mad, or has long pretended to be so, never works, and always steals.
About a week before my arrival she was found in the trash-house, which
she had pitched upon as the very fittest place possible for her kitchen;
and there she was sitting, very quietly and comfortably, boiling her
pot over an immense fire, and surrounded on all sides by dry canes,
inflammable as tinder. This vagary was of too dangerous a nature to
allow of her being longer left at liberty, and she was put into the
hospital. But her husband was by no means pleased with her detention,
as he never failed to appropriate to himself a share of her plunder, and
when discovered, the blame of the robbery was laid upon his wife, in a
fit of insanity. So, while the general joy at my first arrival drew the
hospital attendants from their post, he took the opportunity to carry
off his wife, and conceal her. The consequence was, that this morning
complaints poured upon me of gardens robbed by Catalina, who had carried
off as much as she could, dug up and destroyed the rest, and had shown
as little conscience in providing herself with poultry as in
helping herself to vegetables. I immediately despatched one of the
negro-governors with a party in pursuit of her, who succeeded in lodging
her once more in the hospital; where she must remain till I can get her
sent to the asylum at Kingston, the only hospital for lunatics in the
whole island.
FEBRUARY 12. (Thursday.)
On my former visit to Jamaica, I found on my estate a poor woman nearly
one hundred years old, and stone blind. She was too infirm to walk; but
two young negroes brought her on their backs to the steps of my house,
in order, as she said, that she might at least touch massa, although she
could not see him. When she had kissed my hand, “that was enough,” she
said; “now me hab once kiss a massa’s hand, me willing to die to-morrow,
me no care.” She had a woman appropriated to her service, and was shown
the greatest care and attention; however, she did not live many months
after my departure. There was also a mulatto, about thirty years of age,
named Bob, who had been almost deprived of the use of his limbs by
the horrible cocoa-bay, and had never done the least work since he
was fifteen. He was so gentle and humble, and so fearful, from the
consciousness of his total inability of soliciting my notice, that I
could not help pitying the poor fellow; and whenever he came in my way
I always sought to encourage him by little presents, and other trifling
marks of favour. His thus unexpectedly meeting with distinguishing
kindness, where he expected to be treated as a worthless incumbrance,
made a strong impression on his mind. Soon after my departure his malady
assumed a more active appearance but during the last stages of its
progress the only fear which he expressed was, that he should not live
till last Christmas, when my return was expected to a certainty. In the
mean while he endeavoured to find out a means of being of some little
use to me, although his weak constitution would not allow of his being
of much. Some of his relations being in opulent circumstances, they
furnished him with a horse, for he was too weak to walk for more than a
few minutes at a time; and, mounted upon this, he passed all his time
in traversing the estate, watching the corn that it might not be stolen,
warning the pen-keepers if any of the cattle had found their way into
the cane-pieces, and doing many other such little pieces of service to
the property; so that, as the negroes said, “if he had been a white man
he might have been taken for an overseer.” At length Christmas arrived;
it was known that I was on the sea; Bob, too, was still alive; but still
there was nothing to be heard of me. His perpetual question to all who
came to visit him was, How was the wind? and he was constantly praying
to the wind and the ocean to bring massa’s vessel soon to Savanna la
Mar, that he might but see him once more, and thank him, before he died.
At length I landed; and when, on the day of my arrival on my estate, I
expressed my surprise at the nonappearance of several of the negroes,
who had appeared to be most attached to me, and I had expected to find
most forward in greeting me, I was told that a messenger had been sent
to call them, and that their absence was occasioned by their attendance
at poor Bob’s funeral. Several of his relations, who nursed him on his
death-bed, have assured me, that the last audible words which he uttered
were--“Are there still no news of massa?”
FEBRUARY 13.
Talk of Lucretia! commend me to a she-turkey! The hawk of Jamaica is
an absolute Don Giovanni; and he never loses an opportunity of being
extremely rude indeed to these feathered fair ones; not even scrupling
to use the last violence, and that without the least ceremony, not so
much as saying, “With your leave,” or “By your leave,” or using any of
the forms which common civility expects upon such occasions. The poor
timid things are too much frightened by the sudden attack of this
Tarquin with a beak and claws, to make any resistance; but they no
sooner recover from their flutter sufficiently to be aware of what has
happened, than they feel so extremely shocked, that they always make a
point of dying; nor was a female turkey ever known to survive the loss
of her honour above three days.
