Considering that every Great House was surrounded by hundreds of these
alien dark people, most of them dumbly resentful of their condition,
it is to me a little surprising that the white man ever brought out
his wife and children to share his home. And yet he did sometimes. Of
course, nothing is more certain than that we grow accustomed to a danger
that is always threatening. There are people who take matches into
powder factories and those who dwell on the slopes of Vesuvius and Etna.
From the earliest days the Jamaicans had been used to forced labour,
they were very sure they could not work the plantations without it, and
that the slaves had to be broken in and guarded, came all in the day's
work.
The first difficulty after the buying of the slaves was what they called
the “seasoning.” The earlier settlers first used the word, but it came
to be applied specially to the settling down of the slaves, though it
seems to me simply to mean the survival of the fittest. A certain number
of newly arrived slaves were sure to die. It was not the climate that
killed them, but the breaking in of a free savage unaccustomed to work,
at least not to work with the regularity, and at the times the white man
expected of him. He was an exile, he was lonely, he was driven to this
hated work with the whip, he could not understand what was said to him,
he could not make his wants known, and soon realised it would avail him
little if he did, and he pined and died.
In Lesley's time, and I am afraid long after, the slaves were grossly
underfed.
[Illustration: 0178]
“'Tis sad,” he writes, “to see the mean shifts to which these poor
creatures are reduced. You'll see them daily about twelve o'clock when
they turn in from work scraping the dunghills at every gentleman's door”
(I do like that touch) “for bones which they break extremely small,
boil and eat the broth.” He adds that he hardly cares to speak of their
sufferings because of the regard he had for their masters. And then he
goes on to do so. He says that the most trivial error was punished with
a terrible whipping, “I have seen some of them treated in that cruel
manner for no other reason but to satisfy the brutish pleasure of an
overseer.... I have seen their bodies in a Gore of Blood, the Skin torn
off their backs with the cruel Whip, beaten, Pepper and Salt rubbed on
the Wounds and a large stick of Sealing Wax dropped leisurely upon them.
It is no wonder if the horrid pain of such inhuman tortures incline them
to rebel; at the same time it must be confessed they are very perverse,
which is owing to the many disadvantages they lie under, and the bad
example they daily see.”
A man had a right to kill his slave or mutilate him if he ran away,
but a man who killed a slave out of “Wilfulness, Wantonness, or Bloody
mindedness,” was to suffer three months' imprisonment and pay £50 to the
owner of the slave. It was merely a question of value, the slave was not
considered. If a servant killed a slave he was to get thirty-nine lashes
on the bare back, and serve the owner of the slave after his time with
his master had expired four years. That is to say, he had to pay for the
loss of the slave's services. Indeed the negro's life in those days was
by no means safeguarded, for if a man killed by night a slave found out
“of his owner's grounds, road, or common path, such person was not to
be subject to any damage or action for the same.” That is to say, the
wandering slave was a danger to the community, and might be killed on
suspicion as might some beast of prey. There was a law, too, that all
slaves' houses should be searched once a fortnight for “Clubs, Wooden
Swords, and mischievious Weapons.” Any found were to be burnt. Stolen
goods were also to be sought, and “Flesh not honestly come by”; for
slaves were forbidden to have meat in their possession. The punishment
was death, and in the slave book of Rose Hall after this law had fallen
into desuetude there is an entry under Monday, 28th September 1824:
“Killed a steer named 'Porter' in consequence of his leg being broken,
sunk him in the sea to prevent the negroes from eating it, and having
the like accidents occur.” It does seem hard so to waste the good meat
that the negroes craved, poor things, as children nowadays crave sugar.
For a negro does not regard meat as food even now. It is a treat, a
luxury.
