by Ian Thomson
In books, plays and poems, Jamaica was depicted as a dangerous place where the British were undone by greed and licentiousness. A popular drama of 1771, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, satirised planters as boorish but essentially lovable types who gleefully overturned English standards of civility. Belcour, the ‘West Indian’ of the title, visits England accompanied by a retinue of Jamaican slaves, his trunks bulging with ‘rum puncheons’ and other island exotica. Always drunk, he disgraces himself with other men’s wives, and is shunned as a parvenu of empire. Later, in a show of remorse, Belcour blames his wayward behaviour on his ‘cursed tropical constitution’; if only he had never left Jamaica: Would to heaven I had been dropped upon the snows of Lapland, and never felt the blessed influence of the sun, so had I never burnt with these inflammatory passions.
Eighty years later, the ‘degeneracy’ of West Indians was more memorably evoked by William Thackeray in his novel Vanity Fair. The novel provides a glittery panorama of sugar impresarios, plantation heiresses and remittance men who have died (or are about to die) of drink or yellow fever in the Caribbean. Miss Schwartz, the novel’s egregious ‘West Indian’, has ‘earrings like chandeliers’ and is consumed, like Richard Cumberland’s Belcour before her, by wild amorous lusts. When not drinking, she haunts London’s ‘Tapioca Coffee-House’ (in reality the Jamaica Coffee House on St Michael’s Alley) for news of her Caribbean properties.
Real-life Belcours and Schwartzes populate the diary kept by Lady Nugent, wife of the governor of Jamaica, during her four-year residence on the island between 1801 and 1805. Vast planter meals were endured by the prim and very proper Nugent, who commented of one breakfast:I observed some of the party, to-day, eat as if they had never eaten before-adish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hock-negus [wine punch]; then Madeira, sangaree [sangria], hot and cold meat, stews and fries, hot and cold fish pickled and plain, peppers, ginger sweetmeats, acid fruit, sweet jellies - in short, it was all as astonishing as it was disgusting.
Behind this strenuous dissolution lay the ‘triangle merchants’ who motivated the slave trade between England, Africa and Jamaica. A typical ‘triangle voyage’ carried trading goods (such as beads, rifles and gunpowder) from England to Africa, then slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, and finally sugar, coffee, cotton, rice and rum on the home stretch to England. It was one of the most nearly perfect commercial systems of modern times, a flawless loop of supply and demand, that linked a network of overlapping (not always ‘triangular’) trading routes and merchant-capitalist systems across Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Middle Passage foreshadowed the greater cruelties of the plantations in Jamaica, as Africans were herded on to slave ships, branded with irons, flogged and ferried in stinking holds to the imperial sugar fields.
The African side of the Jamaican ‘triangle’ - sometimes called the ‘black trade’ because it was controlled by non-Europeans - was exemplified by the slave castles which the British operated along the Gold Coast of Africa until slavery’s abolition in 1807. The castles served as holding centres for Africans captured by and sold into servitude by fellow Africans; it was from these ‘castle doors of no return’ that thousands of men, women and children born in Africa were transported to Jamaica. Conceivably, the forebears of British Jamaicans today passed through those warehouse-dungeons on the South Atlantic Ocean.
The realisation that European slavery depended upon African slavery disillusioned James Berry, who told me in a tone of disbelief, ‘My own people - my African ancestors - had sold and abandoned us to the white man. Oh, that was a sorrowful shock for me, I felt a tremendous betrayal, even a hatred for Africa.’ African complicity does not diminish the white man’s responsibility. It was the British who supplied the vessels of profit and despair that made Jamaican slavery possible; it was the British who evolved a new, modern, economic system out of human beings. African rulers who profited from the British triangular trade were often shocked by the antics of their British counterparts, who appraised their ‘cargo’ like cattle, prodding and examining orifices for signs of disease.
Few in Britain acknowledged that each sweet teaspoonful dissolved in tea (that ‘blood-sweetened beverage’, the abolitionist poet Robert Southey called it) was an added measure of black mortality. The misery of untold numbers of Africans barely registered in pre-abolition Britain: slavery was, quite simply, an unquestioned, widely accepted, morally neutral trade which yielded immense profits for some and a sweet pleasure for millions.
