Probably we should be surprised could we reincarnate them to find these ladies giving themselves all the airs of a grande dame, though they had less learning than any cook-maid nowadays, less than the little black boys and girls trotting along the steep and stony paths with slates on their heads to their daily school. But the lords and ladies of that time were hardly models of decorum.
“I wish,” goes on this gossipy good lady who is very sure of herself and her own position in the world, “I wish Lord Balcarres” (the Governor whose place General Nugent was taking) “would wash his hands and use a nail brush, for the black edges of his nails really make me sick. He has, besides, an extraordinary propensity to dip his fingers into every dish. Yesterday he absolutely helped himself to some fricassee with his dirty finger and thumb.” And again, “We drove to Lord Balcarres' Penn. Never was such a scene of dirt and discomfort. Lord B. was in a sad fright, thinking we should expect breakfast. However, upon his secretary's whispering to me that there was but one whole teacup and a saucer and a half, we declared our intention of returning to the King's House, where a party was waiting for us to breakfast.”
If that could be written of the King's representative of one of the premier colonies only thirty-five years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, what must we not forgive in the planters of a century earlier.
Lady Nugent has a certain fearful joy in recounting the backslidings of the men of her day, which makes her most amusing reading, while it certainly throws a good deal of light on the manners and customs of her times.
“The overseer, a vulgar Scotch officer on half pay, did the honours to us.... I talked to the black women, who told me all their histories. The overseer's chère amie (and no man here is without one) is a tall black woman, well made, with a flat nose, thick lips and a skin of ebony, highly polished and shining. She showed me her three yellow children, and said with ostentation she would soon have another.... The marked attention of the other women plainly proved her to be the favourite Sultana of this vulgar, ugly Scotch Sultan.”
As a rule, of course, white ladies did not visit the house where a coloured woman was established. They probably giggled and sniggered, and talked in hushed voices into each other's ears, while the little girls looked innocent and had to pretend they did not understand, but Lady Nugent seems to have broken down the unwritten law, perhaps like a King of old she was above all law.
She tells a story of a slave addressing a Mr Shirley, “a profligate character as far as I can understand.”
“'Hi, Massa, you telly me marry one wife which is no good. You no tinky I see you buckra no content wid one, two, three, four wives, no more poor negro.' The overseers, too, are in general needy adventurers, without either principle, religion, or morality. Of course their example must be the worst possible to these poor creatures...” The smugness of Lady Nugent!
“A little mulatto girl sent into the drawingroom to amuse me,” says she, writing of her visit to Mr Simon Taylors, an old bachelor at Liguanea. “She was a sickly, delicate child, with straight light hair and very black eyes. Mr T. appeared very anxious for me to dismiss her, and in the evening the housekeeper told me she was his own daughter and he had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates.”
When she left the gentlemen she took tea in her own room, surrounded by the black, brown, and yellow ladies of the house, and fairly revelled in gossip, this being the time, of course, when she heard of its master's peccadilloes.
We smile at Lady Nugent, but after all she does succeed in giving us some idea of how the planters of Jamaica lived in her day, all the more so because she is unconscious of doing anything beyond telling the tale of her life and sufferings in a far land with what she regarded as a pestilential climate. But she by no means holds such a high place in my affections as Hans Sloane.
Jamaica is a thickly populated country. The last census taken in 1911 gave a population of 197 to the square mile, and this is mostly black, for the same statistics give something under 16,000 white people to close on 800,000 black and coloured, and in all probability among the so-called white there would be a trace of colour.
Now I was warned not to touch on the colour question when I wrote on Jamaica, which is really like writing about the present times without mentioning the Great War. You must mention the colour question. If a man is charming and courteous and well educated, what can it matter what his shade, and I who was brought up in Australia, where the colour question is a burning one, can say this with feeling.
I have listened to a white woman, whose only recommendation was that she was white, draw herself up and sniff when speaking of a highly cultivated man whose only fault in her eyes could be that there was a trace of colour in his veins.
“Well, I promised my husband I'd receive him, but his wife—I do draw the line at his wife.”
I could see no reason why she should not receive his wife, who had seen a great deal more of the world than she had and was a much more interesting personality. Every man has a right to choose his personal friends, but it seems to me the only reason why a community should ban a race is when that race lowers the standard of living and so imperils the life of the master people. This, of course, is at the root of the colour question, and I could write a book about it.
Men and women with just a dash of the tar brush are often extremely good looking, in fact, never have I seen more beautiful children than in Jamaica, save possibly in Sicily, where a dash of colour from Africa thrown into the stock long, long ago, makes for beauty. But the black man, however good looking, however well educated, has one handicap; a stiffly starched white shirt-front and a black evening coat bear very heavily indeed on him. He may be college bred, have the softest and most cultivated of voices, but the dress imposed upon him by civilisation is apt to take away from his dignity. In Africa they are beginning to realise this, and the Ashanti Chief is never allowed to dress in European costume, and he looks every inch a Chief in the beautiful silken robes, the gay colours of which set off the complexion the sun has kissed.
And if a black man looks bad in fashionable clothes, the black woman looks even worse. How this can be mended I know not, but I feel sure that as soon as the black people find a style of dress that will set off their beauty, much of the feeling against coloured blood will vanish.
It is coming. I went to church one day in Kingston, and, I think, with the exception of the minister in black Geneva gown and white bands, I was the only full-blooded white person present. But the church was full and the people struck me as being very good looking and well dressed, especially the little children. A dainty little girl of African blood with flashing dark eyes and milk-white teeth, dressed in white embroidery with white socks and shoes and a white ribbon in her dark hair, is a thing of beauty.
The most lovely girl I have ever seen in my life is a Creole with a little coloured blood in her veins. She has long brown hair, splendid dark eyes, white teeth, and a clear skin of pale brown that is soft as velvet. She is more than common tall, but so well proportioned that you do not think so until you see her beside some other woman. She is an athlete, she can ride, she can dance, and she can swim and dive like a fish. Truly a daughter of the Gods is she, and Jamaica may be proud of her.
There are people who will say, “Yes, at nineteen, but these Creoles always go off, their beauty does not last. They grow old so soon.” Exactly the same was said of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. The Creole who lives wisely, as women are beginning to live everywhere nowadays, is quite as likely to be good looking at forty, or even at sixty, I think, as the daughter of a cooler clime. Of course if she yield to indolence and do nothing but suck sweets or smoke cigarettes and sleep, why, the inevitable will happen.
My daughter of the tropics is abounding in life. She owns a canoe, the Dodo, a little light boat, with which she can go skimming over the waters of Montego Bay.
“I only take the children who can swim well,” says she, “and when I was younger, they won't let me now I'm grown up, we used to visit all the schooners and cutters that came into the bay.”
