It is very difficult to understand the attitude towards trivial
offences of people who lived in a time when the death penalty was
legally inflicted for breaking down the banks of a fish pond, stealing
anything over the value of a shilling from the person, or illegally
felling trees.
With the last clause I have some sympathy. I sometimes feel I could
cheerfully see the death penalty inflicted upon whoever was responsible
for making Jamaican towns bare of trees, for decreeing that telephone
and telegraph wires are of more importance than shade, and for clearing
all the country roads so that a tropical sun makes them a purgatory for
the unfortunate traveller, when Nature herself has arranged so much more
wisely.
But that is somehow in another dimension, and I quite realise when white
people were so hard on each other as they were a hundred years ago, we
could not expect much consideration from them for the men they held in
bondage.
The first negroes were brought to serve and for nothing else. There was
some faint talk of making them Christians and saving their souls, but
I am afraid it was of their untilled cape-pieces the planters were
thinking when they crowded down to the reeking slave ships. They who
believed, if they gave the matter a thought, that any being who died
unbaptized went out into outer darkness for eternity--only neither they
nor we can grasp eternity--gave no welcome to the men who presently came
to teach their slaves. They objected. Well, even in this year of our
Lord 1922, I have actually, yes actually heard a woman, who certainly
should have known better, declare: “You know, my dear, this teaching of
the lower classes is really a great mistake. It lifts them out of their
own class.”
In all the mass of literature I have waded through about Jamaica I have
met no one till I arrived at Matthew Lewis, writing of 1816, who looked
at the negro with what we may call modern eyes. The Abolitionists
patronised; they had an object in view, a great object, truly, but it
was the cause for which they fought. Lewis was much more reasonable
and sensible. We can read him as we might read a man of to-day, on the
conditions around him. He saw Jamaica as I and people like me see it,
and weighed both sides and held the balance true, for he is far less
hampered by tradition than we might expect.
He landed at Savanna-la-Mar, which lies right upon the sea-shore, a
sea-shore on which there is no cliff, and where the boundaries of land
and water are by no means clearly defined. A wild tropical storm swept
over it while I was there, and I thought of Matthew Lewis as the rain
came slanting down the wide street, turning the scene into one dreary
grey whole; sky, sea, land, we could hardly have told one from the
other but for the houses that loomed up, grey blotches on the universal
greyness. There were no trees, barely a sign of the riotous tropical
vegetation, though presently the sun would be out in all his pride,
and the whole town would be craving for a little shade. But like many
English colonists, the people of Savanna-la-Mar have decided that
beauty, the beauty of trees and growing things, is not necessary in
their town. If you want shade, what about corrugated iron?
I don't know what Savanna-la-Mar was like when Matthew Lewis landed
there, but it was celebrating its holidays, the New Year of 1816, when
the great gentleman arrived.
“Soon after nine o'clock we reached Savanna-la-Mar, where I found my
trustee and a whole cavalcade awaiting to conduct me to my estate. He
had brought with him a curricle and a pair for myself, a gig for my
servant, two black boys upon mules, and a cart with eight oxen to convey
my baggage.”
It took a good deal to move a gentleman with dignity a hundred years
ago. Nowadays it would have been: “We'll send the car for you, and your
heavier baggage can come on by mule cart. You won't want it for a day or
two, will you?”
And here he gives us the sort of picture to which we have become
accustomed in reading about the good old times of slavery.
“Whether the pleasure of the negroes was sincere may be doubted”--a wise
man and a human was Matthew Lewis. He really does not see any reason why
the slaves should be fond of him or make a fuss over him, “but certainly
it”--the welcome--“was the loudest that ever I witnessed; they all
talked together, sang, danced, shouted, and in the violence of their
gesticulations tumbled over each other and rolled on the ground. Twenty
voices at once enquired after uncles and aunts and grandfathers and
great-grandmothers of mine who had been buried long before I was
in existence, and whom I verily believe most of them only knew by
tradition. One woman held up her little black child to me, grinning from
ear to ear.
“Look, massa, look here! Him nice lilly neger for massa.” Another
complained--
“So long since none come see we, massa. Good massa, come at last.”
He rather liked it though.
