All up and down the roads of Jamaica tramp ceaselessly the dark people.
In the towns now, I notice many of the men, when they have anything to
carry, carry it in their hands, under their arms, or on their backs, but
the women are not so progressive. I don't quite believe the yarn about
the girl, who, having been sent to buy a postage stamp, put it on her
head, with a stone to keep it in place, but, certainly, the women still
adhere to the old African way of bearing a burden on their heads. From
my verandah all day, and twenty times a day, I could see men arranging
the load on their companion's head, and the woman accepting the help
offered, and trotting along meekly behind the man, though he went
empty-handed.
[Illustration: 0124]
Men and women are in all shades, but mostly, of course, black, often
with the woolly hair and thick coarse lips, that are considered typical
of the negro. They are not. They are typical of men with low ideals. I
have seen black men with faces as fine as the best Europeans, and I am
sure that the features of a man's face are apt to be altered by his mode
of life and his thoughts. Of course, it is his thoughts that do it, but
his thoughts are produced by his environment. He is a wonderful man
who is able to rise above the degrading environment forced upon him by
circumstances. Up to the present the negro has been handicapped,
and when I see a black man with a fine face, in my mind, I make him
obeisance. He has come up a long way, far, far farther than his white
prototype.
And his unwilling forebears were brought to Jamaica by the accursed
Middle Passage.
It was so called because a ship went from England or America to the
Guinea Coast, thence to the West Indies or wherever there was a market
for slaves, which was seldom at her home port, and thence back empty to
refit. Hence the Middle Passage, a term which, before I investigated the
matter, always puzzled me.
The horrors of the Middle Passage were of no account to the men who did
the trading. It was an uncomfortable job, as the Dutch Skipper Clause
found, but there was money in it, men were not very tender even of each
other in olden days, and they counted as little the pains suffered by
the luckless people whom they held in bondage. Says Montesquieu, who was
before his time, “Slavery is not good in itself. It is useful neither
to the master nor the slave. Not to the slave because he can do nothing
from virtuous motives. Not to the master, because he contracts among his
slaves all sorts of bad habits, and accustoms himself to the neglect
of all the moral virtues. He becomes haughty, passionate, obdurate,
vindictive, voluptuous, and cruel.” He might have added that the men
who made the slaves held a still worse position. Once we begin to
investigate, we find that the captains of the slavers were almost
invariably ruthlessly cruel.
Not quite all. There is mention made in the American Historical Record
of David Lindsay, who in 1740 was trading on the Guinea Coast. Here is
a letter written by one George Scott, who meeting Captain Lindsay at sea
on the 13th June 1740, entrusts him with this letter and all his gold.
He says he left Annamabu on the 8th May, and he had only reached 39.30°
W. No wonder he reports that his voyage is miserable, and he has lost
twenty-nine slaves out of a cargo of one hundred and twenty-nine. The
surprising thing is that he can report that “the slaves we have now is
all recovered.” The ships were tiny. David Lindsay, according to Spear,
was in 1752 in command of the brigantine _Sanderson_, “a square stern'd
vessel of the burthen of about 40 tons.” What a cockle shell! and he,
too, writes from “Anamaboe, 28th February 1753.... The traid is so dull,
it is actually a noof to make a man creasey.” He has been obliged to buy
a cable, and he begs his owners “not to Blaim me in so doeing. I should
be glad I cood come Rite home with my slaves, for my vesiel will not
last to proceed farr. We can see daylight al round her bow under deck.
However, I hope She will carry me safe home once more. I need not
inlarge.” So he, too, lay outside the surf at Annamabu, he, too, walked
on the bastion and discussed with the factors his chances. Oh, they were
plucky men those first slavers, if they were brutes, but Lindsay I do
not think was a brute. And on that last day of February 1753, there must
have been quite a fleet of slavers. “Heare lyes Captains hamlet, James
Jepson, Carpenter, Butler, & Lindsay. Gardner is dun.” “firginson,” he
goes on with a pleasant disregard of the uses of capitals, “is Gon to
Leward. All these is Rum ships.... I've sent a Small boy to my wife. I
conclude with my best Endeavors for Intrust. Gentlemen, your faithful
Servant at Comind, David Lindsay.
