Considering that every Great House was surrounded by hundreds of these alien dark people, most of them dumbly resentful of their condition, it is to me a little surprising that the white man ever brought out his wife and children to share his home. And yet he did sometimes. Of course, nothing is more certain than that we grow accustomed to a danger that is always threatening. There are people who take matches into powder factories and those who dwell on the slopes of Vesuvius and Etna. From the earliest days the Jamaicans had been used to forced labour, they were very sure they could not work the plantations without it, and that the slaves had to be broken in and guarded, came all in the day’s work.
The first difficulty after the buying of the slaves was what they called the “seasoning.” The earlier settlers first used the word, but it came to be applied specially to the settling down of the slaves, though it seems to me simply to mean the survival of the fittest. A certain number of newly arrived slaves were sure to die. It was not the climate that killed them, but the breaking in of a free savage unaccustomed to work, at least not to work with the regularity, and at the times the white man expected of him. He was an exile, he was lonely, he was driven to this hated work with the whip, he could not understand what was said to him, he could not make his wants known, and soon realised it would avail him little if he did, and he pined and died.
In Lesley’s time, and I am afraid long after, the slaves were grossly underfed.
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“‘Tis sad,” he writes, “to see the mean shifts to which these poor creatures are reduced. You’ll see them daily about twelve o’clock when they turn in from work scraping the dunghills at every gentleman’s door” (I do like that touch) “for bones which they break extremely small, boil and eat the broth.” He adds that he hardly cares to speak of their sufferings because of the regard he had for their masters. And then he goes on to do so. He says that the most trivial error was punished with a terrible whipping, “I have seen some of them treated in that cruel manner for no other reason but to satisfy the brutish pleasure of an overseer.... I have seen their bodies in a Gore of Blood, the Skin torn off their backs with the cruel Whip, beaten, Pepper and Salt rubbed on the Wounds and a large stick of Sealing Wax dropped leisurely upon them. It is no wonder if the horrid pain of such inhuman tortures incline them to rebel; at the same time it must be confessed they are very perverse, which is owing to the many disadvantages they lie under, and the bad example they daily see.”
A man had a right to kill his slave or mutilate him if he ran away, but a man who killed a slave out of “Wilfulness, Wantonness, or Bloody mindedness,” was to suffer three months’ imprisonment and pay ￡50 to the owner of the slave. It was merely a question of value, the slave was not considered. If a servant killed a slave he was to get thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, and serve the owner of the slave after his time with his master had expired four years. That is to say, he had to pay for the loss of the slave’s services. Indeed the negro’s life in those days was by no means safeguarded, for if a man killed by night a slave found out “of his owner’s grounds, road, or common path, such person was not to be subject to any damage or action for the same.” That is to say, the wandering slave was a danger to the community, and might be killed on suspicion as might some beast of prey. There was a law, too, that all slaves’ houses should be searched once a fortnight for “Clubs, Wooden Swords, and mischievious Weapons.” Any found were to be burnt. Stolen goods were also to be sought, and “Flesh not honestly come by”; for slaves were forbidden to have meat in their possession. The punishment was death, and in the slave book of Rose Hall after this law had fallen into desuetude there is an entry under Monday, 28th September 1824: “Killed a steer named ‘Porter’ in consequence of his leg being broken, sunk him in the sea to prevent the negroes from eating it, and having the like accidents occur.” It does seem hard so to waste the good meat that the negroes craved, poor things, as children nowadays crave sugar. For a negro does not regard meat as food even now. It is a treat, a luxury.
In Kingston and other towns the notice ran, “No person whatever shall fire any small arms after eight at night unless upon alarm of insurrection which is to be by the Discharge of Four Muskets or small arms distinctly.” The whole atmosphere was one of fear. No negro or mulatto was permitted to row in any wherry or canoe without at least one white man, and all boats of every description had to be chained up and their oars and sails safely disposed, and so important was this rule considered that any master of a craft who broke it was fined ￡10. There was a punishment of four years’ imprisonment for stealing or taking away any craft, and it is clear this had reference not to its value but to the assistance such craft might be to the common enemy.
A negro slave striking any person except in defence of his master’s property—observe he had none of his own—was for the first offence to be severely whipt, for the second to be severely whipt, have his or her nose slit and face burnt in some place, and for the third it was left to two Justices or three freeholders to inflict “Death or whatever punishment they shall think fit.”
