Jamaica is a thickly populated country. The last census taken in 1911
gave a population of 197 to the square mile, and this is mostly black,
for the same statistics give something under 16,000 white people to
close on 800,000 black and coloured, and in all probability among the
so-called white there would be a trace of colour.
Now I was warned not to touch on the colour question when I wrote on
Jamaica, which is really like writing about the present times without
mentioning the Great War. You must mention the colour question. If a man
is charming and courteous and well educated, what can it matter what his
shade, and I who was brought up in Australia, where the colour question
is a burning one, can say this with feeling.
I have listened to a white woman, whose only recommendation was that
she was white, draw herself up and sniff when speaking of a highly
cultivated man whose only fault in her eyes could be that there was a
trace of colour in his veins.
“Well, I promised my husband I'd receive _him_, but his wife--I do draw
the line at his wife.”
I could see no reason why she should not receive his wife, who had
seen a great deal more of the world than she had and was a much more
interesting personality. Every man has a right to choose his personal
friends, but it seems to me the only reason why a community should ban a
race is when that race lowers the standard of living and so imperils the
life of the master people. This, of course, is at the root of the colour
question, and I could write a book about it.
Men and women with just a dash of the tar brush are often extremely
good looking, in fact, never have I seen more beautiful children than
in Jamaica, save possibly in Sicily, where a dash of colour from Africa
thrown into the stock long, long ago, makes for beauty. But the black
man, however good looking, however well educated, has one handicap; a
stiffly starched white shirt-front and a black evening coat bear very
heavily indeed on him. He may be college bred, have the softest and most
cultivated of voices, but the dress imposed upon him by civilisation
is apt to take away from his dignity. In Africa they are beginning
to realise this, and the Ashanti Chief is never allowed to dress in
European costume, and he looks every inch a Chief in the beautiful
silken robes, the gay colours of which set off the complexion the sun
has kissed.
And if a black man looks bad in fashionable clothes, the black woman
looks even worse. How this can be mended I know not, but I feel sure
that as soon as the black people find a style of dress that will set off
their beauty, much of the feeling against coloured blood will vanish.
[Illustration: 0098]
It is coming. I went to church one day in Kingston, and, I think, with
the exception of the minister in black Geneva gown and white bands, I
was the only full-blooded white person present. But the church was full
and the people struck me as being very good looking and well dressed,
especially the little children. A dainty little girl of African
blood with flashing dark eyes and milk-white teeth, dressed in white
embroidery with white socks and shoes and a white ribbon in her dark
hair, is a thing of beauty.
The most lovely girl I have ever seen in my life is a Creole with a
little coloured blood in her veins. She has long brown hair, splendid
dark eyes, white teeth, and a clear skin of pale brown that is soft as
velvet. She is more than common tall, but so well proportioned that you
do not think so until you see her beside some other woman. She is an
athlete, she can ride, she can dance, and she can swim and dive like a
fish. Truly a daughter of the Gods is she, and Jamaica may be proud of
her.
There are people who will say, “Yes, at nineteen, but these Creoles
always go off, their beauty does not last. They grow old so soon.”
Exactly the same was said of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers.
The Creole who lives wisely, as women are beginning to live everywhere
nowadays, is quite as likely to be good looking at forty, or even at
sixty, I think, as the daughter of a cooler clime. Of course if she
yield to indolence and do nothing but suck sweets or smoke cigarettes
and sleep, why, the inevitable will happen.
My daughter of the tropics is abounding in life. She owns a canoe, the
_Dodo_, a little light boat, with which she can go skimming over the
waters of Montego Bay.
“I only take the children who can swim well,” says she, “and when I was
younger, they won't let me now I'm grown up, we used to visit all the
schooners and cutters that came into the bay.”
The logwood schooners are manned by Norwegians, big fair men, who
complimented her on her skill in managing a boat, and said she ought to
have come from the North, “though why,” said she, “shouldn't a Creole
sail a boat?” And there are big brown men from the Cayman Islands,
descendants of the buccaneers, giants with the blood of all the nations
of the world in their veins. They trade in salt. And men of all shades,
from palest yellow to the blackest black, go dodging in and out of
Jamaican ports, and one and all they carry on their bowsprits a shark's
fin to make their little ships sail well.
“But why,” I asked, “did you only take children who could swim?”