“NB.--On the whole I never had so much Trouble in all my voiges. I shall
rite to barbadoes in a few days.” A pleasant letter to come down to us
out of the years and written by a slaver too! His officers were sick
and so were three of the men in the forecastle, and he feared lest the
slaves in the hold, learning how short-handed he was, might rise up and
make a bid for their freedom, but worse than all was the leaky condition
of the ship. Well for her that she sailed in sunny seas, in the season
when hurricanes were hardly to be feared, but I felt a thrill of
triumph when on the 17th June of the same year he was able to write from
Barbadoes:
“Gentle'n:--These are to acqt of my arrival heare ye Day before
yesterday in 10 weeks from Anamaboe. I met on my passage 22 days of very
squally winds & continued Bains, so that it beat my sails alto pieces,
soe that I was oblige Several Days to have Sails on bent to mend them.
The vesiel likewise is all open Bound her bows under deck.... My slaves
is not landed yet; they are 58 in number for owners, all in helth &
fatt. I lost one small gall.” The health of the slaves does him credit
in so small a ship. With my faith in fresh air I cannot help wondering
if some of it was not due to that opening round the ship's bows under
deck.
After a few more remarks he says, “I left Captain Hamblet at Cape Coast
sick. His slaves had rose, and they lost the best of what they had.”
What happened to the slaves? The slave trade is full of such unfinished
stories.
There is another letter from Annamabu from one George Scott. “We have
now aboard one hundred and no gold. I think to purchase about twenty &
go off ye coast: ye time of ye year [it was April], don't doe to tarry
much longer. Everything of provisions is very dear and scarce: it costs
for water Ten shillings for one day. I think to stay in this place but
fourteen days more. We shall go to Shama and water our vessel.”
Shama or Chama is another slave castle about half a day's journey
from Sekondi. Grim high walls surround it, and the only entrance is
approached by the wide steps in a half circle, steps that we so often
see approaching the entrance to an old house in Jamaica. At the Hyde
there were the same sort of circular steps that I met at Chama, but at
Chama they came up to a narrow entrance that two men, in those days,
might hold for a week against great odds.
This slaver goes on to say he thinks he will sail off the coast from
Chama with about 120 slaves cargo. “We have left about two hundred pound
sterg in goods which wont sell here to any profitt. Every man slave that
we pay all Goods for here, costs twelve pounds sterg prime. I hope
I shall be in Barbadoes ye latter end of June but have not concluded
whither we shall go to Jamaica or Virginia; our slaves is mostly large.
60 men and boys, 20 women, the rest boys and girls, but three under four
foot high. Pray excuse all blunders and bad writing for I have no time
to coppy, the sloop being under sail.”
I like the last touch, the slaver captain who copied out his letters so
that they should be neat when he had time and was not ashamed to own it.
I hope he was as careful of his human cargo.
The getting of that cargo was not always accomplished, as Phillips did
it, by the simple process of going to the “trunk” and buying those
he wanted. Clarkson, when he was seeking evidence to justify the
suppression of the slave trade, told a tale of wicked treachery by white
men, Englishmen, I am sorry to say, who found trade bad at Old Calabar.
There lay in the River the ships _Indian Queen, Duke of York, Nancy_ and
_Concord_ of Bristol, the _Edgar_ of Liverpool, and the _Canterbury_
of London, slavers all, and the slaves were not coming in in this year
1767. Therefore they planned among themselves as coolly as if the black
men had been deer or elephants, or pheasants, how they might best fill
their between decks. The Calabar River is hot and it is unhealthy, for
the percentage of moisture in the air is so great that very gladly I
have sat over a fire when the thermometer registered over 90° in the
shade, so that it is hardly a pleasant place of residence for a white
man. Also the old inhabitants were not very tender of each other, or
very careful of human life, for as I sat there watching a most glorious
sunset a woman, who had come there in the early days, and she was not
then, I think, fifty, told me how she hated to walk along the shore--the
Calabar River is really an arm of the sea--because of the living
sacrifices, generally young girls offered to the envious gods and bound
to stakes, waiting for the tide to come up and put an end to their
misery. Still the blood-thirstiness of the natives does not excuse
that of the slavers. I only mention it because I find that while the
advocates for slavery painted the slave in the blackest colours, the
opponents generally depicted the poor black man as a noble martyr. He
wasn't. He was suffering humanity neither better nor worse than his
station in life allowed, often rising to heights of heroism, but often
out-heroding his tormentors in blackguardism.
It happened there was a quarrel at that time between Old and New
Calabar, and the captains of the vessels, says Clarkson, “joined in
sending several letters to the inhabitants of Old Town, but particularly
to Ephraim Robin John who was at that time a grandee of the place. The
tenor of these letters was that they were sorry that any jealousy or
quarrel should subsist between the two parties; that if the inhabitants
of Old Town would come on board, they would afford them security and
protection; adding at the same time that their intention in inviting
them was that they might become mediators and thus heal their disputes.
The inhabitants of Old Town, happy to find their differences were likely
to be accommodated, joyfully accepted the invitation. The three brothers
of the grandee just mentioned, the eldest of whom was Amboe Eobin John,
first entered their canoe, attended by twenty-seven others, and being
followed by nine canoes, directed their course to the Indian Queen.
They were dispatched from thence the next morning to the Edgar, and
afterwards to the Duke of York, They went on board the last ship,
leaving their canoe and attendants by the side of the vessel. These,
of course, were important men. A chief on the Coast now carries a
silver-headed stick as a badge of rank, is clad in the richest silken
robe, and is as far above the rank and file as is the Duke of Devonshire
above the labourer cleaning Piccadilly. And these men of rank being well
received and fêted on board the slavers, the rest of the canoes went
with confidence to the other ships of the fleet. And then the white
brutes worked their wicked will. The men on deck fired on the canoe
lying alongside, she filled and sank, and the wretched attendants were
either killed or drowned or taken as slaves, while their masters, guests
of honour in the white man's saloon, fared no better. The captain,
mates, and some of the crew of the _Duke of York_, armed with pistols
and cutlasses, rushed on the unfortunates, doubtless sitting drinking
rum, and they made for the stern windows; but they were wounded and
helpless and were promptly put in irons.
“The _Duke of York_ having given the signal, most of the other ships
followed her example, and the inhabitants of New Town, concealed in the
mangrove swamps along the shore, where the monkeys play and the grey
parrots call, came out of their hiding-places and joined in the ghastly
fray. And the lust of killing got hold of the aggressors. The ships'
boats were manned, and joined themselves to the canoes from New Town.
They pursued' the fleeing men from Old Calabar, and they apparently
forgot the object for which they had lured these men to the ships, and
killed at least as many of the men of the Old Town as they enslaved.
“And then came a canoe with the principal men from New Town to the _Duke
of York_, demanding Amboe Robin John, the brother of the “grandee” of
the rival town. And Amboe Robin John pleaded pitifully for his life. He
put the palms of his hands together and beseeched and prayed his captor
not so to violate the rights of hospitality. But he spoke to deaf ears.
The captain of the _Duke of York_ only wanted a slave, and the men of
New Town offered him one, named Econg, in exchange, and they forced
their enemy into the canoe and struck off his head, and the slaver put
in his place the man named Econg, who, like the thirty pieces of silver
traded so long ago, was the price of blood.”
Was ever there a more atrocious story of treachery? Nothing happened to
those white men whereas when a slave struck for liberty in Jamaica--but
I have told this story just because presently I shall have occasion
to tell of slave risings in Jamaica, and if the slaves were fiendishly
cruel--and they were--nothing can exceed the cruelty of the white men
who first brought them hither. Clarkson says that the deputy town-clerk
of Bristol, Mr Burges, said that he only knew of one captain from the
port in the slave trade who did not deserve to be hanged.
Perhaps the fate of those men of Old Calabar, whose dead bodies were
washed up on the sands and caught in the mangrove swamps, was the
most merciful, for those who were taken on board the ships truly had
a terrible time. From the very beginning the last thing the slavers
considered was the comfort of the slaves. No, “comfort” is the wrong
word to use, such a word as comfort from the days of Queen Elizabeth to
those of Victoria, was a word not in the language as far as the slaves
were concerned. No one ever thought to see that these men and women,
these living beings, to put them on the very lowest rung of the ladder,
were likely to be free from discomfort, nay, free from actual pain.