When slaves were first introduced the master seems to have had absolute power of life and death, and indeed long after, when it was beginning to dawn on the ruling race that the black man had some rights, it was still difficult to punish a cruel master, because no black man’s evidence could be received against a white man. This rule, too, sometimes worked both ways.
There was once an overseer who was cruelly unjust to the book-keeper under him. As we have seen, the underlings subsisted very largely on salt food. This overseer, disliking his book-keeper, decreed that his salt fish should be exposed to the hot sun until it was rotten and then cooked and offered to him in the usual way. The young man protested, and the overseer declared he had fish out of the same barrel and found nothing wrong with it. Finally the exasperated book-keeper came up to the house and in desperation shot his tormentor. But he was never brought to justice, because there were only slaves present and no white man could be convicted on the testimony of a slave.
When we read the slave code we do well to remember not how men are punished nowadays, but how they were all punished, black and white, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first part of the nineteenth centuries. Laws were made for the rich, and the poor man without influence must go under.
And having said all this, it perhaps seems curious to add that we ought always to remember that the average planter treated his slaves as well as he knew how. Even now we are always advancing. The housemistress of 1921 has to give her maids of right what the housemistress of 1900 would have thought ridiculous, even as a privilege. It was to the planter’s interest that his slaves should be in good health and contented, but what none of them understood was that no man should be subject to the whim of another. The wrong was in enslaving a man. How should they understand it? Slavery had been a custom from time immemorial. Even in this twentieth century I have heard one of the best and kindest women I know mourning, “But if the poor are all so well off what shall we do for servants?” She found it difficult to believe that Providence would not arrange for someone to serve her. So the planters, I am sure, believed that Providence had placed the black man in Africa specially for their use. Why he was not contented with his lot, and a “good” slave, they could never understand. And yet the black people didn’t even mind dying, to such sore straits were the poor things reduced.
“They look upon death,” declares Lesley, “as a blessing.... ‘Tis indeed surprising to see with what courage and intrepidity some of them will meet their fate and be merry in their last moments.”
He had seen more deaths than we of the twentieth century can contemplate with equanimity, and many runaways trying to better their lot. It was probably easier for the first slaves to run away than at the time we come across them in the slave books of Worthy Park and Rose Hall. The lonelier parts of the island were abandoned because of these runaway negroes, who banded themselves together and were a constant danger to the isolated settler. And a place in fertile Jamaica abandoned soon becomes densest jungle, affording a still more useful shelter to people accustomed to such surroundings. Even though the life of a savage in the woods was a hard one, it was better than the almost certain fate that awaited them if they came in and gave themselves up. I conclude it was only when a slave found himself alone that he returned of his own free will. If he found companions he stayed.
This of course it was that made of the Maroons such an ever present danger, free as they were among a black population that outnumbered the white ten to one. The settler had always an enemy within the gates.
“This bad success,” mourns the historian when the whites have failed to overcome the Maroons, “encouraged Gentlemen’s slaves to rebel.”
The trouble was that to keep the slaves under, a great quantity of arms and ammunition had to be stored on the plantations, and when they rose this was likely to be turned against their owners. Did one of those overseers at Worthy Park ever toss restlessly on his feather bed and wonder what would be his fate if some of those slaves, the “ill-disposed” or “skulkers,” rushed his hot room and possessed themselves of that store of powder?
It is only natural that history should mention the rebellions that made their mark, and never those that were nipped in the bud. But those that had a measure of success were numerous enough. There were no less than four between 1678 and 1691, in the three last of which many white people were murdered. One of these was at Sutton’s, a plantation near the centre of the island.
I have been to Sutton’s. A long low house it is, not the first house, the slaves burned that, behind it are the green hills and in front red lilies grow beneath the bananas after the rain. The women who were born there say it is the loveliest plantation in an island of lovely plantations. And here at the end of the seventeenth century, 400 slaves, stark naked savages with hoes and machetes in their hands, stormed the house, and by sheer weight of numbers bore all before them. They murdered their master and every white man there, and seized all the arms kept to be used against them. Fifty muskets and blunderbusses and other arms they took, great quantities of shot and four small field pieces—(in such fear they had been held)—and then they marched on, raiding other plantations and killing every white person they could lay their hands upon.