FEBRUARY 14.
I think that I really may now venture to hope that my plans for the
management of my estate have succeeded beyond even my most sanguine
expectations. I have now passed three weeks with my negroes, the doors
of my house open all day long, and full liberty allowed to every person
to come and speak to me without witnesses or restraint; yet not one man
or woman has come to me with a single complaint. On the contrary, all my
enquiries have been answered by an assurance, that during the two years
of my absence my regulations were adhered to most implicitly, and that,
“except for the pleasure of seeing massa,” there was no more difference
in treatment than if I had remained upon the estate. Many of them have
come to tell me instances of kindness which they have received from one
or other of their superintendents; others, to describe some severe fit
of illness, in which they must have died but for the care taken of them
in the hospital; some, who were weakly and low-spirited on my former
visit, to show me how much they are improved in health, and tell me
“how they keep up heart now, because since massa come upon the property
nobody put upon them, and all go well;” and some, who had formerly
complained of one trifle or other, to take back their complaints, and
say, that they wanted no change, and were willing to be employed in any
way that might be thought most for the good of the estate; but although
I have now at least _seen_ every one of them, and have conversed with
numbers, I have not yet been able to find one person who had so much as
even an imaginary grievance to lay before me. Yet I find, that it has
been found necessary to punish with the lash, although only in a very
few instances; but then this only took place on the commission of
absolute _crimes_, and in cases where its necessity and justice were so
universally felt, not only by others, but by the sufferers themselves,
that instead of complaining, they seem only to be afraid of their
offence coming to my knowledge; to prevent which, they affect to be
more satisfied and happy than all the rest, and now when I see a mouth
grinning from ear to ear with a more than ordinary expansion of jaw, I
never fail to find, on enquiry, that its proprietor is one of those who
have been punished during my absence. I then take care to give them an
opportunity of making a complaint, if they should have any to make; but
no, not a word comes; “every thing has gone on perfectly well, and
just as it ought to have done.” Upon this, I drop a slight hint of the
offence in question; and instantly away goes the grin, and down falls
the negro to kiss my feet, confess his fault, and “beg massa forgib,
and them never do so bad thing more to fret massa, and them beg massa
pardon, hard, quite hard!” But not one of them has denied the justice
of his punishment, or complained of undue severity on the part of his
superintendents. On the other hand, although the lash has thus been in
a manner utterly abolished, except in cases where a much severer
punishment would have been inflicted by the police, and although they
are aware of this unwillingness to chastise, my trustee acknowledges
that during my absence the negroes have been quiet and tractable, and
have not only laboured as well as they used to do, but have done much
more work than the negroes on an adjoining property, where there are
forty more negroes, and where, moreover, a considerable sum is paid for
hired assistance. Having now waited three weeks to see how they would
conduct themselves, and found no cause of dissatisfaction since the
neglect of the watchman to guard the cattle (and which they one and
all attributed to their joy at seeing me again), I thought it time
to distribute the presents which I had brought with me for them from
England. During my absence I had ordered a new and additional hospital
to be built, intended entirely for the use of lying-in women, nursing
mothers, and cases of a serious nature, for which purpose it is to be
provided with every possible comfort; while the old hospital is to be
reserved for those who have little or nothing the matter with them, but
who obstinately insist upon their being too ill to work, in defiance
of the opinion of all their medical attendants. The new hospital is
not quite finished; but wishing to connect it as much as possible
with pleasurable associations, I took occasion of the distribution of
presents to open it for the first time. Accordingly, the negroes were
summoned to the new hospital this morning; the rooms were sprinkled with
Madeira for good luck; and the toast of “Health to the new hospital, and
shame to the old lazy house!” was drunk by the trustee, the doctoresses,
the governors, &c., and received by the whole congregation of negroes
with loud cheering; after which, every man received a blue jacket lined
with flannel, every woman a flaming red stuff petticoat, and every child
a frock of white cotton. They then fell to dancing and singing, and
drinking rum and sugar, which they kept up till a much later hour than
would be at all approved of by the bench of bishops; for it is now
Sunday morning, and they are still dancing and singing louder than ever.
FEBRUARY 15. (Sunday.)
To-day divine service was performed at Savanna la Mar for the first
time these five weeks. The rector has been indisposed lately with the
lumbago: he has no curate; and thus during five whole weeks there was
a total cessation of public worship. I had told several of my female
acquaintance that it was long since they had been to church; that I was
afraid of their forgetting “all about and about it,” and that if there
should be no service for a week longer I should think it my duty to come
and hear them say their Catechism myself. Luckily the rector recovered,
and saved me the trouble of hearing them; but the long privation of
public prayer did not seem to have created any very great demand for the
article, as I have seldom witnessed a more meagre congregation. It was
literally “two or three gathered together,” and it seemed as if five or
six would be too many, and forfeit the promise. I cannot discover that
the negroes have any external forms of worship, nor any priests in
Jamaica, unless their Obeah men should be considered as such; but still
I cannot think that they ought to be considered as totally devoid of
all natural religion. There is no phrase so common on their lips as “God
bless you!” and “God preserve you!” and “God will bless you wherever you
go!” Phrases which they pronounce with every-appearance of sincerity,
and as if they came from the very bottom of their hearts. “God-A’mity!
God-A’mity!” is their constant exclamation in pain and in sorrow;
and with this perpetual recurrence to the Supreme Being, it must be
difficult to insist upon their being atheists. But they have even got a
step further than the belief in a God; they also allow the existence of
an evil principle. One of them complained to me the other day, that when
he went to the field his companions had told him “that he might go
to hell, for he was not worthy to work with them;” and one of his
adversaries in return accused him of being so lazy, “that instead of
being a slave upon Cornwall estate, he was only fit to be the slave of
the devil.” Then surely they could not be afraid of duppies (or ghosts)
without some idea of a future state; and indeed nothing is more firmly
impressed upon the mind of the Africans, than that after death they
shall go back to Africa, and pass an eternity in revelling and feasting
with their ancestors. The proprietor of a neighbouring estate lately
used all his influence to persuade his foster-sister to be christened;
but it was all in vain: she had imbibed strong African prejudices from
her mother, and frankly declared that she found nothing in the Christian
system so alluring to her taste as the post-obit balls and banquets
promised by the religion of Africa. I confess, that this prejudice
appears to me to be so strongly rooted, that in spite of the curates
expected from the hands of the bishop of London, I am sadly afraid, that
“the pulpit drum ecclesiastic” will find it a hard matter to overpower
the gumby; and that the joys of the Christian paradise will be seen to
kick the beam, when they are weighed against the pleasures of eating
fat hog, drinking raw rum, and dancing for centuries to the jam-jam and
kitty-katty. In the negro festivals in this life, the chief point
lies in making as much noise as possible, and the Africans and Creoles
dispute it with the greatest pertinacity. I am just informed that at the
dance last night the Eboes obtained a decided triumph, for they roared
and screamed and shouted and thumped their drums with so much effect,
that the Creoles were fairly rendered deaf with the noise of their
rivals, and dumb with their own, and obliged to leave off singing
altogether.
FEBRUARY 16.
On my arrival I found that idle rogue Nato, as usual, an inmate of the
hospital, where he regularly passes at least nine months out of the
twelve. He was with infinite difficulty persuaded, at the end of a
fortnight, to employ himself about the carriage-horses for a couple of
days; but on the third he returned to the hospital, although the medical
attendants, one and all, declared nothing to be the matter with him, and
the doctors even refused to insert his name in the sick list. Still he
persisted in declaring himself to be too ill to do a single stroke of
work: so on Thursday I put him into one of the sick rooms by himself,
and desired him to get well with the doors locked, which he would find
to the full as easy as with the doors open; at the same time assuring
him, that he should never come out, till he should be sufficiently
recovered to cut canes in the field. He held good all Friday; but
Saturday being a holy-day, he declared himself to be in a perfect state
of health, and desired to be released. However, I was determined to make
him suffer a little for his lying and obstinacy, and would not suffer
the doors to be opened for him till this morning, when he quitted the
hospital, saluted on all sides by loud huzzas in congratulation of his
amended health, and which followed him during his whole progress to
the cane-piece. I was informed that a lad, named Epsom, who used to be
perpetually running away, had been stationary for the last two years.
