive them. The reward placed upon the robber’s head was more
than either gratitude or terror could counterbalance; and on the same
day when the watchman set out to purchase the rum, he apprised two of
his friends at Canaan, for whose use it was intended, and advised _them_
to take the opportunity of obtaining the reward.
The two negroes posted themselves in proper time near the watchman’s
hut. Most unwisely, instead of sending down some of his gang, they saw
Plato, in his full confidence in the friendship of his confidant, arrive
himself and enter the cabin; but so great was their alarm at seeing this
dreadful personage, that they remained in their concealment, nor dared
to make an attempt at seizing him. The spirits were delivered to the
robber: he might have retired with them unmolested; but, in his rashness
and his eagerness to taste the liquor, of which he had so long been
deprived, he opened the flagon, and swallowed draught after draught,
till he sunk upon the ground in a state of complete insensibility. The
watchman then summoned the two negroes from their concealment, who bound
his arms, and conveyed him to Montego Bay, where he was immediately
sentenced to execution. He died most heroically; kept up the terrors of
his imposture to his last moment; told the magistrates, who condemned
him, that his death should be revenged by a storm, which would lay waste
the whole island, that year; and, when his negro gaoler was binding him
to the stake at which he was destined to suffer, he assured him that he
should not live long to triumph in his death, for that he had taken
good care to Obeah him before his quitting the prison. It certainly
did happen, strangely enough, that, before the year was over, the most
violent storm took place ever known in Jamaica; and as to the gaoler,
his imagination was so forcibly struck by the threats of the dying
man, that, although every care was taken of him, the power of medicine
exhausted, and even a voyage to America undertaken, in hopes that a
change of scene might change the course of his ideas, still, from the
moment of Plato’s death, he gradually pined and withered away, and
finally expired before the completion of the twelvemonth.
The belief in Obeah is now greatly weakened, but still exists in some
degree. Not above ten months ago, my agent was informed that a negro
of very suspicious manners and appearance was harboured by some of my
people on the mountain lands. He found means to have him surprised, and
on examination there was found upon him a bag containing a great variety
of strange materials for incantations; such as thunder-stones, cat’s
ears, the feet of various animals, human hair, fish bones, the teeth of
alligators, &c.: he was conveyed to Montego Bay; and no sooner was it
understood that this old African was in prison, than depositions were
poured in from all quarters from negroes who deposed to having seen him
exercise his magical arts, and, in particular, to his having sold such
and such slaves medicines and charms to deliver them from their
enemies; being, in plain English, nothing else than rank poisons. He
was convicted of Obeah upon the most indubitable evidence. The good old
practice of burning has fallen into disrepute; so he was sentenced to be
transported, and was shipped off the island, to the great satisfaction
of persons of all colours--white, black, and yellow.
JANUARY 13.
Throughout the island many estates, formerly very flourishing and
productive, have been thrown up for want of hands to cultivate them,
and are now suffered to lie waste: four are in this situation in my own
immediate neighbourhood. Finding their complement of negroes decrease,
and having no means of recruiting them, proprietors of two estates have
in numerous instances found themselves obliged to give up one of them,
and draw off the negroes for the purpose of properly cultivating the
other.
I have just had an instance strikingly convincing of the extreme nicety
required in rearing negro children. Two have been born since my arrival.
My housekeeper was hardly ever out of the lying-in apartment; I always
visited it myself once a day, and sometimes twice, in order that I
might be certain of the women being well taken care of; not a day passed
without the inspection of a physician; nothing of indulgence, that
was proper for them, was denied; and, besides their ordinary food, the
mothers received every day the most nourishing and palatable dish that
was brought to my own table. Add to this, that the women themselves were
kind-hearted creatures, and particularly anxious to rear these children,
because I had promised to be their godfather myself. Yet, in spite
of all this attention and indulgence, one of the mothers, during the
nurse’s absence for ten minutes, grew alarmed at her infant’s apparent
sleepiness. To rouse it, she began dancing and shaking it till it was in
a strong perspiration, and then she stood with it for some minutes at an
open window, while a strong north wind was blowing. In consequence,
it caught cold, and the next morning symptoms of a locked jaw showed
itself. The poor woman was the image of grief itself: she sat on her
bed, looking at the child which lay by her side with its little hands
clasped, its teeth clenched, and its eyes fixed, writhing in the agony
of the spasm, while she was herself quite motionless and speechless,
although the tears trickled down her cheeks incessantly. All assistance
was fruitless: her thoughtlessness for five minutes had killed the
infant, and, at noon to-day it expired.
