Apocalypse 1692
Page 27
MEANWHILE, after the hurricane of 1722 Kingston eclipsed Port Royal as Jamaica’s principal port and commercial center. After three major disasters in thirty years, even the most determined would-be residents were deterred from resettling at Cagway Point. By the mid-eighteenth century, while Kingston grew and prospered from the profits of the all-important sugar, rum, and slave trades (businesses worth some five times more than they had been in 1700), Port Royal entered a new phase in its history—as a Royal Navy base. The most celebrated event in this period came during the latter stages of the American War of Independence. Encouraged by the British defeat at Saratoga in 1777, the French sided with the Americans the following year. They were joined by the Spanish in 1778, and in 1779 the English declared war on the Dutch. As a result, the focus of the conflict switched from the North American mainland to the Caribbean, a region considered much more significant in economic terms. With the Royal Navy split between blockading the ports of New England and maintaining their presence in the West Indies, the French gained the upper hand. Between 1778 and 1782, with the aid of their Spanish allies, they captured the British colonies of Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Montserrat, Tobago, St. Kitts, and the Turks and Caicos. Jamaica was the next target on their list.
The first threat of invasion came in mid-1779. The arrival of the French admiral Charles-Hector Comte d’Estaing at Hispaniola with a fleet said to number 125 vessels led Rear Admiral Sir Peter Parker, then commander in chief of the Jamaica Station, to prepare for the worst. Troops and money were levied and repairs carried out to Port Royal’s Fort Charles, then under the command of a promising twenty-year-old Royal Navy post captain by the name of Horatio Nelson. “We expect to have 500 [men] in [the] Fort,” Nelson wrote on August 12, 1779. “[HMS] Lion, Salisbury, Charon, and Janus, [are moored] in a line from the Point to the outer shoal; Ruby and Bristol in the narrows going to Kingston, to rake any ships that may attack Fort Augusta; Pomanan and Speke Indiaman above Rock Fort, and Lowestoffe at the end of the dockwall.”24 Nevertheless, the invasion failed to materialize. The Comte d’Estaing sailed on to North America, where his career was blighted by the difficulties he encountered working alongside his “uncouth” revolutionary allies, while Nelson, having fallen ill with malaria, was nursed at Port Royal by a black “doctoress” named Cubah Cornwallis, before returning to Europe and greater things.
By 1782, following British defeat at the Battle of the Chesapeake the previous year, Jamaica was once more under threat. Aside from Barbados, St. Lucia, and Antigua, the island was the only Caribbean possession remaining in British hands, an anomaly that the Comte de Grasse, d’Estaing’s replacement as commander in chief of French naval forces in the theater, and his Spanish ally, Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis, were determined to rectify. At Port Royal, all was hustle and bustle in anticipation of the French descent, but the British naval commander, Admiral Sir George Rodney, was determined to take the initiative. After learning that de Grasse had left Martinique with thirty-five ships of the line on April 7, Rodney set out to intercept them before they could join forces with their Spanish allies. Following an indecisive encounter on April 9, battle was joined three days later off a group of islets known as the Saints from which the ensuing encounter received its name. Aided by the aggressive tactics which characterized the Royal Navy of the time, and two recent technological advances—the use of the short-range yet high-calibre carronade, and the copper sheathing applied to his ships’ hulls, Rodney won a decisive victory. By sunset four French ships of the line had been captured. Another had been destroyed and an estimated three thousand Frenchmen killed or wounded and five thousand others captured, including de Grasse himself. The French plan to invade Jamaica had been thwarted yet again. The colony would remain in British hands.25
FOLLOWING THE BRITISH defeat in the American War of Independence in 1783, Jamaica entered a period of economic decline. Sugar prices fell as the growth of Cuban exports added to an already glutted market, and plantation owners increasingly chose to live in England and leave their Jamaican affairs in the hands of locally based overseers. This latter trend led to a climate of short-termism: with little incentive to introduce costly improvements which would lower immediate returns, the overseers allowed buildings to fall into disrepair, new lands were seldom opened up to cultivation because of the large initial outlay required, and old fields became exhausted. Many overseers stole from their employers, and the slaves on estates owned by absentee landlords also suffered. Most damaging of all was the disastrous effect on triangular trade of the loss of the American colonies. The ships from New England, Rhode Island, Virginia, the Carolinas, and New York which had formerly supplied Jamaica with provisions and building materials were now prohibited from entering her ports by the Navigation Acts. Hopes that American shipping would be replaced by Canadian and Irish vessels proved wishful thinking; prices of provisions rose dramatically and the plantations became increasingly unviable as a result.26
The French Revolution of 1789 proved a mixed blessing for the Jamaican plantocracy. Whilst the ideologies of liberté, égalité, and fraternité inspired rebellion among the plantation slaves, the Haitian Revolution, which came about as an indirect result of events in Paris, led to a dramatic decline in the sugar production of the French Caribbean. The ensuing rise in sugar prices gave a new lease of life to the British colonies. Buoyed by the introduction of Bourbon cane, a new pest-resistant variety, Jamaican sugar production soared, and the island was once again declared Britain’s “principal source of national opulence.”27
The good times were not to last. In Britain, the idea that slavery was a fundamentally immoral practice was rapidly gaining ground. The principal orchestrator was Granville Sharp, an English clergyman’s son who had an epiphany one day in 1765 when walking the streets of London and had since dedicated his life to the cause of abolition. Sharp’s first success came in 1772 when Chief Justice Lord Mansfield declared slavery contrary to the laws of England, a judgment which meant that any slave who set foot in the British Isles was legally a free man. Elsewhere in the British Empire, however, the trade continued unabated.
Another important step toward abolition came in 1783 with the notorious case of the Zong, a slave ship owned by a Liverpool syndicate. In November 1781, when nearing their destination of Black River on the north coast of Jamaica, the crew of the Zong made a serious error of navigation. Having mistaken the Jamaican shoreline for that of Hispaniola, they had continued on a westerly course, only realizing their mistake two days later when they were some 300 miles leeward of Jamaica. Having already lost 62 of the 442 Africans loaded that August at Accra on the Gold Coast, and believing that the water supply remaining on the ship was insufficient to transport the remainder to Jamaica, the crew voted to throw half of the remaining Africans overboard. The decision was prompted by a loophole in the terms of the syndicate’s insurance. If the slaves had been allowed to die on the ship, the Zong’s owners could not have claimed compensation. By jettisoning a portion of the “cargo” to save the remainder they were covered up to £30 per head. On November 29, 1781, fifty-four women and children were hurled into the ocean. Another seventy-eight followed in the next few days, while ten individuals, in a display of defiance, leaped into the water themselves.
Over the next few years the case of the Zong was thoroughly publicized by Granville Sharp. Public support for the abolitionist cause grew. London’s Quakers threw their weight behind Sharp’s efforts in 1783; four years later the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed and Sharp won the backing of William Wilberforce, a wealthy independent MP for Hull, evangelical Christian, and personal friend of the British prime minister, William Pitt. The publication of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in 1789 added further impetus to the cause. The Slave Trade Act, which regulated the number of slaves that could be transported in any vessel on the basis of a ratio of individuals per ton, was passed by Parliament in 1788. The act was made permanent in 1799, but progress
toward actual abolition proved more difficult. The pro-slavery lobby remained powerful, and the anti-reform backlash in England which accompanied the opening of the French Revolutionary War further stilted the abolitionists’ efforts. In 1791 Wilberforce’s first parliamentary bill to abolish the trade was defeated; a second bill, brought the following year, which called for gradual abolition over a four-year period, passed through the House of Commons, but was held up by interminable delays and thereafter thoroughly diluted. In 1804 a third bill, this time calling for immediate abolition, was passed by the Commons only to be defeated in the House of Lords. Finally, the breakthrough was made in 1807. As tributes poured in for an emotional Wilberforce, the bill to abolish the slave trade was passed by 283 votes to 16.