The logwood schooners are manned by Norwegians, big fair men, who complimented her on her skill in managing a boat, and said she ought to have come from the North, “though why,” said she, “shouldn't a Creole sail a boat?” And there are big brown men from the Cayman Islands, descendants of the buccaneers, giants with the blood of all the nations of the world in their veins. They trade in salt. And men of all shades, from palest yellow to the blackest black, go dodging in and out of Jamaican ports, and one and all they carry on their bowsprits a shark's fin to make their little ships sail well.
“But why,” I asked, “did you only take children who could swim?”
“Because,” she laughed, “if you fall out of a canoe you can't get in again.” And she told me how on one occasion the laden canoe became extremely interested in an electric eel lying on the bottom, for the water of the bay is beautifully clear, and all rushed to one side to inspect. Over went the little craft, and then the biggest boy, aged I think 12, saw the danger and flung himself to the other side. He was just in time. The boat righted itself, but he lost his balance and fell into the water, with more than a mile to go before he reached the shore. No wonder young Diana insists that all her passengers should be able to swim well.
There are some useful citizens growing up in Montego Bay for a nation that counts herself the ruler of the seas.
I set out to write about the Castles on the Guinea Coast, and I have wandered to the shores of Montego Bay on the other side of the Atlantic, and yet they are not as far apart as one would think.
It is a far, far cry from the days when the Portuguese, and the English, and Dutch, and Danes, and Brandenburgers, and Swedes, built with slave labour great stone castles with walls and bastions, towers, and portcullises, all along the Guinea Coast from the mouth of the Gambia River to Whydah in Dahomey. The castles are there to-day to tell the tale, and some years ago before the war I travelled along 300 miles of that coast in a hammock borne on men's heads, and again and again as we moved along, our pace regulated by that of the slowest carrier who bore my goods upon his head, there loomed up before us either on a jutting headland, or at the head of some shallow bay, the grey and massive walls of some long-forgotten Castle. Truly one may say forgotten, only a few officials remember these trading strongholds of the past, and if some care, those in authority declare they are not worth keeping up since they are but relics of an iniquitous trade that is best not remembered.
But the past cannot be wiped out. I hardly understood that till I came to Jamaica, till I watched the black women in ragged frocks and dilapidated hats weeding my garden, till I saw the roads thronged with them bearing burdens on their heads. It was forced upon me more emphatically when there came into my compound in Montego Bay one of the men who helped mend the roads in the forlornest remains of what had once been a shirt and trousers, while on his arm he wore what made him look like the savage he was, a bracelet of some red composition which had doubtless by its bright colour caught his eye. These were the same people, the very same people who had been brought from the Guinea Coast, more than one hundred, more than two hundred years ago. They are the same people you see on the Guinea Coast to-day. They called the people from this coast Koromantyns, and though they were, they said, the best slaves to be had, strong and vigorous, yet the French and Spanish refused to buy them, for they were warlike and were apt to rise and tight fiercely for their liberty. Probably many of them had Ashanti blood in their veins, and the Ashantis made good fighting men. The Krobos, too, were a little more to the East, and the Krobos were savages who, even in this century, allowed no young man to marry until he had killed his man.
Often these fortified castles of the different European nations were within a stone's throw of each other, often they were destroyed, often they changed hands as the power of one nation waxed or waned, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the trade was the great thing and these men of old held their little scraps of land, held them though the holding cost them many lives.
Koromantyn, a Castle not far from Cape Coast, was the chief trading place of the English along that shore, till De Ruyter knocked it about their ears. The custom of the English, I judged, when they built a Castle for themselves, and did not take it from some one else, was to choose a site at the head of a bay and build close down to the water's edge, but Koromantyn departs from the usual practice and was built on high rising ground, a site the Portuguese (Portugais the old mariners called them) themselves might have chosen. I have thought of it many a time since I came to Jamaica, for always the slave risings—and the risings were many—were headed by the Koromantyns. Even now, guarding nothing, for the courtyard is overgrown with tropical vegetation, its ruined walls rise up tall and steep and straight, and at their foot among the rubble and coarse grass, lie rusting the cannon that once made them formidable.
Remember, it was not only the black men who suffered, for if with cruel force upon the sons of Ham fell the primeval curse, the venturesome men who dared so much for greed and adventure were not exempt. And they were venturesome. Reading between the lines as we look up the old records,-we feel that the trials endured in the finding of the Poles were more than equalled by what these traders of old must have borne in their search for wealth, the wealth ofttimes being for someone else. The gold is only found further inland now, the elephant is gone, and the trade in men is dead. Dead, yes; but it is impossible to forget here in Jamaica, or as you wander along the Guinea Coast. The sands of the sea cry the story, the shame, shame, shame of it! the tumbling waves take it up, and insist as they crash on the sand in the still hot noonday, or in the glory of the moonlight night, that the end is not yet. I did not understand what they cried to me then, but Jamaica cries out, “Here, here, is the unfinished work of those old time slavers, here is the job incomplete, left for Britain to finish as best she may.” One hot day in March I left Cape Coast and came by the sea-shore, ten miles or more, along the yielding sand, just beyond reach of the furious white surf, but not out of the reach of its spray, and the memories of the men of old, the men who traded here when Cromwell ruled in England, when Queen Anne sat on the throne, when the unwelcome Georges came over from Hanover, crowded thick in every grove of coconut palms, rose to meet me on every grassy headland. The footsteps of the hammock bearers were clearly marked, and the waves came sweeping up and swept them away, the black crabs, like so many pincushions on stilts, raced after the receding waters, and the wading-birds stalked over the half-liquid sand seeking their livelihood. Overhead was the heavy blue African sky, on the right, the dark blue sea with white-topped breakers that rushed from the Pole, half a world away, to fling themselves in thunderous clamour upon the Guinea Coast, and on the left was a low sandy ridge covered with sparse sea-grass and broad-leaved creeping bean. Just such a bean grows on the sea-shore, outside the gates of my house here in Montego Bay, where I write this book. Here and there was a little low undergrowth and coarse elephant grass, and again and again were palm-thatched villages, with surf boats drawn up on the sand, and groves of coconut palms that added beauty to the scene. The brawny, dark men fished, flinging their nets into the sea, or launched their surf boats on a wider venture, and the women beat their cassava or banana into kenky or fufu, and the little naked pot-bellied children played in the shade as children play all the world over, and raced to see the unusual sight of a white woman who had departed from the usual custom of the white folks and come along the shore.
Such is the scene now, such was the scene more than three hundred years ago, when the maiden Queen sat on the throne of England and Hawkins made his first expedition, such was the scene a hundred years later when Phillips in the Hannibal of 450 tons and 36 guns came on an expedition trading for gold, elephants' teeth, and slaves—more especially for slaves. I thought of those old-world men as we passed along, and the sea kept wiping out all traces of the passing of my hammock bearers. But the people would remember that in such a year a white woman had passed that way, even as I remembered that Phillips had passed. And the cool of the morning passed, and the breathless sweltering March midday of the Guinea Coast held all the land, and grey stone walls loomed up clear-cut against the blue of the sky.
“Annamabu, Ma. You chop?” That was all my headman thought. For him there was no past. He had come from Cape Coast this morning—if he could only make me see that it was fit and suitable that I should stay at Annamabu till the following morning, that was all the future he asked.
Annamabu is right on the sea-shore, built upon the rocks that crop out of the surrounding sand. So did the English keep watch and ward over their trade here. It is a great square grey pile, dignified in its very simplicity, and the only entrance is through a low tunnel in the great wall, narrow, and nowhere more than five feet four high. Once the dark people of the land took Annamabu, how, I cannot imagine, for those straight grim walls would seem to defy anything that a savage people could bring against them. There was a town at a little distance, built for the most part with the swish walls and thatched roofs common to the country, but here and there, shabby with the shabbiness of the tropics and the negro combined, were stone houses built on European lines that must have been miniature forts in their time. There is no need of a fort now, there is peace in the land, even the mighty pile of the Castle is delivered over to the care of the negroes, and the glory is departed. I went up the slanting path to the narrow entrance, the entrance, grim and dark and damp, and I got out of my hammock for it was too narrow to admit a hammock, and walked into the courtyard where the powers that be, represented by a medical officer some miles away along the shore, had piled up a store of boards to make certain accommodation for the town of Annamabu, which the inhabitants of the town of Annamabu, being children of nature, will never use. The sun beat down in that courtyard and took one's energy away. How, how in this languid, languishing heat were these mighty stones ever piled one upon the other? Only, surely, by slave labour, only, surely, by the aid of the whip and the goad.
“The negro inhabitants are accounted very bold and stout fellows,” said Phillips of the Hannibal who had come to enslave them, “but the most desperate, treacherous villains and great cheats upon the whole coast, for the gold here is accounted the worst and most mixed with brass of any in Guiny. The Castle, pretty strong, of about 18 guns.”
It was an offshoot of Koromantyn and was built by the Royal Adventurers of England in 1624, but Admiral de Ruyter, the Dutchman, in 1665 drove them out and took the castle, not without a good deal of bloodshed. But in 1673 a new company, the Royal African Company was formed, and out of the wrecked remains of what de Ruyter had left they built up the present castle. It was mysterious to go out of the garish sunshine of the courtyard into the gloom of the tunnelled staircase that led to the bastion, and to remember that Phillips and men of his ilk had passed up that self-same staircase more than two hundred years before, had stood on that self-same bastion in like hot sunshine, had watched the vultures settle on the roof of the little ammunition house in the corner, and the flag of Britain flutter out from the flag-staff that the hard cement foundation supported. Beyond was the sea, whence had come those grim old slavers, and I, a woman from the South, the land of liberty. All round the walls from their embrasures grinned those eighteen guns that defended the castle and terrorised the negroes. And round them is piled up the shot that has never been used and will never be used now. On the west side the coconut palms have grown up, the wind whispers among the fronds that overshadow the guns, whispers that though their day is done the problem that they started still remains, and has only been taken with blood and bitter tears to the other side of the Atlantic. By the sea-shore of this lovely island I hear its echo crying mournfully. In one of the embrasures of the wall from among the piled shot had grown up a green pawpaw tree. The pawpaw is but an ephemeral thing, a tree of a year or so, but its fruit is good to eat. Shall good come out of evil? It marks decay too. Not so would they have kept the castle when Phillips saluted with seven guns to show he was minded to trade for those “stalwart villains,” the men of Annamabu.
Everything is very straight up and down, very square and grey and solid. Possibly Mr Searle, the factor Phillips talks about, and his young mulatto wife dwelt in those rooms-or in rooms not unlike them, very tall and large, with great window spaces. There was little furniture in my time, though this was supposed to be a rest-house. But no man ever comes along the coast now, now that the slaves are not, and the gold is not, and the elephants are gone. The place is held solely for the benefit of the negro, and the dust has settled on everything. There are customs clerks and telegraph clerks, but they are negro, and as yet they do not care. Neither do the English who dwell and rule from Accra, for Accra is far, when the only means of progression is a man's pace, and the rulers say, “These old shells of castles are not worth preserving.” Are they not?
But, indeed and indeed, the air is thick with memories. Here, in these dark rooms on the ground floor, hot and airless, did they store their goods in olden days, “perpetuanos and sayes, knives, old sheets, pewter basons and muskets,” which Phillips has left on record were the best goods with which to buy slaves on the Gold Coast in the seventeenth century. They did not bring out their women, but they took to themselves wives of the daughters of the land, comely, smooth-skinned, dark-eyed girls, with full, round bosoms and a carriage like queens, and the daughters of these unions were much sought after.
“Then came Mrs Rankin,” writes Phillips, of a factor's temporary wife, “who was a pretty young mulatto with a rich silk cloth about her middle, and a silk cap upon her head, flowered with gold and silver, under which her hair was combed out at length, for the mulattoes covet to wear it so in imitation of the whites”—remember the white men wore their hair long in those days—“never curling it up or letting it frizzle as the blacks do. She was accompanied, or rather attended by the second's and doctor's wives, who were young blacks about thirteen years of age. This is a very pleasant way of marrying,” goes on the gossipy mariner, “for they can turn them off and take others at pleasure, which makes them very careful to humour their husbands in washing their linen, cleaning their chambers, etc., and the charge of keeping them is little or nothing.”
Poor children, poor, happy, sad, pitiful children, bearing children and taking a woman's part in ministering to the pleasures of these their masters at an age when our children would still be babies in the nursery. It was a custom that died hard. Twelve years ago the nursing sister at Sekondi told me that when first she was stationed there she saw a girl, just arrived at marriageable age, sent round to all the likely white men in the town, tricked out in all the bravery common to the occasion. She saw her return, too, return in tears, not because she had been chosen, but because she had not! The standard of morals is higher on the coast in these times.
And the end of these women? No one has ever told us of their end. I remember when I was in Sekondi a sad-faced mulatto woman with the remains—only the remains—of great beauty about her, though possibly she was barely thirty-five, and the nursing sister shook her head over Adjuah.
“She is going to die,” she said. “She does not care to live.” It appears she had lived with some white man who had been fond of her as he passed by, and she had given him her whole soul. Then came the inevitable, the time when he departed for Accra, and Adjuah was distracted. She could not believe he had left her for ever, and she, too, started along the coast for the distant town. Like many another loving woman she felt if he could only see her all would be well. But barely a day's journey along the coast came the great Prah river, and it passed her powers to cross it. She waited there for days, and then, reluctantly, all along the burning sands she crawled back wearily to the shelter of the woman she knew would care for her, and there she waited listlessly—to die. Is that what happened to these little girls flaunting it so proudly in their silken clothes? Indeed, worse things might happen to them. Possibly they were sold as slaves; most surely their children were, for it is said in Jamaica that every overseer and book-keeper took a mistress from among the slaves, a girl who came to him gladly for the betterment of her lot, but she knew and he knew that their children must be born into servitude, and the father, when the time came for him to go, left them as lightly as he would so many cattle.