“All this may be palaver, but certainly they at least play their parts
with such an air of truth and warmth and enthusiasm, that after
the cold-hearted and repulsive manners of England this contrast is
infinitely agreeable.”
He went to a lodging-house first, and there he was met by a remarkably
clean-looking negro lad with water and a towel. Lewis took it for
granted that he belonged to the house. The lad waited some time and at
last he said:
“Massa not know me; me your slave.”
And here for the first time we find someone who feels uncomfortable at
holding another in bondage.
“The sound made me feel a pang at the heart,” he writes. And not because
the boy was sad. Stirring within the poet was some feeling concerning
the rights of man.
“The lad appeared all gaiety and good humour, and his whole countenance
expressed anxiety to recommend himself to my notice; but the word
'slave' seemed to imply that although he did feel pleasure then in
serving me, if he had detested me he must have served me still. I really
felt quite humiliated at the moment, and was tempted to tell him.
“Do not say that again; say that you are my negro, but do not call
yourself my slave.”
And then again, when he was established in the house, which he has left
it on record was frightful to look at but very clean and comfortable
inside, he remarks:
“This morning a little brown girl made her appearance with an orange
bough to flap away the flies.”
It had been impressed upon him that he courted death if he drank
orangeade, if he walked in the morning after ten or went out in the cool
of the evening, “be exposed to the dews after sundown” they put it.
But he dares to write: “The air too was delicious, the fragrance of
the sweetwood and other scented trees, but above all of the delicious
logwood of which most of the fences in Westmoreland are made, composed
an atmosphere such that if Satan after promising them a buxom air
embalmed with odours, had transported Sin and Death thither the charming
people must acknowledge their papa's promise fulfilled.” It reads
quaintly now. Sin--sin is so much a matter of the standard we set up.
If the slave had copied the planter, no master would have considered him
anything but a very sinful slave; and death--death is often very, very
kindly.
Lewis enquires into the condition of the people. His attorney had
written to him regularly of the care he expended on the negroes, but he
had been away much of his time managing other estates, and had delegated
his authority to an overseer who treated the people so harshly that
at last they left the estate in a body and threw themselves on the
protection of the magistrate at Savanna-la-Mar, “and if I had not come
myself to Jamaica, in all probability I should never have had the most
distant idea how abominably the poor creatures had been ill-used.”
Now this marks a distinct advance since the times when the savages,
speaking a jargon no one cared to understand, were driven to work with a
whip.
Lewis, to the intense surprise of his compeers, objected to the use of
the whip.
“I am, indeed, assured by everyone about me, that to manage a West
Indian estate without the occasional use of a cart whip, however rarely,
is impossible; and they insist upon it that it is absurd in me to call
my slaves ill-treated, because when they act grossly wrong they are
treated like English soldiers and sailors. All this may be very true;
but there is something to me so shocking in the idea of this execrable
cart whip that I have positively forbidden the use of it on Cornwall;
and if the estate must go to rack and ruin without it, to rack and ruin
the estate must go.”
But, of course, all men were not as broadminded as Lewis. Bridges, who
wrote twelve years later, could never mention a negro without adding
some disparaging adjective, “the vigilance which African perfidy
requires.”
“Experience proves that a strange uniformity of barbarism pervades them
all; and that the only difference lies in the degrees of the same base
qualities which mark the negro race throughout.”
“The salutary measures were of little avail in winning over by
indulgence, or restraining by terror the impracticable savages of
Africa.” Such are a few of the gems dispersed through his work. He
could see no good in a black man, except that his thews and sinews were
necessary to the development of the country, and he grudged them even
that measure of praise.
In the ten years between 1752 and 1762, 71,115 negroes arrived in the
island, “forced upon Jamaica by British merchants and English laws,”
says he, though when England wanted to stop this inflow and to prohibit
the slave trade, the Jamaican planters objected very strongly. They
wanted these unwilling colonists. But since the majority of them were
men, young, strong and lusty, and the Europeans were but a handful, it
was necessary they should be ruled with a rod of iron. Bridges probably
was right when he says that any relaxation was promptly attributed to
fear. They had to be governed by fear and the people who are governed
by fear, are crushed, broken, destroyed. How thoroughly destroyed we
may see by reading statistics of the increase among the slaves, once the
importation from Africa had ceased.
