FEBRUARY 9.
The sea-view from a bridge near Falmouth was remarkably pleasing; a stage of eighteen miles brought us to the town itself, which I understand to be in size the second in the island.
However various are the characters which actors sustain, I find their own to be the same every where. Although the Jamaica company did not consist of more than twenty persons, their green-room squabbles had divided it, and we found one half performing at Falmouth. We did not wait for the play, but proceeded for twenty-two miles to Montego Bay, where I once more found myself under the protecting roof of Miss Judy James.
On our return from dinner at Mr. Dewer’s, we discovered a ball of brown ladies and gentlemen opposite to the inn. No whites nor blacks were permitted to attend this assembly; but as our landlady had two nieces there, under her auspices we were allowed to be spectators. The females chiefly consisted of the natural daughters of attorneys and overseers, and the young men were mostly clerks and book-keepers. I saw nothing at all to be compared, either for form or feature, to many of the humbler people of colour, much less to the beautiful Spaniard at Blue-fields. Long, or Bryan Edwards, asserts that mulattos never breed except with a separate black or white; but at this ball two girls were pointed out to me, the daughters of mulatto parents; and I have been assured that the assertion was a mistake, arising from such a connection being very rarely formed; the females generally preferring to live with white men, and the brown men having thus no other resource than black women. As to the above girls, the fact is certain; and the different shades of colour are distinguished by too plain a line to allow any suspicion of infidelity on the part of their parents.