Spear, in his book on the American slave trade, tells how, in the days when the trade was being suppressed, the British warship Medina, on boarding a slaver off the Gallinas River, found no slaves on board. “The officers learned afterwards, however, that her captain really had had a mulatto girl in the cabin. He kept her for some time after the cruiser appeared, but seeing that he was to be boarded, and knowing that the presence of one slave was enough to condemn the ship, he tied her to a kedge anchor and dropped her into the sea. And so, as is believed, he drowned his own unborn flesh and blood, as well as the slave girl.” Think of the state of public opinion when a whole crew could stand calmly by, or even give a hand to perpetrate such an atrocious deed. Is it any wonder that, on any land where was such slavery as this, there seems to have fallen a curse; less favoured lands have flourished, but gorgeous tropical countries, where vegetation runs riot, have not kept abreast in the race. Surely those unconscious little girls, unconscious of their own woes, sometimes the pampered slave, bound to be the out-cast slave in the end, have brought a curse upon them. It broods over Africa. It is here in Jamaica, it will take much wisdom and many many years to work it off.
Of course it was not only the women who suffered. Slavery was the custom of the time, and men and women alike were chattels. It was the pitiful pretence to place and power that makes us feel more keenly the case of these little girls who were wives and yet no wives, and gained honour for a brief season by being associated with the white men.
And in Annamabu came home to me clearly, the cargoes, the thrice-accursed cargoes these men had set their hearts upon, the cargoes that were the raison d'être of these heavily armed castles. In Phillips' day a really good negro might be bought on the Coast at a cost of about £4 for the most expensive, while he might be sold for about £19 in Jamaica or Barbadoes.
“I had two little negro boys presented to me here,” says he with a certain satisfaction, “by our honest factors, and two more at Cape Corso.” Nobody considered the feelings of the boys torn from their homes. And well might he be pleased, for these presumably were his private property, and not to be accounted among the cargo. When Ansumanah, my own serving boy, sat in the shade at the bottom of the flight of stairs that led up to the bastion, I remembered Phillips' two little boys who had attended their master here. The stone steps are worn, worn in the years by the passing of many unshod feet, sad and glad and hopeful and despairing, but what had the little boys that Phillips was taking to the Indies to hope for?
Exactly at Annamabu he did not gather his slaves, but a little farther along the Coast. Here he took on board 180 chests of corn with which to feed them. The little squat ship having laid in her provisions, went slowly along the coast, and in the daylight the people came off in their canoes, and at night they lighted fires along the shore as a sign they had something to trade, and their trade goods were always the same, gold, elephants' teeth, that is, ivory, or men, and generally they required the captain to come down over the side of his ship and drop three drops of sea water in his eye as a pledge of friendship and of safety for them to come aboard, “which” says Phillips, “I very readily consented to and performed in hopes of a good market.”
Sometimes he got ivory, but his ship was a slaver, slaves she was looking for and slaves she would get, for might was right and wars were perpetually waged—by the black men be it understood—in order that there might be plenty of the commodity. The commodity, being flesh and blood, suffered.
“The master of her brought in three women and four children to sell,” he remarks casually of a canoe that hailed him from the shore, “but he asked very dear for them and they were almost dead from want of victuals, looking like mere skeletons and so weak they could not stand, so that they were not worth buying. He promised to procure us two or three hundred slaves if we would anchor and come ashore and stay two or three days, but, judging what the others might be by the sample he brought us, and being loth to venture ashore upon his bare word, where we did not use to trade and had no factory, we sent him away and resumed our voyage.” He has left us a very graphic account of the manner in which he and the captain of the East Indian Merchant bought their wares. The slaves were evidently got in small parcels, secured in the factories and shipped off on calm days, for the surf of the Guinea Coast would not always allow of a landing. Where they kept them at Annamabu or in the dominant factory at Koromantyn, I do not know, probably in the court-yard or in the dark dungeons, dark and hot and airless that surrounded it, and the reek of them must have gone up to heaven, calling down a curse upon those captors who were apparently so unconscious of wrongdoing. At Whidah, to which Phillips traded from Annamabu, it is not very far away, there was only a small factory, and the local chief or “king” collected the slaves for sale and kept them in a “trunk,” which Phillips and the captain of the East Indian Merchant, attended by their respective doctors and pursers, visited daily to make their purchases.
The purser's business was to pay for the goods I suppose, and the surgeon he considers absolutely necessary.
“Our surgeon examined them well in all kinds to see that they were sound, wind and limb, making them jump, stretch out their arms swiftly, looking in their mouths to judge of their age; for the cappashiers are so cunning that they shave them all close before we see them, so that, let them be never so old, we can see no grey hairs in their heads or beards, and then, having liquored them well and sleek with palm oil, 'tis no easy matter to know an old one from a middle-aged one but by the teeth's decay... therefore our surgeon is forced to examine... both men and women with the nicest scrutiny which is a great slavery but can't be omitted.”
“This place where the slaves were kept day and night,” he records, putting the matter very plainly, “was so foul that I often fainted with the horrid stink of the negroes.” And he was a hard-bitten sailor of the seventeenth century accustomed to the close evil-smelling ships of his period! But he has no particular word of pity for the closely-herded negroes whose condition produced such a state of affairs.
“We marked the slaves we had bought in the breast or shoulder with a hot iron having the letter of the ship's name upon it, the place being before anointed with a little palm oil which caused but little pain, the mark being usually well in four or five days, appearing very plain and white after.” And this is an allegory surely. The mark that slavery made has always appeared very plain after.
And when the surf allowed, the slaves were marched down to the shore and “our canoes carry them off to the long boat, and she conveyed them aboard ship where the men were all put in irons two and two, shackled together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore.”
“The negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country,” he records mournfully as a man who may expect sympathy, “that they have often leaped out of the canoe, boat, and ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats which pursued them, they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbadoes than we can have of hell, tho' in reality they live much better there than in their own country.” The shackling as an introduction to this improved home life was perhaps not calculated to inspire confidence. “But home is home,” moralises Phillips. “We have likewise seen divers of them eaten by sharks, of which a prodigious number kept about the ships in this place. We had about twelve negroes did wilfully drown themselves, and others starved themselves to death, for 'tis their belief that when they die they return home to their own country and friends again. I have been informed that some commanders have cut off the legs of the most wilful to terrify the rest, for they believe if they lose a member they cannot return home again. I was advised by some of my officers to do the same, but I could not be persuaded to entertain the least thoughts of it, much less to put in practice such barbarous cruelty to poor creatures who, excepting their want of Christianity, true religion (their misfortune, more than fault) are as much the works of God's Hands and no doubt as dear to Him as ourselves.” Surprising words from a slaver!
