A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Its demand, through the popularity of tea and coffee, coincided with the colonization of the Caribbean. In 1665 the West Indian planters learned how to whiten sugar. In 1700 England consumed ten thousand tons, in 1800, one hundred fifty thousand tons, and in 1880 over a million tons. The need for it in Europe and in North America was keen; the pleasures of tea and coffee had been recently discovered. In London, coffee-houses had become the meeting place of politicians and intellectuals. Charles II’s bride, Catherine of Braganza, had introduced a taste for tea. Until recently, honey had been used for sweetening. Sugar had also the agreeable by-product of rum. Sugar was an easy crop to raise. You planted the canes; they grew; you cut them down; you pushed them between grinders; the wind worked the sails of the mills, and there were your sugar and your rum. The only thing you required was a strong and obedient labour force, and that luckily existed in large quantities on the Guinea coast. In no other way, with the knowledge that existed at that time, could the canefields have been worked.

  Within the next century the slave trade was to develop into a major industry. The speed and extent of its development may be estimated by its dimensions at the outbreak of the French Revolution. There were then forty European ‘factories’ on the Guinea coast. Fifteen were Dutch, fourteen British, four Portuguese, four Danish and three French. The British shipped annually forty thousand slaves, the French twenty thousand, the Portuguese ten thousand, the Dutch four thousand and the Danes three thousand. This was an annual total of seventy-seven thousand. Not all these slaves went to the West Indies; as early as 1620 the tobacco planters of Virginia had purchased a consignment from a Dutch trader, and by the time of the War of Independence there were two hundred thousand slaves in the States. Spain never entered the slave trade, partially because Pope Alexander VI’s bill of demarcation forbade her acquiring territory in West Africa, partially because she did not officially approve of the trade, partially because her need of slaves was less, since her colonies were not sugar islands, and she had Indian labour available in Central and South America, partially because, at the time when the slave trade was beginning, Portugal was part of Spain. Portugal was then established on the Guinea coast, and slaves for the Spanish colonies could be carried in Portuguese bottoms. When Portugal recovered her independence, Spain gave to other countries a contract, an assiento. to supply her colonies with 4,800 slaves a year. The contract went first to the Dutch, then to the French, finally, after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, to Britain, a contract which resulted twenty-six years later in the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

  The development of this trade was swift. At the start, England’s African trade – which included a great deal of other merchandise – was in the hands of exclusive companies, but William and Mary, in the first year of their reign, 1689, opened it to all subjects of the crown, though the African Company continued to flourish and received periodic parliamentary grants. Between 1680 and 1700, some 140,000 slaves were exported by the African Company, and rather more than as many again by independent traders. Between 1700 and 1786, 610,000 slaves were shipped to Jamaica alone. The British trade was operated mainly from Liverpool, but London, Bristol and Lancaster were also involved; over 190 British ships were engaged in the trade, and they had accommodation for 47,146 slaves. But it is not possible to compute the exact extent of the trade because so much of it was in private hands.

  From a distance of three hundred years, it is impossible to regard this trade without disgust, and within a few years of its inception enlightened persons had begun to protest against it; but there are certain things to be remembered, the main one being that we cannot judge a distant century in terms of our own. We have to think back imaginatively. Slavery had been accepted from the dawn of time; prisoners of war became slaves; serfdom had only been ended in enlightened countries; Christians captured by the Moors were put to work in galleys; slavery flourished in the Arab world well into the nineteenth century, and was one of the problems of the League of Nations. In Africa, slavery was an institution. It was easy for the slave traders, and for the shareholders in the slave trade, to argue that they were merely transporting men from one condition of slavery to another; they could, moreover, console themselves with the belief that Africans transported to the West Indies would be offered an opportunity of conversion to the faith. The soul was then considered more important than the body, the life in the world hereafter more important than the life in this. To the men and women of that day, life itself was not held to be as important a thing as it is in this. It was a transitory commodity, to be ended in sudden violence or prolonged in pain. Medical science had not learned how to alleviate the final agonies. Who would not have preferred Raleigh’s death to Philip II’s? A basic callousness, founded upon a deep central recognition of what ultimately mattered, coloured all the thinking of that day; for a brief period it was possible for civilized men to justify the slave trade.

  Moreover, events moved so quickly that only the men on the spot knew what was happening. A letter took a long time to cross the Atlantic; there were no roving reporters, no Pathé News, no newspapers as we understand them. Louis XIV in Versailles and Charles II in Whitehall could not visualize the activities in which their subjects were engaged; they knew that there was a boom in sugar; the more sugar that was produced, the better. The canefields needed a labour force, and where else could that labour force be found? Europeans could not withstand heavy manual work under a tropic sun. Charles II regarded the colonies as his personal property and formed a King’s Council to deal with them, a council which became later the Colonial Office, and he had a special coin – the guinea – stamped in honour of the slave trade. Louis XIV drew up a series of regulations called le code noir for the regulation of the estates, which was humane in spirit, but he did little to see that his orders were obeyed. A monarch who could accept with equanimity the squalid and miserable conditions under which his own peasantry was existing on a starvation level under northern skies was unlikely to worry about the conditions under which transported Africans were faring in the sun. They were warm, weren’t they, and surely they must be well-fed or they would not be able to work on the plantations. That was the invariable argument; a peasant cherished the horses on which the prosperity of his land depended. A slave was worth several horses; the planter would protect his property. And the argument was valid, up to a point.

