Jamaica 1760-1774

Bryan Edwards arrived in Jamaica early in 1760. He was sixteen years old. Forty years later he wrote: “In this delightful Island … it was my fortune to pass the spring of my life, under the protection and guidance of men whose wisdom instructed, whose virtues I hope improved me.”[1] The two men were his uncle Zachary Bayly (1721-1769), a wealthy merchant and plantation owner, and the Rev Isaac Teale (1717-1764). Bayly behaved like a surrogate father towards Bryan, and was regarded by him in turn “with more than filial affection and veneration” (Sketch). Bayly’s first act was to engage Isaac Teale as a tutor, to mend the gaps in Bryan’s education and probably also to add metropolitan polish to his provincial manners. Teale had been educated at Westminster School in London, and had trained as a lawyer in the Inner Temple before taking a degree and being ordained in the Church of England. After serving for many years as a curate in Kent he obtained a license to serve as a minister in the colonies and went to Jamaica. In 1756 he was appointed as chaplain to the House of Assembly; it was presumably there that his “virtue, learning and talents” attracted Bayly’s attention.[2]

Edwards spent his youth living “chiefly under the same roof” as his uncle and tutor. [3] Their main residence was Greenwich Park, St Andrew, a pen owned by Bayly west of Kingston.

Edwards notes that he lived on “the sultry plains of the south side, near the town of Kingston” for “fourteen years”, which must mean from 1760 until he returned to England in 1774. [4] In the same context, he contrasts the heat of the plains with the pleasant climate of the hills, saying “I speak from actual experience”: he refers to “a villa eight miles distant, in the highlands of Liguanea”, where “the thermometer seldom rose, in the hottest part of the day, above seventy-five.” The villa was probably built by Zachary Bayly as an occasional retreat from the sultry atmosphere of the plains, on the 300 acres of “mountain land” which he owned in St Andrew in addition to his pen land.[5] About eight miles north of 18th-century Kingston is Stony Hill, near Wag Water, which may explain Edwards’s reference to studying with his tutor by the side of the river “Aqualta” (Agua Alta, now Wag Water): “oft round thy banks, sweet stream, …/ Together we explor’d the classic page”.[6]

In the Sketch he portrays those years as a tranquil, studious period, devoted to reading and writing poetry and learning Latin. But as he related in a speech delivered in 1789, within weeks of arriving in Jamaica he witnessed at first hand the brutality of life in a slave society: “I was at that time a youth, just arrived from England, and I felt a shock at a scene which presented itself to me on my arrival, that has not yet lost its impression.”[7] The “scene” was the execution in Kingston of three of the ringleaders of a slave revolt which had broken out on one of Bayly’s plantations in St Mary in April 1760. One of the three was condemned to be burnt, the others to be hung in irons, and left to die in that manner:

“They met their fate without fear or remorse. The negro that was burnt, by some means got his right arm loose, and snatching a brand from the faggots that were consuming him, flung it in the face of the executioner; and the two that were hung up alive, were indulged, at their own request, with a hearty meal before they were suspended on the gibbet.—From that time, until they expired, they never uttered the least complaint, (except only of cold in the night) but diverted themselves all day  long in discourse with their countrymen, who were permitted, very improperly, to surround the gibbet.

On the 7th day, a notion prevailed among the spectators, that one of them wished to communicate an important secret to his master, who being in St. Mary’s, the commanding officer sent for me. I endeavoured, by means of an interpreter, to let him know that I was present; but I could not understand what he said in return. I remember that both he and his fellow- sufferer laughed immoderately at something which occurred; I know not what. The next morning one of them silently expired, as did the other on the morning of the ninth day.” [8]

The 1760 uprising, the first of two slave revolts in St Mary, proved to be the beginning of the most serious rebellion in Jamaica in the eighteenth century.[9]

The remainder of Edwards’s early years in Jamaica were less sensational. His poems show his participation in the social life of Kingston in the company of Teale. In 1763, with Teale’s help, he wrote the prologue for an amateur production of Thomas Otway’s tragedy, Venice Preserved, “by some Gentlemen, friends of the Author”. [10] The play was probably performed in the playhouse in Harbour Street, Kingston, which had been established in 1753; Edward Long described it as “a very pretty theatre, exceedingly well contrived, and neatly finished”.[11] Patriotic references in the prologue suggest that the performance was put on to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Paris in February 1763 at the end of the Seven Years War.

Kingston, with its coffee-houses, taverns, and theatre, was the centre of social life for the white population during most of the year. The two principal taverns, named Ranelagh and Vauxhall, boasted “long rooms for concerts, balls, and public entertainment”, at which, according to Long, “the company are numerous and elegant”.[12] It was probably at one of those assemblies that Teale and Edwards encountered “Miss B****”, to whom Teale addressed an erotic poem in the style of the seventeenth-century Cavalier poets, and  Edwards added a brief coda in the same vein.[13] It was in these years also that the notorious work, The Sable Venus: An Ode, was written by Teale with the complicity of “Bryan”.[14] Edwards seems to have assumed that the appearance in these poems of his tutor (a middle-aged clergyman) in the guise of a sexual adventurer would be taken as poetic fantasy. He was at pains elsewhere to extol Teale’s qualities as a wise moral mentor, describing him as “Guide of my earliest youth, … whose guardian hand, / In life’s gay morn, from passion’s devious maze / Oft turn’d my erring feet.”[15] In another poem he wrote:

