“I wish,” goes on this gossipy good lady who is very sure of herself and her own position in the world, “I wish Lord Balcarres” (the Governor whose place General Nugent was taking) “would wash his hands and use a nail brush, for the black edges of his nails really make me sick. He has, besides, an extraordinary propensity to dip his fingers into every dish. Yesterday he absolutely helped himself to some fricassee with his dirty finger and thumb.” And again, “We drove to Lord Balcarres' Penn. Never was such a scene of dirt and discomfort. Lord B. was in a sad fright, thinking we should expect breakfast. However, upon his secretary's whispering to me that there was but one whole teacup and a saucer and a half, we declared our intention of returning to the King's House, where a party was waiting for us to breakfast.”
If that could be written of the King's representative of one of the premier colonies only thirty-five years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, what must we not forgive in the planters of a century earlier.
Lady Nugent has a certain fearful joy in recounting the backslidings of the men of her day, which makes her most amusing reading, while it certainly throws a good deal of light on the manners and customs of her times.
“The overseer, a vulgar Scotch officer on half pay, did the honours to us.... I talked to the black women, who told me all their histories. The overseer's chère amie (and no man here is without one) is a tall black woman, well made, with a flat nose, thick lips and a skin of ebony, highly polished and shining. She showed me her three yellow children, and said with ostentation she would soon have another.... The marked attention of the other women plainly proved her to be the favourite Sultana of this vulgar, ugly Scotch Sultan.”
As a rule, of course, white ladies did not visit the house where a coloured woman was established. They probably giggled and sniggered, and talked in hushed voices into each other's ears, while the little girls looked innocent and had to pretend they did not understand, but Lady Nugent seems to have broken down the unwritten law, perhaps like a King of old she was above all law.
She tells a story of a slave addressing a Mr Shirley, “a profligate character as far as I can understand.”
“'Hi, Massa, you telly me marry one wife which is no good. You no tinky I see you buckra no content wid one, two, three, four wives, no more poor negro.' The overseers, too, are in general needy adventurers, without either principle, religion, or morality. Of course their example must be the worst possible to these poor creatures...” The smugness of Lady Nugent!
“A little mulatto girl sent into the drawingroom to amuse me,” says she, writing of her visit to Mr Simon Taylors, an old bachelor at Liguanea. “She was a sickly, delicate child, with straight light hair and very black eyes. Mr T. appeared very anxious for me to dismiss her, and in the evening the housekeeper told me she was his own daughter and he had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates.”
When she left the gentlemen she took tea in her own room, surrounded by the black, brown, and yellow ladies of the house, and fairly revelled in gossip, this being the time, of course, when she heard of its master's peccadilloes.
We smile at Lady Nugent, but after all she does succeed in giving us some idea of how the planters of Jamaica lived in her day, all the more so because she is unconscious of doing anything beyond telling the tale of her life and sufferings in a far land with what she regarded as a pestilential climate. But she by no means holds such a high place in my affections as Hans Sloane.