University of Virginia Library

JANUARY 14. (Sunday.)

I gave a dinner to my " white people," as the book-keepers, &c., are called here, and who have a separate houses and establishment for themselves ; and certainly a man must be destitute of every spark of hospitality, and have had " Caucasus horrens" for his great-grandmother, if he can resist giving dinners in a country where Nature seems to have set up a superior kind of " London Tavern " of her own. They who are possessed by the "Ciborum ambitiosa fames, et lautaegloria mensae," ought to ship themselves off Jamaica out of hand ; and even the lord mayor himself need not blush to give his alderman such a dinner as is placed on my table, even when I dine alone. Land and sea turtle, quails, snipes, plovers, and pigeons and doves of all descriptions -of which the ring-tale has been allowed rank with the most exquisite of the winged species, by epicures of such distinction, that their opinion, in matters of this nature, almost carries with it the weight of a law,-excellent pork, barbecued pigs, pepper-pots, with numberless other excellent dishes, from the ordinary fare ; the poultry also is miraculously large and fine. Then our tarts are made of pine-apples, and pine-apples make the best tarts that I ever tasted ; there is no end to the variety of fruits, of which the shaddock is "in itself a host;" but the most singular and exquisite flavor, perhaps, is to be

found in the granadillo, a fruit which grows upon a species of vine, and, in fact, appears to be a kind of cucumber. It must be suffered to hang till it is dead ripe, when it is scarcely anything except juice and seeds, which can only be eaten with a spoon. It requires sugar, but the acid is truly delicious, and like up other separate flavour that I ever met with; what it most resembles is a macedoine, as it unites the different tastes of almost all other fruits, and has, at the same time, a very strong flavour of wine.

As to fish, Savannah la Mar is reckoned , the best place in the island, both for variety and safety; for, in many parts, the fish feed upon copperas-banks, and cannot be used without much precaution ; here, none is necessary: and it is only to be wished that their names were somewhat more attractive ; for it must be owned, that nothing can be less tempting than the sound of Jew-fish, hog-fish, mud-fish, snappers, god-dammies, groupas, and grunts ! Of the sea-fish which I have hitherto met with, the Deepwater Silk appears to me the best ; and of river-fish, the mountain-mullet: but, indeed, the fish is generally so excellent, and in such profusion, that I never sit down to table without wishing for the company of Queen Atygatis of Scythia, who was so particularly fond of fish, that she prohibited all her subjects from eating it on pain of death, through fear that there might not be enough left for her majesty.

This fondness for fish seems to be a sort of royal passion : more than one of our English sovereigns died of eating too many lampreys ; though, to own the truth, it was suspected that the monks, in one or two instances, improved the same by the addition of a little ratsbane ; and Mirabeau assures us, that Frederick the Second of Prussia might have prolonged his existence, if he could but have resisted the fascination of an eel-pie ; but the charm was too strong for him, and, like the great-grandmother of us all, he ate and died-" All for eel-pye, or this world well lost!"

The provision-grounds of the negroes furnish them with plantains, bananas, cocoa-nuts, and yams : of the latter there is a regular harvest once a-year, and they remain in great perfection for many months, provided they are dug up carefully, but the slightest wound with the spade is sufficient to rot them. Catalue

(a species of spinach) is a principal article in their pepper-pots; but in this parish their most valuable and regular supply of food arises from the cocoa-finger, or coccos, a species of -the yam, which lasts all the year round. These vegetables form the basis of negro sustenance ; but the slaves also receive from their owners a regular weekly allowance of red herrings and salt meat, which serve to give a relish to their vegetable diet; and, indeed, they are passionately fond of salted provisions, that, instead of giving them fresh beef (as at their festival of Saturday last), I have been obliged to provide some hogsheads of salt fish, as likely to afford them more gratification.