This woman was a tender mother, had borne ten children, and yet has now
but one alive: another, at present in the hospital, has borne seven, and
but one has lived to puberty; and the instances of those who have had
four, five, six children, without succeeding in bringing up one, in
spite of the utmost attention and indulgence, are very numerous; so
heedless and inattentive are the best-intentioned mothers, and so
subject in this climate are infants to dangerous complaints. The locked
jaw is the common and most fatal one; so fatal, indeed, that the midwife
(the _graundee_ is her negro appellation) told me, the other day, “Oh,
massa, till nine days over, we _no hope_ of them.” Certainly care
and kindness are not adequate to save the children, for the son of a
sovereign could not have been more anxiously well treated than was the
poor little negro who died this morning.
The negroes are always buried in their own gardens, and many strange and
fantastical ceremonies are observed on the occasion. If the corpse be
that of a grown person, they consult it as to which way it pleases to
be carried; and they make attempts upon various roads without success,
before they can hit upon the right one. Till that is accomplished, they
stagger under the weight of the coffin, struggle against its force,
which draws them in a different direction from that in which they had
settled to go; and sometimes in the contest the corpse and the coffin
jump off the shoulders of the bearers. But if, as is frequently the
case, any person is suspected of having hastened the catastrophe, the
corpse will then refuse to go any road but the one which passes by the
habitation of the suspected person, and as soon as it approaches his
house, no human power is equal to persuading it to pass. As the negroes
are extremely superstitious, and very much afraid of ghosts (whom they
call the _duppy_), I rather wonder at their choosing to have their dead
buried in their gardens; but I understand their argument to be, that
they need only fear the duppies of their enemies, but have nothing to
apprehend from those after death, who loved them in their lifetime;
but the duppies of their adversaries are very alarming beings, equally
powerful by day as by night, and who not only are spiritually terrific,
but who can give very hard substantial knocks on the pate, whenever they
see fit occasion, and can find a good opportunity.
Last Saturday a negro was brought into the hospital, having fallen into
epileptic fits, with which till then he had never been troubled. As the
faintings had seized him at the slaughter-house, and the fellow was an
African, it was at first supposed by his companions, that the sight
and smell of the meat had affected him; for many of the Africans cannot
endure animal food of any kind, and most of the Ebres in particular are
made ill by eating turtle, even although they can use any other food
without injury. However, upon enquiry among his shipmates, it appeared
that he had frequently eaten beef without the slightest inconvenience.
For my own part, the symptoms of his complaint were such as to make me
suspect him of having tasted something poisonous, specially as, just
before his first fit, he had been observed in the small grove of mangoes
near the house; but I was assured by the negroes, one and all, that
nothing could possibly have induced him to eat an herb or fruit from
that grove, as it had been used as a burying-ground for “the white
people.” But although my idea of the poison was scouted, still the
mention of the burying-ground suggested another cause for his illness to
the negroes, and they had no sort of doubt, that in passing through the
burying-ground he had been struck down by the duppy of a white person
not long deceased, whom he had formerly offended, and that these
repeated fainting fits were the consequence of that ghostly blow. The
negroes have in various publications been accused of a total want of
religion, but this appears to me quite incompatible with the ideas
of spirits existing after dissolution of the body, which necessarily
implies a belief in a future state; and although (as far as I can make
out) they have no outward forms of religion, the most devout Christian
cannot have “God bless you” oftener on his lips than the negro; nor, on
the other hand, appear to feel the wish for their enemy’s damnation more
sincerely when he utters it.
