Journal of a Residence among the Negroes in the West Indies

by Matthew Gregory Lewis

  DECEMBER 7.

  Yesterday we had the satisfaction of falling in with the trade wind, and now we are proceeding both rapidly and steadily., The change of climate is very perceptible ; and the deep and beautiful blue which colours the sea is a certain intimation of our approach to the tropic. A few flying-fish have made their appearance; and the. spears are being put in order for the reception of their constant attendant, the dolphin. These spears have ropes affixed to them,. and at one end of the pole are five barbs, at the other a heavy ball of lead: then, when the fish is speared, the striker lets the staff fall, on which down goes the lead into the sea, and up goes the dolphin into the air, who is in the utmost astonishment to find itself all of a sudden turned into a flying-fish ; so determines to cultivate the art of flying for the future, and promises itself a great many pleasant airings. The dolphin and the flying-fish are beautifully colored, and both are very good food, particularly the latter, which move in shoals like the herring, and are about the size of that fish. They are supposed to feed on spawn and sea animalcul2e, and will not take the bait; but on the shores of Barbadoes, which they frequent in great multitudes, they are caught in wide nets, spread upon the surface of the sea; then, upon beating the waters around, the fish rise in clouds, and fly till, their fins getting dry, they fall down into the nets which have been spread to receive them. The dolphin is seldom above three feet long; the immense strength which he exerts in his struggles for liberty occasions the necessity of catching him with the spear in the way before described.

  DECEMBER 8.

  At three o'clock this afternoon we entered the tropic of Cancer ; and if the wind continues tolerably favourable, , we expect to see Antigua on Sunday se'nnight. On crossing line, it was formerly usual for ships to receive a visit from an old gentleman and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Cancer: the husband was, by profession, a barber; and, probably, the scullion, who insisted. so peremptorily on shaving Sancho, at the duke's castle, had served an apprenticeship to Mr. Cancer, for their mode of proceeding was, much alike, and, indeed, very peculiar : the old gentleman always made a point of using a rusty iron hoop instead of a razor, tar for soap, and an empty beef-barrel was, in his opinion, the very best possible substitute for a basin; in consequence of which, instead of paying him for shaving them, people of taste were disposed to pay for not being shaved , and as Mrs. Cancer happened to be particularly partial to gin, the gift of a few bottles was generally successful in rescuing the donor's chin from the hands of her husband ; however, to-day this venerable pair "perdventure were sleeping or on a journey," for we neither saw nor heard anything about them.

  DECEMBER 11.

  A dead centipes was found on the deck, supposed to have mad its way on board during the last voyage, among the logwood. This is not the only species of disagreeable passengers who are in the habit of introducing themselves into homeward-bound vessels without leave. While sleeping on deck last year the captain felt something run across his face, and supposing it to be a cockroach, he brushed off a scorpion; but not without its firs biting him upon the cheek: the pain for about four hours was excessive; but although he did no more than wash the wound with spirits, he was perfectly well again in a couple of days.

  DECEMBER 12.

  Since we entered the tropic the rains have been incessant and most violent; but the wind was brisk and favourable, and w, rapidly. Now we have lost the trade-wind, and move that it might almost be called standing still. On the other hand, the weather is now perfectly delicious; the ship makes, but little way, but she moves steadily; the sun is brilliant, the sky cloudless, the sea calm, and so smooth, that it looks like one extended sheet of blue glass; an awning is stretched over the deck ; although there is not wind enough to fill the there is sufficient to keep the air cool, and thus, even during the day, the weather is very pleasant: but the nights are quite heavenly, and so bright, that at ten o'clock yesterday evening little Jem. Parsons (the cabin-boy), and his friend the black terrier, came on deck, and sat themselves down on a gun-carriage, to read by the light of the moon. I looked at the boy's book (the terrier, I suppose, read over the other's shoulder), and found that it was 'The Sorrows of Werter.' I asked who had lent him such a book, and whether it amused him? He said that it had been made a present to him, and so he had read it almost through,, for he had got to Werter's dying; though to be sure he did not understand it all, nor like very much what he under stood ; for he thought the man a great fool for killing himself for love. I told him I thought every man a great fool who killed himself for love or for anything else : but had lie no b9oks but 'The Sorrows of Werter?' -Oh, dear, yes, he said, he had a great many more; he had got I The Adventures of a Louse,' which was a very curious book, indeed ; and he bad got besides, 'The Recess,' and 'Valentine and Orson,' and 'Roslin Castle,' and a book of Prayers, just like the Bible; but he could Dot but that he liked I The Adventures of a Louse' the best of any of them.

