Curse of Negro Slavery, which was then so Familiar and Unquestioned a
Thing in all our Colonies, that its innate and Detestable Wickedness was
scarcely taken into account in men's minds. Speaking only by the Card,
and of that which I saw with my own eyes, I don't think that Maum Buckey
was any crueller than other slave-owners of her class: for 'tis well
known that the Mulotter women are far more severe task-mistresses than
the Whites. But, Lord! Whites and coloured people, who in the West
Indies are permitted, when free, to own their fellow-creatures who are
only a shade darker in colour than they, left little to choose betwixt
on the score of cruelty. When I tell you that I have seen Slave Women
and Girls chained to the washing-tub, their naked bodies all one gore of
blood from the lashes of the whip; that on the public wharf at Kingston
I have seen a Negro man drawn up by his hands to a crane used for
lifting merchandise, while his toes, that barely touched the ground,
were ballasted with a thirty-pound weight, and, in that Trim, beaten
with the Raw Hide or with Tamarind-Bushes till you could lay your two
fingers in the furrows made by the whip (with which expert Scourgineers
boast they can lay deep ruts in a Deal Board), or else I have seen the
poor Miserable Wretch the next day lying on his face on the Beach, and a
Comrade taking the prickles of the Tamarind-Stubs, which are tempered in
the Fire, and far worse than English Thornbushes, out of his back;--you
may imagine that 'twas no milk-and-water Regimen that the slaves in the
West Indies had to undergo at the hands of their Hard masters and
mistresses. Also, I have known slaves taken to the Sick-House, or
Hospital, so dreadfully mangled with unmerciful correction as for their
wounds to be one mass of putrefaction, and they shortly do give up the
Ghost; while, at other times, I have seen unfortunate creatures that had
been so lacerated, both back and front, as to be obliged to crawl about
on All Fours. Likewise have I seen Negro men, Negro women, yea, and
Negro children, with iron collars and prongs about their necks; with
logs riveted to their legs, with their Ears torn off, their Nostrils
slit, their Cheeks branded, and otherwise most frightfully Mutilated.
Item, I have known at the dinner-table of a Planter of wealth and
repute, the Jumper, or Public Flogger, to come in and ask if Master and
Missee had any commands for him; and, by the order of the Lady of the
House, take out two Decent Women that had been waiting at the table,
and give them fifty lashes apiece on the public parade, every stroke
drawing Blood and bringing Flesh with it, and they, when all was over,
embracing and thanking him for their Punishment, as was the custom of
the Colony.[B] Item, within my own knowledge have I been made familiar
with many acts of the Deepest Barbarity. Mistresses, for Jealousy or
Caprice, pouring boiling-water or hot melted Sealing-Wax on their slave
girls' flesh after they had suffered the worst Tortures of the whip; and
white Ladies of Education rubbing Cayenne-pepper into the eyes of
Negroes who had offended them, or singeing the tenderest parts of their
limbs with sticks of fire. And of one horrid instance have I heard of
Malignant and Hellish revenge in Two Ladies who were Sisters (and bred
at a Fine Boarding-School in England), who, having a spite against a
yellow woman that attended on them, did tie her hands and feet, and so
beat her nearly to death with the heels of their slippers; and not
satisfied with that, or with laving her gashed body with Vinegar and
Chillies, did send for a Negro man, and bid him, under threats of
punishment, strike out two of the Victim's teeth with a punch, which, to
the shame of Human Womanhood, was done.
But enough of these Horrors:--not the worst that I have seen, though, in
the course of my Adventures; only I will not further sicken you with the
Recital of the Sufferings inflicted on the Wretched Creatures by Ladies
and Gentlemen, who had had the first breeding, and went to Church every
Sunday. I have merely set down these dreadful things to work out the
theory of my Belief, that the World is growing Milder and more Merciful
every day; and that the Barbarities which were once openly practised in
the broad sunshine, and without e'er a one lifting finger or wagging
tongue against them, are becoming rarer and rarer, and will soon be
Impossible of Commission. The unspeakable Miseries of the Middle Passage
(of which I have been an eye-witness) exist no more; really Humane and
Charitable Gentlemen, not such False Rogues and Kidnappers as your
Hopwoods, are bestirring themselves in Parliament and elsewhere to
better the Dolorous Condition of the Negro; and although it may be a
Decree of Providence that the children of Ham are to continue always
slaves and servants to their white brethren, I see every day that men's
hearts are being more and more benevolently turned towards them, and
that laws, ere long, will be made to forbid their being treated worse
than the beasts that perish.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Captain Dangerous! Captain Dangerous!--ED.
