In this year of Our Lord, 1922, there are still people who regard Jamaica as a far, far distant country, and when it was conquered in 1660 it must have been farther from the British Isles than any spot now on this earth. Indeed, few people would know where it was and fewer still cared. But some—the wise ones, the Great Protector among them, rejoiced over this new possession. It seemed as if the wild tales the seamen told of adventure on the Spanish Main were now put into concrete form. Spain had drawn great wealth from these new lands; was some of that great wealth to come to the northern isle?
But the beginning was very difficult.
Here was an island, a beautiful island truly, but a rugged and heavily timbered land, a fertile land, but the mountains so entrancing and so inaccessible, were full of dangers, known and unknown. And the known were deadly. The Spaniards still lurked in their leafy depths, and even when they left they encouraged their abandoned slaves to keep up the feud, and no man could stray from the armed shelter of his comrades without risking death, often a painful and cruel death.
Among the English themselves it was not all peace, because they were unhappily divided into Roundheads and Cavaliers, fanatics and men of license if we take extremes, and the two parties again and again were at each other’s throats.
And even if there had not been two parties, the soldier as a colonist was a dead failure. He did not want to try and develop the land that fell to his lot. He was an adventurer, a fine adventurer often, but on the whole more given to destruction than to the building up of a colony. What the first settlers looked to find was literally gold and silver, pearls, and precious stones. They felt their work was done when they had conquered the land. They thought they had a right to sit down and reap the harvest of their labour.
And of course there wasn’t any harvest. That wealth lay hidden in the soil they did not and could not understand. Indeed they did not want to understand. For if the land was to produce they must labour, labour under a tropical sun and under conditions that to them were strange. And even if they did labour to get results, there must be a market and as yet there was no market. All they could hope for was to get enough to keep themselves alive. Added to this, their pay was in arrears.
No money, a climate that because they were unaccustomed to it they regarded as pestilential, and idle hands, no wonder these conquerors of Jamaica were discontented, no wonder they roamed through the savannahs slaying ruthlessly the cattle and horses than ran wild in what seemed to the newcomers countless numbers. And so presently it happened that the cattle that had amply supplied the buccaneers for many decades were all slain and the men who had declined to plant were starving. They did not want to settle on the land. They wanted a little more excitement in their lives. In the end, I think, the average inhabitant of Jamaica had plenty of that commodity.
To this boiling pot Cromwell sent ont 1000 Irish men and 1000 Irish women. I can find nothing but the bare notification that they arrived, and it hardly seems to me those 2000 Irish can have helped matters much, whether they were poor convicts or political prisoners.
Somebody must till the ground, that was clear; and there came along Luke Stokes, the Governor of Nevis, intrigued by the stories of the new conquest; he brought with him 1600 people, men, women, children, and slaves, to settle in the eastern part of the colony round Port Morant on the site of an old Spanish hato. The Jamaican Government hoped much from these new importations.
Nevis is a tiny mountain island only fifty square miles in extent, and the people who came from there came to work and were accustomed to the isolation that is the lot of the pioneer. They settled in a part fertile certainly, with a wonderful and amazing fertility, but where the rainfall was very heavy and the heat far greater than in little Nevis, where the sea breeze swept every corner. There were mosquitoes too in the swamps, and a number of those settlers died, men, women, children, and slaves. Governor Stokes had hardly built himself a house when he and his wife died. If it was lonely in Nevis, ringed by the eternal sea, it was lonelier far in Port Morant, Jamaica, with the swamps around and the mountains, beautiful but stern and inaccessible, frowning down upon them.
We know very little about those first comers, but we do know that after the first decimating sickness that fell upon them, the remainder held on and tried to make good.
There were in 1671, the historian Long tells us, sixty settlements in the Port Morant district.