Spear tells how he read of “the new slaver built at Warren in the
country of Bristole in the colony of Rhode Island, that was three
feet ten inches between decks,” and Clarkson, who went up and down the
country collecting information about the slavers and their doings, tells
us of two little sloops which were fitting out for Africa, the one only
of 25 tons which was said to be destined to carry seventy, and the other
of only 11 tons which was to carry thirty slaves, and these were not to
be used as tenders bringing small parties down the rivers to the bigger
ships, but were to sail for the West Indies with the slaves themselves,
and on their arrival, one if not both, were to be sold as pleasure
boats. Then he gives the dimensions. In the larger one each slave “must
sit down all the voyage, and contract his limbs within the narrow limits
of 3 square feet, while in the smaller, each slave had 4 square feet to
sit in, but since the height between decks was only 2 feet 8 inches,
his head must touch the deck above. When the matter was investigated in
Parliament, it was stated that if the space between decks in a slaver
reached 4 feet--it never seems to have exceeded 5 feet 8 inches--they
invariably put up a shelf to the width of 5 feet, so that another layer
of slaves might be placed on top of the first. The men were ironed
together two and two by the ankles, and sometimes their wrists
were handcuffed together, and a chain usually fastened the irons to
ringbolts, either on the deck above or below. The women and children
were left unironed, and the men were stowed forward and the women aft.
If they could get a cargo--and they generally waited on that sweltering
coast, rolling in the surf, until they did--the slaves covered the
entire deck.” In Parliament, at the end of the eighteenth century, they
took the dimensions of the slaver Brookes, picking her at haphazard
from a long list of slavers given them. They found that if each man
was allowed 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, every woman 5 feet by 1 foot 4
inches, every boy 5 feet by 1 foot 2 inches, and every girl 4 feet 6
inches by 1 foot, they could stow in her 432. There is a plan given in
Clarkson's book with every slave in place, and you could not put a pin
between them. Certainly it was utterly impossible for any one to move
amongst them, at least I should have said so. And yet it was proved that
on a previous voyage the _Brookes_ had carried no less than 609 slaves!
And the slave ships were on the coast, the stifling Guinea Coast, from
three to ten months, and from six to ten weeks crossing the Atlantic. It
was quite possible for a slave to be on board in that ghastly stinking
slave deck, stinking is a mild word to use for so foul a den, for over a
year. In this place they must stay for at least sixteen hours out of
the twenty-four, when the weather was bad, or even when it was wet, they
were kept there for days together. Nothing that breathed, it seems to
me, but must have died in such a place. It was stated in Parliament that
“if the ship was full their situation was terribly distressing. They
sometimes drew their breath with anxious and laborious efforts, and some
died of suffocation.”
“Thus crammed together like herrings in a barrel,” said Sir William
Dolben, “they contracted putrid and fatal disorders, so that they who
came to inspect them,” (how could they inspect them save by tramping
over them), “in the morning had occasionally to pick dead slaves out
of their rows, and to unchain their carcases from the bodies of their
wretched fellow sufferers to whom they had been fastened.”
We do well to remember too, that there were no sanitary arrangements
upon a slave ship. All the calls of Nature had to be performed upon the
spot to which the wretched beings were shackled. And when they were sea
sick------
But no words of mine can convey the horror of it.
These unhappy people were allowed a pint of water a day each, and were
fed twice a day upon yams and horse beans. Also, since it was absolutely
necessary that they should have exercise for their health's sake, they
were obliged after each meal to jump up and down, or dance in their
shackles, and if they did not do so--I can imagine they hardly felt
inclined for that form of amusement--they were whipped until they did,
and the same stimulus was used to make them sing!
And yet it was possible to arrive at their final destination with only
the loss of 1 or 2 per cent., and Captain Hugh Crow, the one-eyed slaver
of Liverpool, says Spear, by daily washings, good food, and keeping them
amused by playing on musical instruments, did it, and one, Captain John
Newton, returned thanks in church, because he had performed the voyage
from Africa without the loss of a single man.
But these were in the days when the trade was counted, according to John
Newton, “genteel employment,” when the rich ship owners of Liverpool and
Bristol had no more shame in owning slavers than nowadays they have in
taking passengers to America, or trading to Sicily for oranges and wine.
But care such as Hugh Crow took was, I am afraid, rare, and terrible
are the tales of the utter brutality suffered in addition to the
overcrowding, the filth and the agonies of seasickness which already was
the lot of the human cattle.
Clarkson tells the story of the ship _Zong_--Captain Luke Collingwood,
and Captain Luke Colling-wood seems to have been a devil incarnate.
