Letter to the Lord Glenelg ... containing a report, from personal observation, on the working of the new system in the British West India colonies / [John Innes].

  • Innes, John, Esq.
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letter to the Lord Glenelg ... containing a report, from personal observation, on the working of the new system in the British West India colonies / [John Innes]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The officers of his Majesty’s Customs here may be able to furnish valuable information on this head, should government desire to investigate the sub- ject. Some of the finest fast-sailing schooners that belonged to this island have been sold for the slave- trade, and are actively employed in it; indeed, ].am informed that some government schooners dis- tinguished for fast-sailing, sold since the war, are now in the same service. It may not be improper for me to observe, that in Jamaica the arrangement for the packet-steamers landing mails at Jacmel, in St. Domingo, is much complained of. I can bear testimony to its incon- venience, for I was near losing my passage in the packet from St. Thomas’s to England in conse- quence, and should have lost it, had not the captain of the steamer exercised a sound discretion in passing without waiting to land the mail. The steamer in which I was (the Columbia) arrived off Jacmel when the weather rendered it impracticable to go or send in, and there being no appearance of a change the captain proceeded to St. Thomas’s ; he did not reach it until the forenoon of the seventh day, and the packet, by the Post-Office regulations, could not have postponed _ sailing longer than five o’clock in the afternoon of that day; which clearly shows that, had the captain of the Columbia waited to land the mail at Jac- mel, he must have been too late at St: Thomas’s
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