He himself has but a poor opinion of the men of his calling.
“They commonly undermine, betray, and outbid one another,” he writes, “and the Guiney commanders' words and promises are the least to be depended upon of any I know use the sea, for they would deceive their fathers in their trade if they could.”
And then when the slaves were on board, and the grey castles were down on the horizon, and the long, long voyage was begun, there were troubles not only for the wretched merchandise, but for those who carried them.
“When our slaves are aboard,” he says again, “we shackle them two and two while we lie in port, and in sight of their own country, for 'tis then they attempt to make their escape or mutiny, to prevent which we always keep sentinels upon the hatchways, and have a chest of small arms ready loaden and trim'd, constantly lying at hand upon the quarterdeck together with some granada shells, and two of our quarterdeck guns pointing on the deck thence, and two more out of the steerage, the door of which is always kept shut and well barred.
“They are fed twice a day, at 10 in the morning, and 4 in the evening, which is the time they are apt to mutiny, being all upon the deck; therefore, all that time what of our men who are not employed in distributing their victuals to them and settling them, stand to their arms with lighted matches at the great guns that yawn upon them, loaden with cartridge, till they have done and gone below to their kennels between decks.”
What a picture of life aboard a slaver!
“Great mortality among the slaves,” he writes wearily later on, “which together with their stink and nastiness”—and he goes on feelingly to tell of a Dutch skipper, Clause, who said if his owners would give him £100 per month to go and carry negroes again, he would not take it, but would sooner go elsewhere a common sailor, for 20 guilders a month.
No wonder. Out of 700 taken on board the Hannibal some died every day, and by the time they reached Barbadoes they had thrown overboard 320 of them, and all the comment her master makes is that it was a clear loss to the owners, the African Company, of £10 for every negro that so died.
But there is another thing he notices with intense surprise. He was “forced to clap one Lord, the trumpeter, in irons, for his being the promoter of unseasonable carousing bouts,” we can understand it would never have done for the crew to indulge in such bouts with such a cargo, “and though he remained upon the poop day and night in irons for two months, without any other shelter than the canopy of heaven, he was never troubled with any sickness, but made good the proverb that 'Naught's never in danger.'” And while he goes on complaining of enduring so “much misery and stench among a parcel of creatures nastier than swine,” it never occurs to him, or to anybody else for that matter, for many a long day, that he had provided his recreant trumpeter with at least one safeguard in plenty of air.
Three hundred and twenty negroes murdered on that voyage alone. No wonder “Ichabod” is written over those old castles. Koromantyn that was once the chief stronghold, head castle of the English, is no more, its guns are red with rust, its walls are crumbling to ruin, its courtyards are desolate and grass-grown, and the people from the neighbouring villages go there when they want shaped stones. Annamabu still stands a model of what these castles used to be—with the exception of Elmina, the best model and best preserved along the 300 miles of coast. Cape Coast has been used for many purposes, but no white man can live there, because no servant will stay there, they declare it is haunted. Well it might be, for the dungeons are deep and dark, and assuredly they have been used. Kommenda is a shell, and no native will go into the courtyard where the bush is beginning to grow up because there is ju-ju upon it, and the evil spirits make it their home. At Annamabu, as I sat at luncheon, there came up a quick tropical storm. The roar of the wind hushed the sound of the ceaseless surf, the coconut palms bent before it, and the rain came down in torrents. It blotted out the sea, it swept off the bastion in streams, it beat down the breakers, and like a grey mist it shut out the surrounding landscape.
“You stop here, Ma,” said my head man with a satisfaction he did not conceal.
Stop there? With all the ghosts of the past? Would not the mulatto girl, who was the factor's wife, come back and walk along this bastion, as she must have done more than two hundred years ago? Would she be sad? Or glad? Or proud? Would not the men and women who had been driven so unwillingly through that long-tunnelled entrance, been shut up in those dark dungeons on the ground floor, come back mourning and wailing? Would not the white man, who had looked out over the sea with longing eyes, come tramping those stones again, heedless of dark mistress or coffers slowly piling with gold, counting the days, as he had counted them so often, when in his own pleasant land again he would enjoy the fruits of his labour? Stay? No, a thousand times, no, no. And the tropical storm passed, the golden rays of the afternoon sun fell through the slanting rain drops, and then the rain stopped and a mist rose up from the wet stones, and the sea lay blue, reflecting the blue sky above, and I went down the steps and into the tunnel, and out of the courtyard and away along the sea-shore past Koromantyn, and only in Jamaica did I realise that by the merest chance, I had seen and appreciated the beginnings of the iniquitous Middle Passage, that I had come upon the place whence came all the slaves who led the insurrections in that island for close on two hundred years.
I have wandered in my life, far and wide, east and west, but that remote castle on the Guinea Coast made a far deeper impression than many a more important place.
All up and down the roads of Jamaica tramp ceaselessly the dark people. In the towns now, I notice many of the men, when they have anything to carry, carry it in their hands, under their arms, or on their backs, but the women are not so progressive. I don't quite believe the yarn about the girl, who, having been sent to buy a postage stamp, put it on her head, with a stone to keep it in place, but, certainly, the women still adhere to the old African way of bearing a burden on their heads. From my verandah all day, and twenty times a day, I could see men arranging the load on their companion's head, and the woman accepting the help offered, and trotting along meekly behind the man, though he went empty-handed.
Men and women are in all shades, but mostly, of course, black, often with the woolly hair and thick coarse lips, that are considered typical of the negro. They are not. They are typical of men with low ideals. I have seen black men with faces as fine as the best Europeans, and I am sure that the features of a man's face are apt to be altered by his mode of life and his thoughts. Of course, it is his thoughts that do it, but his thoughts are produced by his environment. He is a wonderful man who is able to rise above the degrading environment forced upon him by circumstances. Up to the present the negro has been handicapped, and when I see a black man with a fine face, in my mind, I make him obeisance. He has come up a long way, far, far farther than his white prototype.
And his unwilling forebears were brought to Jamaica by the accursed Middle Passage.
It was so called because a ship went from England or America to the Guinea Coast, thence to the West Indies or wherever there was a market for slaves, which was seldom at her home port, and thence back empty to refit. Hence the Middle Passage, a term which, before I investigated the matter, always puzzled me.
