A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  In Jamaica in 1789 there were thirty thousand more males than females. But the dropping population on the plantations was also caused by the conditions of plantation life not being conducive to the building of homes and the raising of families.

  The sugar barons were, in fact, faced with a serious problem; those who took a short view solved it by overworking their slaves. It was estimated that the slave population in the islands was reduced by one-eighth between 1807 and 1830. The sugar barons also tried to solve their problem by encouraging contraband slave traders. This was the worst period of the slave trade. The abolitionists in their propaganda had presented grisly diagrams of the way in which the slaves were packed close in the holds, but such conditions were Elysian compared with those under which contraband cargo was transported.

  The traders, both because of the risks attached to the trade and the rich rewards attending a successful voyage, overcrowded their ships. Moreover, the slaves were not only fettered but weighted, so that if an inspecting vessel hove in sight the hatches could be opened and the illicit cargo shot into the sea. It was estimated that two-thirds of the Negroes who were exported were drowned. It was not, moreover, in the interests of the cruisers that watched the Guinea coast to hinder the loading of the slaves. The cruisers shared in the price of the captured slave ship, and the price would be raised if it was captured with a full cargo. It was alleged that a greater number of Negroes was shipped after the abolition of the slave trade than there had been before. It was clear that one remedy alone was possible, the abolition of slavery itself.

  Wilberforce and his friends had a long battle before they could convince Parliament of this necessity, and during the 1820s a rain of pamphlets was maintained by the opposing parties. The planters had powerful friends in England; they suspected that they themselves would be ruined by emancipation, but they argued that it was the islands, the trade of the islands and some of the richest possessions of the empire that would be ruined. Chaos would supervene. Look what had happened in Haiti. No white woman would be safe. The Negroes were lazy, incurably lazy unless a whip was being cracked over their shoulders; Negroes were children; they needed the paternal care of the plantation system.

  Nor could it be denied that many of their arguments were valid. There was always the example of Haiti. Even the abolitionists were in favour of a gradual system of emancipation. A race that had been enslaved, in some cases for several generations, could not suddenly be confronted with freedom. How would it support itself? Britain had led the way in the anti-slavery campaign, but in the British colonies the situation was complicated by the existence of colonial assemblies, which had very definite rights as to the ordering of their own affairs, as Britain had found to her cost when she had questioned those rights in the case of the thirteen colonies. She had learned that lesson.

  The arguments adopted by some of the anti-abolitionists resembled those which in the 1950s opposed disarmament. You cannot start until the others do. The Dutch and the French would have to abandon slavery simultaneously. They also argued that if Europeans did not buy slaves there would be a glut of slaves and the unwanted slaves would be slaughtered.

  It was at first believed that a solution might be found by establishing a kind of serfdom for existing slaves, in conjunction with a measure emancipating all the children born after a certain day. But a counterproposal was carried, by which the home government should make to the colonial legislatures certain suggestions for the improvement of the condition of the slaves, which would only be enforced in the case of resistance. Britain was moving, that is to say, in terms of her traditional policy of compromise, her belief that time solves everything, and she presented to the colonial authorities a list of very sensible recommendations.

  There was an immediate outcry in Barbados and Jamaica. No type of reactionary is more hidebound than the colonial man of property. What, the government siding with these damned radicals? In Demerara, an attempt was made to conceal from the slaves that an order-in-council was on its way, and the slaves, getting confused about the facts, gained the impression that they were already free, and declined to work. The consequent disturbance was put down with great severity and a missionary was victimized. The ill-treatment of this missionary roused the English public. As Parliament procrastinated, the wave of popular feeling mounted. The power of the West Indian planter lobby had been damaged by the abolition of the rotton boroughs. It had become clear by now that the planters would do nothing unless they were forced. There was only one course – to declare emancipation and leave the islanders to work out the problem for themselves.

  That was what was done. A system of apprenticeship was decreed for seven years. The ex-slaves had to work for their masters for three-quarters of the day, and they were liable to be flogged if they were idle. Their master had to feed and clothe them. Children under six years of age were freed at once, and they were to be offered religious and moral guidance; a sum of twenty million pounds was voted to the planters in compensation.

  That was in 1833, and there were many who considered the postponement of emancipation to be unwise. In Antigua the experiment was made of announcing liberation immediately. So calmly was the news received that the following Christmas was the first in twenty years when martial law had not to be declared to preserve the peace. It was accepted that the probationary period was unnecessary, and emancipation was declared generally in the British islands in 1838.

  In the French islands, freedom was announced ten years later, on the fall of Louis Philippe. The Dutch freed their slaves in 1863; the Portuguese announced in 1858 that every slave belonging to a Portuguese subject should be free in twenty years. Most of the former Spanish colonies on the Spanish Main abandoned slavery when they achieved their independence. There remained the two Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, for which a very different destiny was waiting, a destiny whose outcome is still far from clear.

