I can hardly say it too often—in reading about the slaves and their sufferings we must remember that past ages had different standards, and that, although undoubtedly the slaves suffered horribly it was the custom of the times, and other people suffered as well. Even at the beginning of this century, coming to England from a land where the working man could always make enough to keep himself in decency and comfort, I was shocked and horrified at the condition of the poorer classes in the great cities of England. In London, in Liverpool, in the Five Towns, and more particularly in Sheffield, was I dismayed at the low standard of the working man or woman. It seemed to me they were slaves in a bitter cold and cheerless country, and as far as I could see, for I had my living to earn and no time to investigate, they had no hope of bettering their condition.
And my Australian eyes were not the only ones that saw the people so. E. Nesbit, who writes so charmingly, once wrote a story in which the children, either by means of a magic carpet or a reanimated phoenix, brought back Queen Semiramis to visit the earth and took her for a ride on top of an omnibus through the London streets.
“How badly you keep your slaves?” said the Queen.
“Oh, there are no slaves in England,” said the children. I quote from memory but this is the gist of the story.
“Stuff and nonsense, children!” said the Queen. “Don’t tell me! Think I don’t know a slave when I see him!”
E. Nesbit is quite right. We cannot see fairly and in their true colours the things to which use has deadened our sensibilities. It must have seemed quite natural for the planters of Jamaica to be pleased when a slave ship arrived. The news would go round at once, and as the ships were not very big they came to ports that only a coaster visits nowadays. To Kingston, of course, to Montego Bay, but they also went to Savanna la Mar and to Black River and other places that dream idly in the sunshine now and get their stores by motor boats and schooners.
Probably the planter grumbled and growled and said the stench of such a ship was enough to knock you down, and that he hated the job, but he had to have hands, and in a way he enjoyed the outing and the gathering together of his own kind. No one, I think, for one moment thought of the sufferings of the slaves; they grumbled, as men do nowadays because a pig-stye smells. Occasionally a farmer, wiser than the rest, declares the swine should be kept clean, but one and all, grumblers and wise men, are sure they need bacon. And so it was with the sale of the black cattle.
They were savages. Occasionally, perhaps, a highly bred and educated man from the north might be mixed up with them, but as a rule the slaves imported were the merest barbarians. It is no good thinking they were anything else. It is true enough what the advocates of slavery always maintained, that through their enslaving they did get a glimpse of better things. An Ashanti woman with her shaven head and a cloth wrapped round her middle, beating fu-fu, is certainly not as far advanced in the social scale as the milkmaid clambering down the steep hillside to Montego Bay and saving her pennies to buy herself smart clothes in which to go to church. But it is also certain that the men who imported her forbears were thinking only of their own convenience.
There was a tremendous cleaning up on board on arrival; salt water was aplenty, and the slaves were doctored, their sores were attended to, and they were given palm oil and coconut oil with which to anoint themselves. They must have been thankful to come out of their cramped quarters and bask on deck in the sunshine, but they must have feared. One historian has left it on record that the planters who came down to buy had often celebrated the arrival and were so gloriously drunk that the scramble for the goods was disgraceful and the unfortunate Helots must have thought they had fallen into the hands of cannibals and were to be despatched forthwith.
The planters, when they were able, visited the ships to see the new importations and decide for which they should bid at the coming sale, but in later times the slaves were taken straight to the vendue master and sold in the public slave market. There used to be a large slave market at Montego Bay, quite close to the water, so that the merchandise might be rowed ashore, and the gentlemen from Success and Contentment and Retrieve, from Iron Shore and Retirement and True Friendship—thus they name plantations in Jamaica—came crowding to fill up the gaps in their hands, to buy Madam a serving wench, or young master a boy to wait upon him.
