Joseph Knight

by James Robertson

  He spoke with a mild Yorkshire accent, the words interspersed with heavy rasping breaths and much wiping of the brow. His unsuitable dress, clearly the chief source of his discomfort, seemed to indicate a newcomer. In fact Mr Underwood had been on the island nearly thirty years, but would never get used to the heat. He had small eyes made smaller by the encroaching folds of his cheeks. He tipped his fleshy head at John.

  ‘Now, sir, it’s all one to me, I assure you, but were you out?’

  John had an idea that Mr Underwood, through James, already knew the answer. He drew himself up proudly: ‘That, sir, is not a question one gentleman expects to be asked by another.’

  Underwood shrugged. ‘I’ll take that as an aye. No, no, don’t be offended, Mr Wedderburn, I don’t care a bit, and you’ll find very few folk as do. We’re an island of tolerance – we’re only here to get rich after all, and you can’t hold that against nobody. I only ask on account of you Scotchmen are such a curious breed. You’ll murder each other over crowns and creeds at home, but here the loyalest of you falls on his rebel compatriot like a brother. The sun does something to you it don’t do to Englishmen: it seems to dry up all your grudges.’

  ‘Mr Underwood’s plantation,’ James said, ‘is not far from where George Kinloch is. Mr Underwood knows George quite well.’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ Underwood said. ‘Not a grudge on that gentleman’s person.’

  ‘And what brings you to Kingston, sir?’ John asked.

  ‘A scramble, sir,’ Underwood said. ‘Tomorrow morning. I’m hoping to pick up some cheap slaves to replace half a dozen I lost at Christmas to the flux.’

  ‘But there’s a regular market at Savanna-la-Mar,’ John said. ‘Surely it’s a long and hazardous trip to come all this way for slaves?’

  ‘Oh, dreadful hazardous,’ Underwood agreed with enthusiasm. ‘A hundred miles and more on roads that would shake the teeth out of many men – not that you can call them roads, in some parts. But I’ve been visiting friends here, you see, and they’ve given me some fine heavy bits of furniture which I intend to ship home along with the new slaves, if I can get some. Are you in the market for slaves yourself, Mr Wedderburn?’ he asked John.

  ‘Not yet,’ said John.

  ‘But we will be,’ said James.

  ‘You should come along with me in the morning. I can show you what to look out for when you’re buying them up cheap. In a scramble, I mean.’

  ‘What,’ says James, ‘is a scramble?’

  ‘Just what it sounds like. The shipmasters have sorted their negers out by the time they get here, they’ve decided which ones they can sell at premium, which ones are ailing, which ones are feeble-minded, that kind of thing. They sell the best to folk as know what they want and have money to pay for it, they auction the weakest for whatever they can get, which is precious little, and them that’s left, the middling sort you might say, are put to a scramble. A set price is fixed beforehand, same for each slave, so if you’ve a good eye you can pick up an excellent bargain. Oh, but you have to be quick on your feet to beat t’others. Come along with me in the morning and I’ll show you how it’s done.’

  ‘We’ll be there,’ James said at once. ‘How about yourself, Davie?’

  ‘No, I’ll be seeing enough Negroes as it is. I’ve a long day tomorrow. Three plantations and a hundred and fifty slaves to inspect.’

  ‘Ill?’ Underwood said. ‘Not a contagion, I hope?’

  ‘No, a routine visit. A stitch in time, you’ll understand, or more likely a poultice or an incision, may save nine. Nine slaves, that is,’ he explained to the Wedderburns, ‘for which a master may have paid a great deal of money.’

  ‘How’s your master, Davie?’ John asked. ‘Still alive?’

  ‘Very sickly,’ said Davie Fyfe with a wide grin.

  ‘Excellent,’ said James. ‘You’ll be a rich man soon.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Underwood asked.

  ‘The surgeon Davie works for,’ James said, ‘has been ill for months. If he doesn’t want to expire here he’ll have to go back to England.’

  ‘In which case he’ll be dead before the Azores,’ Fyfe said.

  ‘So whatever happens,’ James said, ‘Davie will inherit the business, and probably at a knockdown price, won’t you, Davie?’

