Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801-1805

"Lady Maria Nugent was the wife of the British governor of Jamaica. During her five-year residence on the island (1801-1805) she kept a diary, which evokes a glittery panorama of sugar impresarios, plantation heiresses and remittance men who would die (or in some cases, were about to die) of drink or yellow fever or a combination of the two. Lady Nugent was actually American-born – she wasn’t British. In the book she’s a prim and rather proper presence; she describes the Jamaican plantocracy, their vast planter meals and sexual gropings, in tones of fastidious disgust. I think she saw that behind this strenuous excess there was a sort of capitalist system at work. That’s only hinted at, but she does enable you to understand something of the so-called triangle merchants who motivated the slave trade between England, Africa, and Jamaica. A typical triangle voyage would have carried goods such as gunpowder from England to Africa, and then taken slaves from Africa to the Caribbean , and then finally sugar, coffee, rum, cotton, and some rice on the homestretch to England. It was one of the most nearly perfect commercial systems of modern times, in its loop of supply and demand. Interestingly, she refers to slaves as ‘sufferers’. She was not anti-slavery, but she had this sympathy for the ‘sufferer’ – the downtrodden – which I find very curious. There were plenty of books knocking about at the same time that were not like that at all. She was writing what was essentially a pre-abolitionist tract coming from a very Christian outlook. This Christian side of her, that made her so disapproving of the excesses that she saw on the plantations, also roused her sympathy for the ‘sufferers’."