[B] That which I have made Captain Dangerous relate in fiction will be
found narrated, act for act, and nearly word for word, in the very
unromantic evidence given before the first parliamentary committee on
slavery and the slave-trade moved for by Mr. Clarkson.--ED.
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
OF OTHER MY ADVENTURES UNTIL MY COMING TO BE A
MAN.
THUS in a sultry colony, among Black Negroes and their cruel
Task-masters, and I the clerk to a Mulotter Washerwoman, did I come to
be full sixteen years of age, and a stalwart Lad of my inches. But for
that Fate, which from the first irrevocably decreed that mine was to be
a Roving Life, almost to its end, I might have continued in the employ
of Maum Buckey until Manhood overtook me. The Dame was not unfavourable
towards me; and, without vanity, may I say that, had I waited my
occasion, 'tis not unlikely but that I might have married her, and
become the possessor of her plump Money-Bags, full of Moidores, pilar
Dollars, and pieces of Eight. Happily I was not permitted so to
disparage my lineage, and put a coffee-coloured blot on my escutcheon.
No, my Lilias is no Mulotter Quartercaste. 'Twas my roving propensity
that made me set but little store by the sugar-eyes and Molasses-speech
which Madam Soapsuds was not loth to bestow on me, a tall and likely
Lad. I valued her sweetness just as though it had been so much
cane-trash. With much impatience I had waited for the coming back of my
friendly skipper, that he might advise me as to my future career. But,
as I have already warned the Reader, it was fated that I was to see that
kindly shipmaster no more. Once, indeed, the old ship came into Port
Royal, and right eagerly did I take boat and board her. But her name had
been changed from _The Humane Hopwood_ to _The Protestant Pledge_. She
was in the Guinea trade now, and brought Negroes, poor souls! to slave
in our Plantations. The Mariner that was her commander had but dismal
news to tell me of my friendly Handsell. He, returning to the old
country, had it seems a Mighty Quarrel with his Patron--and my Patron
too, forsooth!--Villain Hopwood. Whether he had reproached him with his
treachery to me or not, I know not; but it is certain that both parted
full of Wrath and High Disdain, and each swearing to be the Ruin of the
other. But Gold had, as it has always in a Mammon-ridden world, the
longest, strongest pull. Devil Hopwood found it easy to get the better
of a poor unlettered tarpaulin, that knew well enough the way into a
Wapping Alehouse, but quite lost himself in threading the mazes of a
great man's Antechamber. 'Tis inconceivable how much dirty work there
was done in my young days between Corinthian columns and over Turkey
carpets, and under ceilings painted by Verrio and Laguerre. Sir Basil, I
believe, went to a great man, and puts a hundred guineas into the hands
of his Gentleman--by the which I mean his Menial Servant, save that he
wore no Livery; but there's many a Base wretch hath his soul in plush,
and the Devil's aigulets on his heart. How much out of the Hundred my
Lord took, and how much his Gentleman kept, it serves not to inquire.
They struck a Bargain, and short was the Time before Ruin came swooping
down on Captain Handsell. He had gone into the Channel trade; and they
must needs have him exchequered for smuggling brandies and lace from St.
Malo's. Quick on this follows a criminal Indictment, from which, as a
Fool, he flies; for he might at least have threatened to say damaging
things of Brute Basil in the dock, and have made terms with him before
trial came on. And then he must needs take command of a miserable lugger
that fetched and carried between Deal and Dunquerque--the old, old,
sorry tinpot business of kegs of strong waters, and worse contraband in
the guise of Jacobite despatches. To think of brave men's lives being
risked in these twopenny errands, and a heart of Oak brought to the
gallows, that clowns may get drunk the cheaper, or traitors--for your
Jacobite conspirators were but handy-dandy Judases, now to King James
and now to King George--exchange their rubbishing ciphers the easier!