Probably we should read for the word “settlements” “estates” either pens or sugar estates. Now to people who do not understand conditions in Jamaica that sounds quite thickly populated. But Jamaica is all hills and valleys—rather I should say, steep precipices and deep ravines—and, as I cannot say too often, especially in that district the vegetation is dense. A mile in Jamaica, it often seemed to me, is farther than ten in England, much farther than a hundred in Australia. Even now many pens, many sugar estates are cut off entirely from neighbours. I lived for three months a guest of hospitable Miss Maxwell Hall, at her house Kempshot, on top of a steep mountain, from which we could see literally hundreds of hills melting away into the dim distance. We could see Montego Bay 1800 feet below us, but no other habitation of a white man was in sight, and we were so cut off by the inaccessibility of the country that though my hostess is certainly one of the most charming and popular young women in the countryside, no one from the town ever made their way up that steep hill. They were content that she who knew the road should come down and see them when she had the time.
When we talk about the colonising of Jamaica, I think we ought to take into consideration the isolation that was of necessity the lot of almost every colonist.
And I think we may count these men from Nevis the very first agriculturists who did make good, and find a living in the soil of an island that is certainly one of the assets of the Empire. I am lost in admiration of these pioneers. They lived to themselves, they were entirely dependent upon themselves. Were they sick? They must see things through, die, or get well. As the crow flies, help might be near enough, but the steep mountain paths were cut by impassable torrents or blocked by dense vegetation. Their slaves might rise—probably they did—for slavery either for the white man or the black is not conducive to contentment, and they had to face it and bring them to a sense of their wrongdoing without outside aid. And then there was that other danger from the corsairs or pirates who swept the seas and made descents upon the lonely plantations, looking for meat, or rum, sometimes for women, and always for any trifles in gold or silver or jewels that might be picked up, and they were as ruthless as a Sinn Feiner in their methods. No wonder the houses were built stern and strong with thick walls loop-holed for defence. They might reckon on the slaves to help them here, for the slaves would not have much to hope for if they fell into the hands of the pirates. A slave’s lot was probably hard enough anyway, but I think it was perhaps better to belong to a settler, to whom his services were of value, than to a pirate who evidently in those days counted a man’s life about on a par with that of a beetle. They must have been a narrow, capable, self-centred people those settlers who came from Nevis and made good at Port Morant.
Cromwell was very anxious that the island should be peopled and both he and Charles II. gave patents for land freely, and though there does not seem to have been much competition for these patents, still some men did come and were planted over the colony.
The need of the island, of course, was women. Some of the old Spanish settlers gave in their submission and they probably had daughters and young sisters to be wooed by the rough English soldiery. I don’t know if any of those who took out patents married in this way. Probably they did, especially in the north, but sometimes they brought their wives from the Old Country.
At Little River in 1670 the lands were surveyed by Richard and Mary Rutledge, and other people took to themselves parcels of land there, varying in size from 50 to 200 acres. It is a rich country, this island that the Spaniards held so long, with rivers running down from the wooded mountains and in the rich river-bottoms almost any tropical plant will grow. The farther I went to the north-west the more fertile I found the country, and at Lucea, Lucea with the lovely little harbour well sheltered from storms, they grow yams, yams that are a byword in a land that will always grow yams. All along the road by the sea, that lovely road, came creaking great carts drawn by oxen—yes, even in these days of motors, bullock drays driven by shouting black drivers, piled high with Lucea yams. Yam, I may interpolate, is a valuable foodstuff. I want butter and milk to it, but the natives, the Creole descendants of the slaves, eat it with coconut oil. The food values of the yam and the potato—the Irish potato, as they quaintly call it in Jamaica—are probably about the same, but you get a great deal more for your money in a yam. It is the food of the common people, while the potato is a luxury. A black man once brought me, as a Christmas present, a cardboard box neatly tied up with pink ribbon, and in it wrapped up in white tissue paper were four “Irish” potatoes! But even potatoes will grow in this goodly land—what will not grow here—I believe they cannot raise primroses—and yet these early settlers were not a success.
“In the second generation,” says the author of Old St James, “they had all died out or gone, and the only memorials were the graves.”
