It is very difficult to understand the attitude towards trivial offences of people who lived in a time when the death penalty was legally inflicted for breaking down the banks of a fish pond, stealing anything over the value of a shilling from the person, or illegally felling trees.

With the last clause I have some sympathy. I sometimes feel I could cheerfully see the death penalty inflicted upon whoever was responsible for making Jamaican towns bare of trees, for decreeing that telephone and telegraph wires are of more importance than shade, and for clearing all the country roads so that a tropical sun makes them a purgatory for the unfortunate traveller, when Nature herself has arranged so much more wisely.

But that is somehow in another dimension, and I quite realise when white people were so hard on each other as they were a hundred years ago, we could not expect much consideration from them for the men they held in bondage.

The first negroes were brought to serve and for nothing else. There was some faint talk of making them Christians and saving their souls, but I am afraid it was of their untilled cape-pieces the planters were thinking when they crowded down to the reeking slave ships. They who believed, if they gave the matter a thought, that any being who died unbaptized went out into outer darkness for eternity—only neither they nor we can grasp eternity—gave no welcome to the men who presently came to teach their slaves. They objected. Well, even in this year of our Lord 1922, I have actually, yes actually heard a woman, who certainly should have known better, declare: “You know, my dear, this teaching of the lower classes is really a great mistake. It lifts them out of their own class.”

In all the mass of literature I have waded through about Jamaica I have met no one till I arrived at Matthew Lewis, writing of 1816, who looked at the negro with what we may call modern eyes. The Abolitionists patronised; they had an object in view, a great object, truly, but it was the cause for which they fought. Lewis was much more reasonable and sensible. We can read him as we might read a man of to-day, on the conditions around him. He saw Jamaica as I and people like me see it, and weighed both sides and held the balance true, for he is far less hampered by tradition than we might expect.

He landed at Savanna-la-Mar, which lies right upon the sea-shore, a sea-shore on which there is no cliff, and where the boundaries of land and water are by no means clearly defined. A wild tropical storm swept over it while I was there, and I thought of Matthew Lewis as the rain came slanting down the wide street, turning the scene into one dreary grey whole; sky, sea, land, we could hardly have told one from the other but for the houses that loomed up, grey blotches on the universal greyness. There were no trees, barely a sign of the riotous tropical vegetation, though presently the sun would be out in all his pride, and the whole town would be craving for a little shade. But like many English colonists, the people of Savanna-la-Mar have decided that beauty, the beauty of trees and growing things, is not necessary in their town. If you want shade, what about corrugated iron?

I don’t know what Savanna-la-Mar was like when Matthew Lewis landed there, but it was celebrating its holidays, the New Year of 1816, when the great gentleman arrived.

“Soon after nine o’clock we reached Savanna-la-Mar, where I found my trustee and a whole cavalcade awaiting to conduct me to my estate. He had brought with him a curricle and a pair for myself, a gig for my servant, two black boys upon mules, and a cart with eight oxen to convey my baggage.”

It took a good deal to move a gentleman with dignity a hundred years ago. Nowadays it would have been: “We’ll send the car for you, and your heavier baggage can come on by mule cart. You won’t want it for a day or two, will you?”

And here he gives us the sort of picture to which we have become accustomed in reading about the good old times of slavery.

“Whether the pleasure of the negroes was sincere may be doubted”—a wise man and a human was Matthew Lewis. He really does not see any reason why the slaves should be fond of him or make a fuss over him, “but certainly it”—the welcome—“was the loudest that ever I witnessed; they all talked together, sang, danced, shouted, and in the violence of their gesticulations tumbled over each other and rolled on the ground. Twenty voices at once enquired after uncles and aunts and grandfathers and great-grandmothers of mine who had been buried long before I was in existence, and whom I verily believe most of them only knew by tradition. One woman held up her little black child to me, grinning from ear to ear.

“Look, massa, look here! Him nice lilly neger for massa.” Another complained—

“So long since none come see we, massa. Good massa, come at last.”

He rather liked it though.

“All this may be palaver, but certainly they at least play their parts with such an air of truth and warmth and enthusiasm, that after the cold-hearted and repulsive manners of England this contrast is infinitely agreeable.”

He went to a lodging-house first, and there he was met by a remarkably clean-looking negro lad with water and a towel. Lewis took it for granted that he belonged to the house. The lad waited some time and at last he said:

“Massa not know me; me your slave.”

And here for the first time we find someone who feels uncomfortable at holding another in bondage.

“The sound made me feel a pang at the heart,” he writes. And not because the boy was sad. Stirring within the poet was some feeling concerning the rights of man.

