by Alec Waugh
It was a period of great hardship for the British public. Cheap food was essential. Free trade was the obvious answer. A West Indian planter calling at Cuba in 1847 found the streets of Havana illuminated because of the good news from England. Three trains of expensive machinery had just arrived from France. Engineers from America were pouring in, new estates were being formed, and coffee was being abandoned. Sugar was selling in London at 22s. 6d. a hundredweight, and on to the Jamaican production cost of 22s. 7d. had to be added 7s. to cover freightage and merchants’ charges. Jamaica, with its narrow valleys and narrow outlets, could not enter into competition with Cuba’s wide harbours and vast plains, with its slave labour and the advantages of American techniques. Cuba was a challenge to every island. When the Louisiana crops were poor, the US bought from Cuba, but when they were good, a glut of surplus Cuban sugar was available for Europe; the Barbadians prayed for rain in Louisiana. The Jamaicans threw up their hands; what was there for them to do? In 1845, two hundred thousand hundredweight of Cuban sugar were shipped to England; in 1864 nearly a million. Jamaica’s plight was very real.
In 1859 Anthony Trollope was sent to Jamaica as an official by the post office, to report on the postal services. On his return he published a book entitled The West Indies and the Spanish Main. It caused considerable offence, as such books tend to do. Provincial societies are very sensitive to criticism. ‘We have lived here all our lives,’ they say. ‘Who is this man to pronounce a verdict on us on the strength of a three-week visit, during which he saw none of the right people?’ To which the author retorts that he has a trained capacity to recognize essentials, that he is justified in trusting first impressions. And certainly, after a hundred years, most of Trollope’s prophecies have been justified. They read like self-evident truths. He had no doubt that emancipation was right, but he considered that far too great and far too quick a result was expected from it. Nor had he any doubt that the area would be soon ruled by men of colour. Of the white men he writes, ‘The light of their star is waning, their ascendancy is over; their work, if not done, is on the decline.’ He exhorts the visitor to ‘go into the house of assembly and see how large a proportion of their debates is carried on by men of colour. . . . They have forced their way up and now loudly protest that they intend to keep it. I think that they will keep it and that on the whole it will be well for us Anglo-Saxons to have created a race capable of living and working in the climate without inconvenience.’
He had a proper regard for the condition of the black man, whose labour must be protected, though he recognizes the need for immigration. He is amused, too, by the black man’s independence. In his hotel he calls for a bath; the servant who is occupied with the cleaning of a pair of boots ignores the summons. ‘Hullo, old fellow, what about that bath?’ he shouts. The servant turns slowly round. ‘Who you call fellow? You speak to a gen’leman gen’lemanly and den he fill de bath.’ Trollope bowed. ‘James, might I trouble you to leave those boots and see the bath filled for me?’ James bowed in return. ‘Yes, sir, go at once.’
Trollope is acutely aware of one of the most obstinate obstacles in the way of a free society. Indians have argued that Britain lost her Indian empire through the snobbery of the memsahib. Trollope diagnoses the same complaint. ‘The difficulty is with the women. ... In questions of high society there is always the same stumbling block. All manners of men can get themselves into a room without difficulty and can behave themselves with moderate forbearance when in it. But there are points on which ladies are harder than steel, stiffer than their brocaded silks, more obdurate than whalebone.’ He repeats a conversation that he had with a planter’s wife. ‘“My husband,” she said, “wishes me to meet Mrs So-and-so, because Mr So-and-so is a very respectable good sort of man. I have no objection whatever to Mr So-and-so, but if I begin with him, I know there will be no end.”
‘“Probably not,” I answered. “When you once begin you will doubtless have to go on.”
‘“Exactly. That is just what I said to my husband. But he never thinks about such things. He is very imprudent. If I ask Mrs So-and-so, how can I keep out Mrs Such-a-one? They are both very respectable, no doubt, but what were their grandparents?” ’
This sounds a very obvious dialogue, but it was not so obvious a hundred years ago. Trollope was the first man to hit that particular nail upon the head. His final comment is particularly prophetic. ‘Jamaica is one of the few sores in our large and healthy carcase.’ Six years later, Jamaica was to provide a dramatic scandal that is still the subject of controversy. The conduct of Governor Eyre in Jamaica in 1865 was as hotly argued as that of General Dyer in Amritsar in 1920.
