overseers complete; in a word, they were colonies in the strictest
sense of the word; transplanted portions of the motherland, with most
of its institutions, dumped down into the Caribbean Sea, but blighted
until 1834 by the curse of negro slavery. It was this overseas
England, set amidst the most enchanting tropical scenery and
vegetation, that I was so anxious to see. Michael Scott, both in _Tom
Cringle_ and _The Cruise of the Midge_, gave the most alluring pictures
of Creole society (a Creole does _not_ mean a coloured person; any one
born in the West Indies of pure white parents is a Creole); they
certainly seemed to get drunk more than was necessary, yet the
impression left on one's mind was not unlike that produced by the
purely fictitious Ireland of Charles Lever's novels: one continual
round of junketing, feasting, and practical jokes; and what gave the
pictures additional piquancy was the knowledge that death was all the
while peeping round the corner, and that Yellow Jack might at any
moment touch one of these light-hearted revellers with his burning
finger-tips.

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