For well he lov’d to guide unpractis’d youth;—

    Haply where genius lay to wake the flame;

To lead the passions to the throne of Truth,

   And smooth the path to Virtue and to Fame.[16]

In 1763, taking advantage of the greater safety of transatlantic crossing after the war, Edwards returned home to visit his family: a letter to Zachary Bayly from a friend in England mentions enjoying the company of “your Brother, – & Nephew (Bryan Edwards)” in Wiltshire in June 1763.[17] Lines in Edwards’s Jamaica, A Descriptive and Didactic Poem refer to a second voyage from England to Jamaica in this period: “And thou, dear soil maternal! tho’ from thee / Again I wander”. [18] On his return voyage he was probably accompanied by his thirteen-year-old brother Nathaniel Bayly Edwards. Nathaniel is known to have died in Jamaica in 1771, aged twenty-one, and to have been buried in the same grave as Zachary Bayly. [19] In an affectionate epitaph Edwards paid tribute to his brother’s “distinguished abilities”, and demonstrated them by printing a translation of Horace’s 2nd Epode written by Nathaniel at the age of fifteen.[20]

The first stage of Edwards’s life in Jamaica came to an end with the death of Teale in January in 1764, and his own twenty-first birthday in May 1764. It was probably on the latter occasion that Zachary Bayly settled an annual allowance of three hundred pounds on him, a handsome income for a young man.[21] It is unlikely that generosity was his sole motive: an income of £300 per year was a necessary qualification for election to the House of Assembly. Bayly was a vigorous member of the Assembly throughout the 1750s, but in 1762 he had been appointed on to the Council. By making his nephew eligible for membership of the Assembly he could reckon on gaining support in the lower house. On 19 March 1765 Edwards, not yet twenty-two, was duly elected as one of the two members for the parish of St George.

He was by then assisting his uncle at his merchant house in Kingston; he refers in the History to having had “direction of the custom-house in Jamaica” in this period.[22] Bayly had been appointed deputy comptroller of the customs in 1764, but he evidently delegated the everyday business to his nephew. Edwards must also have been learning about plantation management, which by then was Bayly’s major concern, both as an attorney for absentee landowners and as a plantation owner himself. By the time Bayly wrote his will in 1769 he was clearly confident that Edwards had gained sufficient knowledge and experience to carry out the responsibilities of a “merchant-attorney”, as distinct from those of a planting attorney.[23] Under its terms, Bayly’s estates were left in trust for five years, during which time Edwards was charged with their maintenance and development: tasks specified in the will included handling the rents and profits; erecting a water mill and carrying out other building works; buying additional land; and maintaining the requisite complement of slaves and livestock.[24] Edwards states that he had no practical, day-to-day experience of the management of a sugar plantation during his first period of residence in Jamaica.[25]

[1] History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, 3rd edn (1801), 1.307-308.

[2] Edwards, History (1801), 1.308.

[3] History (1801), 1.308.

[4] History (1793), 1.183.

[5] Landowners in St. Andrew in 1753: N/A CO 137/28.

[6] ‘Elegy on the Death of a Friend’, Poetical Essays, 7-8.  Cundall  (Historic Jamaica, 1915, 308) inferred from the poem that Edwards lived on one of Bayly’s estates in St. Mary, but none of those estates bordered on the Agua Alta (see James Robertson’s Maps, 1804, National Library of Scotland)

[7] A Speech delivered at a free conference between the honourable the Council and Assembly of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 1789), 67.

[8] Speech (1789), 68-69; repeated almost verbatim in History (1793), 2.65-6.

[9] See Edward Long, History of Jamaica (1774) 2.447-462; Edwards, History, 2nd edn. (1794), 2.64-67; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (1982), 125-139; Richard Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery (1985) 130-156; Vincent Brown: Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative (2012) www.revolt.axismaps.com

[10] Poetical Essays, 10-12; Poems (1792), 35-36.

[11] Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage 1655-1900 (1992), 21-24; Long, History of Jamaica, 2.117.

[12] Long, History of Jamaica, 2.117-118.

[13] ‘The Gnat’ and ‘Written on reading the foregoing’: Poetical Essays, 21-23; Poems (1792), 30-31.

[14] Poetical Essays, 44-53; Poems (1792), 23-29.

[15] ‘Jamaica, A Descriptive and Didactic Poem’ (lines 7-15): Poems (1792), 1.

[16] Poetical Essays, 8: lines added after publication of the elegy in GM (1764).

[17] Letter from Caleb Dickinson, Bristol, to Zachary Bayly, 22 June 1763: Dickinson family papers, South West Heritage Trust, DD\DN 4/1/28/18-19.

[18] Poems (1792), 2, lines 30-31.

[19] ‘Inscription in the Parish Church of St. Andrew’, Poetical Essays, 35-37; Poems (1792), 59-60.

[20] Poetical Essays, 39-43; Poems (1792), 53-55

[21] The deed of settlement is referred to in Zachary Bayly’s will (1769), as executed “some time since”: TNA Prob 11/968/87.

[22] History (1793), 1.239-240.

[23] See J. Stewart, An Account of Jamaica, and its inhabitants (1808), 127.

[24] Will of Zachary Bayly, 1769, TNA Prob 11/968/87.

[25] History (1793), 2.126.