The feud that raged over the religious instruction of the negroes makes a curious piece of Jamaican history.

“The imported Africans were wild, savage and barbarous in the extreme; their untractable passions and ferocious temperament rendered severity necessary. They provoked the iron rule of harsh authority; and the earliest laws, constructed to restrain their unexampled atrocities, were rigid and inclement. They exhibited, in fact, such depravity of nature and deformity of mind as gave colour to the prevailing belief in a natural inferiority of intellect; so that the colonist conceived it to be a crime of no greater moral magnitude to kill a negro than to destroy a monkey; however rare their interest in them, as valuable property, rendered such a lamentable test of conscience.”

Thus the Rev. George William Bridges on the negroes when their spiritual state was exercising the minds of all the religious teachers. This particular shepherd was wroth because he objected to the sectarians, that is Quakers, Methodists and Baptists, taking upon themselves any interest in the souls of the slaves. “The country already pays,” he remarks, “near ￡40,000 per annum for their religious instruction.”

I don’t know if I shall be called libellous, but it does seem to me that the Church was decidedly slack in dispensing that instruction for which she was so highly paid. She administered religion in the impersonal and dignified manner that was her wont, and the slaves might be christened if they so desired. Of course they had to get their master’s consent, for it was not likely the parson was going to do it for nothing, and at the end of the eighteenth century it cost four bits a head, that is about 2s. 6d. But the clergyman was sometimes open to a bargain, and would do the whole estate for a fixed sum—about half the usual cost per head. And sometimes a whole estate would clamour to be christened. Sometimes they did it as a safeguard against some feared Obeah man, and sometimes simply to have names like the buckra. After their new name they added that of their master for a surname, and reserved the old name for common use. And then came trouble for the overseer or book-keeper, for the new Christians while exceedingly proud of being Christians like the buckras, were apt to forget their new names, and were always teasing to be told them, for, of course, they were recorded in the estate book.

As late as the end of the eighteenth century no one bothered about the naming of the slaves, and we find them entered in the Worthy Park estate book as Villian and Mutton, Baddo, Woman and Whore, but towards the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth, when Lewis writes, we find that even the Rose Hall slaves, and Rose Hall slaves were backward, had been christened, most of them.

Hannibal, a Creole, that is a slave born in the island, aged 54, of good disposition, appears to have been content with his old slave name; but Ulysses, of the same age, and also a Creole of good disposition, becomes Henry and adds Palmer because that was the name of his owner. Shemonth and Adonis, both Creoles of 42 and 39, make no change, perhaps the owner would not pay for their christening, neither does Aaron, an African of 44, though how they knew the age of an African unless he had been bought as a baby I do not know. Out of fifty male negroes nearly half changed their names, but some who did not were children, so perhaps they were christened in the ordinary way; The names they chose seem to have been singularly commonplace. Why should Adam, aged 6, become William Bennett? Or Othello, who was older, J. Fletcher? Why should Robert, a quadroon 3 years old, become Lawrence Low, and why should Isaac, 12, become simple J. James?

Out of sixty women and girls only six of mature age neglected to change their names. None of the older women are married, but some of the younger ones add their married names. Still, matrimony was not much in favour, either with slave or free. Lady % Nugent, twenty years before this book was entered up, is always worrying about it.

“See Martin’s daughter soon after breakfast. It is a sad thing to see this good, kind woman, in other respects so easy, on the subject of what a decent kind of woman in England would be ashamed of and shocked at. She told me of all her children by different fathers with the greatest sangfroid. The mother is quite looked up to at Port Royal, and yet her life has been most profligate as we should think at least in England.”

And so, I suppose, these slave women who were entered in the book about twenty years after Lady Nugent left the island, Cecelia and Amelia and Maph and Cowslip, who was christened Mary Paton, and May who became Hannah Palmer, never bothered about matrimony. What made Sussanah Johnston become Elizabeth Palmer I wonder, and why did Kate become Annie Brindley, and why was Frankie, who was only 32, and valued at ￡90, neither christened nor married? I don’t know that Sabina isn’t a prettier name than Eliza, but a Creole negro slave of a hundred years ago evidently didn’t agree with me. Eve aged 9 became Ellen, and to change a negro Venus to Eliza Stennet is bathos indeed.

“Baptism,” says Lewis, “was in high vogue, and whenever one of them told me a monstrous lie—and they told me whole dozens—he never failed to conclude his story by saying, ‘Now, massa, you know I’ve been christened, and if you do not believe what I say I’m ready to buss the book to the truth of it.’ I am assured that unless a negro has an interest in telling the truth, he always lies in order to keep his tongue in practice.”

