Where The Twain Meet

r from the British Isles than any spot now on this earth. Indeed, few people would know where it was and fewer still cared. But some-the wise ones, the Great Prote

ese new lands; was some of that grea

nning was ve

e full of dangers, known and unknown. And the known were deadly. The Spaniards still lurked in their leafy depths, and even when they left they encouraged the

y divided into Roundheads and Cavaliers, fanatics and men of license if we ta

r, a fine adventurer often, but on the whole more given to destruction than to the building up of a colony. What the first settlers looked to find was literally gold and silve

he land was to produce they must labour, labour under a tropical sun and under conditions that to them were strange. And even if they did labour to get results, t

hlessly the cattle and horses than ran wild in what seemed to the newcomers countless numbers. And so presently it happened that the cattle that had amply supplied the buccaneers for many decades were all slain and the me

hing but the bare notification that they arrived, and it hardly seems to me those 2000 Ir

es of the new conquest; he brought with him 1600 people, men, women, children, and slaves, to settle in the eastern part of th

ity, but where the rainfall was very heavy and the heat far greater than in little Nevis, where the sea breeze swept every corner. There were mosquitoes too in the swamps, and a number of those settlers died, men, women, children, and slaves. Governor Stokes ha

know that after the first decimating sickness that fell

an Long tells us, sixty settlem

med to me, is farther than ten in England, much farther than a hundred in Australia. Even now many pens, many sugar estates are cut off entirely from neighbours. I lived for three months a guest of hospitable Miss Maxwell Hall, at her house Kempshot, on top of a steep mountain, from which we could see literally hundreds of hills melting away into the dim distance. We could see Montego Bay 18

we ought to take into consideration the isolation th

d-for slavery either for the white man or the black is not conducive to contentment, and they had to face it and bring them to a sense of their wrongdoing without outside aid. And then there was that other danger from the corsairs or pirates who swept the seas and made descents upon the lonely plantations, looking for meat, or rum, sometimes for women, and always for any trifles in gold or silver or jewels that might be picked up, and they were as ruthless as a Sinn Feiner in their methods. No wonder the houses were built stern and strong wi

I. gave patents for land freely, and though there does not seem to have been much com

d daughters and young sisters to be wooed by the rough English soldiery. I don't know if any of those who took out patents m

rms, they grow yams, yams that are a byword in a land that will always grow yams. All along the road by the sea, that lovely road, came creaking great carts drawn by oxen-yes, even in these days of motors, bullock drays driven by shouting black drivers, piled high with Lucea yams. Yam, I may interpolate, is a valuable foodstuff. I want butter and milk to it, but the natives, the Creole descendants of the slaves, eat it with coconut oil. The food values of the yam and the potato-the Irish potato, as they

of Old St James, "they had all died out or g

lf quitted in his youth. Even so late as when I was a young woman, I have heard battles royal on the subject of the degeneration of Australia, and there were men from England who held, and held strongly, that Australia cut off from Britain for ten years would degenerate into the savagery of the people the English had found there at the first settlement! There was no stamina, said these ultra

n thrive there, but for the first comers, ingrai

he men who stood round the Governor, but the men who took out the patents for small parcels of land and lived on their land were probably hardly the equals of the Council School educated labourer of to-d

eep that there was no bridging it. It remains to-day in the colour question that is for ev

ury of colonisation still standing in St Elizabeth, but there are scarce a dozen in the colony. It has a broad verandah in front, which you approach by a low flight of stone steps, the walls are from 2 to 3 feet thick, there are shutters for the windows, you see at once that the place was originally built for defence. It is of one storey only; there is no ceiling;

n having a carpenter. They had mattresses and quilts and of necessity mosquito curtains, but they had no pictures-the days of the pictorial calendar were not yet-and never a book, save perhaps the Family Bible, wherein to record the births and deaths of the family. If the house mistress were house proud

man should go clad like that in a Jamaican August even when the rain came down in torrents and every leaf held a shower of water. He shed his clothes by degrees, and went about his house, where he was only seen by his women, often about his fields, where he was only seen by his slaves, who did not count, in thread stockings, linen drawers and v

m out into a silk coat and

says, "the people seem all sickly, their complexion is muddy, their colour wan and t

n to say, "they are frank and good-humoured and make the best of life they can. If Death is more busy in this place than in many others, his approach i

ors-those with less of this world's goods-with a condescension that then was the admiration of their historian, but which nowadays would make us smile. One and all, it seems, however small reason they had for it, were very haughty and insi

oks on Labour in England between 1760 and 1830, have I dimly understood what the poor in those times suffered, what it was that

nging of a boy in Jamaica and think what

thinking creatures can teach. Then perhaps he goes to school. But young Master must not be corrected. If he learns 'tis well, if not, it can't be helped. After a little

the year 1716 which throws a little light on the way in which one of

nner for one

mall beer..

ttle of ale.

uart of Rum

Coffee.....

odging......