In Kingston and other towns the notice ran, “No person whatever
shall fire any small arms after eight at night unless upon alarm of
insurrection which is to be by the Discharge of Four Muskets or small
arms distinctly.” The whole atmosphere was one of fear. No negro or
mulatto was permitted to row in any wherry or canoe without at least one
white man, and all boats of every description had to be chained up and
their oars and sails safely disposed, and so important was this rule
considered that any master of a craft who broke it was fined £10. There
was a punishment of four years' imprisonment for stealing or taking away
any craft, and it is clear this had reference not to its value but to
the assistance such craft might be to the common enemy.
A negro slave striking any person except in defence of his master's
property--observe he had none of his own--was for the first offence to
be severely whipt, for the second to be severely whipt, have his or her
nose slit and face burnt in some place, and for the third it was left
to two Justices or three freeholders to inflict “Death or whatever
punishment they shall think fit.”
When slaves were first introduced the master seems to have had absolute
power of life and death, and indeed long after, when it was beginning to
dawn on the ruling race that the black man had some rights, it was still
difficult to punish a cruel master, because no black man's evidence
could be received against a white man. This rule, too, sometimes worked
both ways.
There was once an overseer who was cruelly unjust to the book-keeper
under him. As we have seen, the underlings subsisted very largely on
salt food. This overseer, disliking his book-keeper, decreed that his
salt fish should be exposed to the hot sun until it was rotten and then
cooked and offered to him in the usual way. The young man protested,
and the overseer declared he had fish out of the same barrel and found
nothing wrong with it. Finally the exasperated book-keeper came up
to the house and in desperation shot his tormentor. But he was never
brought to justice, because there were only slaves present and no white
man could be convicted on the testimony of a slave.
When we read the slave code we do well to remember not how men are
punished nowadays, but how they were all punished, black and white,
in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first part of the nineteenth
centuries. Laws were made for the rich, and the poor man without
influence must go under.
And having said all this, it perhaps seems curious to add that we ought
always to remember that the average planter treated his slaves as well
as he knew how. Even now we are always advancing. The housemistress of
1921 has to give her maids of right what the housemistress of 1900 would
have thought ridiculous, even as a privilege. It was to the planter's
interest that his slaves should be in good health and contented, but
what none of them understood was that no man should be subject to the
whim of another. The wrong was in enslaving a man. How should they
understand it? Slavery had been a custom from time immemorial. Even in
this twentieth century I have heard one of the best and kindest women I
know mourning, “But if the poor are all so well off what shall we do for
servants?” She found it difficult to believe that Providence would not
arrange for someone to serve her. So the planters, I am sure, believed
that Providence had placed the black man in Africa specially for their
use. Why he was not contented with his lot, and a “good” slave, they
could never understand. And yet the black people didn't even mind dying,
to such sore straits were the poor things reduced.
“They look upon death,” declares Lesley, “as a blessing.... 'Tis indeed
surprising to see with what courage and intrepidity some of them will
meet their fate and be merry in their last moments.”
He had seen more deaths than we of the twentieth century can contemplate
with equanimity, and many runaways trying to better their lot. It was
probably easier for the first slaves to run away than at the time we
come across them in the slave books of Worthy Park and Rose Hall. The
lonelier parts of the island were abandoned because of these runaway
negroes, who banded themselves together and were a constant danger to
the isolated settler. And a place in fertile Jamaica abandoned soon
becomes densest jungle, affording a still more useful shelter to people
accustomed to such surroundings. Even though the life of a savage in the
woods was a hard one, it was better than the almost certain fate that
awaited them if they came in and gave themselves up. I conclude it was
only when a slave found himself alone that he returned of his own free
will. If he found companions he stayed.
This of course it was that made of the Maroons such an ever present
danger, free as they were among a black population that outnumbered the
white ten to one. The settler had always an enemy within the gates.
“This bad success,” mourns the historian when the whites have failed to
overcome the Maroons, “encouraged Gentlemen's slaves to rebel.”
The trouble was that to keep the slaves under, a great quantity of arms
and ammunition had to be stored on the plantations, and when they rose
this was likely to be turned against their owners. Did one of those
overseers at Worthy Park ever toss restlessly on his feather bed
and wonder what would be his fate if some of those slaves, the
“ill-disposed” or “skulkers,” rushed his hot room and possessed
themselves of that store of powder?