They used to say in those days, and indeed long after, that unless the population were recruited from the Old Country every white would have gone in seven years. We may take that statement for what it is worth. The Briton, wanderer as he is, has a fixed idea in his own mind that the only place where children can really be reared properly is in those islands in the North Atlantic that he himself quitted in his youth. Even so late as when I was a young woman, I have heard battles royal on the subject of the degeneration of Australia, and there were men from England who held, and held strongly, that Australia cut off from Britain for ten years would degenerate into the savagery of the people the English had found there at the first settlement! There was no stamina, said these ultra English, in young Australia, in young New Zealand; even the animals became degenerate. But behold, over Australia’s plains range the largest flocks of sheep in the world with the very best wool (at least it fetches the highest prices in London), and at Gallipoli the stalwart sons of Anzac proved once for all that they too were Britons, worthy sons of the Empire whose flag they were upholding.
And so it is with Jamaica. Men can live, they can thrive there, but for the first comers, ingrained with British ideas, it was very hard indeed.
We talk about planters, but I fancy some of those first comers were accustomed to live very humbly and had very small intellectual attainments. Of course there were the men of standing and their wives, the men who stood round the Governor, but the men who took out the patents for small parcels of land and lived on their land were probably hardly the equals of the Council School educated labourer of to-day. The only difference would be—and of course it is a tremendous difference—those planters, however small their educational attainments, were accustomed to look upon themselves as the salt of the earth.
Each and all had slaves, and the gulf between the slave and his owner was so wide and so deep that there was no bridging it. It remains to-day in the colour question that is for ever cropping up, and it made one class arrogant as it made the other cringingly submissive.
“If an average planter of 1720,” says Planter’s Punch, “and his wife and daughters could be brought back to life and could live for a day now as they lived in times long passed, and if we could witness their manners and have a glimpse of their daily customs, it is little to say that we should be inexpressibly shocked.... There is a planter’s house of the first century of colonisation still standing in St Elizabeth, but there are scarce a dozen in the colony. It has a broad verandah in front, which you approach by a low flight of stone steps, the walls are from 2 to 3 feet thick, there are shutters for the windows, you see at once that the place was originally built for defence. It is of one storey only; there is no ceiling; so that the heavy rafters are exposed. It may contain in all some six apartments; it would not be disturbed by a hurricane, hardly by an earthquake, and it could have withstood for sometime an assault from slaves.... It was in houses of this sort that the country planter lived for a hundred years or more in those fabled ‘good old times’ of which we sometimes speak.”
And these houses were naturally very plainly furnished. There were great mahogany beds, one probably even in the sitting-room if the posts happened to be well carved, there were mahogany chairs and tables, perhaps a cupboard or great box or two, all made on the estate, for they all prided themselves upon having a carpenter. They had mattresses and quilts and of necessity mosquito curtains, but they had no pictures—the days of the pictorial calendar were not yet—and never a book, save perhaps the Family Bible, wherein to record the births and deaths of the family. If the house mistress were house proud, having as many servants as she pleased, she perhaps saw to it that her mahogany floors were kept in a high state of polish and the pieces of family silver brought from the Old Country and set out on the country-made sideboard reflected the faces of its owners, but otherwise there was not much ornament.
The weather was hot, it was always hot to these men from England, and at first they wore their heavy English clothes, their long coats, their waistcoats, their breeches and heavy woollen stockings; and their hair too was long until they took to wearing wigs, which must have been worse. Well, of course, it was utterly out of the question that a man should go clad like that in a Jamaican August even when the rain came down in torrents and every leaf held a shower of water. He shed his clothes by degrees, and went about his house, where he was only seen by his women, often about his fields, where he was only seen by his slaves, who did not count, in thread stockings, linen drawers and vest, with a large handkerchief tied round his head. Out of doors he would wear a hat on top of this kerchief. Of course there were occasions when he graced some state function with his presence, or twice or thrice in his life on some very important occasion he may have felt impelled to attend church, and then he would adorn his head with a wig.
Then, too, he would blossom out into a silk coat and a vest trimmed with silver.