  It is still possible to see along the Guinea coast remains of those factories; the huts and palisades have gone, but several of the forts remain, squat and low like Martello towers. The managers of these factories would conduct their bargaining with the local chiefs, occasionally with a local king. The chief and the king would require their commission on the deal, in addition to the direct fee per head. From time immemorial these kings and chiefs had indulged in raids to provide themselves with slaves and plunder. The frequency and fierceness of these raids now increased its tempo. The pattern which Hawkins had set in Sierra Leone was followed on all sides. Wars were conducted for no other reason than to provide the foreign slavers with human cargo. Raids were conducted far into the interior, and the victims were brought to the coast by river or by canoe, chained together so that they should not escape; the marches from the interior lasted, sometimes, as long as a month; on these occasions the slaves were made to carry heavy loads so that they should be too exhausted to escape. Some of them had been – they and their parents before them – slaves longer than they could remember. They were docile and abject, but others were proud and independent warriors who would cherish for ever, they and their heirs, resentment in their hearts. Of stock such as this were to be bred later men like Toussaint l’Ouverture, Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and the father of Alexandre Dumas, Napoleon’s Black General.

  On the coast, the manacled slaves were submitted to the most acute examination before they were accepted by the slaver’s captain. The joints, limbs, teeth, tongue, eyes, toes of each separate slave were closely scrutinized. Occasionally one of the slaves would be told to step asi
de. The traders were experts at doctoring a sorry creature with lemon juice and powder till he looked like a Hercules. But the experienced captain could tell from the pulse, the feel of the skin, the yellow whites of the eyes and the swollen tongue that within thirty-six hours the air of health would have shown itself to be fictitious. The rejected slaves were killed, and outside the big factories dead bodies would float in and out with every tide, the women face downward, the men upon their backs.

  The selected slaves were moved into a separate barracoon. For the most part they accepted their fate with equanimity. They recognized no particular change in their condition. They roared with long laughs when the ship’s barber soaplessly shaved their heads and chins and cut their toe and finger nails. They entered with a lively zest into the pleasures of a banquet provided for them before their embarkation. With the sounds of the African jungle for the last time in their ears, they drank and ate and sang and danced. The next morning, tired-eyed and heavy-headed, they were embarked, to be stripped as they stepped aboard of such shreds of clothing as remained to them. They carried nothing with them to the world that ultimately they were to possess except the heart and faith of Africa.

  Such was the procedure in the big factories, but there were also a number of independent traders who would drift down the coast in search of a river unguarded by any of the companies owning a monopoly of the trade; their holds would be full of cheap cotton goods and trinkets. They would hang a string or two of beads round a chiefs neck, produce a beaker full of rum and urge him to start a local war on their behalf, or set fire to a village and capture the inhabitants as they fled to save themselves. Occasionally they would get a small consignment from the manager of one of the regular factories, whose barracoons were overfull owing to a delay in the return of one of his company’s ships and who was finding difficulty in nourishing his cargo; sometimes a spy would bring them word of a chance cargo on its way down from the hills and, after hours of waiting, they would intercept at a river’s mouth a canoe rowed by dark warriors, with a score of captives lying bound with bamboo withes in the bilge.

  The Caribbean planters were always glad to get an illegal cargo; the prices would be easier and the quality was likely to be as sound; very often it was sounder because the difficulty of conducting surreptitious operations encouraged the privateers to sail before their holds were full; through absence of overcrowding, the cargo arrived in good condition.

  The journey across the Atlantic was known as ‘the middle passage’, and a great deal has been written about its horrors, particularly by the abolitionists at the end of the eighteenth century. Charts were printed showing how closely the slaves were packed together in the holds. Statisticians have computed that 12^ per cent, of the slaves died during the voyage, but it must be remembered that the rate of mortality on the high seas was at that time very high, and that the sailors of the Royal Navy travelled in conditions of pitiful squalor. Gillespie, a surgeon to the naval hospital in Martinique during the British occupation, wrote in 1798 a pertinent pamphlet of advice to the commanders and officers of His Majesty’s fleet serving in the West Indies, on the preservation of their seamen’s health. He referred to the unwholesome air, the overcrowding, the dampness through overwetting of the decks, the dejection of mind that came both from overwork and underwork. Ardent fever, he said, killed off great numbers, and it must be remembered that the argument about the planters’ treatment of their slaves on the plantations holds good for ‘the middle passage’; it was in the captain’s interest to bring as much of his cargo as possible safe and sound to the market places of Jamaica, Barbados, Martinique, Hispaniola and Guadeloupe.

  For the captain and his crew, ‘the middle passage’ was a grim period too. The slaves, when they discovered the conditions to which they had been brought, proved intractable. Those who were destined for the far corners of the hold had to be driven there with whips. Only the whip could temper them. The shaking and quivering of the ship tore at the manacles upon their legs and arms, ripping the flesh, gangrening the wounds. Suicide was general. They would swallow the vinegar with which they were told to rinse their mouths. They would throttle themselves to death. When the precaution of chaining their wrists as well as their ankles was taken, they would contrive ingeniously to inflict death upon themselves by pressing their throats against the back of the head of their nearest comrade. Usually they were allowed on deck during the mornings. But sometimes one of the slaves availed himself of this liberty to leap overboard, dragging with him by his manacled limbs a couple of his fellows; it would be then decided that this privilege must be denied them. They were allowed on deck only during such time as was necessary to scrub out the holds. Every morning they were brought on deck to be sluiced down with buckets of salt water, the men first and then the women. The stench of a slaver carried for miles across the water.

  The passage would last from six weeks to two months. They would be frail and sickly objects when eventually they were landed at Port Royal or Cap Français and stood drawn up, completely naked, to be prodded, overhauled, to have their muscles pinched and their teeth examined by their prospective owners. They would be weak with scurvy and bad food. But so delighted would they be to think that their journey was at an end that as soon as they realized that the planters who had rowed out from shore to meet them were not a tribe of cannibals eager to devour them, they would do everything in their power to endear themselves to their prospective purchasers. They would chatter incessantly as the inspection was being made. And should one of their number be refused for some blemish or other, they would roar with laughter at his discomfiture.

  The planters would bring down with them to the sale a couple of Negroes to interrogate the newly arrived cargo. On the shoulder of those who had been selected would be set the silver stamp of the plantation; they would then be issued such scanty clothing as was considered necessary – a hat, a shirt, a pair of trousers – and taken to the plantation to recover.

  Of those that survived the journey, five per cent, would die during their stay in the harbours, where they were exposed for the first time to the fevers of the port. Lady Nugent, before she had been many days in Jamaica, was writing of ‘this deceitful, dreadful climate’. Then there was the ‘seasoning up’ process; the Africans were strong but they were exposed to maladies against which they were not immune. It was held that only half the slaves who were shipped from Africa lived to be effective labourers in the islands.

  Of the life that they lived there it is possible to get a picture from the many casual accounts that have been left to us, by the writings of Bryan Edwards and ‘Monk’ Lewis, by the charming eighteenth-century engravings that recreate the pastoral characteristics of the life, by the patient industry of a number of French historians, and also by the architectural survivals that may be still seen in so many of the islands.

  Wars and hurricanes and fires have destroyed a great deal. Saint-Pierre, that loveliest of cities, has been laid low by a volcano, but there remain the forts guarding every harbour, the cannon still mounted upon the battlements. There are the red brick warehouses at Grenada, the estate houses of Barbados, the old Danish castle of St Thomas, the broken windmills in Antigua and St Croix, the terraces of Petionville above Port-au-Prince, the ruins of the old factories, the aqueducts in Grenada, the sulphur baths in St Lucia where Louis XVTs soldiers eased their rheumatism, the cauldrons where the cocoa seeds were trodden. It is not impossible to recreate the patrician life of the landowners and the mercenary struggle of the small businessmen who carried on as ship’s chandlers, as artisans, as architects, but it is less easy to recreate the life of the transported Africans. They have left no record. We know how they lived, but we do not know how they thought and felt.

  Bryan Edwards, writing of them at the end of the eighteenth century, said that’ though born in various and widely separated countries it is not easy to discriminate their peculiar manners and native properties. The familiar and uniform system of life to which they are all redu
ced; the few opportunities and the little encouragement that are given them for mental improvement, are circumstances that necessarily induce a predominant and prevailing cast of character and disposition. “The day,” says Homer, “which makes a man a slave takes away half his worth,” and in fact he loses every impulse to action except that of fear. Nevertheless, there are among several of the African nations some striking and predominant features that cannot easily be overlooked by a person residing in any of the sugar plantations.’

  Most of the tribes to the north and east of Sierra Leone were Mohammedans, and Edwards had a servant who could write in Arabic. The Mandingoes, he said, thought themselves superior to other Africans because their hair, though bushy and crimped, was not woolly but soft and silky to the touch, and they had not the thick lips and flat noses of the more southern Negroes. But the difference lay less in their appearance than in their character. They were not fitted for hard labour. They were, he complained, prone to theft. He found the Gold Coast Negroes tough, ferocious, hardworking. Very often slaves in their own country, they were known as Koromantyns. On the whole, the people of Whidah a Fida (Papaws) were the most satisfactory; they were not so ferocious as the Koromantyns nor as timid and despondent as the Eboes. They were industrious, adroit agriculturists; they dreaded pain and were afraid of death.

  The Eboes came from the Bight of Benin, an extent of coast three hundred English leagues in length. They were yellowish in colour and their eyes appeared to be suffused with bile even when they were in perfect health. ‘Their faces looked like that of a baboon.’ The great objection to the Eboes, according to Edwards, was ‘their continued timidity and despondency of mind, which are so great as to occasion them very frequently to seek in a voluntary death a refuge from their own melancholy reflections. . . . Mild though these people seem, however, they were cannibals at home.’