Why they did not keep their freedom I do not know, but once the whites were roused they had no chance. They fled back to Sutton’s, and driven out of that they fired the cane pieces. Then a party of whites came up behind and completely routed them. Many were killed, some escaped to the hills, but 200 laid down their arms and surrendered. Very unwisely. For though some were pardoned our chronicler declares that most of those who submitted “met with that fate which they well deserved.”
In the eighteenth century there were at least nineteen terrible disturbances, sometimes called rebellions, sometimes conspiracies, to murder the whites, and in the thirty-two years of the nineteenth century that elapsed before the apprenticeship system that heralded the freeing of the slave was introduced, there were no less than six rebellions, conspiracies and mutinies, to say nothing of the isolated murders that must have been done and were not worth recording as history.
Not only were these rebellions sanguinary but they were expensive. The cost of putting down the last in 1832 was ￡161,596, without taking into account the damage sustained by property and the loss to the community of the lives sacrificed. If the black man suffered, white Jamaica too paid very heavily indeed for her slaves.
The Great Rebellion that was long remembered in Jamaica was the rebellion of 1760, and it broke out in St Mary’s Parish on the Frontier Plantation belonging to a man named Ballard Beckford. The adjoining estate was Trinity, belonging to Zachary Bayley, the maternal uncle of Bryan Edwards the historian, but in his book we only get a tantalising account that sets us longing for more details.
Of the leaders, “their barbarous names,” says Bridges, forgetting that the white man had probably supplied those names, “were Tacky and Jamaica,” and Tacky was a man who had been a chief in “Guiney.” That, though Edwards did not know it, meant that he had been accustomed to a certain amount of savage grandeur; had been dressed in silk of bright colours, and wore a necklace of gold and anklets and armlets of the same metal. On his fingers and bare black toes had been rings of rough nuggets. He had been wont to ride in a hammock, as King George rides in his State coach, and with an umbrella carried by slaves high over his head; to the great discomfort of the slaves, but it had marked his high estate. He would move to the accompaniment of barbaric music and on great feast days, such as that of his accession, his “stool,” the symbol of his power, really a carved wooden seat, was literally drenched in the blood of many unfortunate men and women. I remember passing through an Ashanti town on the day of the Coronation of our present King. There was a great feast and all the minor chiefs for miles round had come in to celebrate and all the stools were soaked in blood—sheep’s blood.
“Not long ago,” said the great chief, “it would have been men’s.”
“Oh!” said the young doctor who was with me, “sheep’s is better.”
“Perhaps,” said the African potentate doubtfully, and it was clear he was thinking regretfully of the days when there really would have been something like a decent sacrifice.
In Tacky’s days, too, when the chief died, a great pit would be dug, his bier lowered into it and round it would be seated a large number of his harem who would accompany their lord and master as attendants to the shades, and lucky indeed might they count themselves if they had their throats cut first and were not buried alive.
Even so late as 1908 in Tarkwa I remember a chief—not a great one—dying, and at the same time there came to the District Commissioner a woman complaining that her adopted daughter, an euphemism for a household slave, had disappeared. And the District Commissioner said he was certain, though he could not prove it, that the girl had been stolen and sacrificed that the soul of the chief might not go unaccompanied on his last journey, as that troublesome British Government had set its face against the sacrifice of wives.
Clearly Tacky could not have objected to slavery as an institution, he only objected to it as applied to himself. And he was accustomed to bloodshed.
On those two plantations where the rebellion started were over 100 Gold Coast negroes, and the historian declares they had never received the least shadow of ill-treatment from the time of their arrival there. Like Tacky, he was not so far advanced as to realise that the holding of a man in slavery was in itself gross ill-treatment. We can hardly blame him if he did not think ahead of his times, though we more enlightened may hold a brief for Tacky and those Guinea men, brutal as they undoubtedly were.
Mr Bayley, it appears, inspected his newly purchased Africans, was pleased with the stalwart crew and gave out to them with his own hands not only clothing but knives. Then he rode off to Ballard’s Valley, an estate a few miles distant.
The Guinea men lost no time in making a bid for freedom. At daybreak, in the morning, Mr Bayley was wakened by a servant with the information that his Trinity negroes had revolted; and the people who brought the information shouted that the insurgents were close upon their heels. Mr Bayley seems to have been a man of action and equal to the occasion. A council was held at Ballard’s Valley, the house that could be most easily defended in the neighbourhood was selected, and Mr Bayley mounted his horse and accompanied by a servant rode out to warn every place he could reach. But first, being very sure the revolted slaves—his slaves at any rate&mdash............