  ‘I’m hoping so. If you can stay fit yourself, there’s a fortune to be made here from doctoring.’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t tell me that, sir,’ said Underwood. ‘The bills I pay for doctoring! They would keep a lord and his castle back in England! I’m not complaining, mind you – if you get a surgeon in quick, he can save you far more in slaves than what he’ll charge you for his time. He can spot a fever before it turns into a forest fire, the flux before it becomes a flood, if you understand me. Negers go down in parties, Mr Wedderburn. One gets a fever, they all get it. But a good surgeon – and I’ll say this, a good surgeon’s nearly always a Scotch surgeon, begging your master’s pardon, Mr Fyfe – a good surgeon will nip that fever in the bud, and kill it. He might in the process kill the slave as has it, which is a loss to be borne of course, but I warrant you, it makes t’others get better quick. Am I right, sir?’

  Davie Fyfe acknowledged that he was quite right. ‘Except,’ he added, ‘that a good surgeon never kills his patient, though the patient might unavoidably die of the attempt to make him well.’

  ‘A slip of the tongue, sir,’ said Underwood, slipping his own round another shot of rum. ‘And of course it depends on the illness. And the slave. There’s some negers can withstand any amount of fever, but will go down in a day with the yaws. There’s other negers live with the yaws like it’s their mother, but give them a touch of fever, they’re dead before morning. Am I right, Mr Fyfe?’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘I have seen the yaws,’ said James. ‘What causes it?’

  ‘Seen it?’ Underwood exploded. ‘I should think you have! You can’t be very long here without seeing the yaws! Oh, but you don’t want to know about it, young man. Do he, Mr Fyfe? Very nasty, very nasty. But you have to know about it, to know Negroes. Mr Fyfe will tell you about the yaws. Makes me shudder just to think on it.’

  Davie Fyfe opened his mouth to explain the yaws, but Underwood had hit on a favourite theme, and rolled on unstoppably.

  ‘I take a great pride,’ he said, ‘in knowing my Negroes. I’m a fair man, and I don’t believe in mistreating them. Punishment, yes, but that’s not mistreating them if they deserve it, that’s treating them same as you’d treat anything in your charge, black, white or beast of the field. There’s men I know,’ he went on, shaking his head and in the process showering the table with sweat, ‘as have no respect for your African at all. They forget that he’s a human being. A bad planter don’t break them in as he should, he don’t season them over a twelvemonth, he puts them out in the field far too early, and then he wonders why they die on him and he’s wasted his money. That’s almost like murder, in my book. You can pay a terrible price for a fine Coromantee, a terrible price, but if you don’t look after him, well, you may as well have put your money on a horse with three legs. No, a good planter, such as I believe I am, knows his Negroes, and if you, Mr Wedderburn, and your young brother here, are to flourish in Jamaica, I’d advise you to know your Negroes too. Come along to the scramble with me tomorrow, and you can make a start. Truth of the matter is, you can’t prosper here without keeping slaves, and if you want to keep them you have to understand them, the different types of them. Do you follow me?’

  ‘You must tell us more, sir,’ James said, signalling for more rum and winking at John. ‘How many types of them are there?’

  ‘Oh, limitless, limitless,’ said Underwood. ‘Guinea, you see, where they come from, is bigger than, oh, England and Scotland and France put together. Far bigger. And what is Guinea? Is it a great kingdom, like France, like England? A fine country like your Scotland, sirs? No, it’s a jumble of little kingdoms and tribes and desert and swamp and forest, all
mixed up together. That’s where your neger comes from, and there’s many of them very glad to get out of it, though they don’t think so at the time they’re taken, which is understandable. But if they stayed, chances are they’d be eaten by savage lions, or by other negers, or they’d be killed by them, or they’d starve, or die of thirst – there’s a hundred ways of dying in Guinea, Mr Wedderburn, and none of them’s nice. Or they’d be made slaves of by the Moors, which you may be sure is a sight worse than being a slave here in the Indies. A great deal worse. Am I right, Mr Fyfe?’

  Mr Fyfe opined that he might well be, but as he had never been to Guinea he could not tell.