It drives me wild to think of these pinchbeck enterprises. If a Man's
tastes lead him towards the Open, the Bold, and the Free, e'en let him
ship himself off to a far climate, the hotter the better, where Prizes
are rich, and the King's writ in Assault and Battery runneth not,--nor
for a great many other things ayont Assault and Battery,--and where, up
a snug creek, of which he knows the pilotage well, he may give a good
account of a King's ship when he finds her. He who does any thing
contrair to English law within five hundred leagues of an English lawyer
or an English law-court is a very Ass and Dolt. Fees and costs will have
their cravings; and from the process-server to the Hangman all will have
their due. Give me an offing, where there is no law but that of the
strong hand and the bold Heart. Any sharks but land-sharks for John
Dangerous. I never see a parchment-visaged, fee-clutching limb of the
law but I long to beat him, and, if I had him on blue water, to trice
him up higher than ever he went before. But for a keg of brandy! But for
a packet of treason-papers! Shame! 'tis base, 'tis idiotic. And this
did the unlucky Handsell find to his cost. I believe he was slain in a
midnight affray with some Riding Officers of the Customs close unto
Deal, about two years after his going into a trade that was as mean as
it was perilous.
So no more Hope for me from that quarter. The skipper of _The Protestant
Pledge_ would have retained me on board for a Carouse; but I had too
much care for my Head and my Liver for such pranks, and went back, as
dolefully as might be, to keep Maum Buckey's washing-books. I chafed at
the thought that I could do no more. I told her the grim news I had
heard of her brother-in-law, whereat she wept somewhat; for where Whites
were concerned she was not a hard-hearted woman. But she cheered up
speedily, saying that Sam had come to as sorry an end, and that she
supposed there was but one way with the Handsells, Rum and Riot being
generally their Ruin.
As it is one of the failings of youth not to know when it is well off,
and to grow A-weary even of continued prosperity, I admit that the life
I led palled upon me, and that I longed to change it. But it was not,
all things considered, so very unpleasant a one. True, the employment
was a sorry one, and utterly beneath the dignity of a Gentleman, such as
bearing fardels in the streets or unloading casks and bales at the
wharf, for instance. But it is in man's nature never to be satisfied,
and when he is well to long to be better, and so, by force of striving,
to tumble into a Hole, where indeed he is at the Best, for he is Dead.
At this distance of time, though I have many comforts around
me,--Worldly Goods, a Reputable name, my Child, and her Husband,--I
still look back on my old life in Jamaica, and confess that Providence
dealt very mercifully with me in those bygone days. For I had enough to
eat and to drink, and a Mistress who, although Passionate and
Quarrelsome enough by times, was not unkind. If she would swear, she
would also tender gentle Language upon occasion; and if she would throw
things, she was not backward in giving one a dollar to heal one's pate.
An odd life it was, truly. There was very little of that magnificence
about the town of Port Royal in my days which I have heard the Creoles
to boast about. It may have been handsome enough in the Spaniard's
Reign, or in King Charles the Second's; but I have heard that its most
comely parts had been swallowed up by an Earthquake, and, when I
remember it, the Main thoroughfare was like nothing half so much as the
Fag End of Kent Street in the Borough, where the Broom-men live. As for
public scavengers--humane at least--there were none; for that salutary
practice of putting rebellious Blacks into chain-gangs, and making them
sweep the streets,--which might be well done in London with Pickpockets
and the like trash, to their souls' health and the benefit of the Body
politic,--did not then obtain. The only way of clearing the offal was by
the obscene birds that flew down from the hills; Messieurs the
landcrabs, who were assuredly the best scavengers of all, not stirring
beyond the Palisadoes. Some things were very cheap, but others
inordinately dear. Veal was at a prodigious price; and 'twas a common
saying, that you could buy Four children in England cheaper than you
could one calf in Jamaica. But for the products and dishes of the
colony, which I have elsewhere hinted at, all was as low-priced as it
was abundant. What droll names did they give, too, unto their fish and
flesh and fowl! How often have you in England heard of Crampos,
Bonettas, Ringrays, Albacoras, and Sea-adders, among fish; of Noddies
and Boobies and Pitternells and Sheerwaters among birds? And Calialou
Soup, and Pepperpot to break your Fast withal in the morning, and make
you feel, ere you get accustomed to that Fiery victual, like a
Salamander for some hours afterwards!
Now and then also, with some other young white folks with whom I had
stricken up acquaintance,--clerks, storekeepers, and the like,--would we
seek out the dusky beauties of the town in their own quarters, and shake
a leg at their Dignity Routs, Blackamoor Drums, and Pumpkin-Faced
Assemblies, or by what other name the poor Black wretches might choose
to call their uproarious merrymakings. There, in some shed, all hustled
together as a Moorfields Sweetener does luck in a bag, would be a mob of
men and women Negroes, all dressed in their bravest finery, although
little of it was to be seen either on their Backs or their Feet; the
Head being the part of their Bodies which they chiefly delight to
ornament. Such ribbons and owches, such gay-coloured rags and blazing
tatters, would they assume, and to the Trips and Rounds played to them
by some Varlet of a black fiddler, with his hat at a prodigious cock,
and mounted on a Tub, like unto the sign of the Indian Bacchus at the
Tobacconist's, would they dance and stamp and foot it merrily--with
plenty of fruit, salt fish, pork, roasted plantain, and so forth, to
regale themselves withal, not forgetting punch and sangaree--quite
forgetful, poor mercurial wretches, for the time being of Fetters and
the Scourge and the Driver that would hurry them to their dire labour
the morrow morn. Surely there never did exist so volatile,
light-spirited, feather-brained a race as these same Negro Blacks. They
will whistle and crack nuts, ay and dance and sing to the music of the
Fiddle or the Banjar an hour after the skin has been half flayed off
their backs. They seem to bear no particular Malice to their Tormentors,
so long as their weekly rations of plantain, yam, or salt fish, be not
denied them, and that they have Osnaburgs enow to make them shirts and
petticoats to cover themselves. Give them but these, and their dance at
Christmas time, with a kind word thrown to them now and again, just as
you would fling a marrow-bone to a dog, and they will get along well
enough in slavery, almost grinning at its Horrors and making light of
its unutterable Woes. I never saw so droll a people in my life. Nor is
it the less astonishing thing about them that, beneath all this seeming
lightheartedness and jollity, there often lies smouldering a Fire of the
Fiercest passion and blackest revenge. The dark-skinned fellow who may
be flapping the flies away from you in the morning, and bearing your
kicks and cuffs as though they were so many cates and caresses, may, in
the evening, make one in a circle of Heathen monsters joined together to
listen to the Devilish Incantations of the Obeah man,--to mingle in
ceremonies most hideous and abominable, and of which perhaps that of
swearing eternal Hatred to the White Race over a calabash that is made
out of the skull of a new-born Babe, and filled with Dirt, Rum, and
Blood mixed together, is perchance the least horrid. And yet I don't
think the unhappy creatures are by nature either treacherous, malicious,
or cruel. 'Tis only when the fit seizes them. Like the Elephants, the
idea suddenly comes over them that they are wronged--that 'tis the White
Man who has wrought them all these evils, and that they are bound to
Trample him to bleeding mud without more ado. But 'tis all done in a
capricious cobweb-headed manner; and on the morrow they are as quiet and
good-tempered as may be. Then, just as suddenly, will come over them a
fit of despondency, or dark, dull, brooding Melancholy. If they are at
sea, they will cast themselves into the waves and swim right toward the
sharks, whose jaws are yawning to devour them. If they are on dry land,
they will, for days together, refuse all food, or worse still, go
dirt-eating, stuffing themselves with clay till they have the _mal
d'estomac_, and so die: this _mal_, of which our English stomach-ache
gives no valid translation (which must prove my excuse for placing here
a foreign word), being, with the Yaws, their most frequent and fatal
complaint. Of a less perplexing nature also are their fits of the Sulks,
when, for more than a week at a time, they will remain wholly mute and
intractably obstinate, folding their arms or squatting on their hams,
and refusing either to move or speak, whatsoever threats may be uttered
or enforced against them, and setting no more store by the deep
furrowing cuts of the Cowhide whip (that will make marks in a deal
board, if well laid on, the which I have often seen) than by the
buzzings of a Shambles Fly. They had many ways of treating these fits of
the sulks, in my time all of them cruel, and none of them successful.