Unluckily, he was not the only one in the trade.
On one day early in September 1781, the _Zong_ sailed from the island of
St Thomas, bound for Jamaica, with 440 slaves on board, and she arrived
off the coast short of water. But Collingwood made the mistake of
thinking he was off Hayti, and seeing that the slaves were sickly, and
indeed had suffered much from want of water, he and his mate, James
Kelsall, decided that since the slaves were sickly--sickly was probably
a mild term to use since sixty of them had already died--it would be
well to jettison the cargo, or some of it. For the death rate had been
so great the voyage was likely to be unprofitable, and if he could prove
that some of the cargo had been thrown overboard to save the rest, the
underwriters would pay the value of it, while if these slaves died on
board the ship would be at the loss. They selected accordingly 132 of
the most sickly of the slaves. Fifty-four of these were there and
then thrown overboard to the sharks that swarmed round the ship, and
forty-two went the same way the next day, and in the course of the next
three days the remaining twenty-six were brought out of the den below to
complete the tale of the victims. Poor, wretched, suffering creatures!
They looked at the sea, at the sinister fins appearing above the oily
swell, and they looked back at their prison and the pitiless white faces
that looked down upon them, and then they made their choice. Sixteen,
they say, were thrown overboard by the officers, but the rest leaped
into the bloody sea where the sharks were already fighting for their
meal and shared their fate.
The plea that was set up on behalf of this atrocious act of wickedness
was that the captain discovered, when he made the proposal, that he had
only 200 gallons of water on board, and that he had missed his port.
It was proved, however, in answer to this that no one had been put
upon short allowance; and that rain fell and continued for three days
immediately after the second lot of slaves had been thrown overboard.
They might have filled all their barrels and done away with all
necessity--if one could call it necessity--for the murder of the third
lot. As a matter of fact they only troubled to fill six.
But the underwriters refused to pay, and the Solicitor-General actually
held that the captain of the ship had an “unquestionable right” to throw
the slaves into the sea. But not all men agreed with him. Light was
coming, and Lord Mansfield, presiding in the higher court, said that
this was a shocking case, and, in spite of the law, decided in favour of
the underwriters. Still, nothing apparently was done to the murderers.
They went scot-free. But imagine the state of public opinion when such a
case could actually be brought before the courts, when the perpetrators
of such a crime evidently regarded themselves as agents, doing their
very best for those who had entrusted their business to their charge.
But once the trade was outlawed, and the vigilant warships were ever on
the watch, life was still more cruel for the unfortunate chattel. Then,
to run as many slaves as possible, and to make up for possible losses,
the slaves were compelled to lie on their sides, breast to back, spoon
fashion, and this when the space between decks was less than two feet.
When it was as much as two feet they were stowed, says Spear, “sitting
up in rows, one crowded into the lap of another, with legs on legs like
riders on a crowded toboggan. In storms the sailors had to put on the
hatches, and seal tight the openings into the infernal cesspool. It was
asserted by the naval officers who were stationed on the Coast to stop
the traffic that in certain states of the weather they could detect the
odour of a slaver farther away than they could see her on a clear night.
The odour was often unmistakable at a distance of five miles down the
wind.”
And to what lengths these brutes might go we may see in the case of the
_Gloria_, given by Drake in his _Revelations of a Slave Smuggler_, and
quoted by Spear. The surgeon tells the tale.
The _Gloria_ was coming from the Cape Verde Islands in ballast when
she overhauled a Portuguese schooner with a full cargo of slaves. The
captain of the _Gloria_, as thorough a scoundrel surely as ever sailed
the seas, filled up his men with rum, attacked the schooner, murdered
her officers and crew and one passenger, stole the gold, transferred the
slaves to his own ship and scuttled the other. Dead men and sunken ships
tell no tales, and 190 slaves as witnesses counted as naught in those
days.
Then Ruiz the captain, I'm glad he wasn't an Englishman, bought 400
negroes on the Dahomean Coast and “hauled our course for the Atlantic
voyage. But this was to be my last trip in the blood-stained Gloria.