  ‘Nor I,’ said Underwood, ‘but there’s plenty as has. All the captains of the slave ships, they have, and I talk to them as part of my policy of knowing my Negroes. Anyway, as to types, Mr Wedderburn, there’s your creoles of course, to begin with – that’s them that’s born here in the Indies and has forgotten whatever African tribe they once was. Then, of the Africans, the full-blooded freshly imported slaves, well, I’d say there’s four types, speaking in a general kind of way. First, there’s your Eboes. They come mostly from Benin, that’s the underbelly part of Guinea. They’re the least useful, in my opinion, though they fetch them over in droves. A very timid type, and rather prone to killing themselves of despair, I’m sorry to say. You’ll see a lot of them in the scramble tomorrow, I don’t doubt. Then there’s your Pawpaws and your Nagoes, from a bit further north. Now these are very excellent Negroes if they’ll live, very docile and well-disposed creatures, and never the least trouble, but they die off easy from a lack of character – am I going too fast, sir?’ He asked this of James, who had produced a pocket book and stub of blacklead pencil and was taking rapid notes. James waved him on. ‘The third type is your Mandingo. He’s a clever fellow, too clever in fact, he can learn to read and write and do his sums very quick, but he’s lazy, and much given to theft. And then,’ said the fat planter grandly, as if announcing a prize bull, ‘there’s your Coromantee, from the Gold Coast. He’s the cream of Africans, stands head and shoulders above the rest. Firm of body, firm of mind, brave, strong, extraordinary powerful worker in the field – but proud too, stubborn, and ferocious when roused. You have to watch Coromantees like a hawk, gentlemen, but you’ll get more work out of one of them in a week than you’ll get out of six Eboes. Am I not correct, Mr Fyfe?’ he finished, by way of variation.

  ‘Indeed you are, sir,’ said Davie Fyfe, ‘and to what you’ve said I’ll add that, being of a strong constitution, they don’t get so sick as the others.’

  ‘We should have some Coromantees then,’ said James to his brother, ‘when we are planters. They sound like the negers for us.’

  ‘And how,’ said John, ‘do you intend that we pay for them?’

  James did not answer that question then. Nor did he address it the following day, when they went to the scramble with Underwood and saw him in action picking up bargains. A large wooden pen had been filled with a couple of hundred Africans. Once a set price had been agreed, a drum sounded, the gates were opened and in rushed the planters or their overseers, each carrying a coil of rope identified by a couple of handkerchiefs tied to it.

  Underwood, sweat lashing off him and his wig toppling on his head like a skein of yellow knitting, moved with amazing speed, grabbing at the arms of terrified Africans, quickly inserting a thumb into some of their mouths to check the state of their teeth, slipping his hand between their buttocks (it was known for ships’ surgeons to stop slaves’ anuses with oakum, to disguise the fact that they had the flux), pummelling and punching at their legs to test them for strength, and all the while playing out the rope, the loose end of which James had offered to hold.

  ‘Bring it round, sir, enclose them, that one, that one there, sir, the big bullish one,’ Underwood roared, making himself heard above a similar racket issuing from the mouth of every other white man in the scrum. James darted after Underwood like an elf behind an ogre. Every few seconds he turned back to John, who was following at a distance and doing his best to avoid bodily contact with anyone. There was an appalled look in James’s eyes, but he was also laughing uproariously. He began to wave the rope-end in black faces, and when they cowered or shied away his laugh got louder. It was as if, having decided to do something distasteful, he discovered that he quite enjoyed it.

  In less than a quarter of an hour, Underwood had got himself seven new slaves, corralled by the rope like unwilling participants in some grotesque parlour game, and was settling up with the slave-ship captains.

  That evening, long after Underwood had loaded his new purchases on board ship for Westmoreland, the brothers discussed the scramble over supper in their lodgings.

  ‘It was disgusting,’ John said.

  ‘You mean it offended you?’ James asked. ‘Your moral sensibilities?’

  ‘No, I mean it disgusted me. The noise and sweat and brutishness of it.’

  ‘It was impressive, too, though,’ James said. ‘Not Underwood – he’s a buffoon. But the fact that a man like that has such power over others.’

  ‘He certainly had no compunction about checking his wares.’ John had an image of the fat planter’s fingers running over black skin.

  ‘You’ll have to do the same,’ James said, ‘so you’d better get used to it. And you will. It doesn’t have to be so uncivilised.’ A sly look came over his face and he leaned forward. ‘Listen, John, here’s what I propose. We’ll be planters, and we’ll be better than the likes of Underwood, far better. But first we’ll be surgeons. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Davie’ll teach us, he’ll take us on as apprentices when he gets the business, he’ll not have to pay us much, not till we learn a little anyway. Well, you needn’t look so gloomy, you must have seen a fair display of wounds, quite a pack of sick men, in the last year or two.’