The horrors of the Middle Passage were of no account to the men who did the trading. It was an uncomfortable job, as the Dutch Skipper Clause found, but there was money in it, men were not very tender even of each other in olden days, and they counted as little the pains suffered by the luckless people whom they held in bondage. Says Montesquieu, who was before his time, “Slavery is not good in itself. It is useful neither to the master nor the slave. Not to the slave because he can do nothing from virtuous motives. Not to the master, because he contracts among his slaves all sorts of bad habits, and accustoms himself to the neglect of all the moral virtues. He becomes haughty, passionate, obdurate, vindictive, voluptuous, and cruel.” He might have added that the men who made the slaves held a still worse position. Once we begin to investigate, we find that the captains of the slavers were almost invariably ruthlessly cruel.
Not quite all. There is mention made in the American Historical Record of David Lindsay, who in 1740 was trading on the Guinea Coast. Here is a letter written by one George Scott, who meeting Captain Lindsay at sea on the 13th June 1740, entrusts him with this letter and all his gold. He says he left Annamabu on the 8th May, and he had only reached 39.30° W. No wonder he reports that his voyage is miserable, and he has lost twenty-nine slaves out of a cargo of one hundred and twenty-nine. The surprising thing is that he can report that “the slaves we have now is all recovered.” The ships were tiny. David Lindsay, according to Spear, was in 1752 in command of the brigantine Sanderson, “a square stern'd vessel of the burthen of about 40 tons.” What a cockle shell! and he, too, writes from “Anamaboe, 28th February 1753.... The traid is so dull, it is actually a noof to make a man creasey.” He has been obliged to buy a cable, and he begs his owners “not to Blaim me in so doeing. I should be glad I cood come Rite home with my slaves, for my vesiel will not last to proceed farr. We can see daylight al round her bow under deck. However, I hope She will carry me safe home once more. I need not inlarge.” So he, too, lay outside the surf at Annamabu, he, too, walked on the bastion and discussed with the factors his chances. Oh, they were plucky men those first slavers, if they were brutes, but Lindsay I do not think was a brute. And on that last day of February 1753, there must have been quite a fleet of slavers. “Heare lyes Captains hamlet, James Jepson, Carpenter, Butler, & Lindsay. Gardner is dun.” “firginson,” he goes on with a pleasant disregard of the uses of capitals, “is Gon to Leward. All these is Rum ships.... I've sent a Small boy to my wife. I conclude with my best Endeavors for Intrust. Gentlemen, your faithful Servant at Comind, David Lindsay.
“NB.—On the whole I never had so much Trouble in all my voiges. I shall rite to barbadoes in a few days.” A pleasant letter to come down to us out of the years and written by a slaver too! His officers were sick and so were three of the men in the forecastle, and he feared lest the slaves in the hold, learning how short-handed he was, might rise up and make a bid for their freedom, but worse than all was the leaky condition of the ship. Well for her that she sailed in sunny seas, in the season when hurricanes were hardly to be feared, but I felt a thrill of triumph when on the 17th June of the same year he was able to write from Barbadoes:
“Gentle'n:—These are to acqt of my arrival heare ye Day before yesterday in 10 weeks from Anamaboe. I met on my passage 22 days of very squally winds & continued Bains, so that it beat my sails alto pieces, soe that I was oblige Several Days to have Sails on bent to mend them. The vesiel likewise is all open Bound her bows under deck.... My slaves is not landed yet; they are 58 in number for owners, all in helth & fatt. I lost one small gall.” The health of the slaves does him credit in so small a ship. With my faith in fresh air I cannot help wondering if some of it was not due to that opening round the ship's bows under deck.
After a few more remarks he says, “I left Captain Hamblet at Cape Coast sick. His slaves had rose, and they lost the best of what they had.” What happened to the slaves? The slave trade is full of such unfinished stories.
There is another letter from Annamabu from one George Scott. “We have now aboard one hundred and no gold. I think to purchase about twenty & go off ye coast: ye time of ye year [it was April], don't doe to tarry much longer. Everything of provisions is very dear and scarce: it costs for water Ten shillings for one day. I think to stay in this place but fourteen days more. We shall go to Shama and water our vessel.”
Shama or Chama is another slave castle about half a day's journey from Sekondi. Grim high walls surround it, and the only entrance is approached by the wide steps in a half circle, steps that we so often see approaching the entrance to an old house in Jamaica. At the Hyde there were the same sort of circular steps that I met at Chama, but at Chama they came up to a narrow entrance that two men, in those days, might hold for a week against great odds.
This slaver goes on to say he thinks he will sail off the coast from Chama with about 120 slaves cargo. “We have left about two hundred pound sterg in goods which wont sell here to any profitt. Every man slave that we pay all Goods for here, costs twelve pounds sterg prime. I hope I shall be in Barbadoes ye latter end of June but have not concluded whither we shall go to Jamaica or Virginia; our slaves is mostly large. 60 men and boys, 20 women, the rest boys and girls, but three under four foot high. Pray excuse all blunders and bad writing for I have no time to coppy, the sloop being under sail.”
I like the last touch, the slaver captain who copied out his letters so that they should be neat when he had time and was not ashamed to own it. I hope he was as careful of his human cargo.
The getting of that cargo was not always accomplished, as Phillips did it, by the simple process of going to the “trunk” and buying those he wanted. Clarkson, when he was seeking evidence to justify the suppression of the slave trade, told a tale of wicked treachery by white men, Englishmen, I am sorry to say, who found trade bad at Old Calabar.
There lay in the River the ships Indian Queen, Duke of York, Nancy and Concord of Bristol, the Edgar of Liverpool, and the Canterbury of London, slavers all, and the slaves were not coming in in this year 1767. Therefore they planned among themselves as coolly as if the black men had been deer or elephants, or pheasants, how they might best fill their between decks. The Calabar River is hot and it is unhealthy, for the percentage of moisture in the air is so great that very gladly I have sat over a fire when the thermometer registered over 90° in the shade, so that it is hardly a pleasant place of residence for a white man. Also the old inhabitants were not very tender of each other, or very careful of human life, for as I sat there watching a most glorious sunset a woman, who had come there in the early days, and she was not then, I think, fifty, told me how she hated to walk along the shore—the Calabar River is really an arm of the sea—because of the living sacrifices, generally young girls offered to the envious gods and bound to stakes, waiting for the tide to come up and put an end to their misery. Still the blood-thirstiness of the natives does not excuse that of the slavers. I only mention it because I find that while the advocates for slavery painted the slave in the blackest colours, the opponents generally depicted the poor black man as a noble martyr. He wasn't. He was suffering humanity neither better nor worse than his station in life allowed, often rising to heights of heroism, but often out-heroding his tormentors in blackguardism.
