Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 219

Lewis's first reform was to abolish the use of the terrible cattle-whip. The threat of selling delinquent
slaves to a less benevolent master was, he records, the worst punishment he needed to inflict. He drew
up a mild code of laws for the management of his estate. He affirms that it functioned perfectly. Hospit-
als were built, doctors and midwives employed. His presents of meat, salt-fish, calico and clothing seem
to have been almost daily events, and the parties of country-dances with free food and rum, when his
slaves danced the jam-jam and the kitty-katty all night to the sound of the 'banja and the gumbo drum,'
were scarcely less frequent. The practice of Obeah, the casting of spells, the use of malign herbs, poison-
ing with corrosive sublimate, petty larceny, unreliable bookkeepers, a runaway or two and a number of
lovers' quarrels, seem to have been the only things that marred this earthly paradise. 'If only his friend
Wilberforce could have seen!' Poor Lewis was only six months altogether on his Jamaican estates….
He gives an account of the Myal dance practised by Obeahmen in their secret gatherings—a dance
which sounds very close to Voodoo and Pocomania—and records the terror of duppies, or ghosts, by
which all his slaves were obsessed. 'Nancy-tales,' charming folk-stories of the Negroes, and the legends
of the elderly Ibo slaves were carefully recorded, and the fancy dresses and the contests of the 'Reds'
and the 'Blues'—Britannia, Nelson, Wellington, Royal Princes, Jesters, and Duchesses—at the New
Year Carnival, are extensively described. The names of the slaves themselves, are interesting: Neptune,
Catalina, Oscar, Epsom, Sully, Marlborough, Hazard, Nato, Hercules, Toby, Pickle, Plato, Strap, Damon
and Priam were the names of the men. The girls were called Psyche, Polly, Phillipa, Jug-Betty, Delia,
Moll, Venus, Martia, Big Joan, Juliet, Minetta, Phyllis, Pam and Sappho. 'What other Negroes may be,'
he wrote as he prepared to sail, 'I will not pretend to guess; but I am certain that there cannot be more
tractable or well-disposed persons (take them for all in all) than my Negroes of Cornwall. I only wish
that in my future dealings with white persons I could but meet with half so much gratitude, affection and
goodwill.'
He died at sea a few days later of yellow fever. Byron was genuinely moved. He wrote in a letter to
John Murray, as soon as he learnt the sad news:
'I would give many a sugar cane
Nat Lewis were alive again.'
Months earlier, I had begun to be fascinated by the idea of the Maroons, those Negroes that ran away from
their owners and lived as outlaws in the mountains and forests. Their name probably derives from the
Spanish word Cimarrones or Peak-dwellers. Sometimes they joined themselves together in armed bands.
They were hunted without mercy and subjected, if they were caught, to the direst penalties. But if they
happened to have run away from Spanish plantations, they often secretly leagued with the English, and,
when the English made piratical descents on the Spanish towns of the islands or the Main, the Maroons
would descend like a fifth column from the interior, and simultaneously attack the Spaniards in the rear.
But in Jamaica the usual process was exactly reversed. For, when the Spaniards were driven from the
island, they armed their slaves and set them free, and the presence of these formidable enemies in the
interior, determined at all costs to retain their freedom, was a constant trouble for the new arrivals. After
eighty-three years of liberty, during which time their numbers were steadily augmented by the arrival of
runaways, they were becoming such a menace to the peace of the island—roving the mountains on ma-
rauding parties, plundering, burning estates, and murdering whites—that in 1734 the government built