The question Lewis did not ask himself was whether a white man in like circumstances would have behaved any better.

It may be that the planters were—some of them—brutal men, but I know that had I lived in those times I should probably, like the planters, have regarded the ministers of the other denominations outside the Church of England as most offensively officious. The planters as was not unnatural regarded their slaves as their property, property for which they had paid very heavily, and even though they allowed them many privileges they desired it to be clearly understood that these were privileges given of their own goodwill, and by no means to be considered as rights. The Baptists and Methodists preached what the planters considered sedition. Even tolerant Lewis forbade the Methodists on Cornwall and Hordly, though he allowed any other denomination to preach to the slaves, and much as I dislike the Church of England parson Bridges, I dislike still more the Rev. H. Bleby. He and his confrères must have been a most pernicious lot. Evidently on their own showing they were not men of education. They took the Bible as their guide, quoting it in season and out of season. This is of course not a crime, but even nowadays it grates on the average man. In those days the insistence that the negro was a man and a brother when his master declared him a chattel was extremely offensive.

Besides the doctrine of equality was considered dangerous. It was dangerous.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century the talk of freedom was in the air. It was the burning question of the day in Jamaica. The planters discussed it openly at their tables, so did the overseers and book-keepers, and the listening slaves waiting round the table carried all the gossip to the slave quarters, for then as now the black people went back to their quarters once the day’s work was done. The tinder was more than dry when the spark fell.

The former revolts in Jamaica had frankly been outbreaks of savages, dimly conscious of wrong, trying to regain their freedom, but the revolt of 1831-32 was a revolt into which religion entered largely. The planters declared openly it was engineered by the Baptists, and the slaves themselves called it the “Baptist War” and the “Black Family War,” the Baptists being styled in slave parlance the “Black Family.”

Bleby discussing this last of the slave revolts which raged through Hanover, Westmoreland, St James and Trelawny, declares it started because a certain Mr Grignon, the Attorney of Salt Springs near Montego Bay, going out there one day close to Christmas met a woman with a piece of sugarcane in her hand—not a very desperate offence one would think—and concluding it had been stolen from Salt Springs—it probably had—not only punished her on the spot but took her back to the plantation and called upon the head driver to strip and flog her. She happened to be this man’s wife, so he refused, and the second driver was called upon and he too refused, and all the people taking their cue from their headmen defended her. The Attorney could not get that woman flogged, and becoming alarmed at the attitude of the people he called out the constabulary to arrest the offenders. But the whole body of the slaves menaced the constables, and the principal offenders made their escape to the woods. And the woods round Montego Bay, woods that clothe all the hills that the Maroons held so long, are particularly suited for such guerilla warfare.



0273

Kensington, a place high in the mountains, was the first place burned, and presently the night was lighted by properties burning in all directions. Down the steep hills from Kempshot, down through the dense jungle from Retirement, from Montpelier and from Salt Springs, came the white people flocking to Montego Bay. We can understand the consternation that prevailed in the town. We can imagine the unbridled delight of the slaves as Great House after Great House was abandoned and went up in flames. Those flames spelled to them freedom, and they were sure that the whole island was given over to them. It was not. And in this revolt there was a peculiar character that we find in no other. Many of the slaves were partly civilised now. It was twenty years since any had been imported from Africa; many were acquiring a little property and had some small stake in the land, and must have felt the futility of the uprising. And on these the consequences of the revolt pressed heaviest. Which side were they to take? As plantation after plantation went up in flames, doubtless they were inclined to believe what the insurgent leaders told them, that the country—the country they loved, their country—had been abandoned by the white men. The position of the faithful slaves was difficult.

Bleby says, and a certain Mr Beaumont, who certainly was not prejudiced in favour of the slaves, says that many of them were more afraid of the insurgents than they were of the free inhabitants, and many were carried off by the insurgents and forced to accompany them.

But this did not save them once the whites got the upper hand. The planters put every slave in the same category and hanged ruthlessly, asking no questions, believing no assertions of innocence. They had been badly frightened, and they took vengeance like frightened men.

About the revolt Bleby gives us more information than perhaps he intended. He is delightful—unconsciously.

“Information reached the Commanding Officer,” he says, “that it was the intention of the insurgents to attack and pillage the town; and as the number of men was inadequate to the purpose, he required all who were capable of bearing arms to enrol themselves for its defence” (it certainly seems to me a very natural desire on the part of the Commanding Officer), “myself, a Scotch missionary and a curate included, the rector and another curate having already presented themselves as volunteers. I was far from yielding a cordial consent to this demand upon my services,” how they must have loved him. “He gave promise that we should not be required to leave the town, and should only be called upon to act if the safety of the place should be menaced.”