This whip that Lewis abolished was used on all occasions. A man was
beaten because he did not work, and women were beaten till the blood
flowed, because they suckled their babies during working hours, which
extended, be it remembered, from five in the morning till seven at
night--by law--with an interval of half an hour for breakfast and two
hours for the mid-day meal. The women would protest that the little
things were hungry and cried, but if the overseer or book-keeper were
not kind that was no excuse. Presently there came a law that no slave
was to receive more than thirty-nine lashes at once. It was time. They
are said on occasion to have received more than 500. But there were ways
of getting over the new law. There were men who kept within the
letter and yet inflicted fiendish punishment. There is a story told of
Barbadoes:
Two officers, Major Pitch and Captain Cook, hearing terrible cries,
broke open a door and there found a negro girl chained to the floor
being flogged by her master. The brute got out of their avenging
hands--I am glad to think there was some pity in that world--but he
cried exultingly that he had only given her the thirty-nine lashes
allowed by the law at one time, and that he had only inflicted this
number three times since the beginning of the night, and that he
intended to give her the fourth thirty-nine before morning. This was
long before Lewis's time. It was told by Wilberforce, when pleading for
the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
There were tales enough, of course, of this description and the case
against the planters--some of them--was pretty bad. A youth of nineteen
was found wandering about the streets of Bridgetown, Barbadoes, by
General Tottenham in the year 1780. “He was entirely naked, with an iron
collar about his neck having five long projecting spikes. His body both
before and behind was covered with wounds. His belly and thighs were
almost cut to pieces with running ulcers all over them; and a finger
might have been laid in some of the weals. He could not sit down,
because his hinder part was mortified and he could not lie down on
account of the prongs of his collar. He supplicated the General for
relief, for his master had said as he could not work neither should he
eat.”
And the people of Bridgetown did not rise up and slay that inhuman
monster! It took a long while for the West Indian planter to understand
that a slave had any rights.
Clarkson tells a tale of a master who wantonly cut the mouth of a child
of six months old almost from ear to ear. Times were changing, and he
was brought to task for it. But the idea of calling masters to account
was entirely novel.
“Guilty,” said the jury, “subject to the opinion of the Court if
immoderate correction of a slave by his master be a crime indictable.”
The Court decided it was indictable and fined him £1, 5s.!
And yet that judgment is a great advance upon the times when the negro,
as Mr Francis said in Parliament, was without Government protection and
subject to the mere caprice of men who were at once the parties, the
judges, and the executioners. He instanced an overseer who, having
thrown a negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice for a trifling
offence, was punished merely by the loss of his place, and by being
obliged to pay the value of the slave thus done to death. He told of
another instance, a girl of fourteen who was dreadfully whipped for
coming late to her work. She fell down motionless, and was then dragged
along the ground by the legs to the hospital, where she died. The
murderer, though tried, was acquitted by a jury of his peers, because it
was impossible that a master could destroy his own property!
Here is a story told by Mr Pitt at the same time. A passer-by heard the
piercing shrieks of a woman coming from an outhouse and determined to
see what was going on. On looking in he saw a girl tied up to a beam
by her wrists, she was entirely naked, and was swinging backwards and
forwards while her owner was standing below her with a lighted torch in
his hand, which he applied to all parts of her body!
On the other hand, Mr Edwards told a story to the Assembly of Jamaica,
of how some risen slaves surrounded the house of their mistress, who
was in bed with her newborn child beside her. Imagine the poor woman
shrinking down amidst the pillows, and round the bed these black savages
with wild bloodshot eyes and cruel, grasping hands. The very smell of
their naked bodies, their rags stained with blood and rum, would strike
terror to her heart. They deliberated in their jargon how they could
best put her to death in torment. But in the end one of them decided
to keep her for his mistress. The vile broken patois they spoke made
so much intelligible to her, and then snatching the child from her
protecting arms they killed it with an axe before the poor mother's
eyes.
We can sympathise with the man who felt that no torments were too great
for savages such as these, and with others who were certain that a
repetition of such atrocities must be guarded against at any cost.
And so by a law passed in the West Indies in 1722, “any Negro or other
slave withdrawing himself from his master for the term of six months, or
any slave who was absent and did not return within that time every such
person should suffer death.”
And coming back, of course, he might suffer a good deal. So that the
unfortunate slave was ever between the devil and the deep sea. But
slowly as we read the records, we can see the status of first the
coloured man, and then the black man improving. In the beginning these
Africans who up till the Abolition of the Slave Trade could speak but
little English, and always spoke to each other in their own tongues,
were simply dumb beasts of burden, necessary for the improvement of the
colony, even as a certain number of horses and cattle and other stock
were necessary. Always they were treated as inferior beings, even when
they were desperately feared. Gossipy Lady Nugent talks of them as one
would an intelligent, rather lovable dog or horse, and spares a little
pity for their hard lot.
“The mill is turned by water,” she writes about a visit to a sugar
estate, “and the cane being put in on one side, comes out in a moment on
the other, quite like dry pith, so rapidly is all the juice expressed,
passing between two cylinders turning round the contrary ways. You then
see the juice running through a great gutter, which conveys it to the
boiling house. There are always four negroes stuffing in the canes,
while others are employed continually in bringing in great bundles of
them.... At each cauldron in the boiling house was a man with a large
skimmer upon a long pole, constantly stirring the sugar and throwing it
from one cauldron to another. The man at the last cauldron called out
continually to those below attending the fire to throw on more trash,
etc., for if the heat relaxes in the least, all the sugar in the
cauldron is spoiled.... I asked the overseer how often his people were
relieved. He said every twelve hours; but how dreadful to think of
their standing twelve hours over a boiling cauldron, and doing the same
thing.” (A woman before her time was Lady Nugent.) “And he owned to me
that sometimes they did fall asleep and get their poor fingers into
the mill; and he showed me a hatchet that was always ready to sever
the whole limb, as the only means of saving the poor sufferer's life. I
would not have a sugar estate for the whole world!”
This perhaps explains why in the slave books the slaves seem to be
so often lame in a hand, or with only one hand. And yet there was no
possibility of refusing the work. They must do it.
Lady Nugent pitied, Matthew Lewis tried to remedy, the evils. He was
particularly kindly, and was hated by the planters as making dangerous
innovations in the management of an estate, and allowing much more
latitude than others were inclined to think wise. They probably said
he had not to live in the island; he would go back to England and
allow them to reap what he had sown. But he certainly reaped for a time
himself; his overseers could get no work done, and on one occasion
after his arrival the women refused to carry away the trash, “one of the
easiest tasks that could be set. In consequence the mill was obliged to
be stopped; and when the driver on that station insisted on their doing
their duty, a little fierce young devil of a lass, Whaunica, flew at his
throat and endeavoured to strangle him.”
And again we find him writing: “Another morning with the mill stopped,
no liquor in the boiling house, and no work done.” The whole estate was
suffering from a bad attack of what the negroes call “bad manners,” that
is ingratitude, for if ever a man tried to help them, Lewis did.
“My agent declares,” he goes on, “that they never conducted so ill
before; that they worked cheerfully and properly till my arrival, but
now they think that I shall protect them against all punishment, and
have made regularly ten hogsheads of sugar less than they did before my
coming upon the estate.”
He appears to have been a man of means, and in that he was an exception.
I am sure that nearly all the planters felt they needed every penny
their estates would produce, many were already deeply dipped, and few
and far between were those who could afford to try experiments in the
cause of right. But Lewis persevered, and I am glad to think that in the
end he was no loser, his negroes worked, and his estates did pay.
He actually on one occasion dismissed a bookkeeper for having
ill-treated a negro, and took the evidence of four negroes against the
denial of the accused--and this in a time when a negro's evidence was
inadmissible!
“I immediately discharged the book-keeper, who contented himself with
simply denying the blow having been given by him; but I told him that
I could not possibly allow his single unsupported denial to outweigh
concordant witnesses to the assertation: and if he grounded his claim to
being believed merely upon his having a white skin, on Cornwall estate
at least that claim would not be admitted; and that as the fact was
clearly established nothing should induce me to retain him upon my
property except his finding some means of appeasing the injured negro,
and prevailing on him to intercede on his behalf.”
How dared he! In Jamaica!
“This was a humiliation to which he could not bring himself to stoop;
and accordingly the man has left the estate. I was kept awake the
greater part of the night by the songs and rejoicings of the negroes
at their triumph over the offending bookkeeper.” And this man had only
sluiced a slave with dirty water, called him a rascal, and knocked him
down with a broom because he did not clear away some spilled water
fast enough! No wonder the planters felt this newcomer was attempting
dangerous innovations.
“It is extraordinary,” writes Lady Nugent, more than ten years earlier,
“to witness the immediate effect that the climate” (always the climate)
“and habit of living in this country have upon the minds and manners of
Europeans, particularly the lower orders. In the upper ranks they become
indolent and inactive, regardless of everything but eating and drinking
and indulging themselves, are almost entirely under the dominion of
their mulatto favourites. In the lower orders they are the same,
with the addition of conceit and tyranny, considering the negroes as
creatures formed entirely to administer to their ease, and to be subject
to their caprice, and I have found much difficulty to persuade those
great people and superior beings, our white domestics, that the blacks
are human beings or have souls. I allude more particularly to our German
and our other upper men servants.”
I am afraid there were a good many people like Lady Nugent's German and
other upper men servants.
But Lewis himself had very clear ideas as to the sort of people he was
trying to help. He knew you could not expect either saints or wise men
from men brought up as they had been, though the life might occasionally
evolve a philosopher.
“To do the negroes justice,” he writes, “it is a doubt whether they
are the greatest thieves or liars, and the quantity of sugar which they
purloin during the crop and dispose of at the Bay is enormous.”
And he tells another lovely story of how he was taken in and his
kindness imposed upon. There was a black watchman, old and sick, to whom
he regularly sent soup, and then he discovered that the old scamp had
hired a girl, and had a child by her, and for this accommodation he paid
£30 a year to a brown man in the mountains!
“I hope this fact will convince the African reporter,” he writes, “that
it is possible for some 'of these oppressed race of human beings,' 'of
these our most unfortunate fellow-creatures,' to enjoy at least some
of the blessings of civilised society. And I doubt whether even Mr
Wilberforce himself, with all his benevolence, would not allow a negro
to be quite rich enough, who can afford to pay £30 a year for the hire
of a kept mistress.”
A nice humour of his own has Lewis. He comes down to us pleasantly
through the years. He gives us many little illuminating stories about
the slaves and their ways. Already there were growing up among them many
little differences. For instance, a pure bred negro might not aspire
to the hand of a lady with some of the blood of the ruling class in her
veins. One day he asked Cubina, his body-servant, the nice boy whom he
had first met on his arrival, why he did not marry Mary Wiggins, a most
beautiful brown girl, and they can be beautiful.
“Oh, massa,” said Cubina, shocked, “him sambo!”--that is, the child of a
mulatto and a negro. But this did not always hold good.
He tells another story of a slave of his named Nicholas, a mulatto.
Nicholas was the son of a white man, who on his deathbed charged his
nephew and heir to purchase the freedom of this natural child. The
nephew promised, and Matthew Lewis the master had agreed. Nothing was
wanting except to find a substitute. But a substitute, once the slave
trade had stopped, was very difficult to find. Before he was found, the
nephew had broken his neck, and his estate had gone to a distant heir.
Poor Nicholas's freedom was once more put off. Lewis says he liked the
man so much he was strongly tempted to set him at liberty at once.
“But,” he adds very naturally, “if I began that way there would be no
stopping.”
“Another,” says Lewis, “was building a house for a superannuated
wife--for they have so much decency to call their tender attachments
by a conjugal name.” Which is merely to say that even the mulattoes
continued African customs here in Jamaica.
There was a law against slaves holding stock of any sort, and of course
at first they did not, but gradually men who had to go out into the
wilder parts of the mountains to grow their provisions, acquired live
stock as well, and they held it not only on Lewis's estate, but on other
men's. Lewis bought all the cattle which the industrious ones bred,
good, bad, and indifferent, at an all-round price of £15 a head, and he
never charged them for pasturage. Truly patriarchal in his rule was he.
He believed that the slaves, taken all in all, had a fairly good time,
and he was a man of letters, a man who had travelled, and whose opinion
is worth considering.
“As far as I can judge,” he writes in the inflated style of the time of
George III. of blessed memory, “if I were now standing on the banks of
Lethe with a goblet of the waters of oblivion in my hand and were asked
whether I chose to enter life as an English labourer or a Jamaican
negro, I should have no hesitation in preferring the latter.” Doubtless
he was quite right. His saying it only proves to me what a ghastly time
the English labourer must have had at the beginning of the last century.
There is another aspect of slavery that we don't often realise, but he
brings it before us clearly. At the present day if we wish to get rid of
a bad servant, or even one we dislike, all we have to do is to pay him
and dismiss him, and we are quit of him and his evil ways; but it wasn't
so easy to get rid of a slave. He had a man named Adam, a Creole, who
had a bad reputation as an Obeah man.
“There is no doubt of his having infused poison into the water-jars
through spite against the late superintendent. He is unfortunately
clever and plausible, and I am told that the mischief that he has
already done by working upon the folly and superstition of his fellows
is incalculable. Yet I cannot get rid of him. The law will not suffer
any negro to be shipped off the island until he shall have been
convicted of felony at the session. I cannot sell him, for nobody would
buy him, nor even accept him if I would offer them so dangerous a
present. If he were to go away the law would seize him and bring him
back to me, and I should be obliged to pay heavily for his retaking and
his maintenance in the workhouse. In short, I know not what to do with
him.”
The habit of murdering the superintendents and “bushas” who had done
them an injury, sometimes a very trivial injury, was one that had always
to be taken into account, and a negro who had no personal grudge against
the doomed man could always be relied upon to help a friend. Such were
the strained relations between the white and black. A Mr Dunbar was set
upon and murdered by his driver, helped by two young men who barely knew
the planter by sight, and they could have had no possible grudge against
him except that of colour. Again and again they had missed their chance
by the merest accident, but one night as he was riding home from a
dinner party at Montego Bay they rushed out from behind a clump of
trees, pulled him down from his horse and clubbed him to death. No
one suspected the driver, but a curious superstition gave him away.
Naturally, all the houses of the slaves were searched, and in the
driver's Mr Dunbar's watch and one of his ears was found. The watch
might have been arrived at by barter, but the ear had been kept by the
murderer from a negro belief that so long as the murderer possesses one
of the ears of his victim he will never be haunted by his spectre.
It would be monotonous to put down the number of murders I have
come across in my search for old tales of Jamaica. A book-keeper
was discovered in one of the cane-pieces of Cornwall with his skull
fractured, but the murderer was never discovered; and innumerable were
the book-keepers and overseers who were poisoned by the women they
trusted. Often the woman who mixed the draught had no idea of its being
poison. She received the ingredients from the Obeah man as a charm to
“make her massa good to her,” by which, says Lewis, “the negroes mean
the compelling a person to give another everything for which that other
may ask him.”
It was always feud, feud, feud. Reading the slave books, we see how much
of this bitterness must have been engendered. In crop time the slaves
often had to labour all night, and frequently on Sundays they were in
the cane-pieces instead of being allowed to go to their ground, and if
they had not time to grow their provisions it is hardly likely these
hard taskmasters made good the loss.
“Great evil arises,” writes someone in the Rose Hall estate book,
possibly the Attorney in charge, “to the Negroes and stock from carting
canes at night. An Overseer who arranges his work with judgment will
always have abundance of canes in the mill yard by commencing to carry
early in the morning. It is therefore my desire that no canes are to be
brought from the field after Sunset.”
Judging by this book, sometimes the mills started after 7 p.m. on Sunday
night and ran continuously till the following Saturday night or Sunday
morning without intermission or rest for anyone, white or black. How
bitter might be the black man thus worked remorselessly, even though the
white man was himself driven by a higher power.
A study of the “Runaways” interspersed up and down the pages among the
other entries shows us very clearly the position of the unfortunate
slave, even though no word is said against him. Cæsar on Rose Hall ran
away again and again, and we feel great pity for Cæsar because possibly
he could not stand this appalling labour. He returned on the 6th July
for the last time, and on the 21st of the same month among “Decrease of
negroes” is a simple note “By Cæsar died.” Poor Cæsar! What agonies did
he suffer during that long, long fortnight.
