The awful magnificence of these convulsions of nature is in strange contrast with the insignificance of the record of human actions in this island. Not that Jamaica was an insignificant member of the empire. Far from it. The teeming source of wealth, she was, on the contrary, during the whole of the eighteenth century, continually increasing in importance. Even dukes were glad to leave England to assume the princely state of a governor of Jamaica. Six hundred thousand African slaves were introduced during the last century, of which number something over half remained at the beginning of this. Human blood flowed in fertilizing streams over the island, and out of this ghastly compost rose an opulence so splendid as to silence for generations all inquiry into its origin or character. It secured its possessors not only easy access, but frequent intermarriages among the aristocracy of England, who thus in time came to be among the largest West Indian slaveholders. Jamaica was justly reckoned one of the brightest jewels in the British crown. But the brilliancy was merely that of wealth, and as the ownership of this was transferred more and more to Great Britain, the island itself at length came to be of little more independent account than an outlying estate. Petty squabbles between the governors and the Assembly, occasional negro conspiracies, soon suppressed and cruelly punished, and the wearying contests with the remaining negroes, who, under the name of Maroons, long maintained a harassing warfare from their mountain fastnesses, and yielded at last to favorable terms, are almost all that fills the chronicles of the colony.
The island society, unrelieved by any eminence of genius or virtue, or by the stir of great public interests, presented little more than a dull monotony of sensuality and indolence, on a ground of inhumanity. It is no wonder that Zachary Macaulay, from his experience in Jamaica as the superintendent of an estate, formed in quiet sternness that resolution to devote his life to uprooting a social system whose presiding divinities he saw to be Mammon and Moloch, which he afterward so nobly fulfilled. The graces and virtues of private character that lent some relief to this dreary picture, I shall speak of hereafter.
One relief to the prevailing dulness of Jamaica life was found in a bar of first-rate talent. There was so much wealth passing from hand to hand, and so many disputed titles in the continual mutations of ownership among the estates under the reckless system of conducting them prevalent, that the disciples of the law found a rich harvest, and it was worth while for a first-rate man to settle in the island. It is thought that the lawyers of Jamaica used to receive not less than £500,000 annually. Whether this was reckoned in sterling money or in the island currency, I do not know, but probably the latter, equivalent to £300,000 sterling. Of men not lawyers, Bryant Edwards is the only one of the last century or the early part of this of any note whatever among those permanently settled in the island. His chief claim to distinction is found in his carefully prepared and judicious 'History of the West Indies.' Beckford, the author of 'Vathek,' and Monk Lewis, christened Matthew, the patent ghost-story teller of half a century ago, and more honorably connected with the history of the island as a proprietor, whose inexperienced kindness toward his negroes had almost led to his prosecution, both resided in the island for a while. Jamaica had almost drawn to herself a name far more illustrious than any or all which had appeared in her annals—that of Robert Burns. It is known that he had already engaged his passage to the island, when the course of events turned him from it. He celebrates his expected departure in some verses more witty than moral, in which he addresses our islanders as follows:
'Jamaica bodies, use him weel,
And hap him in a cosy biel,
Ye'll find him aye a dainty chiel,
And fu' of glee;
He wadna wrang the very deil,
That's ower the sea.'
Poor fellow! had he really gone, the admonition to 'Jamaica bodies' to 'use him weel,' would probably have been obeyed by making him drink himself to death ten or twelve years earlier than he did in Dumfries, and thus would one of earth's great, though stained names, have been lost in the inglorious darkness of a Jamaica bookkeeper's short life, as many a young countryman of his, perhaps not less gifted than he, had perished before him.
Among the distinguished personages of Jamaica, I ought not to omit mention of the Duke of Manchester, governor soon after the beginning of this century, who was able to boast that no virtuous woman had crossed the threshold of the King's House in Spanishtown during his administration. So that if Jamaica has never had her parc-aux-cerfs, she can at least boast her Regent Orleans. There is small need of any special parc-aux-cerfs in a slaveholding country.[22]
In brief, except a certain interest attached to the struggles of the barbarous Maroons to maintain their wild freedom in the woods and mountains, the human history of Jamaica, from the English conquest in 1655 to the abolition of slavery in 1834, is little more than a monotonous blank.
She had a vigorous bar, a sumptuous church establishment, and boundless, though shifting wealth. But all these together, smitten as they were with the palsy of voluptuousness and oppression, had not the power to bring forth one great name, to achieve one heroic deed, or on the other hand, to foster any growth of humble, diffused happiness. Her sin, plated with gold, dazzled the eyes and confounded the consciences of men, but, like the ornaments of a sepulchre, it only beautified outwardly what within was full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
Those events of her history which bear on the abolition of slavery will be specially noticed hereafter.