The most pretentious names I heard of were some registered at St Peter’s on Ginger Piece Mountain, such as Jetorah Alvira Industry, and Almahene Leminia Delight. In another church register are to be found the following curious combination of names: Caroline Celeste Celestina and Minimima Constantina Kelly.
Those who have read “Tom Cringle’s Log” will perhaps remember him sitting at dinner in the home of a prosperous West Indian, and, as one could well believe, ejaculating “By Jupiter!” after some good story.
“You want any tink, sah,” came a voice behind his chair; “me tink you call for Jupiter.”
Tom’s astonishment at “the black baboon” being named after the god of a classic age is still greater when he finds out that a she-baboon of the most unprepossessing type, even in the way of negresses, was familiarly called in the household “Mammy Wenus,” and another African slave waiting upon them was known as “Daddy Cupid.” “Mammy Wenus and Daddy Cupid! Shades of Homer!” cries the laughter-loving, incorrigible middy.
I found several Americans at dinner, who rather liked this old West Indian home, notwithstanding the fact that one meets with better appointed tables elsewhere. The house was nearly one hundred and fifty years old. The spacious sitting-room was cruciform; the floor, and doors, and staircase were all of polished mahogany. Upstairs a long central corridor ran the length of the house from back to front; into this all the bedrooms on either side led out. There are nice drives amongst the old sugar estates, which, in this part of the island, abound; these form, I suppose, the attraction for the small American colony. One lady informed me she was searching for curious old mahogany furniture, especially old cabinets and cupboards of native work, for mahogany, in the days of Jamaican prosperity, was like gold in the reign of Solomon, and was lavishly employed in the inside decoration of houses; now there is scarcely a mahogany tree on the island.
My experience of our Yankee cousins who flock to these shores to recruit their forces, or, like myself, to avoid the reign of the Ice King, has been varied. No pleasanter companion than a well-bred, well-travelled American would I wish to come across; but there is a class which corresponds to that which we know in England as “bounders,” which one “strikes” in Jamaica occasionally. This kind of person knows everything. If he bossed the island, instead of the man who has the “misfortune to be the official representative of an effete monarchy,” things would be very different. This description of the gubernatorial office I quote from an American magazine article, not long since put into my hands; but as I think it is impossible for a mind trained to respect the traditions of a glorious past, and the events of a not inglorious present, to follow the warped course of democratic opinion, I will charitably overlook the above, which no doubt was penned in a spirit of extravagant patriotism, and quote what this writer says further on concerning the inhabitants, whom he describes as “cheerful and thoroughly courteous, neither slavishly servile, but smiling and civil, gentle and reasonable.”
There is one thing, however, which rouses my ire. It is to be seriously taken to task over my pronunciation of my own language by a man, who, with every turn of his tongue, distorts and twists it out of all recognisable kinship to any English known or spoken in Great Britain. A good story was told me of a suggestion made by some original American at a time when John Bull and his Yankee cousins were hardly on speaking terms.
Upholders of the Republic declared it to be a shame that they should even speak the same language as perfidious Albion, and insisted that the English tongue henceforth should cease to exist as the national language of America.
“Say! let them darned Britishers get ’nother lingo kinder like for theirselves!” exclaimed one of these gentry.