They stood there in rows, naked savages, men and women with clean cloths round their loins, and boys and girls stark. Their shackles had generally been struck off because a quiet and peaceable slave was more valued than one who had to be kept in restraint. There were shade trees growing round the marketplace, and the sun flickered down through their leaves and made patterns on the shapely dark bodies, and the buyers examined them exactly as they would have examined a horse or a cow they wanted to buy.
The buyers had certain preferences. In spite of an evil reputation, “the Koromantyns,” says Bryan Edwards, “are distinguished from all others by firmness both of body and mind, a ferociousness of disposition; but withal, activity, courage, and stubbornness,” and this, while it made them dangerous, made them good labourers. The Papams or Whidahs, those who came from the coasts between Accra and all along by Keta and Togoland and Dahomey, “are accounted most docile.” The Eboes from Calabar and the swamps round the mouths of the Niger “were valued the least, being feeble, timid, despairing creatures, who not infrequently used to commit suicide in their dejection,” which perhaps was not surprising if they could not work and knew what they had to expect if they did not.
The people from the Gaboon country, at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea, were said to be invariably ill-disposed, and lastly, those from the Congo and farther south from the coasts of Angola, though counted less robust than the other negroes, were more handy as mechanics, and more trustworthy. So the gentlemen, crowding to the sales, had some idea of the quality of the goods they had come to buy.
The value of a slave increased as the years went on. In 1689, I believe, a slave could be bought for ￡7, but of course ￡7 was a great deal more money then than it is now. Then a good negro rose to ￡20. In 1750 a planter writes, “Bought ten negroes at ￡50 each”—which, Edwards says, was the common price in 1791; boys and girls cost from ￡40 to ￡45, while an infant was worth ￡5. After that they rose in value rapidly, and before Edwards had finished his history in his estimate of the expenses of a sugar plantation, he values the negroes at ￡70 apiece; while in 1832, just before the Emancipation, when the planters expected compensation for the loss of their labour, the value of a slave sometimes rose as high as ￡110 per man.
Because of the perquisites of the officers, only the healthy slaves were offered for sale at first, but the sick, injured, and weakly were by no means wasted. Indeed, even in those hard-bitten times, the disposal of the sickly slaves was often considered a scandal. They were generally bought up by speculators who sometimes tended them, sometimes did not, simply made what they could out of them. If the lot of the healthy slaves was hard, that of the newly arrived and sickly was terrible, till death released them from their sufferings. And in every ship we may be sure there were sick.
I do not find any record of slave risings on the arrival of the ships. It seems as if the black men, dazed and frightened, unaccustomed to their new surroundings, submitted quietly enough. It was not until they were on the estates, had time to look round them, had hoes and knives and machetes put into their hands, that they realised the comparative weakness of the whites, and the chance they had of freedom. They might be met any day, a band of stalwart black savages clad only in loin cloths, the women, apart with their babies seated on their hips, leading older children by the hand, marching along the white roads, clambering up the steep mountain paths to the estate that was to be their destination, with a white man on horseback following slowly, and one, or two, or three black drivers, according to the number of the new slaves, with whips, old slaves who could be trusted, marshalling them. Sometimes they sang, and always they went better to some sort of music, but I do not think they were often very rebellious. The first bitterness of the enslavement had passed. Here was solid ground beneath their feet again, a companion they were accustomed to, beside them, pleasant sunshine and a cooling breeze, and it might be worth their while to see what the future held for them.
Arrived at the estate, the newcomers were very often handed over individually to some slave accustomed to the plantation, who showed them the ropes, and possibly heard tales of the country from which he had been torn long ago.
They were practically dumb these first comers. They did not understand the language; even the old hands only grasped the words of command, and though they thoroughly understood the uses to which a knife might be put, a hoe they would certainly regard as a woman’s implement.