“The lad appeared all gaiety and good humour, and his whole countenance expressed anxiety to recommend himself to my notice; but the word ‘slave’ seemed to imply that although he did feel pleasure then in serving me, if he had detested me he must have served me still. I really felt quite humiliated at the moment, and was tempted to tell him.

“Do not say that again; say that you are my negro, but do not call yourself my slave.”

And then again, when he was established in the house, which he has left it on record was frightful to look at but very clean and comfortable inside, he remarks:

“This morning a little brown girl made her appearance with an orange bough to flap away the flies.”

It had been impressed upon him that he courted death if he drank orangeade, if he walked in the morning after ten or went out in the cool of the evening, “be exposed to the dews after sundown” they put it. But he dares to write: “The air too was delicious, the fragrance of the sweetwood and other scented trees, but above all of the delicious logwood of which most of the fences in Westmoreland are made, composed an atmosphere such that if Satan after promising them a buxom air embalmed with odours, had transported Sin and Death thither the charming people must acknowledge their papa’s promise fulfilled.” It reads quaintly now. Sin—sin is so much a matter of the standard we set up. If the slave had copied the planter, no master would have considered him anything but a very sinful slave; and death—death is often very, very kindly.

Lewis enquires into the condition of the people. His attorney had written to him regularly of the care he expended on the negroes, but he had been away much of his time managing other estates, and had delegated his authority to an overseer who treated the people so harshly that at last they left the estate in a body and threw themselves on the protection of the magistrate at Savanna-la-Mar, “and if I had not come myself to Jamaica, in all probability I should never have had the most distant idea how abominably the poor creatures had been ill-used.”

Now this marks a distinct advance since the times when the savages, speaking a jargon no one cared to understand, were driven to work with a whip.

Lewis, to the intense surprise of his compeers, objected to the use of the whip.

“I am, indeed, assured by everyone about me, that to manage a West Indian estate without the occasional use of a cart whip, however rarely, is impossible; and they insist upon it that it is absurd in me to call my slaves ill-treated, because when they act grossly wrong they are treated like English soldiers and sailors. All this may be very true; but there is something to me so shocking in the idea of this execrable cart whip that I have positively forbidden the use of it on Cornwall; and if the estate must go to rack and ruin without it, to rack and ruin the estate must go.”

But, of course, all men were not as broadminded as Lewis. Bridges, who wrote twelve years later, could never mention a negro without adding some disparaging adjective, “the vigilance which African perfidy requires.”

“Experience proves that a strange uniformity of barbarism pervades them all; and that the only difference lies in the degrees of the same base qualities which mark the negro race throughout.”

“The salutary measures were of little avail in winning over by indulgence, or restraining by terror the impracticable savages of Africa.” Such are a few of the gems dispersed through his work. He could see no good in a black man, except that his thews and sinews were necessary to the development of the country, and he grudged them even that measure of praise.

In the ten years between 1752 and 1762, 71,115 negroes arrived in the island, “forced upon Jamaica by British merchants and English laws,” says he, though when England wanted to stop this inflow and to prohibit the slave trade, the Jamaican planters objected very strongly. They wanted these unwilling colonists. But since the majority of them were men, young, strong and lusty, and the Europeans were but a handful, it was necessary they should be ruled with a rod of iron. Bridges probably was right when he says that any relaxation was promptly attributed to fear. They had to be governed by fear and the people who are governed by fear, are crushed, broken, destroyed. How thoroughly destroyed we may see by reading statistics of the increase among the slaves, once the importation from Africa had ceased.

This whip that Lewis abolished was used on all occasions. A man was beaten because he did not work, and women were beaten till the blood flowed, because they suckled their babies during working hours, which extended, be it remembered, from five in the morning till seven at night—by law—with an interval of half an hour for breakfast and two hours for the mid-day meal. The women would protest that the little things were hungry and cried, but if the overseer or book-keeper were not kind that was no excuse. Presently there came a law that no slave was to receive more than thirty-nine lashes at once. It was time. They are said on occasion to have received more than 500. But there were ways of getting over the new law. There were men who kept within the letter and yet inflicted fiendish punishment. There is a story told of Barbadoes:

Two officers, Major Pitch and Captain Cook, hearing terrible cries, broke open a door and there found a negro girl chained to the floor being flogged by her master. The brute got out of their avenging hands—I am glad to think there was some pity in that world—but he cried exultingly that he had only given her the thirty-nine lashes allowed by the law at one time, and that he had only inflicted this number three times since the beginning of the night, and that he intended to give her the fourth thirty-nine before morning. This was long before Lewis’s time. It was told by Wilberforce, when pleading for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

There were tales enough, of course, of this description and the case against the planters—some of them—was pretty bad. A youth of nineteen was found wandering about the streets of Bridgetown, Barbadoes, by General Tottenham in the year 1780. “He was entirely naked, with an iron collar about his neck having five long projecting spikes. His body both before and behind was covered with wounds. His belly and thighs were almost cut to pieces with running ulcers all over them; and a finger might have been laid in some of the weals. He could not sit down, because his hinder part was mortified and he could not lie down on account of the prongs of his collar. He supplicated the General for relief, for his master had said as he could not work neither should he eat.”

