Here is a little bill presented at a first-rate tavern in Kingston in the year 1716 which throws a little light on the way in which one of these beaus dined. A bit, I may say, seems to have been about 7 1/2 d.
Dinner for one......5 Bits
Small beer..........1 Bit
Bottle of ale.......4 Bits
Quart of Rum punch..4 ”
Coffee..............1 ”
Lodging............23 Bits
The bill does not mention how the gentleman got to his bed, but I presume he was carried there, or maybe he slept undisturbed under the table for which they charged him “lodging.”
In Lady Nugent's time, over eighty years later, she says: “I am not astonished at the general ill-health of the men in this country, for they really eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises.... Almost every man of the party was drunk, even to a boy of fifteen or sixteen, who was obliged to be carried home. His father was very angry, but he had no right to be so as he set the example to him.”
Surely there must be something very good in human nature, for we know there were fine men in past times. Evidently in spite of their upbringing.
Life for the women was little better. If Madam could read and write it was as much as she could do. Whatever might have been the opinion of society in the Elizabethan era, undoubtedly, until but quite a few years ago, a learned woman was looked upon askance, and a gentleman—how the word is going out of use—ever feared that he might be thought to be in any way connected with trade. Even I can remember my grandmother saying to me that no gentleman wished to write a clear hand lest people should think he had been a clerk, and as for a woman very little reading and writing was good enough for her. Reading she regarded as “waste of time” for a woman, and my grandmother was born in the end of the eighteenth century and died an old, old woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth. She prided herself—with justice—on her courtly manners, and like one of Jane Austen's heroines, was a lady of leisure, never did I see her doing anything. She must have worked, for she was a poor woman and her house was nicely kept, but it would have been derogatory to allow even her granddaughter to see her sweeping or dusting, or cooking or washing up the crockery. I fear the ladies of the planters and their daughters had less education than even my grandmother would have thought necessary and the courtly manners were left out.
If young Master made free with the better-looking negro wenches, or, as time went on, with the mulattoes and quadroons, it made life exceedingly dull for his sisters and his neighbours' sisters. Nay, more, it absolutely ruined their lives, and it was a cross they must bear with a smile, pretend indeed that it was a thing to which they never gave a thought. Yet these girls were brought up to think that marriage was the be-all and end-all of a woman's life. It was, of course. Nowadays, when most careers are open to her, it is hard on a girl if she may not have the hope of marrying, and she may marry any time between twenty and forty. But if she does not marry, she may still have an important place in the world. Then if she did not marry young she was at once counted a nonentity, she had little chance of marrying at all, her life must needs be empty and she had no standing in the world.
And maturity comes so quickly in the tropics. Her time was so woefully short. Shorter than it was in the Old Country, and it was short enough there. “She had passed her first bloom,” writes Jane Austen on one occasion—and she meant it always—“she was nearly twenty.” If she had not a beau by the time she was sixteen, or were not married by eighteen or nineteen, a girl was branded as a failure, and I think there must have been many heart-burnings among the white women of Jamaica in these long ago days. The twentieth century has given women better fortune, taken away the bitterness that is the portion of the woman who, being as it were on show, is passed by as worthless.
But in the early days, because work was the portion of the slave, the lady must needs sit with idle hands. The long hot hours were interminable.
She lounged about in a loose white garment, bareheaded, barefooted, she did absolutely nothing from morning to night. The slaves brought in food, highly-spiced food, to tempt a languid appetite, and she ate it on the floor, because so it was considered more appetising; if she felt amiable she asked the slaves to share, if not, a blow or many stripes was their portion. Only when there was a chance of meeting a young man, or at least an unmarried man, did she give time and attention to her toilet and lay herself out to please. By reason of her training or lack of it, she had nothing in common with that man but thoughts of passion or pleasure. Of pleasure she might speak, though pleasure taken without work behind it, shared or understood, is very unmeaning; of passion she was supposed to know not even the meaning of the word. She must, so she thought, appear utterly ignorant on most subjects. Many and many a time a girl put on her fine clothes, tried first this colour and then that, curled her hair and powdered her face, put a touch of rouge here and a patch there, pinned down a ribbon or fluffed out a bow and went out with a sigh and a smile and ogled and coquetted as might any more fortunate dame at Bath or Tunbridge Wells.