One was, to set the poor wretches in the stocks, or the bilboes, rubbing
chillies into the eyes to keep them from going to sleep. Another was a
dose of the Fire-cane, as it was called, which was just a long paddle,
or slender oar, pierced with holes at the broadest part, with the which
the patient being belaboured, a blister on the fish rose to each hole of
the Paddle. A curious method, and one much followed; but the Negroes
sulked all the more for it. There was a Dutch woman from Surinam, who
had brought with her from that plantation of the Hollanders that highly
Ingenious Mode of Torment known as the "Spanso Bocko."[C] The manner of
it was this. You took your Negro and tied him wrists and ankles, so
bending him into a neat curve. Then, if his spine did not crack the
while, you thrust a stake between his legs, and having thus comfortably
Trussed him, pullet fashion, you laid him on the ground one side
upwards, and at your leisure scarified him from one cheek to one heel
with any instrument of Torture that came handy. Then he (or she, it did
not at all matter in the Dutchwoman's esteem), being one gore of welts
and gashes, was thought to be Done enough on one side, and consequently
required Doing t'other. So one that stood by to help just took hold of
the stake and turned the Human Pullet over, and then he was so
thoroughly basted as sometimes to be Done a little too much, often dying
on the spot from that Rib wasting. Oh, it was rare sport! I wonder
whereabouts in the nethermost Hell the cunning Dutchman is now who first
devised this torment; also the Dutchwoman who practised it? I can fancy
Signor Beelzebub and his Imps taking a keen delight in _their_
application of the Spanso Bocko. The which I never knew it cure a Negro
of the sulks. They would force back their tongues into their gullets
while the torment was going on, determined not so much as to utter a
moan, and, having a peculiar Art that way, brought by them from their
own country, would often contrive to suffocate themselves and Expire.
Their own country! That is what one of the miserable beings said when,
being threatened with torment of a peculiar, outrageous nature, he flung
himself into a cauldron of boiling sugar, and was scalded to death on
the instant. Let me not omit to mention while I am on this chapter of
Brutality--wreaked by Christian men upon poor Heathen savages, for many
of them were not many weeks from Guinea and Old Calabar, where they had
been worshiping Mumbo Jumbo, and making war upon one another in their
own Pagan fashion--that I have known Planters even more refined in their
cruelty. They would make their slaves drink salt water, and then set
them out in the hot sun tied to the outside posts of the Piazza. The end
of that was, that they went Raving Mad, gnawing their Tongues and poor
blubberous Lips to pieces[D] before they died. Another genius, who was a
proficient in his Humanities, and quite of a classic frame of mind in
his cruelties, bethought himself of a mode of Torture much practised
among the Ancient Persians, and so must needs smear the body of an
unhappy Negro all over with molasses. Then, binding him fast to a stake
in the open, the flies and mosquitoes got at him,--for he was kept there
from one morning until the next,--and he presently gave up the Ghost.
But nothing that I ever saw or heard of during the time of my living in
the Western Indies, could equal the Romantic Torture, not so much
invented as imported, by a Gentleman Merchant who had lived among the
islands of the Grecian Archipelago, and whose jocose humour it was to
imprison his women slaves in loose garments of leather, very tightly
secured, however, at the wrists, neck, and ankles. In the same garments,
before fastening round the limbs of the victim, one or more Infuriated
cats were introduced; the which ferocious animals, playfully disporting
themselves in their attempt to find a point of egress, would so up and
tear, and mangle, and lacerate, with their Terrible claws, the flesh of
the sufferers, that not all the Brine-washing or pepper-pod-rubbing in
the world, afterwards humanely resorted to on their release from their
leathern sepulchre, would save them from mortification. There was a
completeness and gusto about this Performance that always made me think
my Gentleman Merchant from the Greek Islands a very Great Mind. The mere
vulgar imitations of his Process which, in times more Modern, I have
heard of--such as taking an angry cat by the tail and drawing its claws
all abroad down the back of a Negro strapped on to a plank, so making a
map of all the rivers in Tartarus from his neck to his loins--are, in my
holding, beneath contempt. There is positive Genius in that idea of
shutting up the cats in a hide-bound prison, and so letting them work
their own wills on the inner walls; and I hope my Gentleman Merchant has
as warm a niche in Signor Beelzebub's Temple of Fame, as the Great Dutch
Philosopher who first dreamt of the Spanso Bocko.