Of course their masters took no heed of that, any more than they considered the slave’s feelings when they made over a fierce Ashanti or Mendi warrior to a mild Joloff, or gave a Mandingo from the north, who was likely to be a Mohammedan and might even be able to read and write Arabic, into the charge of an Eboe, who was a savage pure and simple, and probably remained a savage after years of plantation labour. To do them justice, I expect these gentlemen from Amity, or Rose Hall, or Good Hope, had about as much idea of the map of Africa as I have of the contour of the Antarctic Continent—less very likely; and that these people were separated as widely by the countries of their birth as they themselves were from England, never occurred to them. I don’t suppose they would have bothered if it had. But certain differences were forced upon them. And for the proper working of their plantations, they must needs take note of those differences. As a rule, they were not intentionally cruel, but they regarded the slaves as chattels.
There is a story told by Bryan Edwards, to illustrate the superior pluck of the Koromantyns, but it also shows us the standing of a slave very well indeed:—
“A gentleman of my acquaintance who had purchased at the same time ten Koromantyn boys, and the like number of Eboes, the eldest of the whole apparently not more than thirteen years of age—caused them all to be collected and brought before him in my presence to be marked on the breast. This operation is performed by heating a small silver brand, composed of one or two letters, in the flame of spirits of wine, and applying it to the skin which is previously anointed with sweet oil. The application is instantaneous and the pain momentary.” So Mr Bryan Edwards but he was in no danger from a branding iron. “Nevertheless, it may be easily supposed that the apparatus must have a frightful appearance to a child. Accordingly, when the first boy, who happened to be one of the Eboes, and the stoutest of the whole, was led forward to receive the mark, he screamed dreadfully, while his companions of the same nation manifested strong emotions of sympathetic terror. The gentleman stopped his hand. But the Koromantyn boys, laughing aloud, and immediately coming forward of their own accord, offered their bosoms undauntedly to the brand, and receiving its impression without flinching in the least, snapped their fingers in exultation over the poor Eboes.”
The natives of Africa are often much worse marked than any small silver brand could mark them merely by way of ornament, and many a time do we see white men who have submitted to the more painful operation of tattooing merely for—well, when I’m put to it I really don’t know why a white man allows himself to be tattooed.
You will find it said that the majority of people were good to their slaves, that it was their interest to be good to them. True, but unfortunately we have only to look round us to see how often nowadays a horse, or indeed any helpless creature dependent upon some careless man’s good-will, is ill-used, even though ultimately that ill-usage means a loss to the owner. And so it was in Jamaica: a man did the best he could for his slaves, his favourites were pampered, but when it came to a pinch the slaves suffered. There was a terrible famine in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth century; England had decreed that there should be no trade with her revolted colonies, supplies were therefore more restricted than they need have been, and it is recorded that the slaves died by thousands. Again and again we are told how, even in normal times, the slave spent his midday rest hour either in the bush picking berries and wild fruits with which to supplement his scanty fare, or else in searching the rubbish heap at the planters’ door for gnawed bones which were ground small and boiled down to get what sustenance there was in them. No one troubled about a slave; some men would get a reputation for ill-treating their slaves, but no one thought of interfering.
Besides, as I have remarked before, the pens and estates were so isolated. Anything might have happened to a slave on one of those estates, and it would have been long before rumour carried the tale to the next estate.
And there was another side of the picture, the side at which the planter looked, especially when he thought of bringing a wife to his lonely Great House set high on a hill-top or a jutting rock. He was surrounded by some hundreds of these alien people, dumbly resentful of their condition—he didn’t put it like that—ill-conditioned ruffians he probably called them, and he never knew when the worst might not influence the rest. And they were armed with machetes and knives and hoes and spades, for purposes of agriculture certainly, but agricultural implements make excellent weapons of offence in the hands of a fierce Timini or Krobo warrior. “He travels the fastest who travels alone,” as Kipling sings, and many a man thanked God he had no wife or children.
He took to himself one of the dark women, and in later times there were the mulattoes and quadroons to be had for the choosing.