I went to Rose Hall once, a great four-storied stone building,
approached by flights of steps built on arches. Its empty window-places,
from which the glass has long since gone, look out over the blue
Caribbean, its floors, where they are not worm-eaten, are of the most
gorgeous polished mahogany, and the walls of the principal rooms are
panelled with the like beautiful polished wood. It is empty, forlorn,
the glory has departed, it is haunted, they say, and there is a blood
stain that will not wash out on the floor. Of Mrs Palmer, who owned it
last, very unsavoury tales are told. She is said to have murdered more
than one husband and lived with her own slaves, doing away with her
paramour when she tired of him. No old planter in the whole island had a
worse reputation than this woman, who was murdered as late as 1833 by a
lover who saw his influence waning. Rose Hall was a “bad estate.” It
was notorious for the ill-treatment of its slaves. Underneath the Great
House, reached by a flight of stone steps, are rooms dark and airless,
where the unfortunates who in any way transgressed were caged. The
walls are of heavy stone, and the only means by which air and light are
admitted are by narrow slits in those walls, and they only give into
another underground room. It was a ghastly and horrible place in which
to confine anyone, let alone these children of the sun. I said this to
a friend who told me of another estate on which a cruel master, when
any slave offended him, had him shut up in a room--a dungeon he called
it--which looked through iron bars on his dining-room. And there he kept
the offender without food, and rejoiced he should be within sight and
smell of the lavish plenty of the planter's table. Like a barbarian
of old, the cruel master took pleasure in the thought of another's
suffering. The narrator went on to say that on one occasion a slave was
so shut up and the master went away taking with him the keys, and as no
one could get in the unfortunate starved to death. This may be perfectly
true, for it seems to me there is no particular form of torture to
which the slaves have not been subjected at one time or another; reading
between the lines of the Rose Hall book, one of the latest slave books,
you can see this. Never till I read up the annals of Jamaica did I so
thoroughly realise the meaning of man's inhumanity to man, and I suppose
the lot of the Jamaican slave was the lot of slaves all the world over.
But we must remember too that there were certain compensations.
As Lewis has shown, it was impossible in later times to get rid of an
objectionable slave, and the slave when he was old and ill was by the
kind master protected and cared for, and the women who had borne many
children were exempt from all work. They were supposed to have no
anxieties about the future, that should be their master's care. At its
best, slavery supplied no stimulus to industry; at its worst--well, no
words are bad enough for slavery at its worst.
In the Worthy Park slave book there is frequent mention made of a slave
always referred to as Creole Cuba's Cuffee, who seems to have been
unmanageable. At any rate he was always in trouble, and at last he was
sent to Spring Gardens, where were others also difficult to deal with.
It was not till I read in Lewis's book the evil reputation of an estate
called Spring Gardens, about that time, that I knew how dreadful was
their fate. Lewis quotes the owner as the cruellest proprietor that ever
disgraced Jamaica. It was his practice when a negro was sick unto death,
to order him to be carried to a distant gully among the mountains on his
estate, there to be cast out and left to die, and the “John Crows”
would clear away his bones. He also instructed the men who carried the
unfortunate to the gully to strip him before they left him, telling them
to be careful not only to bring back his frock, but the very board on
which he had been carried. On one occasion a poor creature while being
removed, screamed out that he was not dead yet, and implored them not to
leave him to perish in the gully. His master cared nothing and ordered
the funeral to proceed, but the bearers were less hard hearted and they
brought the sick man back secretly to the negro village and nursed him
till he recovered, when he was smuggled off the estate to Kingston.
Apparently he found means to support himself there for one day, his late
master on turning a corner came face to face with the man whose bones
he thought had long ago been picked clean by the “John Crows.” He
immediately seized him and claimed him as his slave, and ordered the men
who were with him to drag him to his house. But the slave made one more
bid for freedom. He shrieked and cried out his woes, and I am glad to
say that in Kingston the spirit of fair play held good. The crowd that
gathered were so excited by the tale that Mr Bedward was glad to save
himself from being torn to pieces, fled from Kingston, and never again
dared to claim that slave risen from the dead.
Lewis tells too of a man who was tried in Kingston for cruel treatment
of a sambo woman slave. She had no friends to support her cause, nor any
other evidence to prove her assertions than the apparent truth of
her statement, and the marks of having been branded in five different
places. Her master was actually sentenced to six months imprisonment,
and the slave was given her freedom as compensation for her sufferings.
Thus we see slowly through the years the position of the slave
improving.