In despair, Baquaqua tried to drown himself. He was rescued and returned to his master, who smashed him against the doorpost to punish him. That owner sold him to a dealer, and in time he was sent to sea as a slave for a ship’s captain and his wife. They were as brutal as his first owner. When the ship docked in New York, Baquaqua escaped. With help, he made his way to Canada and finally became a free man, ten long years after he was captured in Africa.
Slaves in Agriculture
During the first years of the slave trade, white servants and African slaves did the same jobs. By the mid-1600s, slaves did all the household chores, including bathing and dressing their owners, carrying them in hammocks and sedan chairs, toting crates and water, making jewelry, weaving cloth, and even painting, sculpting, and making music.
But most slaves did farmwork. On plantations growing coffee, cotton, cocoa, and sugar, slaves worked hard, slept little, and ate poorly. On one coffee plantation they were awakened at three o’clock in the morning, long before the sun rose, and sent back to their quarters at nine at night or later, long after the sun had set. Many plantation owners did not care if they worked their slaves to death; one said he would get his money’s worth if a slave lasted a year.
Slaves often made several visits a day to the community fountain to get water for the household’s use. There they had a chance to talk with other slaves, though they might be under the watchful eye of a police officer, like the one who is breaking up a fight in this picture of slaves in Brazil.
Photo Credit 7.3
The Bitter Business of Sugar
If any single crop was responsible for the growth of slavery in Brazil and the Caribbean, it was sugar. The Portuguese had already put blacks to work on their sugar plantations off the coast of Africa, and they did the same in Brazil. People in Europe were buying as much sugar as the Portuguese could sell, and with Brazil’s warm climate the Portuguese expected to grow a lot more. They started their first sugar mills in Brazil in the 1530s, and by about 1640 they had shipped half a million African slaves there. Soon the Dutch, British, French, and Spanish established their own plantations throughout the Caribbean.
By the eighteenth century, many European planters had become so rich from sugar that they moved back to Europe and left white managers in charge of their plantations. One planter who stayed offers us a remarkable record of what life must have been like on his plantation on the French island of Martinique. Pierre Dessalles worried constantly about money and fretted about his slaves and his staff. In a letter dated July 1823, he wrote that twelve slaves had died since January, and he expected more deaths since thirty or forty more were ill. “I keep up my courage although I am often quite dejected. What a terrible occupation I am engaged in! Yet I have to do it, the interest of my children demands it.”
Although Dessalles felt wretched himself, he could not understand despair in his slaves. After two recently arrived slaves hanged themselves, he sounded bewildered about why they would be unhappy, or why other slaves would care about their deaths. In a letter to his mother, he wrote:
Nobody had done anything to them; they were having a perfectly gay and amiable time. Things are none the worse for it on the plantation. The Negroes were very sad about this event, but I harangued them and they recovered their good spirits. I do not have one of them sick in the hospital. Since one cannot hope to be ever tranquil in this business we are in, I just decided to put up with it.
Still, Dessalles thought he was a good master, and in some ways he was better than others. He made sure the slaves had three meals a day, disapproved when they were not given enough time to eat their lunch, and was even willing to listen to their side in a dispute. Once, a slave ran off with her daughter without any explanation. When they were found, he asked what had prompted her to leave. He wrote in his diary: “She replied that when Monsieur Jules [Dessalles’s son] had taken away part of her time for lunch, she had become exasperated. I agreed not to do anything to her, but I warned her that, at the first infraction, I would not miss her.” He appears to be saying that he will sell her if she ever runs off again.
A WOMAN’S STORY
Mary Prince was born to a slave in Bermuda around 1788. She was sold away from her family when she was twelve because her owner could no longer afford to keep her. In the years that followed, she had several masters. Prince never learned to write, so she described both the terrors and the joys of her life in a story that she dictated after she was free.
One of her most grueling jobs was extracting salt from the ocean and loading it onto vessels.
I was given a half barrel and a shovel, and had to stand up to my knees in the water, from four o’clock in the morning till nine, when we were given some Indian corn boiled in water, which we were obliged to swallow as fast as we could for fear the rain should come on and melt the salt. We were then called again to our tasks, and worked through the heat of the day; the sun flaming upon our heads like fire, and raising salt blisters in those parts which were not completely covered. Our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone, afflicting the sufferers with great torment. We came home at twelve; ate our corn soup, called blawly, as fast as we could, and went back to our employment till dark at night. We then shoveled up the salt in large heaps, and went down to the sea, where we washed the pickle from our limbs, and cleaned the barrows and shovels from the salt. When we returned to the house, our master gave us each our allowance of raw Indian corn, which we pounded in a mortar and boiled in water for our suppers.
Eventually Prince was sold to an owner who took her to England in 1828. She managed to escape, and her life story was the first account of a female slave to be published in Britain.
