book I found specially interesting. It was an old brown leather-covered
book, 18 inches long by 1 foot broad, and round it clung--or so it seemed to me--an unrestful emanation, as if the men who wrote in it were discontented and found life a vexatious thing.
This slave book begins--and the beginning is written in a very clear clerkly hand; I expect my grandmother would have placed the writer's status exactly--with a description of the lands, 3150 acres, held by the original owner of Worthy Park, John Price, Esq., of Penzance, England; he was an absentee owner, and there is no record in the book of his ever having visited his estate. George Doubt was the superintendent, and lived at the Great House; but whether it was he who made those first entries, there is no means of knowing. He certainly did not make them all, for the handwriting varies, and there were no less than six overseers in the five years, the book records, between 1787 and 1792. And the ink and the paper reflect credit on the makers, for though browned with time the writing is perfectly legible, and the pages are stout still.
Once the limits of the estate are laid down, we come to the stock upon it--the negroes, the mules, the horses, the oxen; and every quarter returns were made to the Vestry of the Parish. This, I think, because a tax of 6d. a head had to be paid upon every slave; and for the safety of the public a certain number of white men had to be kept, capable of bearing arms.
The white men were always changing, with the exception of George Doubt, so I conclude either that that superintendent was a hard man, or that John Price, comfortable in his English home, drove him hard; for even for those times the pay seems to have been poor. What Doubt got I do not know, but the overseer got £200 a year, and of course his board and lodging; the surgeon got £140 per annum; the book-keeper and distiller £50 per annum, and the ordinary book-keepers £30 per annum each. It was no catch to be a book-keeper in those days. As a rule he had nothing to do with books, but he did all the little jobs that could not be entrusted to the slaves. He served out the corn for the feeding of the fowls, kept count of the rats that were killed, and went into the cane-fields with the negro drivers. He had to be out in the fields so early that his breakfast was sent out to him.
A negro wench, complained a long-suffering young man, brought him his breakfast--a bottle of cold coffee, two herrings, and a couple of boiled plantains stuck on a fork. It does not sound luxurious, and £30 a year did not hold out much hope of bettering himself.
Among the stock the negroes come before the cattle, and are described in much the same language.
“A General List of Negroes on, and belonging to, Worthy Park Plantation, taken the 1st January 1787.”
The page is divided into three columns, headed respectively, “Names, Qualifications, and Conditions”; and underneath, “Quashie, Head Carpenter, Able,” at the top of a long list that is never less than 340 and sometimes rises to 360 names. There were 6 Carpenters, numbering among them Mulatto Aleck, and 2 learning; there were 2 Sawyers, 1 Joiner and Cabinet Maker, 1 Blacksmith, Mulatto John, 1 Mason, Mulatto Billy, and 1 learning, 3 Drivers, 1 man in the Garden who was marked Old and Infirm, 5 Wain men, 3 Boilers, a Head mule man, and 138 others, ending with children too young to be of any use.
The names are various, and do not differ very much from those of the cattle numbered a few pages further on. Prussia, the Head mule man, is Able, Minuith is Distemper'd, and eight Macs, beginning with MacDonald, and ending with MacLean, are all Able. Nero is a field-labourer and Able, and Don't Care, a wain man, is Able. Further on there is a steer named Why Not? Waller, the Head boiler, is sickly, and Johnston, a field-labourer, is subject to “Fitts.” Dryden is Able, but Elderly. