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.
FEBRUARY 10.
We passed the day at Mr. Plummer’s estate, Anchovy Bottom.
When Lord Bolingbroke was resident in America, large flocks of turkeys used to ravage his corn-fields; but, from their extreme wildness, he never could make any of them prisoners. He had a barn lighted by a large sash window, and into this he laid a train of corn, hiding some servants with guns behind the large doors, which were folded back. The turkeys picked up the corn, and gradually were enticed to enter the barn. But as soon as a dozen had passed in, the servants clapped the doors to with all possible expedition. Now they reckoned themselves secure of their game; but to their utter consternation, the turkeys in a body darted towards the light, dashed against the glass, forced out the wood-work, and away went turkeys, glass, wood-work, and all.
FEBRUARY 11. (Sunday.)
I reached Cornwall about three o’clock, after an excursion the most amusing and agreeable that I ever made in my life. Almost every step of the road presented some new and striking scene; and although we travelled at all hours, and with as little circumspection as if we had been in England, I never felt a headach except for one half hour. On my arrival, I found the satisfactory intelligence usually communicated to West Indian proprietors. My estate in the west is burnt up for want of moisture; and my estate in the east has been so completely flooded, that I have lost a whole third of my crop. At Cornwall, not a drop of rain has fallen since the 16th of November. Not a vestige of verdure is to be seen; and we begin to apprehend a famine among the negroes in consequence of the drought destroying their provision grounds. This alone is wanting to complete the dangerous state of the island; where the higher classes are all in the utmost alarm at rumours of Wilberforce’s intentions to set the negroes entirely at freedom; the next step to which would be, in all probability, a general massacre of the whites, and a second part of the horrors of St. Domingo: while, on the other hand, the negroes are impatient at the delay; and such disturbances arose in St. Thomas’s in the East, last Christmas, as required the interposition of the magistrates. They say that the negroes of that parish had taken it into their heads that The Regent and Wilherforce had actually determined upon setting them all at liberty at once on the first day of the present year, but that the interference of the island had defeated the plan. Their discontent was most carefully and artfully fomented by some brown Methodists, who held secret and nightly meetings on the different estates, and did their best to mislead and bewilder these poor creatures with their fantastic and absurd preaching. These fellows harp upon sin, and the devil, and hell-fire incessantly, and describe the Almighty and the Saviour as beings so terrible, that many of their proselytes cannot hear the name of Christ without shuddering. One poor negro, on one of my own estates, told the overseer that he knew himself to be so great a sinner that nothing could save him from the devil’s clutches, even for a few hours, except singing hymns; and he kept singing so incessantly day and night, that at length terror and want of sleep turned his brain, and the wretch died raving mad.
FEBRUARY 12.
A Sir Charles Price, who had an estate in this island infested by rats, imported, with much trouble, a very large and strong species for the purpose of extirpating the others. The new-comers answered his purpose to a miracle; they attacked the native rats with such spirit, that in a short time they had the whole property to themselves; but no sooner had they done their duty upon the rats, than they extended their exertions to the cats, of whom their strength and size at length enabled them completely to get the better; and since that last victory, Sir Charles Price’s rats, as they are called, have increased so prodigiously, that (like the man in Scripture, who got rid of one devil, and was taken possession of by seven others) this single species is now a greater nuisance to the island than all the others before them were together. The best, mode of destroying rats here is with terriers; but those imported from England soon grow useless, being blinded by the sun, while their puppies, born in Jamaica, are provided by nature with a protecting film over their eyes, which effectually secures them against incurring that calamity.
FEBRUARY 12.
Poor Philippa, the woman who used always to call me her “husband,” and whom I left sick in the hospital, during my absence has gone out of her senses; and there cannot well happen any thing more distressing, as there is no separate place for her confinement, and her ravings disturb the other invalids. There is, indeed, no kind of bedlam in the whole island of Jamaica: whether this proceeds from people being so very sedate and sensible, that they never go mad, or from their all being so mad, that no one person has a right to shut up another for being out of his senses, is a point which I will not pretend to decide. One of my domestic negroes, a boy of sixteen, named Prince, was abandoned by his worthless mother in infancy, and reared by this Philippa; and since her illness he passes every moment of his leisure in her sick-room. On the other hand, there is a woman named Christian, attending two fevered children in the hospital; one her own, and the other an adopted infant, whom she reared upon the death of its mother in child-birth; and there she sits, throwing her eyes from one to the other with such unceasing solicitude, that no one could discover which was her own child and which the orphan.