During their
many tours of inspection poor little Lady Nugent complains that, with
the best wishes in the world, she really could not eat five large
meals a day. She continues (page 95), "At the Moro to-day, our dinner
at 6 was really so profuse that it is worth describing. The first
course was of fish, with an entire jerked hog in the centre, and a
black crab pepper-pot. The second course was of turtle, mutton, beef,
turkey, goose, ducks, chicken, capons, ham, tongue, and crab patties.
The third course was of sweets and fruits of all kinds. I felt quite
sick, what with the heat and such a profusion of eatables."
One wonders what those planters' weekly bills would have amounted to
at the present-day scale of prices, and can no longer feel surprised
at their all running into debt, in spite of their huge incomes. The
drinking, too, was on the same scale. Lady Nugent remarks (page 108),
"I am not astonished at the general ill-health of the men in this
country, for they really eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises.
All the men of our party got drunk to-night, even to a boy of fifteen,
who was obliged to be carried home." Tom Cringle, in his account of a
dinner-party in Cuba, remarks airily, "We, the males of the party, had
drunk little or nothing, a bottle of claret or so apiece, a dram of
brandy, and a good deal of vin-de-grave (_sic_)," and he really
thinks that nothing: moderation itself in that sweltering climate!
In spite of her disgust at the immense amount of food devoured round
her, Lady Nugent seems to have adopted a Jamaican scale of diet for
her children, for when she returned to England with them in the
_Augustus Caesar_ in 1805, she gives the following account of the
day's routine on board the ship.
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