“Because,” she laughed, “if you fall out of a canoe you can't get in
again.” And she told me how on one occasion the laden canoe became
extremely interested in an electric eel lying on the bottom, for the
water of the bay is beautifully clear, and all rushed to one side to
inspect. Over went the little craft, and then the biggest boy, aged I
think 12, saw the danger and flung himself to the other side. He was
just in time. The boat righted itself, but he lost his balance and fell
into the water, with more than a mile to go before he reached the shore.
No wonder young Diana insists that all her passengers should be able to
swim well.
There are some useful citizens growing up in Montego Bay for a nation
that counts herself the ruler of the seas.
I set out to write about the Castles on the Guinea Coast, and I have
wandered to the shores of Montego Bay on the other side of the Atlantic,
and yet they are not as far apart as one would think.
It is a far, far cry from the days when the Portuguese, and the English,
and Dutch, and Danes, and Brandenburgers, and Swedes, built with
slave labour great stone castles with walls and bastions, towers, and
portcullises, all along the Guinea Coast from the mouth of the Gambia
River to Whydah in Dahomey. The castles are there to-day to tell the
tale, and some years ago before the war I travelled along 300 miles of
that coast in a hammock borne on men's heads, and again and again as we
moved along, our pace regulated by that of the slowest carrier who bore
my goods upon his head, there loomed up before us either on a jutting
headland, or at the head of some shallow bay, the grey and massive walls
of some long-forgotten Castle. Truly one may say forgotten, only a few
officials remember these trading strongholds of the past, and if some
care, those in authority declare they are not worth keeping up since
they are but relics of an iniquitous trade that is best not remembered.
But the past cannot be wiped out. I hardly understood that till I
came to Jamaica, till I watched the black women in ragged frocks and
dilapidated hats weeding my garden, till I saw the roads thronged
with them bearing burdens on their heads. It was forced upon me more
emphatically when there came into my compound in Montego Bay one of the
men who helped mend the roads in the forlornest remains of what had once
been a shirt and trousers, while on his arm he wore what made him look
like the savage he was, a bracelet of some red composition which had
doubtless by its bright colour caught his eye. These were the same
people, the very same people who had been brought from the Guinea Coast,
more than one hundred, more than two hundred years ago. They are the
same people you see on the Guinea Coast to-day. They called the people
from this coast Koromantyns, and though they were, they said, the
best slaves to be had, strong and vigorous, yet the French and Spanish
refused to buy them, for they were warlike and were apt to rise and
tight fiercely for their liberty. Probably many of them had Ashanti
blood in their veins, and the Ashantis made good fighting men. The
Krobos, too, were a little more to the East, and the Krobos were savages
who, even in this century, allowed no young man to marry until he had
killed his man.
Often these fortified castles of the different European nations were
within a stone's throw of each other, often they were destroyed, often
they changed hands as the power of one nation waxed or waned, but in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the trade was the great thing and
these men of old held their little scraps of land, held them though the
holding cost them many lives.
Koromantyn, a Castle not far from Cape Coast, was the chief trading
place of the English along that shore, till De Ruyter knocked it about
their ears. The custom of the English, I judged, when they built a
Castle for themselves, and did not take it from some one else, was to
choose a site at the head of a bay and build close down to the water's
edge, but Koromantyn departs from the usual practice and was built on
high rising ground, a site the Portuguese (Portugais the old mariners
called them) themselves might have chosen. I have thought of it many
a time since I came to Jamaica, for always the slave risings--and the
risings were many--were headed by the Koromantyns. Even now, guarding
nothing, for the courtyard is overgrown with tropical vegetation, its
ruined walls rise up tall and steep and straight, and at their foot
among the rubble and coarse grass, lie rusting the cannon that once made
them formidable.
