Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Lady Nugent was the wife of the British governor of Jamaica; during her five-year residence on the island she kept a diary, which evokes a glittery panorama of sugar impresarios, plantation heiresses and remittance men who would die (or, in some cases, were about to die) of drink or yellow fever or a combination of the two. A prim and rather proper presence, Lady Nugent describes the Jamaican plantocracy, their vast planter meals and sexual gropings, in tones of fastidious disgust. Interestingly, she refers to slaves as ‘sufferers’; the word ‘sufferer’ – sufferah, in island patois – is now bandied about by Jamaican academics and politicians as shorthand for ‘righteous poor person’. The term, by conferring a victim status, implies a deficiency that cannot be overcome and seems to me dubious.
Tell us about Lady Nugent’s Journal.
Lady Maria Nugent was the wife of the British governor of Jamaica. During her five-year residence on the island [1801-1805] she kept a diary, which evokes a glittery panorama of sugar impresarios, plantation heiresses and remittance men who would die (or in some cases, were about to die) of drink or yellow fever or a combination of the two. Lady Nugent was actually American-born – she wasn’t British. In the book she’s a prim and rather proper presence; she describes the Jamaican plantocracy, their vast planter meals and sexual gropings, in tones of fastidious disgust. I think she saw that behind this strenuous excess there was a sort of capitalist system at work. That’s only hinted at, but she does enable you to understand something of the so-called triangle merchants who motivated the slave trade between England, Africa, and Jamaica.
What’s a triangle merchant?
A typical triangle voyage would have carried goods such as gunpowder from England to Africa, and then taken slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, and then finally sugar, coffee, rum, cotton, and some rice on the homestretch to England. It was one of the most nearly perfect commercial systems of modern times, in its loop of supply and demand.
What was her attitude toward slavery?
Interestingly, she refers to slaves as ‘sufferers’. She was not anti-slavery, but she had this sympathy for the ‘sufferer’ – the downtrodden – which I find very curious. There were plenty of books knocking about at the same time that were not like that at all. She was writing what was essentially a pre-abolitionist tract coming from a very Christian outlook. This Christian side of her, that made her so disapproving of the excesses that she saw on the plantations, also roused her sympathy for the ‘sufferers’.
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Ian Thomson is a writer, critic and journalist. He is the author of Primo Levi: A Life (Hutchinson, 2002), which won the Royal Society of Literature’s W H Heinemann Award in 2003. His account of contemporary Jamaica, The Dead Yard, was published by Faber in 2009. ‘I think we have a view of Jamaica as being a rather laid-back place where there are no problems,’ he says. ‘Although, in my experience, in Jamaica when they say “no problem” there is one. The other side of all of this is that it is quite an uptight culture in many ways, and there’s a lot of Victorian morality, particularly with the churchgoing population, which is massive in Jamaica. There is a lot of what they call a “fenky-fenky” attitude towards sex, which is actually quite prudish.’ He says 1950s Britain was unmindful of the Commonwealth and disinclined to help Jamaicans. Italians in Britain after the war, selling ice cream and confectionery, were made to feel more welcome, despite having fought on Hitler’s side in the conflict. And yet Jamaicans, British subjects, were not treated as such.