We can easily see why the presence of a white woman was resented upon an estate. If the owner chose to live with some brown or yellow girl he naturally objected to his underlings choosing a mode of life which would be a reproach to him, and if he brought out a wife all those who had no wives felt that Madam exercised an undue espionage over their mode of life.
“In my drive this morning met several of the unfortunate half black progeny of some of our staff,” writes Lady Nugent, “all in fine muslin lace, &c., with wreaths of flowers in their hats. What ruin for these worse than thoughtless, young men.” If she wrote thus, she probably did not refrain from comment at the time, and doubtless her comment was resented.
“Soon after my arrival,” writes Matthew Lewis, “I asked my attorney” (an attorney in Jamaica is the man who manages the estate for an absentee owner) “whether a clever-looking woman who seemed to have great authority in the house belonged to me.”
“‘No, she was a free woman.’
“‘Was she in my service then?’
“‘No, she was not in my service; I began to grow impatient.
“‘But what does she do at Cornwall? Of what use is she in the house?’
“‘Why, sir, as to use, of great use, sir’; and then, after a pause, added in a lower voice, ‘It is the custom, sir, for unmarried men to have housekeepers, and Nancy is mine.’”
Lewis wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth century a little after Lady Nugent, and putting all these little stories together, we get a complete picture of the Jamaican estate as it must have been for close on two hundred years.
The black people, naked at first and later clad in rags, lived in a little village some distance from the Great House where dwelt their master, and the bond between them was the woman he took from amongst them for his convenience. The villages were of palm-thatched houses with walls of swish or of wattle, and were very often surrounded by a wall, for if the owner valued his privacy so did the dweller in the village, and presently around them grew up a grove of trees planted by the negro sometimes by design, sometimes by accident; there were coconut palms and naseberries, tall leafy trees, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks to Bligh and Marshall, breadfruit and mango trees, the handsomest trees, perhaps, that bear fruit, and there were oranges and lemons with their fragrant blossoms.
“I never witnessed on the stage a scene,” says Lewis, “so picturesque as a negro village.... If I were to decide according to my own taste I should infinitely have preferred their habitations to my own. Each house is surrounded by a separate garden, and the whole village is intersected by lanes bordered with all kinds of sweet-smelling and flowering plants.” Certainly he was fortunate. The villages on his estate must have been model ones. I have been up and down the land and I have never seen a negro village that in my eyes did not badly need cleaning up. There is no reason why the houses should not be delightful, but they are not. In those old days, the days long before Lewis, they were a danger, of course. Of sanitation there was none. Even now about a peasant’s house in Jamaica there is often an unpleasant smell from the rotting waste that is scattered around; then it must have been much worse, but what could you expect, when the masters themselves regarded bad smells and rotting waste as all in the day’s work? In the old slave-trading castles on the Guinea Coast there was always a well in the courtyard, a very necessary precaution, surrounded as the traders were by hostile tribes, but they also buried their dead in the courtyard and it never seems to have occurred to them that by such a practice they might possibly be arranging for a constant supply of graves. Sloane, I think it is, puts it on paper that, but for the John Crows—a small vulture—he does not think the towns in Jamaica would have been habitable.
The fields where the slaves grew cassava and yams and chochos and cocos were usually at some distance from the village, “on the mountain,” which meant the rougher and more stony hill ground at a distance from the Great House. According to custom one acre of ground was planted for every five negroes, and they were allowed to work on it one day a week.
And very gradually, the descendants of the naked savages who had been brought so unwillingly came to feel that they belonged to the land—it was their country. It was said that all the outbreaks were led by the newly-imported slaves, and that the Creoles, those born in the colony, were contented enough. They had many wrongs, but undoubtedly they loved the place of their birth, and felt deeply being sent away or sold. They pitied, as from a higher plane, the book-keeper who had to go. It is curious to learn that when a white underling was dismissed, the gangs—these slaves who must stay whether they liked it or not—would sing:
“Massa turn poor buckra away ho!