Hardly were we out a fortnight before it was discovered that our
roystering crew had neglected to change the sea water, which had served
as our ballast in the lower casks, and which ought to have been replaced
with fresh water in Africa. We were drawing from the last casks before
this discovery was made, and the horror of our situation sobered Captain
Ruiz. He gave orders to hoist the precious remnant abaft the main
grating, and made me calculate how long it would sustain the crew and
cargo. I found that half a gill a day would hold out to the Spanish
main; and it was decided that, in order to save our cargo, we should
allow the slaves a half gill and the crew a gill each a day. Then began
a torture worse than death to the blacks. Pent in their close dungeons,
to the number of nearly five hundred, they suffered continual torment.
Our crew and drivers were unwilling to allow even the half gill per
diem, and quarrelled fiercely over their own stinted rations. Our cargo
had been stowed on the platforms closer than I ever saw slaves stowed
before or since. Instead of lowering buckets of water to them, as
was customary, it became necessary to pour the water into half-pint
measures. These farthest from the gratings never got a drop.... In
a short time at least a hundred men and women were shackled to dead
partners.”
It is a ghastly picture. Perhaps we could not expect any pity for the
sufferings of the “cargo” from such a set of pirates. Everyone who was
free on board drank hard “as well as myself,” said the frank narrator,
and they did not trouble to throw the dead overboard, or presumably even
to unshackle the living, for the captain finding his crew out of hand,
ordered the hatches down, and “swore he would make the run on our
regular water rations, and take the chances of his stock.”
Three days those fiends continued their course, drinking in plenty,
while “the negroes suffocated below.” And then came retribution swift
and sure.
“Ruiz and four of the men were taken suddenly ill with a disease that
baffled my medical knowledge. Their tongues swelled and grew black;
their flesh turned yellow, and in six hours they were dead. The first
mate went next, and then three others of the crew, and a black driver
whose body became leprous with yellow spots. I began to notice a strange
fetid smell pervading the vessel, and a low heavy fog on deck, almost
like steam. Then the horrid truth became apparent. Our rotting negroes
under hatches had generated the plague, and it was a malaria or death
mist I saw rising. At this time all our men but three and myself had
been attacked; and we abandoned the _Gloria_ in her long boat, taking
the remnant of water, a sack of biscuit, and a rum beaker, with what
gold dust and other valuables we could hastily gather up. We left nine
of our late comrades dead and five dying on the _Gloria's_ deck.”
I have only read the extract that Spear gives in his book, but if it is
true--and it may well be--judging by what I have read elsewhere--this
ship's surgeon appears to have been a pretty considerable villain
himself. The “cargo,” I suppose, must have been dead. It was hardly
likely one could have survived so long without water in the tropics, but
what about the dying comrades he abandoned on the decks?
As a matter of fact, the slavers themselves often did so suffer, for
it is hardly possible to generate disease, live over it, and escape
scot-free. One of the most ghastly cases is that of the French slaver
_Rôdeur._
In the year in which Queen Victoria was born, she was on her way to
the West Indies with 162 slaves, when ophthalmia appeared among them.
Probably it was not treated properly, but in any case, crowded as they
were between decks, it was bound to spread rapidly, and at last, the
captain with a view to saving the majority repeated the horror of
the _Zong_, and threw thirty-six of them, the ones of least value, I
presume, alive to the sharks. But this living sacrifice did not stop
the disease. As it was bound to, being a filth disease, it spread to the
crew, and presently there was but one man among the crew who could see.
And this one man steering, and with all the work of the ship upon his
shoulders, saw with thankfulness a sail, and steered towards her. But
there was something strange about that sail. As he approached the ship
he saw she was drifting as if derelict, though men were wandering about
her decks. And she, too, was a slaver. On the _Rôdeur_ they might have
known that by the smell, if custom had not deadened in them that sense.
In answer to a hail the crew of the stranger came crowding to the rail
begging, praying for aid, and everyone on board that ship was blind. She
was, they said, the Spanish slaver _Leon_, and among their slaves, too,
ophthalmia had broken out, and had spread to the crew, and there they
lay rolling on the Atlantic helpless.
But what was the good of prayers and cries, and bribes, and wild appeals
for help. One man who could see had as much as he could do to steer his
own ship to port, for the disease was creeping upon him, and tradition
says that he, too, went blind when he reached haven, and of the Spanish
slaver _Leon_, with all her crew and all her slaves, no man ever heard
again.