It is only natural that history should mention the rebellions that made
their mark, and never those that were nipped in the bud. But those that
had a measure of success were numerous enough. There were no less than
four between 1678 and 1691, in the three last of which many white people
were murdered. One of these was at Sutton's, a plantation near the
centre of the island.
I have been to Sutton's. A long low house it is, not the first house,
the slaves burned that, behind it are the green hills and in front red
lilies grow beneath the bananas after the rain. The women who were
born there say it is the loveliest plantation in an island of lovely
plantations. And here at the end of the seventeenth century, 400 slaves,
stark naked savages with hoes and machetes in their hands, stormed
the house, and by sheer weight of numbers bore all before them. They
murdered their master and every white man there, and seized all the arms
kept to be used against them. Fifty muskets and blunderbusses and
other arms they took, great quantities of shot and four small field
pieces--(in such fear they had been held)--and then they marched on,
raiding other plantations and killing every white person they could lay
their hands upon.
Why they did not keep their freedom I do not know, but once the whites
were roused they had no chance. They fled back to Sutton's, and driven
out of that they fired the cane pieces. Then a party of whites came up
behind and completely routed them. Many were killed, some escaped to the
hills, but 200 laid down their arms and surrendered. Very unwisely. For
though some were pardoned our chronicler declares that most of those who
submitted “met with that fate which they well deserved.”
In the eighteenth century there were at least nineteen terrible
disturbances, sometimes called rebellions, sometimes conspiracies, to
murder the whites, and in the thirty-two years of the nineteenth century
that elapsed before the apprenticeship system that heralded the freeing
of the slave was introduced, there were no less than six rebellions,
conspiracies and mutinies, to say nothing of the isolated murders that
must have been done and were not worth recording as history.
Not only were these rebellions sanguinary but they were expensive. The
cost of putting down the last in 1832 was £161,596, without taking into
account the damage sustained by property and the loss to the community
of the lives sacrificed. If the black man suffered, white Jamaica too
paid very heavily indeed for her slaves.
The Great Rebellion that was long remembered in Jamaica was the
rebellion of 1760, and it broke out in St Mary's Parish on the Frontier
Plantation belonging to a man named Ballard Beckford. The adjoining
estate was Trinity, belonging to Zachary Bayley, the maternal uncle of
Bryan Edwards the historian, but in his book we only get a tantalising
account that sets us longing for more details.
Of the leaders, “their barbarous names,” says Bridges, forgetting
that the white man had probably supplied those names, “were Tacky and
Jamaica,” and Tacky was a man who had been a chief in “Guiney.” That,
though Edwards did not know it, meant that he had been accustomed to a
certain amount of savage grandeur; had been dressed in silk of bright
colours, and wore a necklace of gold and anklets and armlets of the
same metal. On his fingers and bare black toes had been rings of rough
nuggets. He had been wont to ride in a hammock, as King George rides in
his State coach, and with an umbrella carried by slaves high over his
head; to the great discomfort of the slaves, but it had marked his high
estate. He would move to the accompaniment of barbaric music and on
great feast days, such as that of his accession, his “stool,” the symbol
of his power, really a carved wooden seat, was literally drenched in the
blood of many unfortunate men and women. I remember passing through an
Ashanti town on the day of the Coronation of our present King. There was
a great feast and all the minor chiefs for miles round had come in to
celebrate and all the stools were soaked in blood--sheep's blood.
“Not long ago,” said the great chief, “it would have been men's.”
“Oh!” said the young doctor who was with me, “sheep's is better.”
“Perhaps,” said the African potentate doubtfully, and it was clear he
was thinking regretfully of the days when there really would have been
something like a decent sacrifice.
