Joseph Knight

by James Robertson

  A quarter mile in the other direction, there was a viewpoint on the escarpment from which one could look out over the plain as far as the sea, and take in the entire estate – the hardwood forest still thick on the hills, the cane fields, the Chocho river snaking through them to join the Cabarita, the mill and storehouses, and the slave huts laid out in rows close to the produce-growing fields.

  It was Good Friday, early in April. James had come over the previous night, and after breakfast the two brothers rode out to the viewpoint to watch the last of the cane being cut and brought in for crushing. It had been an excellent crop, both at Glen Isla and at Bluecastle, where the work was all but done. Already the sun was blazing. The Wedderburns dismounted and let the horses loose to stand in the shade. Down below, the plantation looked like a toy, a model of a plantation. They could see one group of slaves harvesting the cane, another line coming behind them piling it on to ox-drawn carts. Further back, women were carrying loads of cane on their heads into the mill, from which came the faint, repetitive clank of machinery. Elsewhere a handful of children were herding cattle by the river, and a couple of men were stripping the branches off a fallen tree, preparing to clear it from the water. Since the sugar crop was almost in, other slaves had been diverted to the fields kept for growing provisions, and were making the ground ready for yams and cabbages. It was as picturesque and peaceful a scene as any planter could hope to look upon. There was something almost unreal about its perfection. Everywhere was a sense of industry, fertility, domesticity, prosperity. By the end of the week the sugar would be drying, the hogsheads waiting to be filled. Another season over.

  These were the thoughts going through John Wedderburn’s mind when his brother said, ‘We have come a long way since London, have we not?’

  ‘I was just thinking that. Aye, we have. It’s not the road we expected to take, but …’

  ‘… but it’s been paved with gold, eh?’

  ‘Now, perhaps,’ John said. ‘Not at first. As you said, we have come a long way.’

  ‘Do you remember what it was like breaking in some of this land? And how little we got out of it in the first year?’

  ‘I do,’ John said. ‘You were angry with me. You said we’d moved too soon, should have stuck with ginger and indigo for another season or two.’

  ‘Aye, well, you were right. The sugar price shot up. You’re a better farmer than me, I don’t deny it. But I was always the better doctor.’

  They spoke like middle-aged men, contentedly competitive with each other, looking back on decades, but John was not long turned thirty-one, James still only twenty-nine, and both still had plenty of ambitions left. Chief among these was to make enough money to go home; to see their mother and sisters again; to convert some of their wealth into Scottish land, while still leaving enough in Jamaica to go on multiplying. Their two younger brothers, Peter and Alexander, had joined them some years before, and might in due course be left to manage things on the plantations. Back in Scotland, their politics were fast becoming not only forgiven but positively romantic. Another few years would wash the slate quite clean, turn their Jacobite past into an asset. And they would still be young enough to wed, to seed their own Scots sons and daughters.

  The desire to get home was what kept them going, squeezing as much out of the plantations and the slaves as possible without jeopardising the whole enterprise. It was this that differentiated them from planters like Underwood, whom they still saw from time to time, although they had long overtaken him in wealth and social prestige. All Underwood’s loud talk about knowing his Negroes and getting rich quick was a front for bumbling inefficiency and absence of resolve. He still sweated like a pig. He had never got used to Jamaica because he had never made up his mind to escape.

  Some of his information, though, had been useful. He had been right, for example, about the Coromantees: they were the best slaves you could get, and the Wedderburns had made a point of buying only them. They had developed good connections with certain shipping companies and their captains, and had looked for preferential treatment at the markets, since they were prepared to pay the best prices.

  What exactly a Coromantee was, however, was less certain. It had become clear to the Wedderburns very quickly that they were not dealing with a distinct tribe or race when they demanded Coromantees: they would buy a dozen and find four different languages spoken among them. John tried to discover more about the designation. The traders at Savanna were not sure, but thought it derived from an old settlement on the Gold Coast, Kromantine, the site of the first English slave station a century before. It was, in other words, little more than an export stamp.