And the people of Bridgetown did not rise up and slay that inhuman monster! It took a long while for the West Indian planter to understand that a slave had any rights.

Clarkson tells a tale of a master who wantonly cut the mouth of a child of six months old almost from ear to ear. Times were changing, and he was brought to task for it. But the idea of calling masters to account was entirely novel.

“Guilty,” said the jury, “subject to the opinion of the Court if immoderate correction of a slave by his master be a crime indictable.”

The Court decided it was indictable and fined him ￡1, 5s.!

And yet that judgment is a great advance upon the times when the negro, as Mr Francis said in Parliament, was without Government protection and subject to the mere caprice of men who were at once the parties, the judges, and the executioners. He instanced an overseer who, having thrown a negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice for a trifling offence, was punished merely by the loss of his place, and by being obliged to pay the value of the slave thus done to death. He told of another instance, a girl of fourteen who was dreadfully whipped for coming late to her work. She fell down motionless, and was then dragged along the ground by the legs to the hospital, where she died. The murderer, though tried, was acquitted by a jury of his peers, because it was impossible that a master could destroy his own property!

Here is a story told by Mr Pitt at the same time. A passer-by heard the piercing shrieks of a woman coming from an outhouse and determined to see what was going on. On looking in he saw a girl tied up to a beam by her wrists, she was entirely naked, and was swinging backwards and forwards while her owner was standing below her with a lighted torch in his hand, which he applied to all parts of her body!

On the other hand, Mr Edwards told a story to the Assembly of Jamaica, of how some risen slaves surrounded the house of their mistress, who was in bed with her newborn child beside her. Imagine the poor woman shrinking down amidst the pillows, and round the bed these black savages with wild bloodshot eyes and cruel, grasping hands. The very smell of their naked bodies, their rags stained with blood and rum, would strike terror to her heart. They deliberated in their jargon how they could best put her to death in torment. But in the end one of them decided to keep her for his mistress. The vile broken patois they spoke made so much intelligible to her, and then snatching the child from her protecting arms they killed it with an axe before the poor mother’s eyes.

We can sympathise with the man who felt that no torments were too great for savages such as these, and with others who were certain that a repetition of such atrocities must be guarded against at any cost.

And so by a law passed in the West Indies in 1722, “any Negro or other slave withdrawing himself from his master for the term of six months, or any slave who was absent and did not return within that time every such person should suffer death.”

And coming back, of course, he might suffer a good deal. So that the unfortunate slave was ever between the devil and the deep sea. But slowly as we read the records, we can see the status of first the coloured man, and then the black man improving. In the beginning these Africans who up till the Abolition of the Slave Trade could speak but little English, and always spoke to each other in their own tongues, were simply dumb beasts of burden, necessary for the improvement of the colony, even as a certain number of horses and cattle and other stock were necessary. Always they were treated as inferior beings, even when they were desperately feared. Gossipy Lady Nugent talks of them as one would an intelligent, rather lovable dog or horse, and spares a little pity for their hard lot.

“The mill is turned by water,” she writes about a visit to a sugar estate, “and the cane being put in on one side, comes out in a moment on the other, quite like dry pith, so rapidly is all the juice expressed, passing between two cylinders turning round the contrary ways. You then see the juice running through a great gutter, which conveys it to the boiling house. There are always four negroes stuffing in the canes, while others are employed continually in bringing in great bundles of them.... At each cauldron in the boiling house was a man with a large skimmer upon a long pole, constantly stirring the sugar and throwing it from one cauldron to another. The man at the last cauldron called out continually to those below attending the fire to throw on more trash, etc., for if the heat relaxes in the least, all the sugar in the cauldron is spoiled.... I asked the overseer how often his people were relieved. He said every twelve hours; but how dreadful to think of their standing twelve hours over a boiling cauldron, and doing the same thing.” (A woman before her time was Lady Nugent.) “And he owned to me that sometimes they did fall asleep and get their poor fingers into the mill; and he showed me a hatchet that was always ready to sever the whole limb, as the only means of saving the poor sufferer’s life. I would not have a sugar estate for the whole world!”

This perhaps explains why in the slave books the slaves seem to be so often lame in a hand, or with only one hand. And yet there was no possibility of refusing the work. They must do it.

Lady Nugent pitied, Matthew Lewis tried to remedy, the evils. He was particularly kindly, and was hated by the planters as making dangerous innovations in the management of an estate, and allowi............