Whichever side one takes in the dispute, it can scarcely be questioned that Eyre was an unlucky man. As a minor administrator in Australia and New Zealand, he had been a considerable success, and had befriended the aborigines there. He was posted to Jamaica only as a stopgap, because of the ill health of the governor, but through a series of mishaps his relief did not arrive punctually. It had never been intended that he should be permanently promoted, and it was not till he had been an acting governor for two years, from 1862 to 1864, that his posting was confirmed. His enemies have agreed that he was not made out of ‘gubernatorial timber’; that is as may be, but he certainly inherited an extremely delicate situation, and his difficulties were increased by his insecurity of tenure, both in his own eyes and in those of his officials. The island was deep in debt; there had been a succession of years of drought; the American Civil War was raising the price of breadstuffs and of cotton. In 1853 Britain had loaned Jamaica half a million pounds. The governor was responsible for the taxes out of which the interest on this loan had to be met, but he had to deal with a refractory assembly. It had no nominated members, and public business was managed by forty-seven independent legislators, on whose annual votes the revenue was dependent. The assembly made grants of supply, not to the governor but to itself. It could remit taxes. Out of a population of four hundred and forty thousand, there were less than two thousand voters. Trollope had noted that most of the talking in the assembly was done by men of colour, but there were many more white members in it. A system that had worked badly under slavery was working worse under emancipation.
Eyre also inherited from his predecessor a point of dissension that was to be known later as the Tramway scandal; this involved the granting to a government official of a monopoly to run a tramline on a road that was the only thoroughfare for the traffic into Spanish Town of the whole south side of the island. Hundreds of three-mule drays passed down it daily, and now its fairway was to be obstructed by tramlines. There was an indignant outcry, to which Eyre retorted by closing the assembly and sending an inaccurate account of the proceedings to the secretary of state, who, having once backed Eyre, could not easily withdraw his support later. The incident is significant as showing Eyre’s high-handed attitude toward constituted authority, his self-righteousness, his trust in his own judgment, and his belief that the end justifies the means.
Eyre was at this time forty-three years old. He has been described as having a petulant streak to his nature. He was also a rabidly stern stickler for decorum, and in Jamaica, of all places, issued a morality proclamation stating that ‘no one was eligible for a public appointment who was not honest, sober and moral’, and that ‘no one immoral was to be promoted’. This provoked a protest from the Duke of Newcastle, who wrote, ‘I feel sure that you will find it most conducive to the public interests you have at heart, to occupy yourself rather with the substance of acts and proceedings with which you have to deal than with the private characters of the persons who may assail or defend them.’
Eyre did, however, by his proclamation win the support of the Baptist missionaries, who were causing considerable concern to the plantocracy by their insistence on the equality of all men, irrespective of colour, before the Lord. It was, however, to be a short-lived alliance; indeed, the missionaries were to prove one of his most acute concerns.
The labouring classes were discontented; they were enduring considerable suffering and they had many grievances, some of them imaginary. They resented, for example, the tax on wheels and horses because the idea of taxation was unfamiliar to them. But many of these grievances were genuine, particularly those that were concerned with idle land. A good deal of territory had been abandoned during the slump. Much of this land, which lay between the estates and the mountains, had been taken over by the Crown, partly to prevent the abandonment by the labour force of the estates that were still in operation. The Negroes, who regarded Queen Victoria as their fairy godmother, believed that this land had been given to them. They also suspected that there was in existence a plot to re-enslave them; in a sense this was an imaginary grievance, yet there were ideas in the air that made such a suspicion tenable. The plight of the planters was making a number of people in England feel that some coercion was essential. Thomas Carlyle, who appears to have believed in the divine right of the whites to rule the blacks, had published in Fraser’s Magazine in November 1849 ‘A discourse on niggers’, in which he wrote: ‘Wherever in British territory there exists a black man, and needful work to the just extent is not got out of him, such a law in default of a better should be brought to bear on such a black man ... on the whole it ought to be rendered possible, ought it not, for white men to live beside black men and in some just manner to command black men and to produce West Indian fruitfulness by way of them. . . . Not a square inch of soil in these fruitful isles, purchased by British blood, shall any black man hold to grow pumpkins for him, except on terms that are fair to Britain.’ It is easy to see how such an article, repeated by word of mouth across a distance of four thousand miles, could be construed as a plot to re-establish slavery. Their credulity went so far as to believe that Prince Albert was the instigator of the plot, for which cause God had struck him dead.
Unemployment was mounting; cotton was scarce, bread was dear and abandoned estates were padlocked. The Islanders insisted on their right to petition their fairy godmother. Eyre resented this petition; though he had no illusions about the state of the island – he saw ‘everywhere deterioration, decadence, decay’ - he described the petitioners as ‘deluded people’. It may well be that the letter with which the petition was forwarded prejudiced its contents. At any rate, the reply from the fairy godmother first puzzled, then outraged the Jamaicans. ‘The Queen,’ so it read, ‘desired the petitioners to be told that prosperity depended upon their working for wages, not uncertainly or capriciously but steadily and continuously, at the times when their labour is wanted . . . not from any such schemes as had been suggested to them.’ This message, headed ‘The Queen’s Advice’, was under Eyre’s orders reproduced and placarded round the island.
