JAMAICA. 185 



ship was off again. When morning broke, they were 

 running into Savannah-le-Mar through a very narrow 

 channel, the coral reef almost touching them on either 

 side. Gosse mounted a little way up the shrouds, and saw 

 the beautiful bay beneath him, so calm, pure, and trans- 

 parent that it seemed simply like gazing down through a 

 broad sheet of plate glass. After some days in the 

 deplorably dead-and-alive town of Savannah-le-Mar, the 

 captain of the Caroline lent Gosse the cutter to Bluefields, 

 the house of a ]\Ir. and Mrs. Coleman, ^loravian mis- 

 sionaries, with whom he had made arrangements to lodge. 

 Several kindly faces were waiting to welcome him on the 

 beach, and the good-natured negroes competed for the 

 honour of taking his boxes and cases up to the mansion. 



Bluefields, which was now to be his home for eighteen 

 months, is marked on the maps as if it were a town of some 

 importance on the coast-road from Savannah-le-Mar to 

 Black river, on the south-west shore of Jamaica. In point 

 of fact it is, or was, but a solitary house ; one of the 

 oldest and largest of the planters' mansions in the pros- 

 perous times, but already, in 1S44, fallen into partial decay 

 in the midst of what was called a "ruinate" plantation. 

 It figures in literature in the pages of that ver>^ spirited 

 and entertaining novel, Tom Criytgles Log, which gives an 

 unsurpassed picture of what Jamaica was in the opening 

 years of the centur>'. The gaiety and opulence of Michael 

 Scott's Jamaica had, however, given place to commercial 

 dejection within the forty years that preceded Philip 

 Gosse's visit. In 1844 the beautiful sugar estates through- 

 out the island were half desolate, and the planters had 

 either ceased to reside in their mansions, or had pitifully 

 retrenched their expenses. With all this had come a spirit 

 of pietism, and Bluefields, in particular, seems to have been 

 the centre of a missionary activity, in the hands of the 



