A tinted lithograph of Bluefields House and its immediate surroundings
forms the frontispiece to the “Naturalist’s Sojourn”; but various
alterations have been effected in the house since the drawing was made,
and the internal re-arrangements have been so numerous that the actual
room used by Gosse—a naturalist’s workroom—cannot now be identified. A
view of Bluefields, entitled “The Torch was lying in Bluefields Bay,”
also forms the frontispiece to one of the many editions of “Tom
Cringle’s Log,” _i.e._ the third volume of “Blackwood’s Standard
Novels,” published in 1842. Gosse gave a copy of this work to his young
son on his request for information regarding the West Indies. Bluefields
River—the “romantic little stream,” as he fondly terms it—still glides
and tumbles down to the sea, its waters as pure and fresh as ever and as
well stocked with mullet, crayfish, and crabs as when the naturalist
wandered along its banks, turned aside its stones or searched its
crevices for specimens, or bathed in its enticing pools. The Bluefields
hills behind stretch upwards, their sides as thickly wooded as when
Gosse first gazed upon them from Bluefields Bay, or, as he himself says
of the Peak, “in the rude luxurious wildness that it bore in the days
when the glories of those Hesperides first broke upon the astonished
eyes of Europeans.”
In August 1694 Sir William Beeston sent home to the Duke of Shrewsbury
“A Brief Account of what passed in Jamaica during the preparations and
duration of the French attacks on it in 1694.” In it, while telling of
the French predatory attacks along the coast before the final landing at
Carlisle Bay, he says: “On the Thursday after their arrival at Cow Bay,
the wind blew hard and the Admiral’s ship and another were blown off
shore to Blackfield Bay at the west end of the Island, where they landed
sixty men. Major Andress, who had been left there with a few men,
engaged them and there was a small encounter in which we had one man
killed and two wounded, and they lost some; but the Admiral firing a gun
to recall them they hurried on board, leaving their food and captured
cattle behind them, and sailed away.”
Although the word is Bluckfield or Blackfield in the original manuscript
(it is printed Blackfield in the “Calendar of State Papers”) there is no
doubt that Bluefields is referred to. The Major Andress is evidently
identical with Lieutenant-Colonel Barnard Andreiss, who was custos and
member of the Assembly for St. Elizabeth, and died at Lacovia in 1710.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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