Remember, it was not only the black men who suffered, for if with cruel
force upon the sons of Ham fell the primeval curse, the venturesome men
who dared so much for greed and adventure were not exempt. And they were
venturesome. Reading between the lines as we look up the old records,-we
feel that the trials endured in the finding of the Poles were more than
equalled by what these traders of old must have borne in their search
for wealth, the wealth ofttimes being for someone else. The gold is only
found further inland now, the elephant is gone, and the trade in men is
dead. Dead, yes; but it is impossible to forget here in Jamaica, or as
you wander along the Guinea Coast. The sands of the sea cry the story,
the shame, shame, shame of it! the tumbling waves take it up, and insist
as they crash on the sand in the still hot noonday, or in the glory of
the moonlight night, that the end is not yet. I did not understand
what they cried to me then, but Jamaica cries out, “Here, here, is the
unfinished work of those old time slavers, here is the job incomplete,
left for Britain to finish as best she may.” One hot day in March I
left Cape Coast and came by the sea-shore, ten miles or more, along the
yielding sand, just beyond reach of the furious white surf, but not
out of the reach of its spray, and the memories of the men of old, the
men who traded here when Cromwell ruled in England, when Queen Anne
sat on the throne, when the unwelcome Georges came over from Hanover,
crowded thick in every grove of coconut palms, rose to meet me on every
grassy headland. The footsteps of the hammock bearers were clearly
marked, and the waves came sweeping up and swept them away, the black
crabs, like so many pincushions on stilts, raced after the receding
waters, and the wading-birds stalked over the half-liquid sand seeking
their livelihood. Overhead was the heavy blue African sky, on the right,
the dark blue sea with white-topped breakers that rushed from the Pole,
half a world away, to fling themselves in thunderous clamour upon the
Guinea Coast, and on the left was a low sandy ridge covered with sparse
sea-grass and broad-leaved creeping bean. Just such a bean grows on the
sea-shore, outside the gates of my house here in Montego Bay, where I
write this book. Here and there was a little low undergrowth and coarse
elephant grass, and again and again were palm-thatched villages, with
surf boats drawn up on the sand, and groves of coconut palms that added
beauty to the scene. The brawny, dark men fished, flinging their nets
into the sea, or launched their surf boats on a wider venture, and
the women beat their cassava or banana into _kenky_ or _fufu_, and the
little naked pot-bellied children played in the shade as children play
all the world over, and raced to see the unusual sight of a white woman
who had departed from the usual custom of the white folks and come along
the shore.
Such is the scene now, such was the scene more than three hundred years
ago, when the maiden Queen sat on the throne of England and Hawkins made
his first expedition, such was _the scene a hundred years later when
Phillips in the Hannibal_ of 450 tons and 36 guns came on an expedition
trading for gold, elephants' teeth, and slaves--more especially for
slaves. I thought of those old-world men as we passed along, and the sea
kept wiping out all traces of the passing of my hammock bearers. But the
people would remember that in such a year a white woman had passed that
way, even as I remembered that Phillips had passed. And the cool of the
morning passed, and the breathless sweltering March midday of the
Guinea Coast held all the land, and grey stone walls loomed up clear-cut
against the blue of the sky.
“Annamabu, Ma. You chop?” That was all my headman thought. For him there
was no past. He had come from Cape Coast this morning--if he could only
make me see that it was fit and suitable that I should stay at Annamabu
till the following morning, that was all the future he asked.
Annamabu is right on the sea-shore, built upon the rocks that crop out
of the surrounding sand. So did the English keep watch and ward over
their trade here. It is a great square grey pile, dignified in its very
simplicity, and the only entrance is through a low tunnel in the great
wall, narrow, and nowhere more than five feet four high. Once the dark
people of the land took Annamabu, how, I cannot imagine, for those
straight grim walls would seem to defy anything that a savage people
could bring against them. There was a town at a little distance, built
for the most part with the swish walls and thatched roofs common to the
country, but here and there, shabby with the shabbiness of the tropics
and the negro combined, were stone houses built on European lines that
must have been miniature forts in their time. There is no need of a fort
now, there is peace in the land, even the mighty pile of the Castle is
delivered over to the care of the negroes, and the glory is departed. I
went up the slanting path to the narrow entrance, the entrance, grim
and dark and damp, and I got out of my hammock for it was too narrow to
admit a hammock, and walked into the courtyard where the powers that be,
represented by a medical officer some miles away along the shore, had
piled up a store of boards to make certain accommodation for the town of
Annamabu, which the inhabitants of the town of Annamabu, being children
of nature, will never use. The sun beat down in that courtyard and took
one's energy away. How, how in this languid, languishing heat were these
mighty stones ever piled one upon the other? Only, surely, by slave
labour, only, surely, by the aid of the whip and the goad.
[Illustration: 0108]
“The negro inhabitants are accounted very bold and stout fellows,” said
Phillips of the _Hannibal_ who had come to enslave them, “but the most
desperate, treacherous villains and great cheats upon the whole coast,
for the gold here is accounted the worst and most mixed with brass of
any in Guiny. The Castle, pretty strong, of about 18 guns.”
It was an offshoot of Koromantyn and was built by the Royal Adventurers
of England in 1624, but Admiral de Ruyter, the Dutchman, in 1665 drove
them out and took the castle, not without a good deal of bloodshed. But
in 1673 a new company, the Royal African Company was formed, and out of
the wrecked remains of what de Ruyter had left they built up the present
castle. It was mysterious to go out of the garish sunshine of the
courtyard into the gloom of the tunnelled staircase that led to the
bastion, and to remember that Phillips and men of his ilk had passed up
that self-same staircase more than two hundred years before, had stood
on that self-same bastion in like hot sunshine, had watched the vultures
settle on the roof of the little ammunition house in the corner, and
the flag of Britain flutter out from the flag-staff that the hard cement
foundation supported. Beyond was the sea, whence had come those grim old
slavers, and I, a woman from the South, the land of liberty. All
round the walls from their embrasures grinned those eighteen guns that
defended the castle and terrorised the negroes. And round them is piled
up the shot that has never been used and will never be used now. On the
west side the coconut palms have grown up, the wind whispers among the
fronds that overshadow the guns, whispers that though their day is done
the problem that they started still remains, and has only been taken
with blood and bitter tears to the other side of the Atlantic. By the
sea-shore of this lovely island I hear its echo crying mournfully. In
one of the embrasures of the wall from among the piled shot had grown up
a green pawpaw tree. The pawpaw is but an ephemeral thing, a tree of a
year or so, but its fruit is good to eat. Shall good come out of evil?
It marks decay too. Not so would they have kept the castle when Phillips
saluted with seven guns to show he was minded to trade for those
“stalwart villains,” the men of Annamabu.
Everything is very straight up and down, very square and grey and solid.
Possibly Mr Searle, the factor Phillips talks about, and his young
mulatto wife dwelt in those rooms-or in rooms not unlike them, very tall
and large, with great window spaces. There was little furniture in my
time, though this was supposed to be a rest-house. But no man ever comes
along the coast now, now that the slaves are not, and the gold is not,
and the elephants are gone. The place is held solely for the benefit
of the negro, and the dust has settled on everything. There are customs
clerks and telegraph clerks, but they are negro, and as yet they do not
care. Neither do the English who dwell and rule from Accra, for Accra is
far, when the only means of progression is a man's pace, and the rulers
say, “These old shells of castles are not worth preserving.” Are they
not?
But, indeed and indeed, the air is thick with memories. Here, in these
dark rooms on the ground floor, hot and airless, did they store their
goods in olden days, “perpetuanos and sayes, knives, old sheets, pewter
basons and muskets,” which Phillips has left on record were the best
goods with which to buy slaves on the Gold Coast in the seventeenth
century. They did not bring out their women, but they took to themselves
wives of the daughters of the land, comely, smooth-skinned, dark-eyed
girls, with full, round bosoms and a carriage like queens, and the
daughters of these unions were much sought after.
“Then came Mrs Rankin,” writes Phillips, of a factor's temporary wife,
“who was a pretty young mulatto with a rich silk cloth about her middle,
and a silk cap upon her head, flowered with gold and silver, under which
her hair was combed out at length, for the mulattoes covet to wear it so
in imitation of the whites”--remember the white men wore their hair long
in those days--“never curling it up or letting it frizzle as the blacks
do. She was accompanied, or rather attended by the second's and doctor's
wives, who were young blacks about thirteen years of age. This is a very
pleasant way of marrying,” goes on the gossipy mariner, “for they can
turn them off and take others at pleasure, which makes them very
careful to humour their husbands in washing their linen, cleaning their
chambers, etc., and the charge of keeping them is little or nothing.”
Poor children, poor, happy, sad, pitiful children, bearing children and
taking a woman's part in ministering to the pleasures of these their
masters at an age when our children would still be babies in the
nursery. It was a custom that died hard. Twelve years ago the nursing
sister at Sekondi told me that when first she was stationed there she
saw a girl, just arrived at marriageable age, sent round to all the
likely white men in the town, tricked out in all the bravery common to
the occasion. She saw her return, too, return in tears, not because
she had been chosen, but because she had not! The standard of morals is
higher on the coast in these times.
And the end of these women? No one has ever told us of their end.
I remember when I was in Sekondi a sad-faced mulatto woman with the
remains--only the remains--of great beauty about her, though possibly
she was barely thirty-five, and the nursing sister shook her head over
Adjuah.
