see if there was any personal merit in
a man, and if you deserved his respect you would have it. One
particular merit he had which I greatly approved. He kept his cabin to
himself, and did not turn it into a smoking room, as I have known
captains do a great deal too often.

All my own thoughts were fixed upon Jamaica. I had read so much about
it, that my memory was full of persons and scenes and adventures of
which Jamaica was the stage or subject. Penn and Venables and the
Puritan conquest, and Morgan and the buccaneers; Port Royal crowded with
Spanish prizes; its busy dockyards, and English frigates and privateers
fitting out there for glorious or desperate enterprises. The name of
Jamaica brought them crowding up with incident on incident; and behind
the history came Tom Cringle and the wild and reckless, yet wholesome
and hearty, planter's life in Kingston; the dark figures of the pirates
swinging above the mangroves at Gallows Point; the balls and parties and
the beautiful quadroons, and the laughing, merry innocent children of
darkness, with the tricks of the middies upon them. There was the tragic
side of it, too, in slavery, the last ugly flash out of the cloud being
not two decades distant in the Eyre and Gordon time. Interest enough
there was about Jamaica, and things would be strangely changed in
Kingston if nothing remained of the society which was once so brilliant.
There, if anywhere, England and English rule were not yet a vanished
quantity. There was a dockyard still, and a commodore in command, and a
guardship and gunboats, and English regiments and West Indian regiments
with English officers. Some representatives, too, I knew were to be
found of the old Anglo-West Indians, men whose fathers and grandfathers
were born in the island, and whose fortunes were bound up in it. Aaron
Bang! what would not one have given to meet Aaron? The real Aaron had
been gathered to his fathers, and nature does not make two such as he
was; but I might fall in with something that would remind me of him.
Paul Gelid and Pepperpot Wagtail, and Peter Mangrove, better than either
of them--the likeness of these might be surviving, and it would be
delightful to meet and talk to them. They would give fresh flavour to
the immortal 'Log.' Even another Tom was not impossible; some middy to
develop hereafter into a frigate captain and to sail again into Port
Royal with his prizes in tow.

Nature at all events could not be changed. The