The Africans (as is well known) generally believe, that there is a life
beyond this world, and that they shall enjoy it by returning to their
own country; and this idea used frequently to induce them, soon after
their landing in the colonies, to commit suicide; but this was never
known to take place except among fresh negroes, and since the execrable
slave-trade has been abolished, such an illusion is unheard of. As to
those who had once got over the dreadful period of “seasoning,” they
were generally soon sensible enough of the amelioration of their
condition, to make the idea of returning to Africa the most painful that
could be presented to them. But, to be sure, poor creatures! what with
the terrors and sufferings of the voyage, and the unavoidable hardships
of the seasoning, those advantages were purchased more dearly than any
in this life can possibly be worth. God be thanked, all that is now
at an end; and certainly, as far as I can as yet judge, if I were now
standing on the banks of Virgil’s Lethe, with a goblet of the waters of
oblivion in my hand, and asked whether I chose to enter life anew as
an English labourer or a Jamaica negro, I should have no hesitation
in preferring the latter. For myself, it appears to me almost worth
surrendering the luxuries and pleasures of Great Britain, for the single
pleasure of being surrounded with beings who are always laughing and
singing, and who seem to perform their work with so much _nonchalance_,
taking up their baskets as if it were perfectly optional whether they
took them up or left them there; sauntering along with their hands
dangling; stopping to chat with every one they meet; or if they meet no
one, standing still to look round, and examine whether there is nothing
to be seen that can amuse them, so that I can hardly persuade myself
that it is really _work_ that they are about. The negro might well say,
on his arrival in England--“Massa, in England every thing work!” for
here nobody appears to work at all.
I am told that there is one part of their business very laborious, the
digging holes for receiving the cane-plants, and which I have not as yet
seen; but this does not occupy above a month (I believe) at the utmost,
at two periods of the year; and on my estate this service is chiefly
performed by extra negroes, hired for the purpose; which, although
equally hard on the hired negroes (called a jobbing gang), at least
relieves my own, and after all, puts even the former on much the same
footing with English day-labourers.
But if I could be contented to _live_ in Jamaica, I am still more
certain, that it is the only agreeable place for me to die in; for I
have got a family mausoleum, which looks for all the world like the
theatrical representation of the “tomb of all the Capulets.” Its outside
is most plentifully decorated “with sculptured stones,”--
“Arms, angels, epitaphs, and bones.”
Within is a tomb of the purest white marble, raised on a platform of
ebony; the building, which is surmounted by a statue of Time, with his
scythe and hour-glass, stands in the very heart of an orange grove, now
in full bearing; and the whole scene this morning looked so cool, so
tranquil, and so gay, and is so perfectly divested of all vestiges of
dissolution, that the sight of it quite gave me an appetite for being
buried. It is a matter of perfect indifference to me what becomes of
this little ugly husk of mine, when once I shall have “shuffled off
this mortal coil;” or else I should certainly follow my grandfather’s
example, and, die where I might, order my body to be sent over for
burial to Cornwall; for I never yet saw a place where one could lie down
more comfortably to listen for the last trumpet.
JANUARY 14. (Sunday.)
I gave a dinner to my “white people,” as the book-keepers, &c. are
called here, and who have a separate house and establishment for
themselves; and certainly a man must be destitute of every spark of
hospitality, and have had “Caucasus horrens” for his great-grandmother,
if he can resist giving dinners in a country where Nature seems to
have set up a superior kind of “London Tavern” of her own. They who
are possessed by the “Ci-borum ambitiosa fames, et lautæ gloria mensæ,”
ought to ship themselves off for Jamaica out of hand; and even the lord
mayor himself need not blush to give his aldermen such a dinner as is
placed on my table, even when I dine alone. Land and sea turtle, quails,
snipes, plovers, and pigeons and doves of all descriptions--of which the
ring-tail has been allowed to rank with the most exquisite of the winged
species, by epicures of such distinction, that their opinion, in matters
of this nature, almost carries with it the weight of a law,--excellent
pork, barbicued pigs, pepperpots, with numberless other excellent
dishes, form the ordinary fare; while the poultry is so large and fine,
that if the Dragon of Wantley found “houses and churches to be geese and
turkies” in England, he would mistake the geese and turkies for
houses and churches here. Then our tarts are made of pineapples, and
pine-apples make the best tarts that I ever tasted; there is no end of
the variety of fruits, of which the shaddock is “in itself an host;” but
the most singular and exquisite flavour, perhaps, is to be found in the
granadillo, a fruit which grows upon a species of vine, and, in fact,
appears to be a kind of cucumber. It must be suffered to hang till it is
dead ripe, when it is scarcely any thing except juice and seeds, which
can only be eaten with a spoon. It requires sugar, but the acid is truly
delicious, and like no other separate flavour that I ever met with; what
it most resembles is a _macedoine_, as it unites the different tastes of
almost all other fruits, and has, at the same time, a very strong
flavour of wine.