Lesley, speaking of his arrival in Jamaica in the beginning of the eighteenth century says, “the people seem all sickly, their complexion is muddy, their colour wan and their bodies meagre, they look like so many corpses and their dress resembles a shroud.”
It must be remembered that yellow fever was rampant, and that not till the very end of the nineteenth century was the cause known. “However,” he goes on to say, “they are frank and good-humoured and make the best of life they can. If Death is more busy in this place than in many others, his approach is nowhere received with a greater unconcernedness. They live well, enjoy their friends, drink heartily, make money, and are quite careless of futurity.”
I suppose he meant the Future Life, that life beyond the Grave, of which we know nothing; but it seems to me it was the present that those past colonists played with so lightly. Many of the gentlemen were very fine and treated their inferiors—those with less of this world’s goods—with a condescension that then was the admiration of their historian, but which nowadays would make us smile. One and all, it seems, however small reason they had for it, were very haughty and insisted upon being bowed down to. If a man wished to do business with them he might get much more favourable terms if he knew how to “apply to their humour; but they who are so unhappy as to mistake it, may look for business in another place.”
It is very difficult for us to understand the feelings of the people of those times. Only after reading Mr and Mrs Hammond’s books on Labour in England between 1760 and 1830, have I dimly understood what the poor in those times suffered, what it was that filled the ships that brought bondsmen to the plantations in the West and later convicts to the colonies of the unknown South.
Meditate on this description of the upbringing of a boy in Jamaica and think what it was to trust men’s lives in such hands.
“A boy till the age of seven or eight diverts himself with the negroes, acquires their broken way of talking, their manner of behaviour, and all the vices which these unthinking creatures can teach. Then perhaps he goes to school. But young Master must not be corrected. If he learns ‘tis well, if not, it can’t be helped. After a little knowledge of reading he goes to the dancing school and commences Beau, learns the common topics of discourse and visits and rakes with his equals. This is their method.”
Here is a little bill presented at a first-rate tavern in Kingston in the year 1716 which throws a little light on the way in which one of these beaus dined. A bit, I may say, seems to have been about 7 1/2 d.
Dinner for one......5 Bits
Small beer..........1 Bit
Bottle of ale.......4 Bits
Quart of Rum punch..4 ”
Coffee..............1 ”
Lodging............23 Bits
The bill does not mention how the gentleman got to his bed, but I presume he was carried there, or maybe he slept undisturbed under the table for which they charged him “lodging.”
In Lady Nugent’s time, over eighty years later, she says: “I am not astonished at the general ill-health of the men in this country, for they really eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises.... Almost every man of the party was drunk, even to a boy of fifteen or sixteen, who was obliged to be carried home. His father was very angry, but he had no right to be so as he set the example to him.”
Surely there must be something very good in human nature, for we know there were fine men in past times. Evidently in spite of their upbringing.
Life for the women was little better. If Madam could read and write it was as much as she could do. Whatever might have been the opinion of society in the Elizabethan era, undoubtedly, until but quite a few years ago, a learned woman was looked upon askance, and a gentleman—how the word is going out of use—ever feared that he might be thought to be in any way connected with trade. Even I can remember my grandmother saying to me that no gentleman wished to write a clear hand lest people should think he had been a clerk, and as for a woman very little reading and writing was good enough for her. Reading she regarded as “waste of time” for a woman, and my grandmother was born in the end of the eighteenth century and died an old, old woman in the last quarter of the nineteenth. She prided herself—with justice—on her courtly manners, and like one of Jane Austen’s heroines, was a lady of leisure, never did I see her doing anything. She must have worked, for she was a poor woman and her house was nicely kept, but it would have been derogatory to allow even her granddaughter to see her sweeping or dusting, or cooking or washing up the crockery. I fear the ladies of the planters and their daughters had less education than even my grandmother would have thought necessary and the courtly manners were left out.