So on Wednesday last, as he happened to come in my way, I gave him all
proper commendation for having got rid of his bad habits; and to
make the praise better worth his having, I added a maccarony: he was
gratified in the extreme, thanked me a thousand times, promised most
solemnly never to behave ill again, and ran away that very night.
However, he returned on Saturday morning, and was brought to me all
rags, tears, and penitence, wondering “how he could have had such _bad
manners_ as to make massa fret.”
FEBRUARY 17.
Some of the free people of colour possess slaves, cattle, and other
property left them by their fathers, and are in good circumstances; but
few of them are industrious enough to increase their possessions by any
honest exertions of their own. As to the free blacks, they are almost
uniformly lazy and improvident, most of them half-starved, and only
anxious to live from hand to mouth. Some lounge about the highways
with pedlar-boxes, stocked with various worthless baubles; others keep
miserable stalls provided with rancid butter, damaged salt-pork, and
other such articles: and these they are always willing to exchange for
stolen rum and sugar, which they secretly tempt the negroes to pilfer
from their proprietors; but few of them ever make the exertion of
earning their livelihood creditably. Even those who profess to be
tailors, carpenters, or coopers, are for the most part careless,
drunken, and dissipated, and never take pains sufficient to attain any
dexterity in their trade. As to a free negro hiring himself out for
plantation labour, no instance of such a thing was ever known in
Jamaica, and probably no price, however great, would be considered by
them as a sufficient temptation.
FEBRUARY 18.
The Africans and Creoles certainly do hate each other with a cordiality
which would have appeared highly gratifying to Dr. Johnson in his “Love
of Good Haters.” Yesterday, in the field, a girl who had taken some
slight offence at something said to her by a young boy, immediately
struck him with the bill, with which she was cutting canes. Luckily,
his loose wrapper saved him from the blow; and, on his running away, she
threw the bill after him in his flight with all the fury and malice of
a fiend. This same vixen, during my former visit, had been punished
for fixing her teeth in the hand of one of the other girls, and nearly
biting her thumb off; and on hearing of this fresh instance of devilism,
I asked her mother, “how she came to have so bad a daughter, when all
her sons were so mild and good?”--“Oh, massa,” answered she, “the girl’s
father was a Guineaman.”
FEBRUARY 19.
Neptune came this morning to request that the name of his son, Oscar,
might be changed for that of Julius, which (it seems) had been that of
his own father. The child, he said, had always been weakly, and he was
persuaded, that its ill-health proceeded from his deceased grandfather’s
being displeased, because it had not been called after him. The other
day, too, a woman, who had a child sick in the hospital, begged me to
change its name for any other which might please me best: she cared not
what; but she was sure that it would never do well, so long as it should
be called Lucia. Perhaps this prejudice respecting the power of names
produces in some measure their unwillingness to be christened. They find
no change produced in them, except the alteration of their name, and
hence they conclude that this name contains in it some secret power;
while, on the other hand, they conceive that the ghosts of their
ancestors cannot fail to be offended at their abandoning an appellation,
either hereditary in the family, or given by themselves. It is another
negro-prejudice that the eructation of the breath of a sucking child has
something in it venomous; and frequently nursing mothers, on showing the
doctor a swelled breast, will very gravely and positively attribute it
to the infant’s having broken wind while hanging at the nipple.
FEBRUARY 20.
I asked one of my negro servants this morning whether old Luke was
a relation of his. “Yes,” he said.--“Is he your uncle, or your
cousin?”--“No, massa.”--“What then?”--“He and my father were shipmates,
massa.”
FEBRUARY 23.
The law-charges in Jamaica have lately been regulated by the House of
Assembly; and by all accounts (except that of the lawyers) it was full
time that something should be done on the subject. A case was mentioned
to me this morning of an estate litigated between several parties. At
length a decision was given: the estate was sold for £16,000; but the
lawyer’s claim must always be the first discharged, and as this amounted
to more than £16,000 the lawyer found himself in possession of the
estate. This was the fable of Æsop’s oyster put in action with a
vengeance.
FEBRUARY 25.