But the white men, at least, took the risks with their eyes open; upon
the blacks, it had been forced, and no wonder the wretched cargo in
their hopeless misery tried rebelling, though rebellion meant death to
all concerned, and often, to some who had absolutely nothing to do with
it.
Take the story told by the surgeon of the slaver _Little Pearl_, which
sailed from the Coast in 1786. The chief mate used to beat the men
slaves in season and out of season. One night he heard a noise and
jumped down amongst them with a lantern. On the _Brookes_ there wouldn't
have been room for a lantern, and I doubt if there was more on the
_Little Pearl_. Two of the slaves forced themselves out of their irons,
and seizing him, began to strike him with these, their only weapons. His
cries brought the crew to his aid, we can imagine how mercilessly they
trampled on the slaves in that confined space to do it, and they got him
out, and the “cargo” began one of those hopeless struggles for freedom
which could only end one way. At least, as a rule, it did. They were
still on the Coast, and the thought that they were near their homes,
probably gave added vigour to the arms of those who fought. The crew
fired down upon them, careless of whom they might hurt. In truth, there
was hardly anything else they could do, for, if the slaves got the upper
hand, it would have been “Good-night,” as far as the white men were
concerned. Next morning they were brought up one by one, and then it was
found a boy had been killed. Only the two men who had first broken their
bonds did not come with the others. They found their way into the hold,
and armed themselves with knives from a cask that had been opened for
trade. Oh, the forlorn hope! If they had been white men someone would
have enthused over their pluck and valour, but they were only two negro
slaves. One was persuaded to come up by a negro trader calling to him
in his own tongue, and the moment he appeared on deck, one of the crew,
“supposing him to be yet hostile,” shot him dead. The other held that
hold for twelve hours! They mixed scalding water with fat and poured it
down upon him to make him come up, but, “though his flesh was painfully
blistered,” by these means he kept below. A promise was then made to him
in the African tongue by the same trader that no injury should be done
him if he would come amongst them. To this at length he consented.
But, on observing when he was about half way up that a sailor was armed
between decks, he flew to him and threw him down. The sailor fired his
pistol in the scuffle, but, without effect; he contrived, however, to
fracture his skull with the butt end of it, so that the slave died on
the third day. Mercifully. Though we are left in the dark as to his
sufferings before he died, but we may judge of them by the way the same
men treated a boy when they arrived at their destination in the West
Indies.
There was a boy slave on board, says Clarkson, who was very ill and
emaciated. Now the rule in slavers was that each officer of the ship was
allowed one or more slaves for his own benefit, according to his rank.
But the slaves were not given to them. When they were sold, the total
amount brought in was added together and then divided by the number
of slaves sold, and in that way each officer took his share in money.
Therefore, if a slave were sold for a trifling amount, he brought down
the value of the officers' slaves. The chief mate objected to this boy
being sold. He would only bring down the average. His objection was
allowed. It was a natural one. Therefore, the boy was kept on board, and
not exposed for sale, but no provisions were allowed him, and the mate
suggested he should be thrown overboard. No one would do this, however,
though they could quite easily watch him starving to death before their
eyes. And starve he did, and on the ninth day died, “having never been
allowed any sustenance during that time.” And this in a tropical island
where the fruits of the earth could be bought for the merest trifle. It
seems impossible that men should have been so fiendishly cruel, but
the evidence is overwhelming. The times were hard, and we know that
Wilberforce, who championed so well the slave, turned a deaf ear to
the sufferings of the British labourer. Still, two wrongs do not make a
right, and, without doubt, the black people stolen away for slaves were
treated by many with a whole-hearted callousness that is hard to believe
in these times.
They had all sorts of means of coercion. Clarkson found openly exposed
for sale, in a shop in Liverpool, the handcuffs and the leg irons with
which one slave was shackled to another, also a thumbscrew, and an
instrument like a brutal pair of scissors with screws at the end instead
of looped handles. This was pushed in a mouth obstinately kept shut,
tearing lips and breaking teeth, then forcibly opened and kept open
with a screw, so that the unfortunate who wished to end his miseries by
starvation might be fed.
That this was used fairly often there is no doubt. There is the
testimony of Captain Frazer, accounted one of the most humane men in the
trade. It had been said of him that he had held hot coals to the mouth
of a recalcitrant slave to compel him to eat. He was questioned on this
point but he denied it, and presently--I am telling the tale as the
great abolitionist told it--the true story came out.
