Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

After that it became quite fashionable to take out patents to hunt for wrecks, and though Sloane says much money was made on that first wreck, much more was lost in the projects than ever was taken out of the sea.

Evidently to Hans Sloane his expedition to Jamaica loomed large, for it was years after he left it that his last volume on the subject was published. That voyage must have been the event of a fairly full life. After the death of the Duke of Albemarle, who certainly seems to have been a shining example of how not to live in the tropics, Hans Sloane, in the train of the Duchess, left Jamaica on the 16th March 1689, and did not arrive off the Lizard till the 29th May. How far off Jamaica was in those days we may judge when we are told that the fleet was afraid to go into Plymouth because they did not know whether England was at war or not. At last they picked up a fishing smack and heard that James II. had been deposed, that William III. reigned in his stead, and that the Channel was full of French privateers.

Before I leave the subject of Jamaica's first historian, I must tell a strange story that was told me by a friend. He told his experience reluctantly, he does not believe in the supernatural, and he is quite sure there must be some perfectly natural explanation of the incident could he but find it. There was something wrong with his knee and he was afraid he was going to be a cripple for life, for no doctor could find out what was wrong. He used to struggle from his bed on to a board and his servants carried him that way to a sofa, where he spent his daylight hours. So it went on from day to day and he had little hope of getting better. At night his black manservant slept on the floor close to his bed, so as to be near in case he should want any help. Naturally, being a young and active man and not given to books, he was much depressed at the outlook.

One night as he lay in bed he wakened suddenly from his sleep with the feeling that somebody was in the room. For a moment he could see nothing, only hear the snores of the man on the floor. Then as he looked he saw the moonlight streaming through the open window, and right in its light stood a man, not anyone he knew, but a white man with a kindly face, his brown hair drawn back and tied behind with a ribbon, and his brown coat, knee-breeches, stockings and shoes those of other days. He said nothing, but, smiling quietly, came towards the bed and laying his hand on the injured leg began slowly stroking it up and down. It was infinitely soothing, and presently to his surprise my friend closed his eyes, and when he opened them again his strange visitor had gone. He felt strangely at ease and fell asleep. When he waked in the morning he rose up, and, discarding the board on which he had been carried, told everyone he was going to get well and would require it no more. And sure enough he never did.

From that day he mended and now hardly knows which leg was bad. But instead of wondering, as I should have done, whether the Duke of Albemarle's physician had visited him, he says, “Only fancy, I'm sure it was only fancy.” He is not a reading man, and I don't think he has ever heard of Hans Sloane.

But if I skipped some of Hans Sloane's two great volumes, I must confess to having raced through at a much faster rate many of the other books on early Jamaica. There is a novel called Marly, the scene of which is laid in the beginning of the last century, and so dull it is I can hardly believe it was presented to people for amusement. If they had nothing else to read, it almost excuses the ignorance and easy-going ways of the planters and their families. Not that these regarded themselves as ignorant by any means. Uncultured as they were, they held themselves far above any of their dependents, though the ladies might, and often did, sit round the pepper pot with their black serving women, ate as they did, and talked as they did. Lady Nugent, the Governor's wife, between 1801 and 1805, found great difficulty in talking to them, and she, of course, met the best.

“A party of ladies with me at the Penn,” she writes, “and never was there anything so completely stupid. All I could get out of them was, 'Yes, ma'am,' 'No, ma'am,' with now and then a simper or a giggle. At last I set them to work stringing beads, which is now one of my occupations; and I was heartily glad when their carriages came at 2 o'clock.”

Of course Lady Nugent forgets that she was a very great lady, and that quite likely these wives and daughters of the planters were shy. They might have shown to greater advantage if she could have met them on equal terms. But she never did. She seems to have been a cheery soul, but I am afraid she was convinced she was made of very superior clay. She is always complaining that she finds “sad want of local matter or indeed any subject of conversation with them.” The manner of their speech, too, was bad.

“The Creole language,” she says, “is not confined to the negroes. Many of the ladies who have not been educated in England speak a sort of broken English, with an indolent drawling out of their words that is very tiresome, if not disgusting. I stood next to a lady one night, next to a window, and by way of saying something remarked that the air was much cooler than usual, to which she answered, “Yes, ma'am, him railly too fraish.'”

Probably we should be surprised could we reincarnate them to find these ladies giving themselves all the airs of a grande dame, though they had less learning than any cook-maid nowadays, less than the little black boys and girls trotting along the steep and stony paths with slates on their heads to their daily school. But the lords and ladies of that time were hardly models of decorum.