Other owners were more heartless. By considering slaves less than human, they could treat them viciously with a clear conscience. Many of them shared the sentiments of Edward Long, an English planter in Jamaica who said that blacks were a different species from whites. He described African slaves as “unjust, cruel, barbarous, half-human, treacherous, deceitful thieves, drunkards, proud, lazy, unclean, shameless, jealous to fury, and cowards.” We can only guess how many of those slaves would have described their owners the same way.
In this 1835 illustration, a Brazilian slave owner hits his female slave across the palm of her hand with a stick, as punishment for some error or misdeed.
Photo Credit 7.4
Slaves in Sugar Production
Plantations ranged in size, and as many as four hundred slaves worked on them. They labored from dawn to dusk during the harvest season, from January until July. An overseer was always ready with a whip or other instrument of torture to punish anyone who did not seem to be working hard enough.
Plantation owners depended on the slaves for each step that converted sugar cane, a thick, fibrous plant, into the sweet granules Europeans demanded for their tea and cakes and candy. The owners organized their slaves into teams known as gangs. Gangs worked in the field, planting the cane or cutting it with a sugar knife; in the mill, where they pushed the cane between heavy rollers to squeeze out the juice; or in the boiling or curing house, where the juice was converted into crystals or molasses.
A horrifying description of the risks they faced comes from the journal of John Gabriel Stedman, a Dutch soldier who was stationed in Surinam, on the northeast coast of South America.
So very dangerous is the work of those Negroes who enter the canes in the rollers, that should one of their fingers catch between them, which frequently happens by inadvertency, the whole arm is instantly shattered to atoms, if not part of the body, for which reason a hatchet is generally kept ready to chop off the limb, before the working of the mill can be stopped. The other danger is that should a Negro slave dare to taste that sugar which he produces by the sweat of his brow, he would run the hazard of paying the expense by some hundred lashes, if not by the breaking out of all his teeth. Such are the hardships, an
d dangers, to which the sugar-making Negroes are exposed.
Although hardships abounded at the sugar mills, one task was more hated than most. A Scottish observer in the British island of St. Kitts wrote about the process of carrying manure from dung hills to fertilize the cane fields. The dung hills were mounds with “ashes from the boiling kettle, the bruised canes, the spilt leaves of the cane, the cleaning of the houses, and dung of the stables.…”
Every ten Negroes have a driver, who walks behind them, carrying in his hand a short whip and a long one … each has a little basket, which he carries up the hill filled with the manure and returns with a load of canes to the Mill. They go up at a trot, and return at a gallop, and did you not know the cruel necessity of this alertness, you would believe them the merriest people in the world.
As disgusting as the task sounds, it was also backbreaking. The “little basket” – which must have reeked and dripped in the heat of the day – weighed around seventy-five pounds (34 kilos).
Children as young as three were old enough to work, according to Thomas Roughley, the author of The Jamaica Planter’s Guide. He recommended that plantation managers put toddlers under the care of an “old woman” in a “little playful gang.” He said each slave child “should have a little basket, and be made somewhat useful by gathering up fallen trash and leaves, and pulling up young weeds.”
Young or old, plantation slaves got small thanks for all their toil. Many of them were allowed a tiny plot of land where they could grow vegetables or even chickens or pigs, which they could sell. But the slaves had to manage these plots on their own scant time, usually on the one day a week they did not have to work. In Martinique, Pierre Dessalles gave his slaves an extra half day off to work their plots, not from the goodness of his heart, but because he sometimes couldn’t afford to feed them.
Slaves in the Mines
The discovery of gold in Brazil in 1693 and diamonds in the 1720s created a demand for slaves to pan for gold or diamonds in the rivers, or dig for gold in hillside tunnels. Many slaves who were shipped to Brazil had worked in mines on the west coast of Africa, and knew more about the job than their owners did.
Mining is dangerous, even today. In those days there were no safety laws, and slaves were at constant risk of death from cave-ins and other accidents. And the cold, wet, and stony mines, where the slaves not only worked but also ate and slept, sapped their health. Pneumonia and other illnesses claimed many lives. One missionary said that owners did not expect their slave miners to survive more than seven years.
Some mine owners lived far from their slaves, and trusted them to give the owners a specified amount of gold and keep the rest to buy food. By 1784, many slaves had saved enough money to buy freedom for themselves and their children. Thousands of people won their freedom this way, and the Portuguese government became suspicious. How could so many slaves have saved up the price of freedom? The slaves were suspected of smuggling gold and diamonds out of the mines. Officials tried to catch them in the act, and imposed strict penalties on anyone who was caught, but people were so desperate for freedom that they were willing to take the risk.
Miners were not the only ones to buy their freedom in Brazil. Many owners, particularly in cities, rented their workers out as laborers and let them keep any money they earned above a certain amount. If they saved enough over time, they could become free.
HUNGRY AS A SLAVE
Because the fertile land of the West Indies was devoted almost exclusively to sugar cane, there wasn’t much room for other food crops. As a result, many of the slaves did not eat enough protein and vegetables and developed diseases such as rickets and scurvy. Male Caribbean slaves were, on average, three inches (almost 8 cm) shorter than those in the American South. The women were so badly fed that half of them never produced babies. So while the American slave population went up, the slave population of the British West Indies declined.