But Massa can’t turn poor neger away oh!”
We see that they must have looked at their position from a different view-point from that we naturally take now.
I have read through two or three books of records of such estates as Worthy Park and Rose Hall, and in them the slaves are enumerated in exactly the same fashion as the cattle on the next page. The Worthy Park book I found specially interesting. It was an old brown leather-covered book, 18 inches long by 1 foot broad, and round it clung—or so it seemed to me—an unrestful emanation, as if the men who wrote in it were discontented and found life a vexatious thing.
This slave book begins—and the beginning is written in a very clear clerkly hand; I expect my grandmother would have placed the writer’s status exactly—with a description of the lands, 3150 acres, held by the original owner of Worthy Park, John Price, Esq., of Penzance, England; he was an absentee owner, and there is no record in the book of his ever having visited his estate. George Doubt was the superintendent, and lived at the Great House; but whether it was he who made those first entries, there is no means of knowing. He certainly did not make them all, for the handwriting varies, and there were no less than six overseers in the five years, the book records, between 1787 and 1792. And the ink and the paper reflect credit on the makers, for though browned with time the writing is perfectly legible, and the pages are stout still.
Once the limits of the estate are laid down, we come to the stock upon it—the negroes, the mules, the horses, the oxen; and every quarter returns were made to the Vestry of the Parish. This, I think, because a tax of 6d. a head had to be paid upon every slave; and for the safety of the public a certain number of white men had to be kept, capable of bearing arms.
The white men were always changing, with the exception of George Doubt, so I conclude either that that superintendent was a hard man, or that John Price, comfortable in his English home, drove him hard; for even for those times the pay seems to have been poor. What Doubt got I do not know, but the overseer got ￡200 a year, and of course his board and lodging; the surgeon got ￡140 per annum; the book-keeper and distiller ￡50 per annum, and the ordinary book-keepers ￡30 per annum each. It was no catch to be a book-keeper in those days. As a rule he had nothing to do with books, but he did all the little jobs that could not be entrusted to the slaves. He served out the corn for the feeding of the fowls, kept count of the rats that were killed, and went into the cane-fields with the negro drivers. He had to be out in the fields so early that his breakfast was sent out to him.
A negro wench, complained a long-suffering young man, brought him his breakfast—a bottle of cold coffee, two herrings, and a couple of boiled plantains stuck on a fork. It does not sound luxurious, and ￡30 a year did not hold out much hope of bettering himself.
Among the stock the negroes come before the cattle, and are described in much the same language.
“A General List of Negroes on, and belonging to, Worthy Park Plantation, taken the 1st January 1787.”
The page is divided into three columns, headed respectively, “Names, Qualifications, and Conditions”; and underneath, “Quashie, Head Carpenter, Able,” at the top of a long list that is never less than 340 and sometimes rises to 360 names. There were 6 Carpenters, numbering among them Mulatto Aleck, and 2 learning; there were 2 Sawyers, 1 Joiner and Cabinet Maker, 1 Blacksmith, Mulatto John, 1 Mason, Mulatto Billy, and 1 learning, 3 Drivers, 1 man in the Garden who was marked Old and Infirm, 5 Wain men, 3 Boilers, a Head mule man, and 138 others, ending with children too young to be of any use.
The names are various, and do not differ very much from those of the cattle numbered a few pages further on. Prussia, the Head mule man, is Able, Minuith is Distemper’d, and eight Macs, beginning with MacDonald, and ending with MacLean, are all Able. Nero is a field-labourer and Able, and Don’t Care, a wain man, is Able. Further on there is a steer named Why Not? Waller, the Head boiler, is sickly, and Johnston, a field-labourer, is subject to “Fitts.” Dryden is Able, but Elderly. Punch and Bacchus are Elderly and Weakly, which seems wrong somehow, and Ishmael is Infirm and a Runaway. Italy is Able, Spain is Distemper&rsqu............