  ‘What does it matter?’ James had said, when John told him what he had learned. ‘I don’t give a damn what they’re called, so long as nobody sells us a bad one.’

  As for Underwood’s faith in the abilities of Scotch doctors, it was shared by many planters, which was both gratifying and useful, but largely misconceived. The brothers knew this because, with minimal training, they had both practised as Scotch doctors these last thirteen years, though only James still did much in that line. His claim that he was a better doctor was based on a bolder and more cold-blooded approach than John would ever be capable of. Davie Fyfe had given them a basic knowledge. The rest, as James had divined at sixteen, was a crude mix of guesswork, trial and error, and common sense.

  Bleeding, blistering and purging: these were the basic cures most doctors relied on. Release the blood, scorch the skin, sluice out the bowels, and you might, just might, remove whatever the sickness was. The Wedderburns had learned the application of leeches and of the scalpel, the preparation of emetics, the uses of fire, steam, nitre, tartar, mercury; any number of potions, powders and pills patented in Europe or America by medical men whose names were attached to them but who could never be held accountable for their inefficacy. Mercury for the pox; opium to quell pain; ‘tapping’ to relieve dropsy; for dysentery – the bloody flux – bleeding, purging, puking, sweating, anything to cleanse the body of a condition which carried off more slaves than any other. Doctoring was a chancy business, a gamble. There was, of course, an inexhaustible supply of patients on whom to try out new methods, but this was itself part of the problem. Whenever they thought they were on top of some outbreak of illness, thousands more Africans arrived in the island after months at sea in filthy, disease-ridden holds, bringing new strains of tropical ailments with them.

  The Wedderburns had often discussed slave health with other doctors and planters. There were soft fools like Underwood who thought they knew their slaves but paid more attention to the quacks who spouted medical jargon and charged exorbitant fees for the privilege of hearing it. There were hard fools who treated every African wound as self-inflicted, every sign of lethargy as malingering, every desperate fever as one more indicator of the degraded racial origins of their slaves. And then there were the calculating, thoughtful, observant ones – like the Wedderburns – who saw each dead or debilitated slave as a loss of fifty or sixty pounds sterling, each sound and working one as the same sum spread over ten, twenty or thirty years. One school of thought argued that it was good economy to extract the maximum labour for the least expense from your slaves, use them up and start again. Another school, to which the Wedderburns subscribed, believed the opposite: that it paid to keep your Negroes in reasonable health. Nobody, however, could be accused of getting things out of proportion. Whatever your thinking, it was not in the end about slave welfare. It was about money.

  Now John and James Wedderburn were looking down from Glen Isla on the source of that money. ‘Half a life,’ said James. ‘Or not much less, anyway. That’s how long we’ve been here.’ Then he began to laugh.

  ‘What?’ John asked. ‘What’s so amusing?’

  ‘Just that I was thinking, our father was the fifth Baronet of Blackness, whereas you have become the first Baronet of Blackness.’

  ‘Very good, James.’

  ‘But think of it, John. In
’45, Papa took only you as his retinue. Were the opportunity to arise again, you could bring four dozen Coromantees to the Prince’s standard. That’s a whole Highland glen.’

  ‘And you could bring a company of your own black bairns.’ In the last year, James had delivered two of the girls that kept house at Bluecastle of babies which he freely admitted were his own. Boys, both thriving. ‘We may soon be able to count them in dozens also.’

  ‘Well, and what of it?’ James was still grinning at his brother, who was staring steadfastly ahead.

  ‘You know how little Papa would have approved of that … miscegenation of which you are so fond.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do. I never spoke to him about matters of the flesh, even though we had that time together in the prison.’ This was a dig at John, a reminder of his exclusion from those visits. ‘But in any event you are not him, and Abba and Jenny are not yours. Well, I suppose you have a part share in them. Not that you make any claim on it – not that I’d object if you did. For all practical purposes they’re mine to do with what I like.’