but I presume he was carried there, or maybe he slept undi

for they really eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises.... Almost every man of the party was drunk, even to a boy of fifteen

n nature, for we know there were fine men in pas

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,

deed 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 m

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 a

ion of the slave, the lady must needs sit with i

oung 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

re conferring the favour and this young man had fallen a victim to her charms. When he came awooing in earnest he likely had, for the odds were heavy against her. Marriage was out of fashion. The young pl

all the bitterer for that. And the oftener she did it, and the fainter her hopes, the more dreary would be her feelings. Her own helplessness, her own uselessness,

amaica there is a proverb that says rudely that the two worst things on a pen

en described as a sort of nightgown wrapped round them. In all the world there are born slatterns, and I can easily imagine the women of those first settlers drifting into very easy-going ways. In my own household we two women wakened at dawn and stood on the porch in our nightg

rought to the plantations in the West Indies and America to do the work o

after that beginning almost every ship brought its quota of ser

es these servants were convicts, sometimes they were only prisoners for debt, sometimes they were political prisoners, sometimes, I am afraid, they had been kidnapped, and sometimes like a well-known man, Sir William Morgan, they had sold themselves into slavery to get away from a life

might read the effects of sea tyranny by their wild and dejected countenances. 'Tis horrid to relate the barbarities they complained of. A word or a wrong look was constru'd a

a penalty of ￡10 for every one so sold, and their keep was paid by the factor or seller. Why this was, I do not know. It might have been to give the most distant planters a chance to buy or it may have been in the interests of the servants themselves, so that any m

d lot had begun, a path which o

gentlemen of Monmouth's following, fallen from their high estate and passed from hand to hand by these men whom once they would have regarded as far below them, only fit to sit at table with their servants, and bitterer still must it have been for the wome

en he had to serve seven years, and convicted felons, of course, for the time of their banishment. Fancy buying the se

defence when the end of his time was approaching, a man would prevail upon his master to re-sell him for a further term of years to some other man. And often the servant died before the years were passed. I have found no record of what a woman brought, but I expect that Madam often commissioned her husband to bring her a quiet, middle-aged woman, not too good looking-thoug

vided for that. At the expiration of his time his master had to give the servant ￡2 and a certificate of freedom, and whoever employed any free pers

roportionately. As a matter of fact the men often had no shoes, and were dressed, says Lesley, in a speckled shirt, a coarse Osnaburg frock (Osnaburg seems to have been a coarse sort of linen, something, I take it, like the dowlas of which we make kitchen towel

attached where the slaves grew their provisions, the cattle were turned out to recruit, and hogs were raised, and in a country like Jamaica there should have been no difficulty in supplying plenty of meat. But practically

e value of the thing traded and ￡10 in addition. Human nature was frail, and if a freeman got a woman servant with child he had to pay ￡20 for the maintenance of the woman and child or serve the mast

er, wear as good clothes, be allowed a horse and a negro boy to attend them." But to me this only emphasises how much the unfortunate servant was dependent for his comfort, his happiness, his success in life, not upon his worth but upon the caprice of the fine gentleman who was his master. If he were "stupid or roguish" he was hardly used, often put in the stocks and beaten seve

ly a servant to a planter in Barbadoes, and "though that state of life be the meanest and most disgraceful, yet he caused to be

own piracy with a high hand, hanging the less fortunate of his fellows. But since he was not too proud t

ting fifty white servants was freed from port charges on the ship for that voyage, but they

from Ireland, ￡6; from New England, Carolina, and other parts of America, ￡3, 10s.; from Providence and the Windward Isles, ￡2. These sums were evidently paid to the shipowner through the master, for Lesley goes on to say that, for every person brought from Europe, the master "should have for his encouragement and to his own use the further s

ithout leave of the Governor, and anyone wishing to get leave had his name set up for twenty-one days, and had to bring a witness who had known him or her for at least a year. It was

more extraordinary still, tradition does not point at any man as having among his forebears one who so arrived in the colony. All trace of them i

an ancestor. But I have heard of none such. If these bond-servants died they were forgott

hite man, servant, overseer, or hired man, for the first five working slaves; for ten slaves, two whites, and two whites for every ten more, and these had to be resident on the plantation

to speak to the planter's daughter. Their social standing was by no mean

rch look or a melting glance to a closer acquaintance. It ended-well in one way. She ran away with him, or possibly there was nowhere to run to, and a man cannot go far without

ed and better mannered than the girl running wild on the estate. Some provision would be made for the young couple, the lad would get his free

servants has vanished as completely as though they had never been, but this is the way I interpret Les

an was only one

om a servitude grown too hard, and died beneath the tangle o

to, and they thought the night air was deadly. All classes drank, the masters "Madera" and rum, and the servants rum that was doubtless not of the best. It is easy to sneer, but human nature needs some relaxation, and living on beef that was like brine, sleeping all night in a room from which the night air was

e will to better things was hardly born among the majority till after the Great War. Now at last is the worker coming into

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