And now, listen to the sufferings of this noble gentleman. One day they were asked to go a little way into the country and to return in the evening, but when they had been gone some distance he found they had no intention of returning for several days. I can see the Commanding Officer smiling secretly over the discomfiture of his valuable recruit. Incredible as it seems, considering the country was in the throes of a slave revolt, with all its possible horrors, this gentleman can actually write that they were “harassed by journeys day after day amongst the woods and mountains, often riding for eight or ten hours in succession beneath a scorching sun, and sleeping without pillow, sheet or mat, or any other accommodation on the boarded or earthen floor of the house where we might happen to stop for the night.”

Truly a very gallant gentleman! I quite feel for the pleasure the Commanding Officer must have got out of making him as uncomfortable as he possibly could. Doubtless he would have joyfully put him in the forefront of the battle had there been a battle, but there wasn’t one.

After the first riotous outburst, when the whites were taken by surprise, there seems to have been no hope for the wretched slaves.

The militia was composed naturally of planters, the officers being in many instances men whose property had been destroyed by the insurgents, and who regarded themselves as ruined or reduced to the verge of ruin by the revolted negroes. We cannot but agree with Bleby that these were the last men who should have tried them, but try them they did, and the reprisals were terrible. As in the old days the Romans in Sicily, if I remember rightly, crucified their rebellious slaves along the sea-shore, so these Jamaican planters hanged and shot the deluded people without finding out whether they were guilty or not. After six weeks of trials, one of the newspapers at Montego Bay gravely announced: “The executions during the week have been considerably diminished, being in number only fourteen.”

They hanged them by twos and threes in the public market-place and left them hanging there till another lot were due, when they cut down the bodies and left them lying on the ground till the workhouse negroes came out with carts in the evening and took them away, to cast them into a pit dug for the purpose a little distance from the town.

When the tropical day drew swiftly to its ending, and the sun sank gorgeous into the sea, when the purple and gold changed to bands of seashell pink and delicate nile green, and the shadows swept up and the stars, gleaming crystals, came out in a sky of velvet, then for me those dead-and-gone slaves, trapped in a web of circumstance, rose from their graves and walked along the shore. Ignorant, toil-worn, insolent, cringing by turns, with all the vices of their unwilling servitude upon them, they cry to high heaven for vengeance. And avenged they have been, for surely Jamaica is the land of wasted opportunities.

There is an old house high on the hills above Montego Bay. It is beautifully situated, looking away over the hills and over the lovely bay. It has two-foot thick stone walls built by slave labour, the pillars that uphold the verandah are of solid mahogany—painted white by some Goth—and the windows are heavily shuttered.

It is haunted, they say.

“Knock, knock, knock!” comes a sound against the shutters of one room every night, a passionately appealing knock that will not be stayed. Only some people can hear it, but when they do, it wrings their hearts, so importunate is it. One man I know of sitting there reading at night, used every prayer and exhortation he could think of to still that uneasy ghost—he was a priest of the Church of Rome—but it would not be stilled, and at last he—practical, middle-aged man as he was, fled away from the sound of it to some friends who lived the other side of the town, and refused ever to come back to that haunted house. Was it some unhappy woman begging and praying her master who had been her lover to intercede for her son caught in the slave revolt? Whoever it was prayed there, prayed in vain, and now sensitive souls hear the knock, knock, knock, “for God’s sake have pity and help me!”

Oh, most of the houses of the old slave town could tell pitiful stories.

Bleby tells ghastly ones of what happened to the unfortunate slaves when the whites had recovered themselves and got the upper hand. In reading them, we must always remember that this is always the case when a handful of people holding a very much larger class by fear has been thoroughly frightened itself.

There was a negro named Bailey who had hidden his master’s silver for safety in a cave, and after the rebellion was over he took one of the women belonging to the estate and went to the cave to bring back to the house the property which he had hidden. He sent off the woman with a load upon her head, and remained behind to get out the rest. A company of militia came upon him thus engaged. They paid no heed to his explanations, and when the woman returned for another load he had been hanged as a man taken red-handed!

But the case that Bleby dilates upon is that of a negro named Henry Williams. Now Henry Williams appears to have been a very decent, respectable man, far advanced from the wild savage who was his progenitor. He was wickedly treated, but I do not think he was exactly the martyr Bleby makes out.

“He was a respected and useful class leader in the Wesleyan Society at Beechamville,” says Bleby. Can’t we imagine him? He was a driver when he wasn’t in religion, a slave on ............