It happened there was a quarrel at that time between Old and New Calabar, and the captains of the vessels, says Clarkson, “joined in sending several letters to the inhabitants of Old Town, but particularly to Ephraim Robin John who was at that time a grandee of the place. The tenor of these letters was that they were sorry that any jealousy or quarrel should subsist between the two parties; that if the inhabitants of Old Town would come on board, they would afford them security and protection; adding at the same time that their intention in inviting them was that they might become mediators and thus heal their disputes. The inhabitants of Old Town, happy to find their differences were likely to be accommodated, joyfully accepted the invitation. The three brothers of the grandee just mentioned, the eldest of whom was Amboe Eobin John, first entered their canoe, attended by twenty-seven others, and being followed by nine canoes, directed their course to the Indian Queen. They were dispatched from thence the next morning to the Edgar, and afterwards to the Duke of York, They went on board the last ship, leaving their canoe and attendants by the side of the vessel. These, of course, were important men. A chief on the Coast now carries a silver-headed stick as a badge of rank, is clad in the richest silken robe, and is as far above the rank and file as is the Duke of Devonshire above the labourer cleaning Piccadilly. And these men of rank being well received and fêted on board the slavers, the rest of the canoes went with confidence to the other ships of the fleet. And then the white brutes worked their wicked will. The men on deck fired on the canoe lying alongside, she filled and sank, and the wretched attendants were either killed or drowned or taken as slaves, while their masters, guests of honour in the white man's saloon, fared no better. The captain, mates, and some of the crew of the Duke of York, armed with pistols and cutlasses, rushed on the unfortunates, doubtless sitting drinking rum, and they made for the stern windows; but they were wounded and helpless and were promptly put in irons.
“The Duke of York having given the signal, most of the other ships followed her example, and the inhabitants of New Town, concealed in the mangrove swamps along the shore, where the monkeys play and the grey parrots call, came out of their hiding-places and joined in the ghastly fray. And the lust of killing got hold of the aggressors. The ships' boats were manned, and joined themselves to the canoes from New Town. They pursued' the fleeing men from Old Calabar, and they apparently forgot the object for which they had lured these men to the ships, and killed at least as many of the men of the Old Town as they enslaved.
“And then came a canoe with the principal men from New Town to the Duke of York, demanding Amboe Robin John, the brother of the “grandee” of the rival town. And Amboe Robin John pleaded pitifully for his life. He put the palms of his hands together and beseeched and prayed his captor not so to violate the rights of hospitality. But he spoke to deaf ears. The captain of the Duke of York only wanted a slave, and the men of New Town offered him one, named Econg, in exchange, and they forced their enemy into the canoe and struck off his head, and the slaver put in his place the man named Econg, who, like the thirty pieces of silver traded so long ago, was the price of blood.”
Was ever there a more atrocious story of treachery? Nothing happened to those white men whereas when a slave struck for liberty in Jamaica—but I have told this story just because presently I shall have occasion to tell of slave risings in Jamaica, and if the slaves were fiendishly cruel—and they were—nothing can exceed the cruelty of the white men who first brought them hither. Clarkson says that the deputy town-clerk of Bristol, Mr Burges, said that he only knew of one captain from the port in the slave trade who did not deserve to be hanged.
Perhaps the fate of those men of Old Calabar, whose dead bodies were washed up on the sands and caught in the mangrove swamps, was the most merciful, for those who were taken on board the ships truly had a terrible time. From the very beginning the last thing the slavers considered was the comfort of the slaves. No, “comfort” is the wrong word to use, such a word as comfort from the days of Queen Elizabeth to those of Victoria, was a word not in the language as far as the slaves were concerned. No one ever thought to see that these men and women, these living beings, to put them on the very lowest rung of the ladder, were likely to be free from discomfort, nay, free from actual pain. Spear tells how he read of “the new slaver built at Warren in the country of Bristole in the colony of Rhode Island, that was three feet ten inches between decks,” and Clarkson, who went up and down the country collecting information about the slavers and their doings, tells us of two little sloops which were fitting out for Africa, the one only of 25 tons which was said to be destined to carry seventy, and the other of only 11 tons which was to carry thirty slaves, and these were not to be used as tenders bringing small parties down the rivers to the bigger ships, but were to sail for the West Indies with the slaves themselves, and on their arrival, one if not both, were to be sold as pleasure boats. Then he gives the dimensions. In the larger one each slave “must sit down all the voyage, and contract his limbs within the narrow limits of 3 square feet, while in the smaller, each slave had 4 square feet to sit in, but since the height between decks was only 2 feet 8 inches, his head must touch the deck above. When the matter was investigated in Parliament, it was stated that if the space between decks in a slaver reached 4 feet—it never seems to have exceeded 5 feet 8 inches—they invariably put up a shelf to the width of 5 feet, so that another layer of slaves might be placed on top of the first. The men were ironed together two and two by the ankles, and sometimes their wrists were handcuffed together, and a chain usually fastened the irons to ringbolts, either on the deck above or below. The women and children were left unironed, and the men were stowed forward and the women aft. If they could get a cargo—and they generally waited on that sweltering coast, rolling in the surf, until they did—the slaves covered the entire deck.” In Parliament, at the end of the eighteenth century, they took the dimensions of the slaver Brookes, picking her at haphazard from a long list of slavers given them. They found that if each man was allowed 6 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, every woman 5 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, every boy 5 feet by 1 foot 2 inches, and every girl 4 feet 6 inches by 1 foot, they could stow in her 432. There is a plan given in Clarkson's book with every slave in place, and you could not put a pin between them. Certainly it was utterly impossible for any one to move amongst them, at least I should have said so. And yet it was proved that on a previous voyage the Brookes had carried no less than 609 slaves! And the slave ships were on the coast, the stifling Guinea Coast, from three to ten months, and from six to ten weeks crossing the Atlantic. It was quite possible for a slave to be on board in that ghastly stinking slave deck, stinking is a mild word to use for so foul a den, for over a year. In this place they must stay for at least sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, when the weather was bad, or even when it was wet, they were kept there for days together. Nothing that breathed, it seems to me, but must have died in such a place. It was stated in Parliament that “if the ship was full their situation was terribly distressing. They sometimes drew their breath with anxious and laborious efforts, and some died of suffocation.”
“Thus crammed together like herrings in a barrel,” said Sir William Dolben, “they contracted putrid and fatal disorders, so that they who came to inspect them,” (how could they inspect them save by tramping over them), “in the morning had occasionally to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow sufferers to whom they had been fastened.”
We do well to remember too, that there were no sanitary arrangements upon a slave ship. All the calls of Nature had to be performed upon the spot to which the wretched beings were shackled. And when they were sea sick———
But no words of mine can convey the horror of it.
These unhappy people were allowed a pint of water a day each, and were fed twice a day upon yams and horse beans. Also, since it was absolutely necessary that they should have exercise for their health's sake, they were obliged after each meal to jump up and down, or dance in their shackles, and if they did not do so—I can imagine they hardly felt inclined for that form of amusement—they were whipped until they did, and the same stimulus was used to make them sing!
And yet it was possible to arrive at their final destination with only the loss of 1 or 2 per cent., and Captain Hugh Crow, the one-eyed slaver of Liverpool, says Spear, by daily washings, good food, and keeping them amused by playing on musical instruments, did it, and one, Captain John Newton, returned thanks in church, because he had performed the voyage from Africa without the loss of a single man.