  ‘That’s evident. I hope you’ll not live to regret it.’

  ‘I’ll not. And nor will the lassies, if the bairns live.’ A challenge had entered James’s voice. ‘I’ve told you before, I’m going to set them free, mothers and bairns, if they reach ten years. I’ve told them too.’

  ‘It’ll be throwing money away.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I’ll not have my own blood chained for life.’

  ‘That’s very noble of you.’

  ‘Ach, John, you should learn to relax. You’re so cold. Are you never tempted yourself?’

  ‘I intend to marry a Scotswoman whenever I return home.’

  ‘As do I. A good, clean, virginal, white Scotswoman. Or maybe a rich widow. Marriage is a different matter altogether. But I could not tolerate this heat and this life without the black lassies to relieve my passion. It keeps the fever out of me.’

  ‘You really do think that, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, look at me. Fit and healthy. Mind you, so are you.’

  ‘We are different.’

  ‘Aye, hot and cold. I’m rum and you’re ice. Perhaps that’s just our different ways of surviving here. But I can’t be like you.’

  ‘Nor I like you. We’ve always been different. But we complement one another.’

  ‘We do here. We’ve had to. It was not always like that. I’d have been too hot for Scotland in ’45. If I’d been allowed to come with you, I’d probably have concluded my life at Culloden, or with Papa in London.’

  ‘Well, you should thank God you did not. Think what you’d have missed. And thank Him that those days are by with, James. I may never warm to a German king but I’ll live under one readily enough when I go home.’

  ‘You’d not come out for Charles, if he came again?’

  ‘No, and nor would you and well you know it. I’d not offer my sword to a Stewart now, even if there were one worthy of it. There’s too much to lose.’ They looked again at the wealth creation going on below. ‘Half a lifetime, James, as you say. We were boys then, both of us. Just the eighteen months between us, but I, you’ll mind, was sixteen and thus old enough to die for a cause. Not now. Now I am old enough not to die for a cause. There is only one cause – one’s own self and one’s family –’

  ‘Which you don’t yet have –’

  ‘You forget Mama and our sisters. One’s self, one’s family, and the prosperity of these. Nothing else matters.’

  ‘And the relief of passion,’ said James. ‘That matters to me a great deal.’

  They remounted and rode downhill, threading in and out of the shade until the road levelled out, then struck off towards the mill. Wilson, the bookkeeper, was managing operations. There were other white overseers in the fields, but the three of them were the only white men in the mill – the distiller, boilerman, packers, coopers and other skilled workers were all black. The place was a clammy hive of activity. The noise and heat and sweet stench of the crushed cane were oppressive and heady. After a few minutes the Wedderburns left Wilson and his men to it, and rode back to the coolness of the house.

  Within a fortnight, the rest of the cane was in, cut and crushed. From the mill’s boilers vast quantities of liquid had been run off to make low wines for the slaves and rum for the mother country; the remaining juice had been cooled, allowed to granulate, and packed into hogsheads. The fields lay slashed and brown, ready to be planted for the next season. The field gangs were exhausted, the mill slaves hardly less so. Crop Over: a holiday for all of them. From their hut village down on the plain, the noise of their singing and drumming drifted up.

  The Wedderburns were tolerant of it: the sounds, hesitating almost deferentially at the open windows, enhanced their own sense of superiority, of being proprietors. John imagined a big house in Scotland where the lowing of cattle beside a bright splashing burn might have the same effect. Such a house would be far more substantial and imposing than the wood, clay and brick edifice he had here, grand though this was in comparison with the accommodations of his white overseers, let alone the slaves’ huts. There would be a tree-lined avenue, perhaps, leading up to the porticoed entrance; stone columns and balconies instead of the wooden porch; enormous, roaring fireplaces in carpeted drawing room and oak-panelled dining room. Not these sweating uneven walls that were home to a multitude of scurrying beetles, cockroaches and green lizards. On evenings when he was by himself, John Wedderburn walked the rooms of that imagined house: sometimes he walked them alone; sometimes with a graceful, lily-white lady on his arm.