“She is going to die,” she said. “She does not care to live.” It appears
she had lived with some white man who had been fond of her as he passed
by, and she had given him her whole soul. Then came the inevitable, the
time when he departed for Accra, and Adjuah was distracted. She could
not believe he had left her for ever, and she, too, started along the
coast for the distant town. Like many another loving woman she felt
if he could only see her all would be well. But barely a day's journey
along the coast came the great Prah river, and it passed her powers to
cross it. She waited there for days, and then, reluctantly, all along
the burning sands she crawled back wearily to the shelter of the woman
she knew would care for her, and there she waited listlessly--to die.
Is that what happened to these little girls flaunting it so proudly
in their silken clothes? Indeed, worse things might happen to them.
Possibly they were sold as slaves; most surely their children were,
for it is said in Jamaica that every overseer and book-keeper took a
mistress from among the slaves, a girl who came to him gladly for the
betterment of her lot, but she knew and he knew that their children must
be born into servitude, and the father, when the time came for him to
go, left them as lightly as he would so many cattle.
Spear, in his book on the American slave trade, tells how, in the days
when the trade was being suppressed, the British warship _Medina_, on
boarding a slaver off the Gallinas River, found no slaves on board. “The
officers learned afterwards, however, that her captain really had had a
mulatto girl in the cabin. He kept her for some time after the cruiser
appeared, but seeing that he was to be boarded, and knowing that the
presence of one slave was enough to condemn the ship, he tied her to a
kedge anchor and dropped her into the sea. And so, as is believed, he
drowned his own unborn flesh and blood, as well as the slave girl.”
Think of the state of public opinion when a whole crew could stand
calmly by, or even give a hand to perpetrate such an atrocious deed. Is
it any wonder that, on any land where was such slavery as this, there
seems to have fallen a curse; less favoured lands have flourished, but
gorgeous tropical countries, where vegetation runs riot, have not kept
abreast in the race. Surely those unconscious little girls, unconscious
of their own woes, sometimes the pampered slave, bound to be the
out-cast slave in the end, have brought a curse upon them. It broods
over Africa. It is here in Jamaica, it will take much wisdom and many
many years to work it off.
Of course it was not only the women who suffered. Slavery was the custom
of the time, and men and women alike were chattels. It was the pitiful
pretence to place and power that makes us feel more keenly the case of
these little girls who were wives and yet no wives, and gained honour
for a brief season by being associated with the white men.
And in Annamabu came home to me clearly, the cargoes, the
thrice-accursed cargoes these men had set their hearts upon, the
cargoes that were the _raison d'être_ of these heavily armed castles. In
Phillips' day a really good negro might be bought on the Coast at a cost
of about £4 for the most expensive, while he might be sold for about £19
in Jamaica or Barbadoes.
“I had two little negro boys presented to me here,” says he with a
certain satisfaction, “by our honest factors, and two more at Cape
Corso.” Nobody considered the feelings of the boys torn from their
homes. And well might he be pleased, for these presumably were his
private property, and not to be accounted among the cargo. When
Ansumanah, my own serving boy, sat in the shade at the bottom of the
flight of stairs that led up to the bastion, I remembered Phillips'
two little boys who had attended their master here. The stone steps are
worn, worn in the years by the passing of many unshod feet, sad and glad
and hopeful and despairing, but what had the little boys that Phillips
was taking to the Indies to hope for?
Exactly at Annamabu he did not gather his slaves, but a little farther
along the Coast. Here he took on board 180 chests of corn with which
to feed them. The little squat ship having laid in her provisions, went
slowly along the coast, and in the daylight the people came off in their
canoes, and at night they lighted fires along the shore as a sign they
had something to trade, and their trade goods were always the same,
gold, elephants' teeth, that is, ivory, or men, and generally they
required the captain to come down over the side of his ship and drop
three drops of sea water in his eye as a pledge of friendship and of
safety for them to come aboard, “which” says Phillips, “I very readily
consented to and performed in hopes of a good market.”
Sometimes he got ivory, but his ship was a slaver, slaves she was
looking for and slaves she would get, for might was right and wars were
perpetually waged--by the black men be it understood--in order that
there might be plenty of the commodity. The commodity, being flesh and
blood, suffered.
