Lady Nugent, wife of Sir George Nugent, Governor of Jamaica from 1801
to 1806, kept a voluminous diary during her stay in the island, and
most excellent reading it makes. She was thus rather anterior in date
to Michael Scott, but their descriptions tally very closely. I shall
have a good deal to say about Lady Nugent.
The West Indies make an appeal of a different nature to all Britons.
They were the training-ground and school of all the great British
Admirals from Drake to Nelson. Benbow died of his wounds at Port Royal
in Jamaica, and was buried in Kingston Parish Church in 1702, whilst
Rodney's memory is still so cherished by West Indians, white and
coloured alike, that serious riots broke out when his statue was
removed from Spanish Town to Kingston, and his effigy had eventually
to be placed in the memorial temple which grateful Spanish Town
erected to commemorate his great victory over de Grasse off Dominica
on April 12, 1782, as the result of which the Lesser Antilles remained
British instead of French. For all these reasons I had experienced,
since the age of thirteen, an intense longing to see these lovely
islands with all their historic associations.
In 1884 I travelled from Buenos Ayres to Canada in a tramp steamer
simply and solely because she was advertised to call at Barbados and
Jamaica.
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