  From the beginning, Cuba’s history had been different from that of the other islands. Lying well to the north, it was the one island in which it was possible for the white man to carry out manual labour. The Spaniards were able to acclimatize themselves to Cuba in a way that the British and French were unable to do in Barbados and Martinique. That is one of the reasons why its tobacco crop was so successful. The delicate handling that is required for the rolling of cigars could scarcely have been performed by slave labour. In consequence, the Negro population was small in comparison with what it was in other islands. The census of 1867 gave a population of 1,370,211, of whom 746,750 were whites, and 605,461 were black or coloured; of these latter, 225,938 were free.

  The Spanish slave code which was issued in 1789 was humane, and it was relatively easy for a black slave to purchase his freedom. At the same time, owing to the inefficiency of the Spanish authorities, this code was rarely observed, and slavery continued to exist right into the middle of the nineteenth century. The following figures are evidence of that. In 1792 there were 84,000 slaves in Cuba, in 1817 there were 179,000, in 1827 there were 286,000, and in 1843 there were 436,000. Yet all the time the institution of slavery was disintegrating. General abolition was declared in 1880; definitive abolition in 1886; and in 1893 equality of status between blacks and whites was announced, but in fact the system had ended earlier. This was typical of Spain’s whole handling of her Caribbean possessions. She had continued to maintain that she alone had any rights in the area long after the British and French were settled in the Lesser Antilles, the Dutch in Curaçao and the Danes in St Thomas.

  By the middle of the century, slavery had ceased to be an issue in the Caribbean; under the most favourable conditions the second half of the century must inevitably have been a difficult time for the sugar barons. Their whole economy had to be constructed on a new basis, and it was at this very moment of test and trial that an unexpected rival appeared upon the scene – sugar that had been made from beet.

  As early as the middle of the eighteenth century, a German scientist had discovered th
at sugar was contained in beet and other roots that could be grown in temperate regions. But no use was made of his discovery during his lifetime. In 1801, however, a pupil of his established a beet-sugar factory in Silesia, near Breslau; the results at first were not very satisfactory, but there was at this time a great scarcity of sugar, owing to Napoleon’s continental system, and the price of such sugar as there was, was high. A number of factories were established in France and Germany. With Napoleon’s defeat, Germany lost interest in the industry, but the French persisted in it. By 1830 it was established and by 1840 it was ready to sweep the market. Protectionist countries stimulated the beet-sugar industry by bounties on exports, and the production of sugar was pushed far beyond the point at which it would have been profitable without state aid; the price of sugar had to be raised in bounty-paying countries to meet the cost of these bounties. This reduced the consumption of sugar. There was a glut of sugar, and the British markets were flooded with sugar at a price that often fell below the price at which it was produced. The effect on British refineries and on the sugar-producing colonies was so disastrous that by the end of the century the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, was asking the treasury to send out a royal commission to the West Indies to discover what effect these foreign sugar bounties were having on their principal industry. In his opinion, the advantages to the British public and to certain British industries of the importation of cheap sugar were ruining some of Britain’s colonies. That was a long way off, but the British planters did have cause for alarm when they faced the prospect of competition from bounty-sponsored beet sugar and, in the 1840s, from sugar produced in the Spanish and French colonies by slaves.

  The British planters had received twenty million pounds in compensation, and that is a substantial sum of money. Yet they were almost without exception heavily in debt, and very few of them were in a position to plough their money back into their estates and seek for alternative crops. For the most part, they shrugged their shoulders, went back to England, bought themselves country houses, and handed over their estates to agents who swindled them and neglected their interests, while the labourers sat in the sun doing as little as they could, cultivating their own gardens in the hills. They were not used to the idea of working for a wage; they expected to be clothed and fed and housed, work as little as they could conveniently manage, and cultivate their own gardens for their individual needs. The idea of personal ambition in a career was alien to them. That this was likely to happen was denied, very naturally, by the abolitionists, and, indeed, many English manufacturers supported emancipation in the belief that it would help their business. In 1840 a Baptist minister made a tour of the islands and reported enthusiastically on the bettered conditions there. His name was Joseph John Gurney, and he published his reflections in a series of letters addressed to his American friend Henry Clay, under the title A Winter in the West Indies. He was a pious gentleman, as may be gathered from his comments on the rum trade.

  ‘The new rum of the West Indies is a tempting but most unhealthy liquor,’ he said, ‘and has doubtless caused an unnumbered multitude of untimely deaths. It is a circumstance much to be lamented that the distillery is an almost unvarying appendage to the boiler house, and every two hogsheads of sugar are accompanied by at least one puncheon of rum.’ He hoped that the example might be followed of an abstemious friend who reconverted his molasses into sugar. He said of St Thomas that the pursuits of religion were generally forgotten. Merchandise by day and gaiety by night seemed chiefly to engross the attention of the residents. But his enthusiasm for the new conditions was unbounded. He claimed the value of estates had risen in St Kitts since emancipation. Everyone seemed happy. ‘They will do an infinity of work for wages,’ the governor of Antigua told him. ‘At the lowest computation the land, without a single slave on it, is fully as valuable now as it was, including all the slaves, before emancipation.’ An estate that once employed two hundred slaves could now be worked by forty. Freed Negroes who before emancipation refused to work in the cane fields were now glad to do so. ‘The old notion that the Negro is, by constitution, a lazy creature who will do no work at all except by compulsion is now forever exploded,’ he concluded. ‘Concubinage, the universal practice of the coloured people, has wholly disappeared from among them. No young woman of colour thinks of forming such connections now.’