In Tacky's days, too, when the chief died, a great pit would be dug, his
bier lowered into it and round it would be seated a large number of his
harem who would accompany their lord and master as attendants to the
shades, and lucky indeed might they count themselves if they had their
throats cut first and were not buried alive.
Even so late as 1908 in Tarkwa I remember a chief--not a great
one--dying, and at the same time there came to the District Commissioner
a woman complaining that her adopted daughter, an euphemism for a
household slave, had disappeared. And the District Commissioner said he
was certain, though he could not prove it, that the girl had been stolen
and sacrificed that the soul of the chief might not go unaccompanied
on his last journey, as that troublesome British Government had set its
face against the sacrifice of wives.
Clearly Tacky could not have objected to slavery as an institution,
he only objected to it as applied to himself. And he was accustomed to
bloodshed.
On those two plantations where the rebellion started were over 100 Gold
Coast negroes, and the historian declares they had never received the
least shadow of ill-treatment from the time of their arrival there. Like
Tacky, he was not so far advanced as to realise that the holding of a
man in slavery was in itself gross ill-treatment. We can hardly blame
him if he did not think ahead of his times, though we more enlightened
may hold a brief for Tacky and those Guinea men, brutal as they
undoubtedly were.
Mr Bayley, it appears, inspected his newly purchased Africans, was
pleased with the stalwart crew and gave out to them with his own hands
not only clothing but knives. Then he rode off to Ballard's Valley, an
estate a few miles distant.
The Guinea men lost no time in making a bid for freedom. At daybreak,
in the morning, Mr Bayley was wakened by a servant with the information
that his Trinity negroes had revolted; and the people who brought the
information shouted that the insurgents were close upon their heels. Mr
Bayley seems to have been a man of action and equal to the occasion.
A council was held at Ballard's Valley, the house that could be most
easily defended in the neighbourhood was selected, and Mr Bayley mounted
his horse and accompanied by a servant rode out to warn every place he
could reach. But first, being very sure the revolted slaves--his slaves
at any rate--had nothing to complain of, he rode out to meet them. I can
imagine that gentleman of the eighteenth century in shirt and drawers,
in the dewy tropical morning, his broad straw hat over a handkerchief on
his head, a knife at his belt and pistols at his holsters, mounting his
horse in hot haste at the verandah steps and riding straight down the
hill with his bond-servant behind him shouting to those who watched his
departure, perhaps protesting at his rashness, that he would bring the
ungodly villains to their bearings.
But he had barely started before he heard the wild ear-piercing
Koromantyn yell of war, and saw below him on the hillside a body of
stark-naked negroes marching in rude order for the overseer's house not
half a mile away. He looked back. The other gentlemen were mounting in
hot haste, making for the rendezvous, rousing the country as they went
and then--a brave man was Zachary Bayley--he rode towards the body of
negroes. They did not notice him at first, and with the confidence of
the white man he went towards them waving his hat and shouting. Truly
a brave man, for 100 Ashantis armed with muskets and knives, yelling,
shouting, foaming at the mouth, with fierce eyes and white teeth
gleaming, men young and strong, chosen for their strength, are not to be
lightly faced. Had they all come on he could not possibly have escaped,
but the negroes were always keen on plunder, and apparently only a few
turned aside from their main objective, the overseer's house, and met
him with a discharge of muskets. His servant's horse was shot under
him--shocking bad shots they must have been to do so little damage--and
the chronicler declares they both narrowly escaped with their lives. I'd
have liked him better had he told me how. I expect the overseer's house
was more interesting than a man who, if put to it, would certainly show
fight. At least he found discretion the better part of valour, and the
rest of the Koromantyns went on to the overseer's house. At Trinity the
overseer was a man named Abraham Fletcher, who had earned the respect
and love of the negroes, and he had been allowed to pass through the
ranks of the revolting slaves and escape scot-free. I don't know whether
he was the man who brought the news to Ballard's Valley. But they showed
no such mercy here. All the white men in that overseer's house they
butchered before they were fairly awake, and then passed on towards Port
Maria. There were some among them evidently who knew the ropes. The fort
at Port Maria must have been guarded with singular carelessness, for
they slew the sentry, and seem easily to have possessed themselves
of all the arms and ammunition they could manage, and then they went
through the country slaying and burning.
Luckily they stayed to burn. It gave Zachary Bayley time to ride round
to all the plantations in the neighbourhood.
We can imagine the excited, determined man on the galloping horse
dashing up the hills to the Great Houses, his breathless arrival and the
warning given, the name of the place of rendezvous.
“But we can't”--the protest might begin. But the other knew they _must_
get there.
“I tell you the slaves have risen. The overseer and book-keepers at
Cruikshank's have been murdered! Get your horses. There's not a minute
to be lost!”
“But my blackguards------”
“Damnation! The Koromantyns I tell you, man! Hurry along that girl of
yours and her child! I saw the place burning! I heard the poor beggars'
frantic shrieks and I couldn't help them, Cruikshank has cleared out.
For the love of God, stir yourself!”
“But the girl is------”
“I tell you they killed Nancy and a child at her breast, and she a
mulatto, and dark at that! Not a drop of white blood! Hurry! Waste not a
second! Is that the nearest road to Brimmer Hall?” He stretches out his
whip. “Tell the others you saw me, and I'll be back as soon as I can.
But--my God, man, if you want to save your bacon, hurry!” and his
horse turned with a clatter and he was away again, leaving dismay and
consternation behind him.
And well they might fear. From the butchery at Ballard's Valley,
where they had drunk rum mixed with the blood of their victims in true
barbaric triumph, the revolting slaves marched to Port Maria, and thence
along the high road into the interior, the other slaves joining them as
they went, and they spread death and destruction, murdering the people
and firing the canes. The galloping horse on an errand of mercy did
not reach Esher and other estates, they were roused too late by the
Koromantyn yell, and the Ashantis behaved like the bloodthirsty savages
they were. In that one morning they butchered between thirty and forty
whites and mulattoes, sparing not even the babies in their mother's
arms.
Gladly would I know something more about it, but the historian was
not an artist, and doubtless in those days everybody knew exactly what
happened. In the heat of the day the whites would be lolling idly in
the great hall, second breakfast just finished, and there would come the
pad, pad of bare feet on the polished mahogany floor.
“Missus! Missus! Run! Dem Koromantyns! Dem bad slaves!”
Some one would look from the window. The noise that had been as the
other noises of a morning's work swelled in the sea breeze, and there
was a commotion, naked figures rushing here and there and--What was
that? That white man running with his face all bloody. Could it be the
new bookkeeper?
Even at this day there are people who will tell you what tradition has
told them that the negroes would come on in a body, fling themselves
like an avalanche on the Great House and cut down ruthlessly all before
them. Or if they found the white people fled, they satisfied their
desires by broaching the rum casks and breaking open the stores. This
possibly saved many lives, for while the enemy were thus engaged the
fugitives made the best of their way to some place of safety. They did
not always succeed in reaching it, for the slaves knew the woods
far better than their masters, a thousand times better than their
mistresses, and they hunted them, beat the bush for them, as beaters
beat for pheasants, cut down the men with the machetes they themselves
had supplied or beat them with conch shells--and the women, nothing
could be more terrible than the fate of the poor girl cowering on
the hillside among the dense jungle, its very denseness betraying her
presence to eyes keen as those of these savages trained to hunt.
Edwards gives no details of what happened to the women slain in this
rebellion, but a little later on he speaks of the rebellion in Hayti
and he tells how a superintendent who had been popular and good to
his slaves was treated by them when they rose, and he adds the
ghastly details of what happened to his wife, who was expecting almost
immediately the birth of her baby. They are too terrible to give here,
though I do not count myself over-squeamish, but it made me understand
why Zachary Bayley fled at full speed along those rough hillside tracks
to warn the planters.
There is another horrible story told of a Jamaican planter whose slaves
rose against him, slaves whom he trusted and to whom he had been kind.
They rose in the night led by a runaway he had rescued from starving in
the woods. They gagged him and then proceeded to torture him, “by turns
wounded his most tender and sensitive parts till his soul took flight.”
They violated his wife and killed her with the rest of the family and
every white man on the plantation.
This is what the white people feared subconsciously all the time. What
the girls feared when they let down their hair and undressed for the
night, when they drew together the shutters and shut out the gorgeous
tropical moonlight, what the master of the house feared when he stirred
in his sleep, uneasily, roused because the dogs were barking, what the
mother feared as she hushed her baby's crying to listen, and wonder if
that were the tramp of unshod feet over in the direction of the breeze
mill. It is what Zachary Bayley feared when he tore across the country
in the dawn of the tropical morning.
By noon he had collected 130 men, “white men and trusty blacks.” We do
not know the proportion of white men to “trusty blacks,” but we do know
that the white men were all imbued with the same awful fear, the fear
lest all the Koromantyns in the island, and there were thousands of
them, should revolt. These men Bayley led in pursuit of the rebels.
The wasteful savages had dissipated the advantage they had gained. They
might have held the whole colony up to ransom, but instead they were
actually found at Haywood Hall roasting an ox by the flames of the
buildings they had set on fire.
I should like to know more precise details, but Edwards only says the
whites attacked them with great fury, killed eight or nine on the spot,
took several prisoners and drove the rest into the woods. Here, of
course, sustenance could not be found for so large a party all at once,
and they were obliged to act wholly on the defensive. The ruling class
when they were thoroughly aroused had this in their favour, they had
some sort of discipline, the blacks had none. Sullenly enough they had
retired to the woods, and there Tacky the chief who had instituted the
revolt was killed by one of the parties which constantly harried the
wretched fugitives, and before long some died, some made good in the
recesses of the mountains and the rest were taken.
But before they were conquered the revolt had spread across the island
to Westmoreland.
“In St Mary,” writes Bridges, “they were repulsed, broken and
disheartened. In Westmoreland they were flushed with early victory;
murderous success crowned their first efforts; they beat off the
militia, increased their ranks to a thousand effective men, and after
a tedious struggle they could be subdued only by the exertions of a
regiment of regulars, the militia of the neighbouring parish and the
Maroons of the interior. The most cruel excesses that ever stained the
pages of history, marked the progress of these rebels; and the details
which would elucidate barbarity scarcely human, almost chills the warm
hope of civilisation ever reaching the bosoms in which ferocity is so
innate.”
Edwards takes some trouble to show us what the civilisation of the times
meant and what might be hoped from it. It was better to die than
be taken, for there was little to choose between black and white in
fiendish cruelty. The white gentleman ran the ignorant savage close.
“It was thought necessary,” says Edwards, “to make a few examples of
some of the most guilty. Of three who were clearly proved to have been
concerned in the murders at Ballard's Valley, one was condemned to be
burnt and the other two to be hung up alive in irons and left to perish
in that dreadful situation.”
There is in the Jamaican Institute a set of the irons used for such
a sentence. When found, they had the bones of a skeleton in them, the
skeleton of a woman!
They burnt the man after the fashion that Hans Sloane described. He
uttered not a groan when they applied the fire to his feet, and saw his
legs and feet reduced to ashes with the “utmost firmness and composure.
Then getting one of his hands loose he seized a burning brand and flung
it in the face of his executioner.” Truly a man it seems to me who might
have been worth something better.
In the case of the other two, Fortune and Kingston, the whole proceeding
was gone through with a ghastly deliberation that makes us shiver now
although it happened a hundred and sixty years ago. They were given a
hearty meal and then they were hung up on a gibbet which was erected on
the parade of the town of Kingston. Edwards declares that from the
time they were hung up till the moment they died they never uttered a
complaint. A week later they were still alive and as the authorities
thought that one of them had something to tell his late master, Zachary
Bayley, who was on his plantation, Edwards was sent for, but though he
had an interpreter he could not understand what the man wanted and he
only remembers that one of them laughed immoderately at something, he
did not know what. They must have had water, for one lived for eight
days and the other one died on the morning of the ninth day.