Abolition did not bring an immediate end to slavery. Although unable to legally import further Africans, Jamaica’s plantocracy continued to use slave labor. The creolization of the workforce, a trend long in progress, intensified as a result, but otherwise conditions on the plantations remained largely unchanged. Back in England, the push for empire-wide emancipation continued. In 1816 a series of bills requiring the compulsory registration of slaves were brought into effect. In 1823 the Anti-Slavery Society was founded and that May a resolution for gradual emancipation was passed. As a result, dispatches were sent to the sugar colonies to encourage the amelioration of the conditions under which slaves were held: the whip was to be forbidden in the field; flogging of women was banned outright; and slaves were to be allowed religious instruction. Although the more recently established crown colonies of Trinidad, Guiana, and St. Lucia were obliged to comply, Jamaica and the other older, more independent territories refused to instigate reform. The plantocracy resented what they saw as government interference, and some Assembly members even went as far as to suggest that they cede the island to the United States to ensure that their livelihoods remained unmolested.28
As word of these developments filtered down to the plantations, slave unrest grew. In 1823 a major rebellion occurred in Demerara, a British colony on the Caribbean coast of South America. Between 100 and 250 slaves out of an estimated 10,000 involved were killed. Twenty-seven others were executed after the revolt had been put down. A much larger rebellion followed in Jamaica eight years later. The so-called Baptist War, or Christmas Rebellion (1831–1832), was an eleven-day uprising by as many as 60,000 of Jamaica’s 300,000 slaves. Led by a black Baptist preacher named Samuel Sharpe, the rebels aimed to implement a nonlethal general strike until their demands for “half the going wage rate” and greater freedom were met. The strike got out of hand, however. Several plantations were put to the torch in the western parishes, more than £1 million worth of property damage was done, and several planters’ homes were plundered. As the white population fled to the east, the militia attacked the main rebel strongholds. By the time the island was back under the government’s control on January 4, 1832, 207 slaves and 14 whites had been killed. In the aftermath, an estimated 344 slaves were executed, among them the preacher Samuel Sharpe.29
By this stage, emancipation was considered inevitable in Westminster. With increasing competition from Cuba, Mauritius, and Brazil, the British colonies could only be maintained by the imposition of heavy import duties on foreign sugar. Leading newspapers openly supported emancipation, and public petitions raised as many as a million and a half signatures. In the Commons, debate no longer centered on whether or not the slaves should be freed, but rather on how slave labor would be replaced, how the social order of the sugar colonies would be maintained, and what compensation would be offered to the owners. A bill for partial emancipation was passed in 1834 and full freedom was granted four years later. Even so, the lot of the “emancipated” remained an unenviable one. Second-class citizens, they were harassed by the authorities, subject to taxes that favored their former oppressors, and denied political rights by loaded property qualifications. Although some black Jamaicans continued to work on the estates of their former masters, others were replaced by a combination of industrialization and “coolie” laborers, imported first from India and later from China, while a few managed to set up independent villages of small holdings on the least desirable land.30
By the 1860s conditions for Jamaica’s black population had reached a new low. Unemployment was endemic; wages stood at 9 pence to 1 shilling per day; taxation was heavy; a series of floods and droughts had had a disastrous effect on recent crop yields with many sugar plantations being declared bankrupt as a result; and epidemics of cholera and smallpox had devastated the island’s poorest communities. During the election of 1864, fewer than 2,000 black Jamaicans out of a population of 436,000 were eligible to vote. Despite outnumbering the island’s whites by a ratio of thirty-two to one, the black population had no political control.