Since Jamaica was riddled with disease, insects and reptiles, the British plantation owners became absentee landlords if they could. Or else they liquidated their tropical holdings outright. Still others never even set foot in Jamaica. The Gothic novelist William Beckford’s sole attempt to sail to his properties in Jamaica, in 1787, took him no further than Lisbon: sea-sickness, combined with a fear of shipboard cockroaches, detained him. The few planters who did stay behind aimed to send their children ‘home’ to England for their education. Tobias Smollett, the eighteenth-century Scottish novelist, having married a ‘home-comer’ from Jamaica, appointed a London agent to oversee the sale and purchase of her slaves. Typically, funds were slow to arrive, as slaving agents were inefficient and, often as not, drunk. ‘That cursed Ship from Jamaica,’ Smollett complained in a letter of 1756, ‘is at last arrived without Letter or Remittance.’ Smollett and his wife could hope to earn £80 for each ‘Negro man’ sold in their behalf-a considerable sum in those days.
In the absence of their owners, Jamaican estates were run by attorneys or family relatives. Often these were ignorant, limited men (family black sheep, army deserters, youngest sons) who wanted only to fight duels, smoke cigars, ‘humbug’ absentees, make money and spend it. Their wives, according to an account of Jamaica published anonymously in 1808, were little better, as they suffered from a slothful, bed-bound inertia, or squandered their time in drinking ‘corkers’ (strong rum punch) and reading ‘trash’ novels sent out from England. Like their husbands, they had come to Jamaica to acquire a fortune and a social status that would have been denied them at home. By the end of the eighteenth century, when Jamaica enjoyed remarkable prosperity, only one in ten of the plantation great houses was occupied by a proprietor.
The first slaves to arrive in British Jamaica, however, were not Africans, but white ‘bondsmen’ and women shipped out from England in the 1600s as convicts, debtors, political dissidents and other ‘undesirables’. Many of these transportees were Royalist casualties of the English Civil War, prisoners of Oliver Cromwell sold as ‘redemptioners’ to the West Indies. From the start, then, British dominion in Jamaica rested on coercion rather than voluntary settlement - the land was held and worked by violence.
Cromwell had seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655 as part of his great ‘Western Design’ intended to halt the spread of Catholicism in the Hispanic New World. It took him five years to clear the Spanish out of Jamaica, however, and his new territorial jewel was far from attractive in the short term. Disease soon wiped out the white slaves; Cromwell therefore agreed to import slaves from Africa. These arrived from the Gold Coast (today’s Ghana), the Bight of Benin (today’s Togo, Benin and south-west Nigeria), and the coast of Sierra Leone (on today’s map, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast).
However, it was not until the Restoration that Jamaica became to England what India later became-a showcase mercantile colony where Britons sought easy wealth and a future. John Evelyn, the Restoration diarist, worked as a civil servant for the Council for Foreign Plantations, a seventeenth-century equivalent of the Department of Overseas Trade. His job was to oversee the maintenance of Jamaica as a colonial and commercial outpost, and to that end he devoted his energies to an investigation of Jamaican soil conditions and forestry. The Council met each month at the Earl of Bristol’s house in Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and had no scruple about the brutality of the ‘Negro trade’. All that mattered was that B
ritain rivalled Spain as a slaving nation and inflicted piratical raids on Spanish territories along the Panama trade route to Europe.
For that reason, Kingston was turned into a slave depot, while Charles II worked with Parliament to establish the legal existence of slavery. Kingston was protected against Spanish attack by a ten-mile spit of land with the citadel of Port Royal at the seaward end, which served as a British navy base, as well as home to Jamaica’s lieutenant governor, the former pirate Captain Henry Morgan. By the time Port Royal was hit by an earthquake and tidal wave in 1692 the city had earned its reputation as ‘the wickedest’ on earth. Merchants, pimps, prostitutes, mercenaries and criminals of every stripe came to gorge on Port Royal’s free-flowing wealth, much of it generated by the government-sponsored pirates who had marauded the Caribbean with Lieutenant Morgan, disposing of the Spanish. Only one tenth of this rackety boom town survived its ‘Biblical destruction’ by wave and tremor (the rest still lurks a few metres beneath the surface of the sea). It says something for British Jamaica that it began life as both a pirate and a slave base - profit and criminality conjoined on the high seas.