Puzzled and then outraged – but outraged not against Her Majesty but against the governor – they believed that the placard was a forgery, that the Queen’s real reply had been suppressed. A highly electric situation had been created, and it can be assumed that the fervour of religious revival was inflamed by the privations of the drought. All over the island what were known as Underhill meetings were held – meetings that Eyre called seditious – to discuss Underhill’s complaints that the number of prisoners in the jails had doubled, and that there was very little coin in the country, as well as Underhill’s recommendation that there should be an inquiry into the legislation, an encouragement of exports, and that capital could be induced to enter by a lowering of taxes. Of all this turmoil George William Gordon was the mouthpiece.
Gordon was a man of colour; he was a landed proprietor, he owned a newspaper, The Sentinel, and he had a seat in the assembly. He was a magistrate and a Baptist; he was eloquent and bellicose, a type that is familiar enough today in West Indian politics. His eloquence and bellicosity were inflamed by his Bible reading. He told his followers that ‘the Lord would send them their day of deliverance’1– a prophecy that was later interpreted as an instigation to revolt. From the start he was against authority. Because he objected to the conditions of the local lockup, he was dismissed from his magistracy by Eyre’s predecessor for ‘false and unfounded imputations’. He was told that he had usurped the prerogative of the Crown. Eyre, regarding him with particular distrust, opposed his candidature as a churchwarden, to which Gordon retorted that he ‘had never seen an animal more voracious of cruelty and power than the present governor of Jamaica’.
The air was tense, and across a few miles of water there was in Haiti a perpetual warning. The blacks outnumbered the whites by fifty to one. There was tension in several areas. A popular doctor was told, ‘I don’t think any black people would harm you, but take my advice, go away somewhere.’ And then, in Morant Bay, on October 11, 1865, the powder house exploded.
A royal commission was later to explore the causes of the outbreak, but by then the men who would have been most valuable as witnesses were dead. On the actual sequence of events there was a concurrence of agreement. It began outside a courthouse. A woman had brought a case of assault against a boy. He was fined 4s, with costs estimated at 12s. 6d. There was an outburst of indignation from the mob. A man who protested was seized by the police; his friends rescued him and beat up the police; there was a throwing of stones, the riot act was read, more stones were thrown, the volunteers opened fire, the mob broke loose, the volunteers were killed, the courthouse burned; next day there was a kind of war, with a maddened crowd of rioters chanting their death march:
Buckra4 blood we want,
Buckra blood we’ll have,
Buckra blood we’re going for,
Till there’s no more to have.
During a two-days’ massacre, twenty-two civilians were killed and thirty-four wounded.
Eyre acted with vigour, speed and courage. He cordoned off the danger area, proclaimed martial law in it and brought troops and Maroon volunteers into action. Within four days effective resistance had ceased. Up to this point, he had the full support of the court of inquiry, but he continued martial law in the affected area, and the reprisals that he took were as ruthless as they were thorough. The official tally of the executions was 439, 345 of which followed a court martial, the remainder being summarily shot by government troops. A further 147 were shot after martial law had ceased. There were innumerable floggings, both of men and women, and it was sometimes found that prisoners who were being tried in a court martial had been already flogged. All the ringleaders, with the exception of those who were already dead, were hanged. Gordon was included among the leaders.
Eyre was resolved to make an example. Just as sixty years later the memory of the Indian mutiny and fear of its repetition goaded General Dyer into issuing the crawling order at
Amritsar, so in Jamaica the memory of the massacres in Haiti warned Governor Eyre against any soft-handed treatment. The lives and property of Britons were in danger. He was convinced that the rebellion in Morant Bay was the result of a daring and determined intention to make Jamaica a second Haiti, and he saw in the occasion an excellent opportunity to change the constitution. He persuaded the cowed and rattled assembly to vote its own dissolution and place the fortunes of the island under the direct control of the Crown. This was what he had wanted all along. Fate, he felt, had played into his hands. He was the instrument of destiny. He had been sent out as a stopgap, but his name would be remembered and revered as one of the island’s greatest governors. He awaited with confident complacency the salvoes of congratulatory rhetoric which would greet in London the dispatch that announced his triumph.
It was not till November 16 that the news reached London, and when the dispatch was published in the Times there was an outcry of incredulous indignation. It was by the hanging of Gordon that popular opinion was most affronted. Gordon had not been in Morant Bay when the revolt broke out. He had been at Kingston, and when the disturbance began he voluntarily presented himself at the police station, where he was taken into custody. There was no martial law in Kingston, and had he been put on trial there he would have had to be tried, formally, before a judge and jury. Eyre therefore had him taken by boat to Morant Bay to be tried by a court martial.