If young Master made free with the better-looking negro wenches, or, as time went on, with the mulattoes and quadroons, it made life exceedingly dull for his sisters and his neighbours’ sisters. Nay, more, it absolutely ruined their lives, and it was a cross they must bear with a smile, pretend indeed that it was a thing to which they never gave a thought. Yet these girls were brought up to think that marriage was the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life. It was, of course. Nowadays, when most careers are open to her, it is hard on a girl if she may not have the hope of marrying, and she may marry any time between twenty and forty. But if she does not marry, she may still have an important place in the world. Then if she did not marry young she was at once counted a nonentity, she had little chance of marrying at all, her life must needs be empty and she had no standing in the world.
And maturity comes so quickly in the tropics. Her time was so woefully short. Shorter than it was in the Old Country, and it was short enough there. “She had passed her first bloom,” writes Jane Austen on one occasion—and she meant it always—“she was nearly twenty.” If she had not a beau by the time she was sixteen, or were not married by eighteen or nineteen, a girl was branded as a failure, and I think there must have been many heart-burnings among the white women of Jamaica in these long ago days. The twentieth century has given women better fortune, taken away the bitterness that is the portion of the woman who, being as it were on show, is passed by as worthless.
But in the early days, because work was the portion of the slave, the lady must needs sit with idle hands. The long hot hours were interminable.
She lounged about in a loose white garment, bareheaded, barefooted, she did absolutely nothing from morning to night. The slaves brought in food, highly-spiced food, to tempt a languid appetite, and she ate it on the floor, because so it was considered more appetising; if she felt amiable she asked the slaves to share, if not, a blow or many stripes was their portion. Only when there was a chance of meeting a young man, or at least an unmarried man, did she give time and attention to her toilet and lay herself out to please. By reason of her training or lack of it, she had nothing in common with that man but thoughts of passion or pleasure. Of pleasure she might speak, though pleasure taken without work behind it, shared or understood, is very unmeaning; of passion she was supposed to know not even the meaning of the word. She must, so she thought, appear utterly ignorant on most subjects. Many and many a time a girl put on her fine clothes, tried first this colour and then that, curled her hair and powdered her face, put a touch of rouge here and a patch there, pinned down a ribbon or fluffed out a bow and went out with a sigh and a smile and ogled and coquetted as might any more fortunate dame at Bath or Tunbridge Wells.
And she hoped—for what? That perhaps at last she might find favour in some young buck’s eyes, and so be able to talk to her sisters and her friends, and above all to her brothers, as if it were she who were conferring the favour and this young man had fallen a victim to her charms. When he came awooing in earnest he likely had, for the odds were heavy against her. Marriage was out of fashion. The young planter did not wish to marry. It was an age of so-called gallantry—of intrigue, and once the negro slaves were introduced, he formed connections with his own women slaves that gave him entire satisfaction.
How often I wonder did the girl take off the gown put on with such high hopes with a bitter sense of failure, a failure that might not ever be put into words, and all the bitterer for that. And the oftener she did it, and the fainter her hopes, the more dreary would be her feelings. Her own helplessness, her own uselessness, though she would not put it that way, made her hard on the luckless girl who waited on her, made her curtail her scanty liberty, beat her, or starve her ruthlessly.
But there were not always white women in a planter’s household. Even now in Jamaica there is a proverb that says rudely that the two worst things on a pen are a goat and a white woman—that is what made these girls’ chances so poor.
Of course I am describing extreme cases. There were girls who were wooed and won, as there were women, I expect, who never neglected their toilet even when they were alone. But considering the climate, it was not unnatural they should pass the day in a dressing-gown which has been described as a sort of nightgown wrapped round them. In all the world there are born slatterns, and I can easily imagine the women of those first settlers drifting into very easy-going ways. In my own household we two women wakened at dawn and stood on the porch in our nightgowns wondering what the new day would bring. A nightgown and loose hair and bare feet seemed the proper costume. It is not too cool when the fresh morning air plays around you, it is quite enough when the heat of the day is upon you. Jamaica calls for some loose and airy costume.
I have always been curious about the indentured white servants who were brought to the plantations in the West Indies and America to do the work of artisans and labourers, and I have been able to find little about them.