I set out from Kingston to visit Arthur’s Seat, a plantation house on Jamaica’s north coast. Arthur’s Seat had been the centre of a very prosperous banana and pimento business in the 1770s; the English owners of that time, the Hepworths, had given their name to the outlying district known as Epworth. (Jamaicans can have a cockneylike difficulty with their aitches.) After slavery’s abolition, however, Arthur’s Seat collapsed as a commercial enterprise; bush smothered the cane fields, the slave quarters were burned down and the remaining servants occupied the empty great house. (Great house was the name given to a plantation home in Jamaica during the slaving era.)
Almost forty years ago, in 1970, Marjorie and Jacqueline Parkins, a black Jamaican mother and daughter, moved into Arthur’s Seat. They live by selling bric-a-brac and giving tours of the old plantation home. Some tourists (the majority of them American) would ask the Parkinses if they could meet ‘the owners’ of the house; others wanted to know if ‘white people’ had bequeathed money to the Parkinses, so they could live like wellheeled sugar ladies. By inhabiting Arthur’s Seat, the Parkinses seemed to upset the notion of white freedom and black servitude. In reality, slaves had been owned by ‘people of colour’ (to use that unattractive phrase), and in a few exceptional cases Jamaican slaves were even owned by freed slaves.
St Ann parish, as I drove across it from Kingston, had the appearance of English parkland. Cattle grazed on green meadows, and green fields rolled towards the sea. On my left, just before I reached Arthur’s Seat, a mammoth cotton tree stood perhaps sixty feet tall in a dip of the land. Cotton trees, with their bulging steelgrey trunks and banyan-like buttresses, are sacred in Africa, and sacred also in Jamaica. Their branches are believed to harbour spirits or ‘duppies’. Cotton trees rooted in graveyards are particularly feared; a spirit known as Old Hinge hangs her skin on the branches, and travels about at night, making mischief.
Marjorie Parkins, the mother, had the worn and disappointed look of one who had spent her best years in public life. In 1962, immediately after independence, she was posted to New York to serve as Jamaican consul. Jamaica’s conservative JLP government under Alexander Bustamante had sided with the United States on Cold War issues and shared America’s disapproval of the Soviet influence in Cuba. So Marjorie Parkins was made to feel welcome. On her return to Jamaica eight years later, in 1970, she bought the ruin of Arthur’s Seat and filled it with modern furniture freighted in from Brooklyn. ‘But,’ Marjorie said to me, ‘the American furniture didn’t really suit a British great house, so we got rid of the American stuff and filled it with antiques.’
Every room was crammed with a neo-colonial accumulation of rosewood and mahogany furniture, much of it for sale. Sunlight, dispelling the frowsy atmosphere, streamed in through open jalousies on to a collection of porcelain dolls, a metal 1960s Red Stripe advert, and an immense Victorian bird cage. An air of unreality pervaded the place. Some of the furniture was pseudoantique, with much gilt trimming, brass studs and lacquer like an east European coffin. Jacqueline Parkins, Marjorie’s daughter, told me about the people who had visited Arthur’s Seat. Not so long ago a group of thirty British tourists were taken to see the property’s slave dungeon, where the ventilation slits could still be seen. Jacqueline had described to them how the English-born Hepworths had whipped and branded their slaves, and hanged them by their necks from the cotton tree. As she dilated on their brutality, some of the visitors turned away and stared fixedly at their feet, while others seemed most distressed. ‘Oh no, please!’ They begged Jacqueline to show forgiveness - forgiveness for Britain’s slave-trading past.
I asked Jacqueline: ‘Do you like the British?’ and her big, gentle face stirred with impatience.
‘Not always,’ she replied. ‘You British expect to find a paradise of sea and sun and sand in Jamaica - you don’t want to be reminded of historical realities.’ Some of the visitors that day had become really quite hysterical. ‘I thought we’d have to call an ambulance,’ she said. Jacqueline’s mother, looking at me, interjected grimly: ‘Or a hearse.’ She added, ‘Those English people - they were white, of course - they just weren’t expecting to be lectured on slavery by two black ladies living in a plantation great house ...’ Amid the antique gloom of Arthur’s Seat, mother and daughter had further reversed the old planter ‘rankings’ by keeping a black staff of their own.
In 2007, during the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, British guilt for the ‘Africa Trade’ was expressed in various ways. Tony Blair offered a tokenistic ‘deep sorrow’ at Britain’s involvement in the ‘shameful’ commerce, yet his government made no official apology (John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, made a woeful attempt at it: ‘Everybody should feel the sorrow, pain and regret ...’) An apology by the Church of England in February of that year was ridiculed in some quarters; the word ‘sorry’, it was objected, hardly atoned for the crimes committed. Whatever could?
Thirty years after Cromwell had wrested Jamaica from Spain, in 1687 the scientist-collector Sir Hans Sloane arrived on the island to act as physician to the British governor. Sloane became a founder of the British Museum (his collection of Jamaican curiosities was purchased by Parliament in 1752 for £20,000 and donated to the museum), but he was no philanthropist. For the crime of ‘rebellion’ he recommended that slaves be pinioned to the ground and burned with a flaming brand ‘by degrees from the Feet and Hands ... gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant’. For ‘lesser’ crimes he recommended ‘chopping off half of the Foot with an Ax’.
Slave resistance - what Sir Hans chose to call ‘rebellion’ - took many forms: sabotage, withdrawal of labour (‘laziness’), protest in words and song, escape, outright revolt. Punishment records in the Wilberforce House Archives, Hull, add ‘stealing rum’, ‘insolence to overseers’, ‘refusing to pump water’, and ‘making use of improper language’ as punishable offences. On Parnassus Estate in Jamaica, amputation appears to have been inflicted, as the overseer notes for the year 1779 that his slaves had ‘lost both hands’, are ‘without fingers’ or have ‘only one foot’. They have been given Classical names such as Pompey, Caesar, Cupid and Juno, which seem to mock their servile condition. Most of them died of overwork or disease: the Hull records say they are ‘pox’d’ or ‘laid up’; they have ‘yaws’ (a form of leprosy), or they are ‘troubled with fitts’.
Britain’s complicity in what John Newton, a former slave-trade captain, called the ‘disgraceful branch of commerce’ should be acknowledged and taught in British schools, as a matter of education. But apologised for? Tony Blair could not feel personal guilt for the slave trade, yet surely apologies are meaningless without any show of remorse. ‘Deep sorrow’ is probably the best the British can offer.
Meanwhile, the impression of something sinister in the heart of Arthur’s Seat was enhanced (for me) by a
local legend of recent vintage. During Hurricane Dennis in 2005, Epworth district was convulsed by such a loud commotion that it was assumed the old slave mansion had ‘exploded’. One of the cotton tree’s elephantine branches had cracked off in the storm. It was believed that from the tree’s dismembered limb the spirits of hanged slaves had been released. ‘Ever since that night, if one person dies in Epworth,’ Jacqueline Parkins said, ‘two more always follow. Well, the locals blame the hangman’s tree for that. They blame the British.’ Jacqueline had recounted this story with excited, wide eyes; and as she did so I wondered how she and her mother could live so isolated, without transport or a working telephone, in this haunted place.
5
Massa Day Done?
On a dreary day in Hull, under a damp North Sea drizzle, I visited Wilberforce House. A statue of the English abolitionist, with thin mouth and serious eyes, stands outside the red-brick Jacobean manor where he was born in 1759. Inside I saw a recreation of a British ship’s slave-hold, complete with life-size models of enchained Africans and a recording of a slave captain’s yelled abuse (‘Get out of my way, filthy animals!’). A teacher was accompanying a group of primary-school-aged children. ‘See,’ he said to them, ‘the slaves were treated like pieces of meat-cargo’; and with dour Humberside understatement he added: ‘It wasn’t luxury-class cruising, it was horrendously cruel, children.’
In the bicentenary year of the abolition of Britain’s slave traffic, 2007, William Wilberforce was feted by Humberside City Council. From 1788 onwards he had been the British MP synonymous with the Parliamentary campaign to ban the slave trade in the British Empire. Under Wilberforce was a group of other high-minded Englishmen (many of them Quakers) who opposed a brutish, mercantile greed and its arsenal of chains, whips and leg irons.