Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 217

of fashionable visitors. Ice clatters in shakers and poker dice are thrown unceasingly on the bars of this
Jamaican Nineveh, and, for the uninitiated visitor, the chasms of tedium yawn deeper every second.
Inland, among the hills and the coconuts and the immeasurable cane-fields are scattered a number of old
houses which are closely connected with English and Colonial social history. Some of these—notably
Cardiff Hall, an ancient hurricane-house which still possesses its old dungeons—have been in the posses-
sion of the same families for many generations. This house, until almost yesterday, was still in the pos-
session of the Blagroves, descendants of one of the parliamentarian regicides who, after having appended
his signature to King Charles's death warrant, found sanctuary in the remote island which the Common-
wealth had so recently acquired. Not far away, Fonthill, which is named after the English architectural
phenomenon, is the home of a branch of the Beckford family, collateral kinsmen of the author of Vathek .
The architectural, bibliophile and antiquarian adventures of William Beckford were paid for out of the
revenues of his vast Jamaican estates, and it was the same source that enabled his uncle Peter, the author
of Thoughts upon Hare and Foxhunting to devote his life so elegantly to scholarship, gastronomy, travel
and the chase. His work was Jorrocks's bedside book. 'He would bag a fox in Greek,' a contemporary
writes, 'find a hare in Latin, inspect his kennels in Italian and direct the economy of his stables in exquis-
ite French.' His companions on the continent were Voltaire and Rousseau and Sterne; a second-rate life,
perhaps, by absolute standards, but a stinging rebuke nevertheless to the present irreconcilable antagon-
ism that severs the active from the intellectual way of life.
One of the most remarkable of these houses is the ruin of Rose Hall, a ruin that heavy outlay might
still breathe back to life. It was built in 1780, and its remains show that it must have been a magnificent
building. It stands dramatically on the summit of a hill, and from the edge of its abandoned garden the
sugarcane surges down to the sea. Scars on the wall show where the staircase has been ripped away. The
floors and ceilings have disappeared, and the sun streams through the rafters. Strange and rather disquiet-
ing sounds come from the cellar, caused, it soon appears, by a donkey which has strayed from the fields
and wandered down the steps, miserably tearing now at the thistles that abound there. Rose Hall is celeb-
rated in the annals of Jamaica as the house of a terrible Mrs. Palmer. She has proved a theme for novelists
and her complex love-life and her brutality to her slaves are still proverbial.
The epitaph of a lady a couple of miles away tells a very different story. She died at the age of twenty-
seven—'beloved and bewailed not by her immediate friends only, but by all her Negroes, for whom she
laboured both by precept and example to make known the true God and eternal life.' It is the tomb of
Mary Clementina Barret, lying not far from the earliest of her dynasty, 'Eduardo Barret,' who died on
the 'kalends of December MDCCXCVIII.' The little overgrown cemetery was filled with Barret tombs,
derelict stones with the writing half-effaced, and half-buried in the long grass. One of these slabs—broken
clean in half, with a green lizard poised in frozen alertness above the lettering—commemorated the death
in London, in 1857, of Edward Barret Moulton-Barrett, father of Elizabeth Browning. It was difficult to
connect the uncompromising Caribbean glare with the stuffy sitting-room in Wimpole Street, with the
Halls of the Ca'Rezzonico, murmurous with the muted rumours of the Grand Canal; or with the cool
rooms of the Brownings' house in Florence, where, still unreconciled to her father, the poetess was es-
tablished at the time of his death. Her father had added a second and final Barret to his surname when, as
a young man, he inherited from his aunt, together with a substantial fortune, the surrounding cane-fields.
It is interesting that the prosperity of Elizabeth Browning's family and that of Gladstone should have
owed so much to slave-labour. Both of them, prompted no doubt by a feeling of remorse about the guilty