“If an average planter of 1720,” says Planter's Punch, “and his wife and daughters could be brought back to life and could live for a day now as they lived in times long passed, and if we could witness their manners and have a glimpse of their daily customs, it is little to say that we should be inexpressibly shocked.... There is a planter's house of the first century of colonisation still standing in St Elizabeth, but there are scarce a dozen in the colony. It has a broad verandah in front, which you approach by a low flight of stone steps, the walls are from 2 to 3 feet thick, there are shutters for the windows, you see at once that the place was originally built for defence. It is of one storey only; there is no ceiling; so that the heavy rafters are exposed. It may contain in all some six apartments; it would not be disturbed by a hurricane, hardly by an earthquake, and it could have withstood for sometime an assault from slaves.... It was in houses of this sort that the country planter lived for a hundred years or more in those fabled 'good old times' of which we sometimes speak.”
And these houses were naturally very plainly furnished. There were great mahogany beds, one probably even in the sitting-room if the posts happened to be well carved, there were mahogany chairs and tables, perhaps a cupboard or great box or two, all made on the estate, for they all prided themselves upon having a carpenter. They had mattresses and quilts and of necessity mosquito curtains, but they had no pictures—the days of the pictorial calendar were not yet—and never a book, save perhaps the Family Bible, wherein to record the births and deaths of the family. If the house mistress were house proud, having as many servants as she pleased, she perhaps saw to it that her mahogany floors were kept in a high state of polish and the pieces of family silver brought from the Old Country and set out on the country-made sideboard reflected the faces of its owners, but otherwise there was not much ornament.
The weather was hot, it was always hot to these men from England, and at first they wore their heavy English clothes, their long coats, their waistcoats, their breeches and heavy woollen stockings; and their hair too was long until they took to wearing wigs, which must have been worse. Well, of course, it was utterly out of the question that a man should go clad like that in a Jamaican August even when the rain came down in torrents and every leaf held a shower of water. He shed his clothes by degrees, and went about his house, where he was only seen by his women, often about his fields, where he was only seen by his slaves, who did not count, in thread stockings, linen drawers and vest, with a large handkerchief tied round his head. Out of doors he would wear a hat on top of this kerchief. Of course there were occasions when he graced some state function with his presence, or twice or thrice in his life on some very important occasion he may have felt impelled to attend church, and then he would adorn his head with a wig.
Then, too, he would blossom out into a silk coat and a vest trimmed with silver.
Lesley, speaking of his arrival in Jamaica in the beginning of the eighteenth century says, “the people seem all sickly, their complexion is muddy, their colour wan and their bodies meagre, they look like so many corpses and their dress resembles a shroud.”
It must be remembered that yellow fever was rampant, and that not till the very end of the nineteenth century was the cause known. “However,” he goes on to say, “they are frank and good-humoured and make the best of life they can. If Death is more busy in this place than in many others, his approach is nowhere received with a greater unconcernedness. They live well, enjoy their friends, drink heartily, make money, and are quite careless of futurity.”
I suppose he meant the Future Life, that life beyond the Grave, of which we know nothing; but it seems to me it was the present that those past colonists played with so lightly. Many of the gentlemen were very fine and treated their inferiors—those with less of this world's goods—with a condescension that then was the admiration of their historian, but which nowadays would make us smile. One and all, it seems, however small reason they had for it, were very haughty and insisted upon being bowed down to. If a man wished to do business with them he might get much more favourable terms if he knew how to “apply to their humour; but they who are so unhappy as to mistake it, may look for business in another place.”
It is very difficult for us to understand the feelings of the people of those times. Only after reading Mr and Mrs Hammond's books on Labour in England between 1760 and 1830, have I dimly understood what the poor in those times suffered, what it was that filled the ships that brought bondsmen to the plantations in the West and later convicts to the colonies of the unknown South.
Meditate on this description of the upbringing of a boy in Jamaica and think what it was to trust men's lives in such hands.
“A boy till the age of seven or eight diverts himself with the negroes, acquires their broken way of talking, their manner of behaviour, and all the vices which these unthinking creatures can teach. Then perhaps he goes to school. But young Master must not be corrected. If he learns 'tis well, if not, it can't be helped. After a little knowledge of reading he goes to the dancing school and commences Beau, learns the common topics of discourse and visits and rakes with his equals. This is their method.”