  DECEMBER 13.

  We caught a dolphin, but not with the spear: he gorged a line which was fastened to the stern and baited with salt pork; but being a very large and strong fish, his efforts to escape were so powerful, that it was feared he would break the line, and a grainse (as the dolphin-spear is technically termed) was thrown at him : he was struck, and three of the prongs were buried in his side ; yet with a violent effort be forced them out again, and threw the lance up into the air. I am not much used to take pleasure in the sight of animal suffering, but if Pythagoras him self bad been present, and "of opinion that the soul of his. grandam might haply inhabit" this dolphin, I think he must still have admired the force and agility displayed in his endeavours to escape. Imagination can picture nothing more beautiful than the colours of this fish: while covered by the waves be was entirely green ; and as the water gave him a case of transparent crystal, he really looked like one solid piece of living emerald; when he sprang into the air or swam fatigued upon the surface, his fins alone preserved their green, and the rest of his body appeared to be of the brightest yellow, his scales shining like gold wherever they caught the sun; while the blood which, as long as he remained in the sea, continued to spout in great quantities forces its way upwards through the water like a wreath of smoke, and then dispersed itself in separate globules among the spray. From the great loss of' blood his colours soon became paler; but when he was at length safely landed on deck, and beating himself to death against the flooring, agony renewed all the lustre of his tints: his fins were still green and his body golden, except his back, which was olive, shot with bright deep blue; his head and belly became silvery, and the spots with which the latter was mottled, changed with incessant rapidity, from deep olive to the most beautiful azure. Gradually his brilliant tints disappeared; they were succeeded by one uniform shade of slate colour, and when he was quite dead he exhibited nothing but dirty brown and dull dead white. As soon as all was over with him, the first thing done was to convert one of his fins into the resemblance of a flying-fish, for the purpose of decoying other dolphins ; and the second, to order some of the present gentleman to be got ready for dinner. He measured above four feet and a half.

  DECEMBER 14.

  At noon to-day we found ourselves in the latitude of Jamaica. We were promised the sight of Antigua on Sunday next, but that is now quite out of the question. We made but eight miles in the whole of yesterday ; and as Jamaica is still at the distance of eighteen hundred miles, at this rate of proceeding we may expect to reach it about eight months hence. The sky this evening presented us with quite a new phenomenon, a rose colored moon : she is to be at her full to-morrow; and this afternoon, about half-past four, she rose like a disk of silver, perfectly white and colourless ; but as she was exactly opposite sun at the time of his setting, the reflection of his rays a kind of pale blush over her orb, which produced an t as beautiful as singular. Indeed, the size and inconceivable brilliance of the sun, the clearness of the atmosphere, which assumed a faint greenish line, and was entirely without a cloud, the smoothness of the ocean, and the
aforesaid rose-coloured moon altogether rendered this sunset the most magical in effect that I ever beheld ; and it was with great reluctance that I was called away from admiring it to ascertain whether the merits of our new acquaintance, the dolphin, extended any further than his skin. Part of him, which was boiled for yesterday's dinner, was rather coarse and dry, and might have been mistaken for indifferent haddock. But his having been steeped in brine, and then broiled with a good deal of pepper and salt , had improved him wonderfully, and to-day I thought him as good as any other fish.

  DECEMBER 15.

  The wind has dwindled away to nothing. We are now so absolutely becalmed that I begin to suspect Neptune is amusing himself by making the ship take root in the ocean. I have got some locust plants on board in pots: if we get on as slowly as we have done for the last week, before we reach Jamaica my plants will be forest trees, little Jem, the cabin-boy, will have been obliged to shave, and the , black terrier will have died of old age. Great numbers of porpoises were playing about to day, and tumbling under the ship's very nose. When in their 9xambols they allow themselves to be seen above the surface, they are of a dirty blackish brown, and as ugly as heart can wish ; but in the waves they acquire a fine sea-green cast, and their spouting up water in the sunbeams is extremely ornamental.

  DECEMBER 16.