The first were evidently those Irish sent out by Cromwell. And after that beginning almost every ship brought its quota of servants, as they called them, in contradistinction to the slaves.
“Scarce a ship arrives,” says Lesley, “but has passengers who design to settle, and servants for sale. This is a constant supply and a necessary one,” meaning that they considered the white race must die out unless constantly renewed. Servants in those days were always aplenty. Sometimes these servants were convicts, sometimes they were only prisoners for debt, sometimes they were political prisoners, sometimes, I am afraid, they had been kidnapped, and sometimes like a well-known man, Sir William Morgan, they had sold themselves into slavery to get away from a life in England grown intolerable. That any men should have done so throws a sinister light on the life of many men in those times, for if the life of a negro slave was hard—and God knows it must have been—in no sense can it have approached the hardships of the lot of the white bondservant.
“Another ship brought in a multitude of half-starved creatures,” writes Lesley on another occasion, “that seemed like so many skeletons. Misery appeared in their looks, and one might read the effects of sea tyranny by their wild and dejected countenances. ‘Tis horrid to relate the barbarities they complained of. A word or a wrong look was constru’d a design to Mutiny, and Hunger, Handcuffs and the Cat o’ Nine Tails was immediately the punishment.” True, he adds, “‘tis only aboard a few vessels such cruelties are practised.”
When they arrived, they were not landed at once; they must not leave the ship for at least ten days after she had entered the port. The master of the ship, merchant or importer of the white servants, had not the right to sell any before that time had elapsed under a penalty of ￡10 for every one so sold, and their keep was paid by the factor or seller. Why this was, I do not know. It might have been to give the most distant planters a chance to buy or it may have been in the interests of the servants themselves, so that any man who had been unlawfully smuggled aboard might have time in which to have his case investigated. Still, we may pity those poor bondsmen sweltering in their cramped quarters, but I suppose we may give the authorities credit for some little effort to do them justice.
Once they were landed their hard lot had begun, a path which often led straight to the grave.
There was always a shoal of buyers. Roystering Cavaliers and prim Roundheads crowded down to the ship and the servants passed before them and were examined, men and women, as if they had been so many horses or cattle. It must have been a bitter pill for the gentlemen of Monmouth’s following, fallen from their high estate and passed from hand to hand by these men whom once they would have regarded as far below them, only fit to sit at table with their servants, and bitterer still must it have been for the women. And though there was competition for them you might buy a good artisan for ￡40, an ordinary labourer for ￡20, and I am afraid the higher rank a man had held in England the lower would be his value in Jamaica, at least before negro slaves became numerous.
Every servant had to serve according to contract, if there was no contract, for four years, but if he was under eighteen he had to serve seven years, and convicted felons, of course, for the time of their banishment. Fancy buying the services of a good carpenter for ￡10 a year and his keep! It must have been cheap even when money was worth so much more.
All authorities agree that these bondservants were cruelly ill-used. It was generally understood that while a man looked after his black slave, who was his for life, it was to his interest to get as much as he could out of his bondservant whose services were his only for a limited period. Thus it was that they were worked very hard indeed, so hard that often in sheer self-defence when the end of his time was approaching, a man would prevail upon his master to re-sell him for a further term of years to some other man. And often the servant died before the years were passed. I have found no record of what a woman brought, but I expect that Madam often commissioned her husband to bring her a quiet, middle-aged woman, not too good looking—though she probably didn’t put it quite in those words—to tend the children and do the sewing. And the younger men, I expect, looked at the girls and suggested the propriety of a new waiting-maid to their fathers, or possibly, if they had houses of their own, bought them themselves. Oh, I can see bitter depths of degradation that lay in wait for some of those younger bondwomen.
One might think, considering how valuable was the worker, it would have been easy to escape and work as a free labourer. But the authorities had provided for that. At the expiration of his time his master had to give the servant ￡2 and a certificate of freedom, and whoever employed any free person without a certificate from the last employer forfeited ￡10. Who then would take any risk when for so little more he could have a servant of right?