“The master of her brought in three women and four children to sell,”
he remarks casually of a canoe that hailed him from the shore, “but
he asked very dear for them and they were almost dead from want of
victuals, looking like mere skeletons and so weak they could not stand,
so that they were not worth buying. He promised to procure us two or
three hundred slaves if we would anchor and come ashore and stay two
or three days, but, judging what the others might be by the sample he
brought us, and being loth to venture ashore upon his bare word, where
we did not use to trade and had no factory, we sent him away and resumed
our voyage.” He has left us a very graphic account of the manner in
which he and the captain of the _East Indian Merchant_ bought their
wares. The slaves were evidently got in small parcels, secured in the
factories and shipped off on calm days, for the surf of the Guinea Coast
would not always allow of a landing. Where they kept them at Annamabu
or in the dominant factory at Koromantyn, I do not know, probably in
the court-yard or in the dark dungeons, dark and hot and airless that
surrounded it, and the reek of them must have gone up to heaven, calling
down a curse upon those captors who were apparently so unconscious of
wrongdoing. At Whidah, to which Phillips traded from Annamabu, it is not
very far away, there was only a small factory, and the local chief or
“king” collected the slaves for sale and kept them in a “trunk,” which
Phillips and the captain of the _East Indian Merchant_, attended by
their respective doctors and pursers, visited daily to make their
purchases.
The purser's business was to pay for the goods I suppose, and the
surgeon he considers absolutely necessary.
“Our surgeon examined them well in all kinds to see that they were
sound, wind and limb, making them jump, stretch out their arms swiftly,
looking in their mouths to judge of their age; for the cappashiers are
so cunning that they shave them all close before we see them, so that,
let them be never so old, we can see no grey hairs in their heads or
beards, and then, having liquored them well and sleek with palm oil,
'tis no easy matter to know an old one from a middle-aged one but by the
teeth's decay... therefore our surgeon is forced to examine... both men
and women with the nicest scrutiny which is a great slavery but can't be
omitted.”
“This place where the slaves were kept day and night,” he records,
putting the matter very plainly, “was so foul that I often fainted with
the horrid stink of the negroes.” And he was a hard-bitten sailor of the
seventeenth century accustomed to the close evil-smelling ships of his
period! But he has no particular word of pity for the closely-herded
negroes whose condition produced such a state of affairs.
“We marked the slaves we had bought in the breast or shoulder with a
hot iron having the letter of the ship's name upon it, the place being
before anointed with a little palm oil which caused but little pain, the
mark being usually well in four or five days, appearing very plain and
white after.” And this is an allegory surely. The mark that slavery made
has always appeared very plain after.
And when the surf allowed, the slaves were marched down to the shore
and “our canoes carry them off to the long boat, and she conveyed them
aboard ship where the men were all put in irons two and two, shackled
together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore.”
“The negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country,” he
records mournfully as a man who may expect sympathy, “that they have
often leaped out of the canoe, boat, and ship, into the sea, and kept
under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by
our boats which pursued them, they having a more dreadful apprehension
of Barbadoes than we can have of hell, tho' in reality they live
much better there than in their own country.” The shackling as an
introduction to this improved home life was perhaps not calculated to
inspire confidence. “But home is home,” moralises Phillips. “We have
likewise seen divers of them eaten by sharks, of which a prodigious
number kept about the ships in this place. We had about twelve negroes
did wilfully drown themselves, and others starved themselves to death,
for 'tis their belief that when they die they return home to their own
country and friends again. I have been informed that some commanders
have cut off the legs of the most wilful to terrify the rest, for they
believe if they lose a member they cannot return home again. I was
advised by some of my officers to do the same, but I could not be
persuaded to entertain the least thoughts of it, much less to put in
practice such barbarous cruelty to poor creatures who, excepting their
want of Christianity, true religion (their misfortune, more than fault)
are as much the works of God's Hands and no doubt as dear to Him as
ourselves.” Surprising words from a slaver!
He himself has but a poor opinion of the men of his calling.
“They commonly undermine, betray, and outbid one another,” he writes,
“and the Guiney commanders' words and promises are the least to be
depended upon of any I know use the sea, for they would deceive their
fathers in their trade if they could.”
And then when the slaves were on board, and the grey castles were down
on the horizon, and the long, long voyage was begun, there were troubles
not only for the wretched merchandise, but for those who carried them.
