Page:A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.djvu/105

 WHITNEY ESTATE, CLARENDON.

, the property of Viscount Dudley and Ward, is situated on the great interior road which connects St. Elizabeth with St. Dorothy's, at the distance of about thirty-five miles from Spanish Town. It contains 3,243 acres; of which 160 are in canes, 2,902 in provision and wood land, 151 in pasturage, and 22 in corn. The average crops are 250 hogsheads, and the number of negroes 271. The produce is shipped at Milk River, nearly fifteen miles from the estates; but this distance is relieved by Rymesbury Penn, a portion of the same property. The soil of the high lands of Clarendon is in general rather rocky, intermingled with a black shell mould, or a fine vegetable dark mould on a clay. The lower grounds are chiefly clay, intermixed here and there with rich veins of vegetable mould: the latter mostly abounds near the banks of rivers, consisting of the sediment they have deposited, or the finer particles washed down from the hills. Long, in his History of Jamaica, published in 1774, speaking of this estate, says: "The plantation called Carvers (now Whitney) is one of the most celebrated for its fertility. It is a small dale surrounded with rocky hills, and so rich that it produces invariably three hundred hogsheads of sugar per annum, with so little labour upon it, that they (the negroes) multiply sufficiently to keep up their stock, without having recourse to African recruits."—These estates became the property of the present noble family by marriage with an heiress of the Carvers, a descendant of the original settler. The Plate before us gives the general view of the Estate in approaching it from the South. The road is crossed by the aqueduct, which conveys the water to the mill, and its course may be traced along the side of the hill to the works.