Each servant was to receive yearly three shirts, three pairs of drawers, three pairs of shoes, three pairs of stockings, and one hat or cap, little enough in a climate like Jamaica where the need is for plenty of clothes, washed often. The women were supplied proportionately. As a matter of fact the men often had no shoes, and were dressed, says Lesley, in a speckled shirt, a coarse Osnaburg frock (Osnaburg seems to have been a coarse sort of linen, something, I take it, like the dowlas of which we make kitchen towels), buttoned at the neck and wrists, and long trousers of the same, and they had bare feet unless they could contrive sandals. The women wore generally a striped Holland gown with a plain cloth wrapped about their heads, such as every negro maid wears nowadays.
There were regulations for their feeding too. By these, each servant was to have 4 lbs. of good flesh or good fish weekly, and such convenient plantation provisions as might be sufficient. Most plantations had a “mountain” attached where the slaves grew their provisions, the cattle were turned out to recruit, and hogs were raised, and in a country like Jamaica there should have been no difficulty in supplying plenty of meat. But practically, I am afraid, it was not often supplied, and the 4 lbs. of good flesh became Irish salt beef, which was admittedly very coarse, and as it had often been months on the way, was probably a great deal nastier than it sounds.
The poor bondsman found himself hemmed in by all manner of regulations. No one could trade with a servant—or slave for that matter—without the consent of the master on penalty of forfeiting treble the value of the thing traded and ￡10 in addition. Human nature was frail, and if a freeman got a woman servant with child he had to pay ￡20 for the maintenance of the woman and child or serve the master double the time the woman was to serve. If he married her though, lucky woman, after he had paid that ￡20 she was free; if they married without the master’s consent the man had to serve two years.
True, he had some privileges this luckless bondservant. He could not be whipped on the naked back without the order of a justice of the peace under a penalty of ￡5; less, you see, than a man had to pay for trading with him without the consent of his master. And sometimes, of course, he was a favourite; Lesley says he has known servants to dine “on the same victuals as their master, wear as good clothes, be allowed a horse and a negro boy to attend them.” But to me this only emphasises how much the unfortunate servant was dependent for his comfort, his happiness, his success in life, not upon his worth but upon the caprice of the fine gentleman who was his master. If he were “stupid or roguish” he was hardly used, often put in the stocks and beaten severely, and he got nothing to eat but the salt provisions and the ground food the law insisted he should have, and at the end of his four years naturally, if his master would not give him a character, nobody could be found to employ him. His lot was worse than that of the black slave, whom custom and public opinion decreed should not be cast off in his old age whatever his record.
How low was the status of a bond-servant is told by a chance remark of Lesley’s, who says that Sir Henry Morgan was at first only a servant to a planter in Barbadoes, and “though that state of life be the meanest and most disgraceful, yet he caused to be painted round his portrait a chain and pothooks, that marked the punishment to which he was like to be subjected in those days.”
That little story made me change my opinion of Sir Henry Morgan. He climbed by piracy, and then he put down piracy with a high hand, hanging the less fortunate of his fellows. But since he was not too proud to be reminded of the lowly position from which he had sprung, there must have been reason in what he did.
The colony desired bond-servants or, more probably, white inhabitants. Any shipmaster importing fifty white servants was freed from port charges on the ship for that voyage, but they had, observe, to be male servants. They didn’t think much of women in the days of gallantry.
And others were welcome besides servants. “All tradesmen and others not able to pay their passages, except Jews, cripples, and children under eleven years of age, willing to transport themselves to this island shall be received on board any ship, and were free from any servitude.” The master received for anyone coming from England, ￡7, 10s.; from Ireland, ￡6; from New England, Carolina, and other parts of America, ￡3, 10s.; from Providence and the Windward Isles, ￡2. These sums were evidently paid to the shipowner through the master, for Lesley goes on to say that, for every person brought from Europe, the master “should have for his encouragement and to his own use the further sum of ￡1 per head, while those brought from America brought the master in 10s. ahead apiece.” And evidently these willing emigrants were set to work at once, for all rogues and vagabonds and idle persons refusing to work were to be whipped on the naked back with thirty-nine lashes, when presumably they took their place among the bondservants.