  What little wind there is blows so perversely, that we have been obliged to alter our course; and instead of Antigua, we are now told that the Summer Islands (Shakespeare's "still vexed. Bermoothes") are the first land that we must expect to see. I am greatly disappointed at finding such a scarcity of monsters ; I had flattered myself that as soon as we should enter the Atlantic ocean, or at least the tropic, we should have seen whole shoals of sharks, whales, and dolphins, wandering about as plenty as sheep upon the South Downs; instead of which, a brace of dolphins, and a f6w flying-fish and porpoises, are the only inhabitants of the ocean who have as yet taken the trouble of paying us the common civility of a visit. However, I am promised that as soon as we approach the islands I shall have as many sharks as heart can wish. As I am particularly fond of proofs of conjugal attachment between animals (in the human species they are so universal that I set no store by them), an instance of that kind which the captain related to me this morning gave me great pleasure. While lying in Black River harbour, Jamaica, two sharks were frequently seen playing about the ship; at length the female was killed, and the desolation of the male was excessive:- "Che, faro senz' Eurydice? " What be did without her remains a secret, but what be did with her was clear enough; for scarce was the breath out of his Eurydice's body, when be stuck his teeth in her, and began to eat her up with all possible expedition. Even the sailors felt their sensibility excited by so peculiar a mark of posthumous attachment and to enable him to perform this melancholy duty the more easily, they offered to be his carvers, lowered their boat, and proceeded to chop his better half in pieces with their hatchets ; while the widower opened -his jaws as wide as possible, and gulped down pounds upon pounds of the dear departed as fast as they were thrown to him, with the greatest delight and all the avidity imaginable. I make no doubt that all the while be was eating he was thoroughly persuaded that every morsel which went into his stomach would make its way to his heart directly! " She was perfectly consistent," he said to himself; "she was excellent through life, and really she's extremely good now she's dead ! " I doubt whether the annals of Hymen can produce a similar instance of post-obitual affection. Certainly Calderon's " Amor despues de la Muerte" has nothing that is worthy to be compared to it ; nor do I recollect in history any fact at all resembling it, except perhaps a circumstance which is recorded respecting Cambletes, king of Lydia, a monarch equally remark .able for his voracity and uxoriousness, and who, being one night completely overpowered by sleep, and at the same time violently tormented by hunger, eat up his queen without being conscious of it, and was mightily astonished the next morning, to wake with her hand in his mouth, the only bit that was le ft of her. But then Cambletes was quite unconscious what he was doing whereas the shark's mark of attachment was evidently intentional.

  DECEMBER 17. (Sunday.)

  On this day, from a sense of propriety no doubt, as well as from having, nothing else to do, all the crew in the morning betook themselves to their studies. The carpenter was very seriously spelling a comedy; Edward was engaged with " The Six Princesses 5 Babylon ;' a third was amusing himself with a tract I On the Management of Bees;' another had borrowed the cabin-boy's "Sorrows of Werter,' and was reading it aloud to a, large circle-some whistling-and others yawning; and Werter's abrupt transitions, and exclamations, and raptures, and refinements , read in the same loud monotonous tone, and without the slightest respect paid to stops, had the oddest effect possible. I was surprised to find that (except Edward's Fairy Tale) none of them were reading works that were at all likely to amuse them (Smollett or Fielding, for instance), or any which might interest them as relating to their profession, such as voyages and travels; much less any which had the slightest reference to the particular day. However, as most of them were reading what they could not possibly understand, they might mistake them for books of devotion, for anything they knew to the contrary ; or, perhaps, they might have so much reverence for all books ill print, as to think that, provided they did but read something, it was doing a good work, and it did not much matter what. So one of Congreve's fine ladies swears Mrs. Mincing, the waiting- maid, to secrecy, " upon an odd volume of Messalina's Poems." Sir Dudley North, too, informs us (or is it his brother Roger? but I mean the Turkey merchant)-that at Constantinople the respect for printed books is so great, that when people are sick, they fancy that they can be read into health again; and if the Koran should not be in the way, they will make a shift with a few verses of the Bible, or a chapter or two of the Talmud, or of any other book that comes first to hand, rather than not read something. I think Sir Dudley says, that he himself cured an old Turk of the toothache by administering a few pages of ' Ovid's Metamorphoses;' and in an old receipt-book, we are directed for the cure of a double tertian fever, "to drink plentifully of cock-broth, and sleep with the Second Book of the, Iliad under the pillow." If, instead of sleeping with it under the pillow, the doctor had desired us to read the Second Book of tile Iliad in order that we might sleep, I should have had some faith in his prescription myself.

