Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 218

origins of their affluence, were violently opposed to slavery. Two Barret manor-houses, Barret Hall and
Cinnamon Hill, lie close by: white, solid country seats pleasantly shaded by spreading trees in valleys
that wind downhill to the seashore.
The island has many connections with literature. Lady Holland, the formidable friend of Sheridan and
Byron and Macaulay, who for so many years made Holland House the most exciting place in England,
belonged to a plantation-owning family of Jamaica; and when she inherited her father's estates, both she
and Lord Holland prefixed her maiden name of Vassall to that of Fox. Dallas, the friend and cousin by
marriage of Byron, was likewise a Jamaican squire. He has claims on the traveller's attention, as we shall
see later, which are quite unconnected with the poet. It is an odd coincidence that Byron should also have
been the friend of a third remarkable Jamaican figure of that period. It is as though his restless spirit
spread tentacles all over the world. This third Jamaican is none other than Matthew Gregory Lewis.
One imagines “Monk” Lewis far more readily in a European setting—devouring the novels of Mrs.
Radcliffe, and, under the influences of the Mysteries of Udolfo and Horace Walpole, scribbling The Monk
and its melodramatic successors in a fever of romantic medievalism; calling on Goethe at Weimar and
arguing with Madame de Staël; simultaneously boring and charming Byron in London and Geneva and
Venice—boring him by his earnestness and his prolixity, and charming him by his engaging ingenuous-
ness and his kind heart. But 'a jewel of a man,' Byron admitted him to be.
But in his Jamaican diaries, [3] he is neither tedious nor prolix, and the account of his two short visits
to his newly-inherited estates, which he undertook with the sole purpose of inquiring into the conditions
of his slaves, give us a vivid picture of life in the island during the interregnum between the abolition of
the Slave Trade and the Emancipation Act. True, there are occasional traces of silliness, and, from time
to time, he plunges into almost unreadable verse. The hawks that swoop so unnaturally from the sky to
inflict rape on the turkey-hens of his backyard become, in his prose, feathered Tarquins and their vic-
tims are hapless Lucretias. His outdoor privy, whose walls are so transparent that passing slaves tactlessly
raise their hats in homage when he is inside, becomes a 'Temple of Cloacina….' One sees what Byron
was getting at. But his high spirits, his sense of fun and his kindness are never obscured for long beneath
the buckram and the horsehair.
Many of the regular planters in his pages are hard and illiberal men, and nearly all the overseers and
bookkeepers are perfidious and cruel. But a large number of them emerge from 'Monk' Lewis's pages
as humane masters who did their best to mitigate the horrors of slavery. His cabin companion was, like
Lewis himself, one of the new and advanced school of planters. 'Hedicating the Negroes,' he kept re-
peating, 'is the honly way to make them appy; indeed in his umble hopinion, hedication is hall in hall….'
Although the slave-owners' power of life and death, the use of chains and the fiendish flogging of the last
century had been abolished or curtailed by law, brutalities still occurred. But by the time he visited the
island in 1815 and 1817, a change was well on the way. The slaves were being converted to Christianity,
and were slowly assuming the status, in their masters' eyes, of human beings. Sunday had at last been
allotted to them as a day of rest, and, on Lewis's plantation at any rate, Saturday was kept free for the
cultivation of the slaves' own garden produce. Each family had its own cottage. Their wooden houses
were equipped—it sounds almost incredible—with four-poster beds, and plentifully stocked with food
and wine and porter. They grew their own vegetables, and reared their own livestock, and appear to have
been allowed considerable freedom of movement from place to place. Baskets of vegetables were carried
to market in Savannah-la-Mar or Montego Bay—the “Bay” and the “Bay Girls” were a great attraction
for the more adventurous and unruly—and the life, compared to the bad old times, seems almost normal.