As to fish, Savannah la Mar is reckoned the best place in the island,
both for variety and _safety_; for, in many parts, the fish feed upon
copperas banks, and cannot be used without much precaution: here, none
is necessary, and it is only to be wished that their names equalled
their flesh in taste; for it must be owned, that nothing can be less
tempting than the sounds of Jew-fish, hog-fish, mud-fish, snappers,
god-dammies, groupas, and grunts! Of the Sea Fish which I have hitherto
met with, the Deep-water Silk appears to me the best; and of rivers, the
Mountain-Mullet: but, indeed, the fish is generally so excellent, and in
such profusion, that I never sit down to table without wishing for the
company of Queen Atygatis of Scythia, who was so particularly fond of
fish, that she prohibited all her subjects from eating it on pain of
death, through fear that there might not be enough left for her majesty.
This fondness for fish seems to be a sort of royal passion: more than
one of our English sovereigns died of eating too many lampreys; though,
to own the truth, it was suspected that the monks, in an instance
or two, improved the same by the addition of a little ratsbane; and
Mirabeau assures us, that Frederick the Second of Prussia might have
prolonged his existence, if he could but have resisted the fascination
of an eel-pye; but the charm was too strong for him, and, like his
great-grandmother of all, he ate and died--“All for eel-pye, or this
world well lost!” And now, which had to resist the most difficult
temptation, Frederic or Eve? _She_ longed to experience pleasures yet
untasted, and which she fancied to be exquisite: _he_, like Sigismunda,
pined after known pleasures, and which he knew to be good; _she_ was the
dupe of imagination; _he_ fell a victim to established habit. Which was
the most deserving pardon? There is a question for the bishops: those
clergymen who reside constantly on their livings (as all clergymen ought
to do, or they ought not to be clergymen), I shall, in charity, believe
to have something better to do with their time than to solve it.
The provision-grounds of the negroes furnish them with plantains,
bananas, cocoa-nuts, and yams: of the latter there is a regular harvest
once a year, and they remain in great perfection for many months,
provided they are dug up carefully, but the slightest wound with the
spade is sufficient to rot them. Catalue (a species of spinach) is a
principal article in their pepper-pots; but in this parish their most
valuable and regular supply of food arises from the cocoa-finger, or
coccos, a species of the yam, but which lasts all the year round. These
vegetables form the basis of negro sustenance; but the slaves also
receive from their owners a regular weekly allowance of red herrings
and salt meat, which serves to relish their vegetable diet; and, indeed,
they are so passionately fond of salted provisions, that, instead of
giving them fresh beef (as at their festival of Saturday last), I have
been advised to provide some hogsheads of salt fish, as likely to afford
them more gratification, at such future additional holidays as I may
find it possible to allow them in this busy season of crop.
JANUARY 15.
The offspring of a white man and black woman is a _mulatto_; the mulatto
and black produce a _sambo_; from the mulatto and white comes the
_quadroon_; from the quadroon and white the _mustee_; the child of a
mustee by a white man is called a _musteefino_; while the children of a
musteefino are free by law, and rank as white persons to all intents and
purposes. I think it is Long who asserts, that two mulattoes will never
have children; but, as far as the most positive assurances can go, since
my arrival in Jamaica, I have reason to believe the contrary, and that
mulattoes breed together just as well as blacks and whites; but they are
almost universally weak and effeminate persons, and thus their children
are very difficult to rear. On a sugar estate one black is considered
as more than equal to two mulattoes. Beautiful as are their forms in
general, and easy and graceful as are their movements (which, indeed,
appear to me so striking, that they cannot fail to excite the admiration
of any one who has ever looked with delight on statues), still the women
of colour are deficient in one of the most requisite points of female
beauty. When Oromases was employed in the formation of woman, and
said,--“Let her enchanting bosom resemble the celestial spheres,” he
must certainly have suffered the negress to slip out of his mind. Young
or old, I have not yet seen such a thing as a _bosom_.
JANUARY 16.