  He believed what he wanted to believe, though he did note regretfully that the Negroes were less willing to go to church in the rain because they now had shoes and stockings which they did not wish to expose to the mud.

  Gurney’s book is typical of the pro-abolitionist pamphlet. But in fact the prophecies of the reactionary planters were fulfilled. The prosperity of the islands did depend on the maintenance of the slave trade and of slavery. Between Europe and the New World lies the Sargasso Sea, a flat, drab, tideless area filled with seaweed, where, in the schoolboy serials of 1910 in Chums and Boy’s Own Paper, galleons were continually being stranded. And it was into a kind of Sargasso Sea that the West Indies socially, politically and economically drifted during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Nothing particular was happening; the sun shone and the earth was fertile and the laboratories of Europe and North America discovered medicines for the maladies that had afflicted the first settlers; the recession was gradual. First one planter and then another decided to stay on in England. His estates were in debt; he could not understand his agent’s figures. Better to sell out now while the market was still good.

  The agent was usually a man of colour, and when the estate was put upon the market he got either a cut upon the deal or a share in the property, which passed into the hands of a coloured family. White men went home; no white immigrants came to take their place. The change was slow and it was more rapid in some islands than in others, but gradually it became apparent that the rule of the white man was less exclusive. Men of colour were sitting in legislative assemblies. Men of colour were representing the colony at cricket. The colour bar was ceasing to be so restrictive. In certain islands like Barbados, the one island from which no other flag has ever flown, whose loyalty to the Crown is beyond question, the process was more slow. The island was rich in sugar. The planters loved their island. They wanted to see their grandchildren inherit the land that they had received from their grandparents; they were sound men of affairs and they had been Barbadians for two hundred years. But they were exceptional, and even in Barbados the tide was receding slowly. In the other islands it was receding faster. The modern tourist has only to travel through the countryside of Nevis, Antigua and Jamaica, and examine there in the bush the ruins of former mansions, to recognize how considerable was the prosperity that existed in the days when ‘rich as a Creole’ was in daily use.

  12 Two Scandals

  1 THE CASE OF GOVERNOR EYRE

  The modern traveller who is familiar with the world of the West Indies often wishes himself back a hundred years so that he could see exactly how things were in the days when twilight was settling on the Antilles. Few accounts remain for him to study. The West Indies had been news while the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists were waging their war of pamphlets; and they were news immediately after emancipation, when the public was wondering which of the two parties had been right; but when nothing particular happened, the public decided that the issue had been settled, and turned to other matters.

  In London, after the Reform Bill of 1832, there was no longer a West Indian lobby in the House of Commons to urge the planters’ claims, and as regards the British islands, the picture was confused by the fact that in each island the situation was a little different, because the separate islands were often governed on a different system and because in some islands, like Trinidad, there was a great deal of idle land on which the freed slaves could settle, while in islands like Barbados there was not.

  The systems of government differed to the extent that some had assemblies and some had not. The colonies like Barbados and Jamaica had assemblies, in
the same way that the thirteen colonies had had, and the British government had learned to be chary of infringing the privileges of colonial assemblies. Grenada when it was taken over by the British was granted an assembly, and as a result of that grant, a Grenadian planter was able to protest against a tax levied against him by the home government; a claim that was upheld by Lord Mansfield in the English courts. After that decision, Whitehall prudently protected itself by not granting assemblies to new colonies, like Trinidad. In the islands that had a house of elected representatives, there was constant friction between the governor and his assembly, and it was the imperial government’s pious hope that the problem would be settled by the assembly proving itself incompetent and appealing to Britain for a loan. When there is a loan there are strings attached, and it was expected that sooner or later the islands would relegate themselves to the status of crown colonies – as indeed most of them did. But the fact that there was this difference of systems makes it difficult to present a precise composite picture of the situation as it was at that time in the British islands.

  The situation was even more confused by the problem of idle land. The idea of working for a wage was alien to the Negro. He expected to be housed, clothed and fed by a master, while he provided himself with the minor luxuries he cherished out of his own labour, on his own plot of land. Emancipation to him meant emancipation not from slavery but from work. To lie in the sun, munching yams and breadfruit, was his idea of freedom. His retort to inducements to industry was, ‘No tankee, master, me tired now, me want no more money.’ In islands where there was little idle land he had to continue working or he would starve. In an island like Barbados, which was overpopulated, labour was cheap and plentiful. In Antigua, for instance, a labourer’s daily wage was 9d. with cottage and grounds; in Trinidad it was 2s. without cottage and grounds, since both were plentiful. In Jamaica it was 1s. 8d. with a cottage. In 1848 it cost 22s. 7d. to produce a hundredweight of sugar in Jamaica, in Barbados only 15s. 4d. And it was just at this time, when conditions were most difficult for the West Indian planter, who was faced with competition not only from the East Indies and from the newly acquired Mauritius but also from slave-run Cuba, that the home government decided to remove the protective tariffs.