“Being sick in my cabin, I was informed that a man slave would neither
eat, drink, nor speak. I desired the mate and surgeon to try and
persuade him to speak. I desired that the slaves might try also. When I
found he was still obstinate, not knowing whether it was from sulkiness
or insanity, I ordered a person to present him with a piece of fire in
one hand and a piece of yam in the other, and to tell me what effect
this had upon him. I learned that he took the yam and began to eat it,
but he threw the fire overboard.”
These were the tender mercies of the kind. Few slaves could expect so
much consideration.
There was a slave ship once struck on Morant Keys, not far from the
east end of Jamaica--again I get my information from Clarkson. The crew,
taking care of their own skins, landed in their boats with arms and
provisions, and with incredible brutality--save that nothing a slaver
did would now strike me as incredible--left the slaves on board still in
their irons. This was in the night; and when morning broke they saw that
the slaves, who must have been capable men, had not only managed to
get free, but were busy making rafts on which they placed the women and
children, swimming themselves beside the rafts, and guiding them as they
drifted towards the island whereon were the crew. They should have been
hailed as heroes and helped, but the crew were afraid--whether rightly
or wrongly I cannot say. Certainly you could hardly expect men who had
been left heavily ironed to drown, to deal very tenderly with the men
who had calmly acquiesced in their death. At any rate, the story goes
the white men feared, not that the black men would attack them, but that
they would consume the water and provisions that had been landed. They
resolved to destroy them as they approached the shore, and they
killed between three and four hundred; and out of the whole cargo only
thirty-three were saved to be brought to Kingston and sold.
To me it is a strange thing that I cannot explain to myself, that our
pity is more easily aroused by the story of one individual case than by
the tale of suffering in the mass. It was an awful thing to leave those
helpless people confined and shackled, and at the mercy of the winds and
waves; it was still worse to shoot them down when by their own pluck and
intrepidity they had succeeded in saving themselves. There were little
children amongst them, and they too must have been shot down; they too
must have raised despairing little hands to brutes who knew not the
meaning of the word pity. But somehow even that, terrible as it is,
pales before the conduct of a brutal slaver, the last I shall tell of
the many brutalities of the Middle Passage. It was told in Parliament at
the end of the eighteenth century, told probably reluctantly, for much
of the evidence was dragged out of unwilling witnesses who feared for
themselves. They were surgeons, or ships' officers, or seamen, and their
livelihood depended upon their keeping in with captains and shipowners.
There was a baby of ten months old, a chubby little round-faced helpless
thing. It “took sulk and would not eat,” Clarkson puts it. How should
it eat when what it wanted was milk, and what it got was rice or pulse,
poor baby. And that tiny child that brutal monster flogged with a
“cat,” swearing he would make it eat or kill it. “From this and other
ill-treatment,” says Clarkson, not specifying the ill-treatment, “the
child's legs swelled. He then ordered some water to be made hot to abate
the swelling. But even his tender mercies were cruel, for the cook,
putting his hand in the water, said it was too hot. Upon this the
captain swore at him, and ordered the feet to be put in. This was done.
The nails and skin came off. Oiled cloths were then put round them.” And
then, as if that were not enough, the child was tied to a heavy log, and
apparently the brute who had charge of his destinies forgot all about it
for a little while. It must have eaten something, perhaps its mother had
a little, for the captain did not notice it for two or three days;
then its pitiful crying, I suppose, called his attention to it, and he
“caught it up again and repeated that he would make it eat or kill it.
He immediately flogged it again, and in a quarter of an hour it died.”
Now I am aware that cases of individual cruelty may happen at any time
in any place. But against that is the fact that this brutality was
committed openly upon the deck of the slaver, the officers and crew saw
it, and not one of them raised a hand to help a helpless baby who was
being cruelly done to death. More--when the story came out nothing was
done to the man who has left such a memorial behind him, and no one
seemed surprised at this.
I apologise for this chapter, it is so full of horrors. But seeing
the people who have made Jamaica their own, writing about them I am of
necessity compelled to tell the whole story, for it seems to me they
cannot be properly understood--their kindliness, their subserviency,
their cheerfulness, even their insolence and their dishonesty--unless we
examine the way in which their forbears first came to Jamaica.