  ‘It’s true. But all those black bodies crushed together. It unnerved me.’

  ‘Well, treating them’s only common sense, surely, and luck, and having a strong belly. After what you’ve been through it’ll be bairn’s play; and if you can manage it, I can. And we’ll use our fees to buy slaves. We’ll do it right, though, not like that madness this forenoon. We’ll go direct to the slave ships, and buy us some Coromantees.’

  ‘But we’ve no qualifications,’ John protested. ‘The island is awash with surgeons, real surgeons.’

  ‘Ah, but we’re Scotch, which Mr Underwood seems to consider as fine a qualification as any. And how many of these real surgeons you speak of have ever been challenged to produce their degrees? We studied in Glasgow, or Aberdeen, or Edinburgh, it doesn’t matter which, none of the medical men here are young enough to say it’s odd how they never met us in the dissecting room – except Davie, and he’ll not betray us. And if we’re lacking our papers it’s because of our political indiscretions, which obliged us to leave a wee bit hurriedly. Nobody will care, if only we’re competent. There’s to be an amnesty soon anyway, they’re saying, for folk like you that were out. So we must practise, and get competence, and Davie’s the man that will help us to get it. And in any event it’ll only be practising on slaves, so we can afford a few minor mistakes. A few major ones, even.’

  ‘We’d need land, too,’ said John. ‘No point in having slaves if we’ve nowhere to work them.’

  ‘There’s land a-plenty here. But we’ll keep an eye out for what’s already been reclaimed and planted. Buy a share in a small plantation, buy the whole of it, and build it up.’

  ‘Maybe to leeward,’ John said, ‘in the west, where Underwood and George Kinloch are. Westmoreland’s the youngest parish, it’s not so congested as this end.’

  ‘Aye,’ James said, ‘we’ll get over to leeward in a while. But first we’ll be doctors. What do you say?’

  John Wedderburn thought of touching black flesh, cutting into it, gangrenous rot, infestations, flux, fever. He remembered the limb-scattered field of Culloden. Surely he could steel himself. Surely he could.


  He smiled at his brother. ‘You’re a scoundrel, James. I say we shall be doctors.’

  Glen Isla, 1760

  A dozen miles north and west of Savanna-la-Mar, the main town and port of Westmoreland, the westernmost parish of Jamaica, the soil-rich plain of the Cabarita river gave way to the lower slopes of the mountains. Here, a rough road curled up into the hills, and the landscape took on a wilder aspect than that of the sugar-growing flat land that stretched down to the sea. Wilder, and yet somehow comfortingly familiar. Up in the hills the heat was less intense, less humid. If you discounted the size and abundance of the vegetation, you could almost believe yourself to be in a Scottish glen.

  This was what John Wedderburn had thought when he had first inspected the area with a view to buying property, two or three years after his arrival in Jamaica. A further ten years had passed, and the place was now his home. The refuge-like feel of it had led him to name it Glen Isla.

  It had been a time of constant, grinding, back-breaking labour. The Wedderburns had become rich. These two facts were connected, indirectly. The labour had been overseen by them, but actually carried out by slaves. Not that they had been idle: they had worked, first as doctors, then as planters, as hard as any other white gentlemen in Jamaica, but they had also had a large helping of luck – of the kind that really involves no luck at all, but only patience till somebody dies. In 1751, John had come into a substantial inheritance left by a great-uncle in Perthshire, and this they had used to purchase two parcels of land. The first, Bluecastle, was down near the coast, a few miles west of Savanna, an old-established cane plantation in need of new management. James had taken that on. The second was Glen Isla.

  The house at Glen Isla was situated in an elevated position just over the crest of the escarpment that rose from the sugar plain. An area two hundred yards in width had been cleared of trees all around the house, so that it had unobstructed views of all the approaches – highly necessary in times of slave unrest. Where the rough parkland created by the tree-felling ended, the track to the house joined the public south – north road that twisted across the mountains into Hanover parish, eventually reaching Montego Bay twenty arduous miles away on the north coast.