  December 19.

  During these last two days nothing very extraordinary, or of sufficient importance to deserve being handed down to the latest posterity, has occurred ; except that this morning a swinging rope knocked my hat into the sea, and away it sailed upon a voyage of discovery, like poor La Perouse, to return no more, I suppose; unless, indeed, like Polycrates, the fortunate tyrant of Samos, who threw his favourite ring into the ocean, and found it again in the stomach of the first fish that was served up at his table, -I should have the good luck (but I by no means reckon upon it) to catch a dolphin with my bat upon his bead: as to a porpoise, he never could squeeze his great numskull into it ; but our dolphin of last week was much about my own size, and I daresay such another would find my bat fit him to a miracle, and look very well in it.

  December 20.

  The weather is excessively close and sultry; and in point of heat there is no difference between the days and the nights; or if it is that the nights are rather the hottest of the two. The lightning is incessant, and it does not show itself forked or in flashes, but in wide sheets of mild mild blue light which spread themselves at once over the sky and sea; and, for the moment during which they last, make all the objects around as distinct as in daylight. The moon now does not rise till late, and during her absence the size and brilliancy the of the stars are admirable. In England they always seemed to me to peep through the blanket of the dark;" but here the heaven,; appear to be studded with them on the outside, if they were chased with so many jewels: it is really Milton's "firmament of living sapphires;" and what with the lightning and the stars, and quantity of floating lights which just gleame
d round the ship every moment, and then were gone again, to-night the sky had an effect so beautiful, that when at length the moon thought proper to show her great red drunken face, I thought that we did much better without her. The above-mentioned floating light' are a kind of sea-meteors, which, as I am told, are produced by the concussion of the waves, while eddying in whirlpools round the rudder ; but still I saw them rise sometimes at so great a distance from the ship, and there appeared to be something so like will in the direction of their course-sometimes hurrying on, sometimes gliding along quite slowly; now stopping and remaining motionless for a minute or two, and then hurrying on again,-that I could not be convinced of their not being Medusae, or some species or other of phosphoric animal: but whatever be the cause of this appearance, the effect is singularly beautiful. As to air, we have not enough to bless ourselves with. I had been led to believe, that when once we should have fallen in with the trade-winds, from that moment we should sail into our destined port as rapidly and as directly as Truffaldino travels in Gozzi's farce ; when, having occasion to go from Asia to Europe, and being very much pressed for time, he persuades a conjuror of his acquaintance to lend him a devil, with a great pair of bellows, the nozzle of which being directed right against his stern, away goes the traveller before the stream of wind, with the devil after him, and the infernal' bellows never cease from working till they have blown him out of one quarter of the globe into another: but our trade-winds must "hide their diminished heads" before Truffaldino's bellows. It seems that like the Moors, "in Africa the torrid," they are of temper somewhat mulish;" for although, to be sure, when they do blow, they will only blow in one certain direction, yet very often they will not blow at all; which has been the case for the last week: indeed, they seem to be but a queerish kind of a concern at best. About three years ago a fleet of merchantmen was becalmed near St. Vincent's: in a few days after their arrival, there happened a violent eruption of a volcano in that island, nor was it long before a favourable breeze sprang up. Unluckily, one of the ships had anchored rather nearer to the shore than the ethers, and was at the distance of about one hundred and fifty yards from the stream of the trade-wind ; nor could any possible efforts of the crew, by tacking, by towing, or otherwise, ever enable the vessel to conquer that one hundred and fifty yards : there she remained, as completely becalmed , as if there were not such a thing as a breath of wind in the universe; and on the one band she had the mortification to see the rest of the merchantmen, with their convoy (for it was in the very beat of the war), sail away with all their canvass spread and swelling; while, on the other hand, the sailors had the comfortable possibility of being suffocated every moment by the clouds of ashes which continued to fall on their deck every moment from the burning volcano, although they were not nearer to St. Vincent's than eight or nine miles; indeed that distance went for nothing, as ashes fell upon vessels that were out at sea at least five hundred miles and Barbadoes being to windward of the volcano, such immense quantities of its contents were carried to that island as almost covered the fields; and destroying vegetation completely wherever they fell, did inconceivable damage, while that which St. Vincent's itself experienced was but trifling in proportion.