Slaves under the Law
Everywhere in South America and the Caribbean, a slave was defined as anyone who had been bought or had been born to a slave mother. Martinique and other French colonies followed the Code Noir (Black Code) of 1685, which gave their slaves more protection than they had in other colonies. The law considered the slaves chattels – possessions – but recognized them as human beings with souls. All slaves in French islands had to be baptized as Catholics, and they could marry, though only if their masters let them. They were not supposed to work on Sundays or holidays, and masters had to take care of any who were elderly or ill. Owners could not sell a husband, wife, and young children away from one another.
The Code Noir decreed that slaves could be beaten with rods or straps but could not be tortured or have a limb mutilated. It set out specific penalties for fugitive slaves absent for a month or more. After a first attempt, they would have their ears cut off and one shoulder branded with a fleur-de-lis, the symbol of France. A second try at running away would be punished by branding of the other shoulder and cutting of the slave’s hamstring (the tendon at the back of the knee) to keep the slave from running anywhere at all. Any slave who tried to escape again would be killed.
In the British islands slaves could not marry, and there was no mention of baptism or religious education. The law described them as having a “wild, barbarous and savage nature, to be controlled only with strict severity,” but it did recognize the need to guard them from “the cruelties and insolence of themselves, and other ill-tempered people or owners,” and required their owners to feed, shelter, and clothe them. The law provided punishments for slaves who traded in stolen goods, hit Christians, or burned sugar cane. The penalty for stealing property or threatening or striking a white person was death. Runaway slaves were whipped; whites who gave them shelter could be fined, but blacks could be put to death.
In the Dutch islands, masters were officially prohibited from mutilating or killing their slaves, but sometimes even that seems to have been allowed. Stedman, the soldier, described a white woman who often abused her slaves. He said she drowned the infant of one slave in a stream because she could not tolerate the child’s crying, and then flogged the mother when she tried to follow the baby to her death. One day some slaves begged her to be gentler, but that only enraged her more. She immediately had two slaves decapitated. The surviving slaves visited the governor of the colony and said:
This, your Excellency, is the head of my son, and this is the head of my brother, struck off by our mistress’s command for endeavoring to prevent murder. We know our evidence is nothing in a state of slavery, but if these bloody heads etc. are sufficient proof of what we say, we only beg that such may be prevented in time to come, when we will all cheerfully spill our blood and our sweat for the preservation and prosperity of our master and mistress.
A slave’s word was never trusted over an owner’s. If a white person had seen the carnage, Stedman said, the woman would have been punished, though only with a fifty-pound fine for each murder. But no white person had witnessed her vicious behavior, so the slaves were flogged for telling a lie.
In 1833, the British government introduced the treadmill in prisons as a more “humane” punishment than floggings. The treadmill consisted of rows of wooden steps around a hollow cylinder. Slave owners in the Caribbean also found this a useful tool. Guards with whips kept the slaves moving quickly from step to step. If they fainted or stopped from exhaustion, the steps would hit them.
Photo Credit 7.5
Slave Religion
Owners were always afraid that slaves would rise up against them, so they tried to control what slaves were allowed to think, as well as what they were allowed to do. Laws were passed to wipe out any traces of African religion, languages, and customs. For example, beating drums, blowing horns, and using other loud instruments were banned. The Code Noir prohibited slaves who belonged to different masters from gathering, for fear that they might be plotting rebellion.
Nevertheless, slaves practiced their African rituals and faiths, even th
ough they had to do so in secret. Although their religions varied greatly, many included worship of ancestors and gods, and made use of herbs and charms. In their new homes, they adapted such customs to suit their new needs. For example, Voodoo came to Haiti from Dahomey in Africa. One of its deities is from Africa and is considered tranquil and generous, while another, originating in America, is considered angry and impatient – which truly reflected the slaves’ experiences in the New World.
In the practice of Obeah, sorcerers known as Obeah men used charms and herbs to heal, or to punish one slave at the request of another. Obeah made the rulers of the British colony of Jamaica so uneasy that they investigated whether Obeah men really could cause death or injury. In a report in 1789, they wrote that Africans go to them “with the most implicit faith, upon all occasions, whether for the cure of disorders, the obtaining of revenge for injuries or insults, the conciliating of favor, the discovery and punishment of the thief or the adulterer, and the predicting of future events.” The British banned Obeah.
Even those slaves who converted to Christianity often mixed parts of their old faiths with the new. They were trying, as much as they could, to hang onto some traces of the lives they had known in Africa, in this new and difficult world.
Escape to Freedom
Sometimes plantation owners freed their slaves in their wills, and in Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, slaves could buy their freedom. In other places, freedom couldn’t be bought but an owner might decide to free a slave – usually if the slave was old, or was his own child. But most slaves could only become free by running away.
Five Thousand Years of Slavery Page 9