  For Crop Over he had granted the slaves a few goats to slaughter, and made presents of some bolts of Lancashire coloured cotton for the women to turn into gaudy holiday clothes – a gesture, he was pleased to think, that far exceeded the annual suit of working clothes island law obliged him to provide each slave. Not that anyone ever checked – which made his provision still nobler. Who was going to check? His neighbours? The magistrates from Savanna? And who, more to the point, was going to complain?

  He had worked out a few years ago that if he could keep one in every three acres of the estate under cane, and from them produce around a ton of sugar for each slave, at current prices he would achieve a very acceptable profit. Another third of the land he devoted to animal grazing and provision-growing for the house and workforce, and the final portion – mostly on the hills – was woodland, from which he was gradually extracting some excellent timber. This year, by a combination of working the blacks hard and storm-free weather, the sugar crop had been excellent. Although his calculations were not complete, he estimated it at nearly one and a half tons per slave. Furthermore, Britain and France were at war, struggling for territorial control of North America and economic mastery of India, and occasionally attacking some of each other’s smaller Caribbean islands. The war had driven the London sugar price up to thirty-five shillings a hundredweight. He had every reason to feel thankful to Providence, and therefore generous to his workforce.

  James was over from Bluecastle for an extended dinner. Their younger brothers Peter and Alexander were also there. Peter was twenty-four, Sandy a year younger. They divided their time between the two estates, depending on where they were most needed. Neither of them had responded well to the climate when they first arrived, but Peter had gradually acquired some strength, and his natural enthusiasm had helped him overcome bouts of illness. He was not particularly clever or imaginative, but went along with whatever plans John and James proposed. John thought that in many ways these were the best characteristics for surviving in the West Indies.

  Sandy was a different case. He had been sick as a dog on the passage out, and swore he would never get in a boat again. Six years on, he was still weak and liable to come down with fever at any time. John had considered sending him back home but the thought of the journey appalled Sandy so much that he was stirred to try to keep up with Peter. The strain and anxiety never really left his face, however, and it di
d not take much to throw him into a depression. James, though he indulged Sandy when he was trying to be manful, was also less patient than John when he was not, and as a result Sandy spent as much time as he could at Glen Isla, where fewer demands were made of him.

  George Kinloch, now a successful planter in his own right, was expected for dinner. Davie Fyfe, the thriving doctor, also now in the west, had come in the company of Charles Hodge, a Savanna merchant who had supplied most of the furnishings for the house. In the absence of a wife John Wedderburn had depended on Mr Hodge to fit him out from the shipments that came in from London and Boston. Hodge, he understood, depended in turn on Mrs Hodge’s taste, and judging by the sumptuous decor of their own town house on Great George Street she knew what she liked. But she was also sensible: she realised that an unmarried planter was looking for comfort, not necessarily extravagance; for practicality, but then again not austerity; that such a man was not over concerned with fashion, but equally did not wish his friends to think him a primitive. So she had taught her husband how to navigate these tricky waters, cultivate the confidence of the planters, encourage them to spend wisely yet often, and thus bring the Hodges’ own money-making vessel safely into port.

  The only slaves at Glen Isla not yet celebrating Crop Over were the domestics: the cooks, maids, butler and footman required to prepare, serve and remove the long parade of dishes their master and his guests would work their way through over the duration of a three-hour dinner. But as their daily tasks were much lighter than those of the field and mill workers, they could hardly expect to be released so readily. There were, in any case, not that many of them. Three maids, Mary, Peach and Bess, doubled up as kitchen hands helping Naomi the cook. Two men, Jacob and Julius, acted as butler and footman, but of this pair it was not quite certain where the duties of one ended and of the other began.