“Throughout their torture,” remarks Bridges, “they evinced such hardened
insolence and brutal insensibility that even pity was silenced.” What
did he expect them to do? They could not expect any mercy, so why should
they express regret except for having failed?
But did Bridges really believe, “that their condition was gradually
rising in the scale of humanity and the tide of Christianity, which in
the wilds of Africa never could have reached them, was here flowing
with a gentle but accelerated motion.” God save us from the Christianity
preached by some of its advocates.
Here I may put it on record that the slaves, no matter to what torture
they were subjected, never betrayed each other. In all the tale of
conspiracies and rebellion seldom are we told of a slave having betrayed
the secret of the proposed rising, and when one did there was generally
strong reason for it. Once a girl begged that the life of her nursling
might be saved. The man of whom she begged the baby's life refused--all
the whites must die. So she saved the baby she loved and its mother and
father by betraying the rebellion. Then again, sometimes I think a girl
might tell to save the life of her white lover, the book-keeper or the
overseer of the estate.
One would think that living amidst a hostile people every white man
would be most careful in his comings and goings, careful even of what
he said, for though at first the negroes did not understand English, the
house servants soon learned it, and we may be very sure that the doings
and sayings of the people up at the Great House were reported daily in
the slave village and listened to with as great avidity as to-day we
read the news of the world in the daily papers.
Besides, all the slaves were not hostile. The Creoles, born to the
conditions in which they found themselves, were more contented. They
regarded slavery as their natural lot, and it was only by slow degrees
that the talk of emancipation grew. But it did grow and the rebellion
of 1882, a very devastating one, which ran like wildfire through
Westmoreland, Hanover, and St James', was caused mainly because at
the Great Houses and the “Buckras'” tables the white people talking
carelessly before the black servants, to whom they never gave a thought,
declared emphatically that all this talk of emancipation was so much
rubbish.
And at Christmas time, the angry, disappointed, misguided slaves rose. I
have always taken particular interest in this rebellion, because I once
enjoyed the hospitality of Montpelier, one of the loveliest pens in
Jamaica, where much money has been spent, and beneath the trees on
the green grass rest white Indian cattle bred for draught purposes. Mr
Edwards, the owner, told me that he used to hear stories in his youth
of how the slaves burned the houses, and mills, and cane pieces, and the
night was alight with blazing fires. Major Hall and his wife, high in
the hills at Kempshot, received warning just in time, and through the
darkness made their way to Worcester, lying far below.
It must have been terrible, stumbling down that stony mountain path
through the darkness, with the dread fear that the enemy might reach
Worcester before them. Neither husband nor wife returned, nor was the
house rebuilt, and not till nearly fifty years afterwards did Mr Maxwell
Hall, seeking through the country for a site on which to build an
observatory, choose a hill on Kempshot Pen just above the place where
the old house had stood. Where the country was not dense jungle it was
occupied by negro cultivators, the most destructive cultivators perhaps
in the world, of the old house there was not one stone left upon
another, nothing remained but the Mango Walk. It stands there still, the
only monument to the white people who once lived on that spot. The trees
have long given over bearing, but the avenue is a thing of beauty, and
to the very tops has grown a lovely creeper which strews the ground
beneath with heavily scented white bellshaped flowers.
It has nothing to do with them, of course, but in my mind that beautiful
Walk stands for the slave rebellions, the terrible times that are past
and gone but hardly forgotten. In judging the relations of the white
man and the black, in weighing the causes of discord between them, in
considering the shortcomings of both, we must always remember that past
when they lived together bound by a tie galling to both which has left
behind it a legacy of bitterness that only time and success on the part
of the black man can sweeten.