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JOURNAL OF A WEST INDIA PROPRIETOR,

Kept During A Residence In The Island Of Jamaica.

By Matthew Gregory Lewis

Author of “The Monk,” “The Castle Spectre,” “Tales Of Wonder,” &c.

London: John Murray, Albemarle Street.

MDCCCXXXIV


“I WOULD GIVE MANY A SUGAR CANE,

MAT. LEWIS WERE ALIVE AGAIN!”

BYRON.


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ADVERTISEMENT.


The following Journals of two residences in Jamaica, in 1815-16, and in
1817, are now printed from the MS. of Mr. Lewis; who died at sea, on the
voyage homewards from the West Indies, in the year 1818.




JOURNAL OF A WEST INDIA PROPRIETOR


Expect our sailing in a few hours. But although the vessel left the
Docks on Saturday, she did not reach this place till three o’clock on
Thursday, the 9th. The captain now tells me, that we may expect to sail
certainly in the afternoon of to-morrow, the 10th. I expect the ship’s
cabin to gain greatly by my two days’ residence at the “--------------,”
 which nothing can exceed for noise, dirt, and dulness. Eloisa would
never have established “black melancholy” at the Paraclete as its
favourite residence, if she had happened to pass three days at an inn
at Gravesend: nowhere else did I ever see the sky look so dingy, and the
river “_Nunc alio patriam quaero sub sole jacentem_.”--Virgil.




1815. NOVEMBER 8.


(WEDNESDAY)

I left London, and reached Gravesend at nine in the morning, having been
taught to exso dirty; to be sure, the place has all the advantages of
an English November to assist it in those particulars. Just now, too,
a carriage passed my windows, conveying on board a cargo of passengers,
who seemed sincerely afflicted at the thoughts of leaving their dear
native land! The pigs squeaked, the ducks quacked, and the fowls
screamed; and all so dolefully, as clearly to prove, that _theirs_ was
no dissembled sorrow? And after them (more affecting than all) came
a wheelbarrow, with a solitary porker tied in a basket, with his head
hanging over on one side, and his legs sticking out on the other, who
neither grunted nor moved, nor gave any signs of life, but seemed to
be of quite the same opinion with Hannah More’s heroine, “Grief is for
_little_ wrongs; despair for mine!”

As Miss O’Neil is to play “Elwina” for the first time to-morrow, it is
a thousand pities that she had not the previous advantage of seeing the
speechless despondency of this poor pig; it might have furnished her
with some valuable hints, and enabled her to convey more perfectly to
the audience the “expressive silence” of irremediable distress.


NOVEMBER 10.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, I embarked on board the “Sir Godfrey
Webster,” Captain Boyes. On approaching the vessel, we heard the loudest
of all possible shrieks proceeding from a boat lying near her: and who
should prove to be the complainant, but my former acquaintance, the
despairing pig, He had recovered his voice to protest against entering
the ship: I had already declared against climbing up the accommodation
ladder; the pig had precisely the very same objection. So a _soi-disant_
chair, being a broken bucket, was let down for us, and the pig and
myself entered the vessel by the same conveyance; only pig had the
precedence, and was hoisted up first. The ship proceeded three miles,
and then the darkness obliged us to come to an anchor. There are only
two other cabin passengers, a Mr. J------ and a Mr. S------; the
latter is a planter in the “May-Day Mountains,” Jamaica: he wonders,
considering how much benefit Great Britain derives from the West Indies,
that government is not careful to build more churches in them, and is of
opinion, that “hedicating the <DW64>s is the only way to make them appy;
indeed, in his umble hopinion, hedication his hall in hall!”


NOVEMBER 11.

We sailed at six o’clock, passed through “Nob’s Hole,” the “Girdler’s
Hole,” and “the Pan” (all very dangerous sands, and particularly the
last, where at times we had only one foot water below us), by half past
four, and at five came to an anchor in the Queen’s Channel. Never having
seen any thing of the kind before, I