“When our slaves are aboard,” he says again, “we shackle them two and
two while we lie in port, and in sight of their own country, for 'tis
then they attempt to make their escape or mutiny, to prevent which we
always keep sentinels upon the hatchways, and have a chest of small arms
ready loaden and trim'd, constantly lying at hand upon the quarterdeck
together with some granada shells, and two of our quarterdeck guns
pointing on the deck thence, and two more out of the steerage, the door
of which is always kept shut and well barred.
“They are fed twice a day, at 10 in the morning, and 4 in the evening,
which is the time they are apt to mutiny, being all upon the deck;
therefore, all that time what of our men who are not employed in
distributing their victuals to them and settling them, stand to their
arms with lighted matches at the great guns that yawn upon them, loaden
with cartridge, till they have done and gone below to their kennels
between decks.”
What a picture of life aboard a slaver!
“Great mortality among the slaves,” he writes wearily later on, “which
together with their stink and nastiness”--and he goes on feelingly to
tell of a Dutch skipper, Clause, who said if his owners would give him
£100 per month to go and carry negroes again, he would not take it, but
would sooner go elsewhere a common sailor, for 20 guilders a month.
No wonder. Out of 700 taken on board the _Hannibal_ some died every day,
and by the time they reached Barbadoes they had thrown overboard 320 of
them, and all the comment her master makes is that it was a clear loss
to the owners, the African Company, of £10 for every negro that so died.
But there is another thing he notices with intense surprise. He was
“forced to clap one Lord, the trumpeter, in irons, for his being the
promoter of unseasonable carousing bouts,” we can understand it would
never have done for the crew to indulge in such bouts with such a cargo,
“and though he remained upon the poop day and night in irons for two
months, without any other shelter than the canopy of heaven, he was
never troubled with any sickness, but made good the proverb that
'Naught's never in danger.'” And while he goes on complaining of
enduring so “much misery and stench among a parcel of creatures nastier
than swine,” it never occurs to him, or to anybody else for that matter,
for many a long day, that he had provided his recreant trumpeter with at
least one safeguard in plenty of air.
Three hundred and twenty negroes murdered on that voyage alone. No
wonder “Ichabod” is written over those old castles. Koromantyn that was
once the chief stronghold, head castle of the English, is no more, its
guns are red with rust, its walls are crumbling to ruin, its courtyards
are desolate and grass-grown, and the people from the neighbouring
villages go there when they want shaped stones. Annamabu still stands
a model of what these castles used to be--with the exception of Elmina,
the best model and best preserved along the 300 miles of coast. Cape
Coast has been used for many purposes, but no white man can live there,
because no servant will stay there, they declare it is haunted. Well it
might be, for the dungeons are deep and dark, and assuredly they have
been used. Kommenda is a shell, and no native will go into the courtyard
where the bush is beginning to grow up because there is ju-ju upon
it, and the evil spirits make it their home. At Annamabu, as I sat at
luncheon, there came up a quick tropical storm. The roar of the wind
hushed the sound of the ceaseless surf, the coconut palms bent before
it, and the rain came down in torrents. It blotted out the sea, it swept
off the bastion in streams, it beat down the breakers, and like a grey
mist it shut out the surrounding landscape.
“You stop here, Ma,” said my head man with a satisfaction he did not
conceal.
Stop there? With all the ghosts of the past? Would not the mulatto girl,
who was the factor's wife, come back and walk along this bastion, as
she must have done more than two hundred years ago? Would she be sad?
Or glad? Or proud? Would not the men and women who had been driven so
unwillingly through that long-tunnelled entrance, been shut up in those
dark dungeons on the ground floor, come back mourning and wailing? Would
not the white man, who had looked out over the sea with longing eyes,
come tramping those stones again, heedless of dark mistress or coffers
slowly piling with gold, counting the days, as he had counted them so
often, when in his own pleasant land again he would enjoy the fruits of
his labour? Stay? No, a thousand times, no, no. And the tropical storm
passed, the golden rays of the afternoon sun fell through the slanting
rain drops, and then the rain stopped and a mist rose up from the wet
stones, and the sea lay blue, reflecting the blue sky above, and I went
down the steps and into the tunnel, and out of the courtyard and away
along the sea-shore past Koromantyn, and only in Jamaica did I realise
that by the merest chance, I had seen and appreciated the beginnings
of the iniquitous Middle Passage, that I had come upon the place whence
came all the slaves who led the insurrections in that island for close
on two hundred years.
I have wandered in my life, far and wide, east and west, but that remote
castle on the Guinea Coast made a far deeper impression than many a more
important place.