On October 11, 1865, two hundred black peasants led by the preacher Paul Bogle marched on the courthouse in Morant Bay in protest. When local militia opened fire on the crowd they killed seven. Eighteen more were killed in the riot that ensued and the courthouse and several neighboring buildings were burned to the ground. Over the next two days the protest spread across St. Thomas-in-the-East Parish. Houses were plundered, two white planters were killed, and several others forced to flee for their lives. The repression that followed was worse than anything seen in the days of slavery. Troops sent into the area killed 439. “We slaughtered all before us,” one later recalled, “man or woman or child.” Another 354 were arrested. Many, including Paul Bogle, were executed following improvised military trials. At least six hundred others were whipped and given lengthy prison sentences and over one thousand homes were burned.
The Morant Bay Rebellion proved a turning point in Jamaican history. Subsequently, the island moved slowly toward reform. In 1866 the legal system was remodeled along the lines of English common law, the much-hated militia was replaced by a constabulary force, and the Anglican Church was disestablished. Some of the money saved was invested in health care and social projects. In 1892 elementary education was made free for all and the total number of schools in the island reached nine hundred, twice the number there had been in 1866. At the turn of the twentieth century, black Jamaicans began to make an impact on island politics. Dr. Robert Love won a seat on the Council in 1906 and by the 1920s there were more black council members than white. The global depression that followed the Wall Street crash in 1929 saw major strikes break out in Westmoreland Parish in 1938 which led to the establishment of workers’ unions. The consequent rise of Labour and Socialist parties would go on to produce several reform-minded prime ministers in the latter half of the twentieth century, and in 1962, following an eighteen-year period of “constitutional decolonization,” Jamaica finally achieved its independence from Britain.31
IN MODERN-DAY JAMAICA, several reminders of the late seventeenth century remain. A string of archaeological dives on the site of the sunken city, conducted intermittently between the 1960s and the 1990s by a host of treasure hunters and state-backed operators alike, turned up a number of artifacts, many of which are on display in a museum housed in a restored Fort Charles. In Kingston, Beckford Street runs near Sutton Street. Other thoroughfares are named after Peter Heywood, William Beeston, and Nicholas Laws. In the Church of St. Dorothy in St. Dorothy’s Parish is the grave of Colonel Thomas Fuller, the old councilor and planter who died a few weeks after Governor Inchiquin’s arrival. Thomas Sutton’s gravestone can be found in the parish church in Vere, while the tombstone of Judith de Lucena, wife of the merchant Moses de Lucena, stands in the Jewish graveyard in Hunt’s Bay, three miles outside of Kingston on the Spanish Town road. In 2008, on an overgrown site on a bend in the Rio Minho in Clarendon Parish, the remains of a boiling house, mill house, and curing house once worked by the slaves belonging to Thomas Sutton were identified by two officers of the Jamaican National Heritage Trust, and on January 6, 2017, hundreds of descendants of Jamaica’s maroons (as well as tourists) gathered under the ancient kindah tree at Accompong Town in the hills
of the Cockpit Country to celebrate Cudjoe Day, some 279 years after he had secured his people’s freedom.32
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. For descriptions of Port Royal, contemporary and seventeenth century, see Marx, Port Royal: The Sunken City, 5; Talty, Empire of Blue Water, 1–5; and Black, Port Royal. For details on Galdy, see Black, Tales of Old Jamaica, 27–32.
2. Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century; Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts; Pincus, 1688, 49–90; Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 2–16.
3. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 149–165; Cundall, The Governors of Jamaica in the Seventeenth Century, 118–135.
CHAPTER 1: THE WEST INDIES FLEET
1. Pincus, 1688, 83–87; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 65–80; Waller, 1700, 195–204; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 28–30.
2. Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 97–99; Waller, 1700, 163–165; Davies, The Royal African Company, 97.
3. Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 2–16; Pincus, 1688, 49–90; Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century.
4. A List of all the ships now bound out from London to Barbadoes, Jamaica & the Leeward Islands, PC 2/73, Folios 334–340, 345; Ship Arrivals Port Royal, June 1690, CO 142/13, folios 72–73; Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies, 238–279.
5. Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, 26–27, 31.