It wasn’t very easy to get out of this country that was so lavish with its invitations to come and settle. Every shipmaster had to give security of ￡1000 not to carry off any person without leave of the Governor, and anyone wishing to get leave had his name set up for twenty-one days, and had to bring a witness who had known him or her for at least a year. It was even difficult to hide, for if a servant or hired labourer hid another man’s servant or slave, he forfeited one year’s service to the master or had thirty-nine lashes on the bare back.
And that is all I can find about these unwilling immigrants. Not one person that ever I heard of owns to having descended from them, and what is more extraordinary still, tradition does not point at any man as having among his forebears one who so arrived in the colony. All trace of them is lost. Naturally, perhaps. No one owns to a convict grandfather or great grandfather, even if the conviction were only for knocking down a rabbit.
Still, in after years, no one would have been ashamed at having a follower of Monmouth for an ancestor. But I have heard of none such. If these bond-servants died they were forgotten, and if they made good, as some must have done, they were absorbed into the population.
As the black slaves became commoner the value of the white bondsmen was enhanced, for the slaves were always a menace, and there was a law by which every owner of slaves had to keep one white man, servant, overseer, or hired man, for the first five working slaves; for ten slaves, two whites, and two whites for every ten more, and these had to be resident on the plantation, so that these bondsmen became either overseers or book-keepers, if they had not skill enough to be blacksmiths or carpenters. And then, I think, it was that the bondsman had his chance.
Book-keepers or artisans were not supposed, even when they were free men, to speak to the planter’s daughter. Their social standing was by no means good enough, and it was a time when class differences were very marked.
But youth is youth, and if the girl had no hope of a lover among her own class, and indeed even if she had, I expect the good looking young bondsman was often encouraged by an arch look or a melting glance to a closer acquaintance. It ended—well in one way. She ran away with him, or possibly there was nowhere to run to, and a man cannot go far without money, so—the tropical nights are made for love-making. Presently, if the father and the mother were not wise, there was a scandal and some poor servant had ill-merited stripes.
But sometimes, I think, the planter was wise. Quite likely the bondsman, especially if he had been a political prisoner, was far better educated and better mannered than the girl running wild on the estate. Some provision would be made for the young couple, the lad would get his freedom, and in some house a little more sequestered in the hills, they would start housekeeping with a cane patch and black servants of their own.
This is entirely my own idea. I can find no record whatever of such a marriage. All trace of the bond-servants has vanished as completely as though they had never been, but this is the way I interpret Lesley’s remark, “At last for the most part run away with the most insignificant of their humble servants!”
But that lucky man was only one out of hundreds.
Many and many an unhappy being, I am afraid, crawled away from a servitude grown too hard, and died beneath the tangle of palms and tropical greenery among the mountains of Jamaica.
For they died prematurely—we know they died. Even the ruling class died like flies often before they had reached their prime, and each and all set down the abnormal death rate to the pestilential climate. Really Jamaica has a beautiful climate, but they did not understand in those days the danger of the mosquito, and they thought the night air was deadly. All classes drank, the masters “Madera” and rum, and the servants rum that was doubtless not of the best. It is easy to sneer, but human nature needs some relaxation, and living on beef that was like brine, sleeping all night in a room from which the night air was carefully excluded, the gorgeous divine night of Jamaica, and overworked in the burning sun, we can hardly blame these bondsmen for drinking. They watered the cane pieces with their sweat and blood, and they died—died—died! They were not even pioneers. They were simply bond-servants on whom no one wasted pity.
It seems to me that pity, that true pity which is not half-sister to contempt, but has eyes for suffering humanity, and the will to better things was hardly born among the majority till after the Great War. Now at last is the worker coming into his own, and if he wax fat and kick like the gentleman in Holy Writ, I think we must forgive him, for long has he served.