Nominally a mail-packet sailed from
Jamaica once a month, but the seas were swarming with swift-sailing
French and Spanish privateers, hanging about the trade-routes on the
chance of capturing West Indiamen with their rich cargoes, so the
mail-packets had to wait till a convoy assembled, and were then
escorted home by men-of-war. This entailed the increasing isolation of
the white community in Jamaica, who, in their outlook on life,
retained the eighteenth-century standpoint. Now the eighteenth century
was a thoroughly gross and material epoch. People had a pretty taste
in clothes, and a nice feeling for good architecture, graceful
furniture, and artistic house decoration, but this was a veneer only,
and under the veneer lay an ingrained grossness of mind, just as the
gorgeous satins and dainty brocades covered dirty, unwashed
bodies. Even the complexions of the women were artificial to mask the
defects of a sparing use of soap and water, and they drenched
themselves with perfumes to hide the unpleasant effects of this lack
of bodily cleanliness. On the surface hyper-refinement, glitter and
show; beneath it a crude materialism and an ingrained grossness of
temperament. What else could be expected when all the men got drunk as
a matter of course almost every night of their lives? Over the
coarsest description of wood lay a very highly polished veneer of
satin-wood, which might possibly deceive the eye, but once scratch the
paper-thin veneer and the ugly under-surface was at once
apparent.
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