But these were in the days when the trade was counted, according to John Newton, “genteel employment,” when the rich ship owners of Liverpool and Bristol had no more shame in owning slavers than nowadays they have in taking passengers to America, or trading to Sicily for oranges and wine.
But care such as Hugh Crow took was, I am afraid, rare, and terrible are the tales of the utter brutality suffered in addition to the overcrowding, the filth and the agonies of seasickness which already was the lot of the human cattle.
Clarkson tells the story of the ship Zong—Captain Luke Collingwood, and Captain Luke Colling-wood seems to have been a devil incarnate. Unluckily, he was not the only one in the trade.
On one day early in September 1781, the Zong sailed from the island of St Thomas, bound for Jamaica, with 440 slaves on board, and she arrived off the coast short of water. But Collingwood made the mistake of thinking he was off Hayti, and seeing that the slaves were sickly, and indeed had suffered much from want of water, he and his mate, James Kelsall, decided that since the slaves were sickly—sickly was probably a mild term to use since sixty of them had already died—it would be well to jettison the cargo, or some of it. For the death rate had been so great the voyage was likely to be unprofitable, and if he could prove that some of the cargo had been thrown overboard to save the rest, the underwriters would pay the value of it, while if these slaves died on board the ship would be at the loss. They selected accordingly 132 of the most sickly of the slaves. Fifty-four of these were there and then thrown overboard to the sharks that swarmed round the ship, and forty-two went the same way the next day, and in the course of the next three days the remaining twenty-six were brought out of the den below to complete the tale of the victims. Poor, wretched, suffering creatures! They looked at the sea, at the sinister fins appearing above the oily swell, and they looked back at their prison and the pitiless white faces that looked down upon them, and then they made their choice. Sixteen, they say, were thrown overboard by the officers, but the rest leaped into the bloody sea where the sharks were already fighting for their meal and shared their fate.
The plea that was set up on behalf of this atrocious act of wickedness was that the captain discovered, when he made the proposal, that he had only 200 gallons of water on board, and that he had missed his port. It was proved, however, in answer to this that no one had been put upon short allowance; and that rain fell and continued for three days immediately after the second lot of slaves had been thrown overboard. They might have filled all their barrels and done away with all necessity—if one could call it necessity—for the murder of the third lot. As a matter of fact they only troubled to fill six.
But the underwriters refused to pay, and the Solicitor-General actually held that the captain of the ship had an “unquestionable right” to throw the slaves into the sea. But not all men agreed with him. Light was coming, and Lord Mansfield, presiding in the higher court, said that this was a shocking case, and, in spite of the law, decided in favour of the underwriters. Still, nothing apparently was done to the murderers. They went scot-free. But imagine the state of public opinion when such a case could actually be brought before the courts, when the perpetrators of such a crime evidently regarded themselves as agents, doing their very best for those who had entrusted their business to their charge.
But once the trade was outlawed, and the vigilant warships were ever on the watch, life was still more cruel for the unfortunate chattel. Then, to run as many slaves as possible, and to make up for possible losses, the slaves were compelled to lie on their sides, breast to back, spoon fashion, and this when the space between decks was less than two feet. When it was as much as two feet they were stowed, says Spear, “sitting up in rows, one crowded into the lap of another, with legs on legs like riders on a crowded toboggan. In storms the sailors had to put on the hatches, and seal tight the openings into the infernal cesspool. It was asserted by the naval officers who were stationed on the Coast to stop the traffic that in certain states of the weather they could detect the odour of a slaver farther away than they could see her on a clear night. The odour was often unmistakable at a distance of five miles down the wind.”
And to what lengths these brutes might go we may see in the case of the Gloria, given by Drake in his Revelations of a Slave Smuggler, and quoted by Spear. The surgeon tells the tale.
The Gloria was coming from the Cape Verde Islands in ballast when she overhauled a Portuguese schooner with a full cargo of slaves. The captain of the Gloria, as thorough a scoundrel surely as ever sailed the seas, filled up his men with rum, attacked the schooner, murdered her officers and crew and one passenger, stole the gold, transferred the slaves to his own ship and scuttled the other. Dead men and sunken ships tell no tales, and 190 slaves as witnesses counted as naught in those days.
Then Ruiz the captain, I'm glad he wasn't an Englishman, bought 400 negroes on the Dahomean Coast and “hauled our course for the Atlantic voyage. But this was to be my last trip in the blood-stained Gloria. Hardly were we out a fortnight before it was discovered that our roystering crew had neglected to change the sea water, which had served as our ballast in the lower casks, and which ought to have been replaced with fresh water in Africa. We were drawing from the last casks before this discovery was made, and the horror of our situation sobered Captain Ruiz. He gave orders to hoist the precious remnant abaft the main grating, and made me calculate how long it would sustain the crew and cargo. I found that half a gill a day would hold out to the Spanish main; and it was decided that, in order to save our cargo, we should allow the slaves a half gill and the crew a gill each a day. Then began a torture worse than death to the blacks. Pent in their close dungeons, to the number of nearly five hundred, they suffered continual torment. Our crew and drivers were unwilling to allow even the half gill per diem, and quarrelled fiercely over their own stinted rations. Our cargo had been stowed on the platforms closer than I ever saw slaves stowed before or since. Instead of lowering buckets of water to them, as was customary, it became necessary to pour the water into half-pint measures. These farthest from the gratings never got a drop.... In a short time at least a hundred men and women were shackled to dead partners.”
It is a ghastly picture. Perhaps we could not expect any pity for the sufferings of the “cargo” from such a set of pirates. Everyone who was free on board drank hard “as well as myself,” said the frank narrator, and they did not trouble to throw the dead overboard, or presumably even to unshackle the living, for the captain finding his crew out of hand, ordered the hatches down, and “swore he would make the run on our regular water rations, and take the chances of his stock.”
Three days those fiends continued their course, drinking in plenty, while “the negroes suffocated below.” And then came retribution swift and sure.
“Ruiz and four of the men were taken suddenly ill with a disease that baffled my medical knowledge. Their tongues swelled and grew black; their flesh turned yellow, and in six hours they were dead. The first mate went next, and then three others of the crew, and a black driver whose body became leprous with yellow spots. I began to notice a strange fetid smell pervading the vessel, and a low heavy fog on deck, almost like steam. Then the horrid truth became apparent. Our rotting negroes under hatches had generated the plague, and it was a malaria or death mist I saw rising. At this time all our men but three and myself had been attacked; and we abandoned the Gloria in her long boat, taking the remnant of water, a sack of biscuit, and a rum beaker, with what gold dust and other valuables we could hastily gather up. We left nine of our late comrades dead and five dying on the Gloria's deck.”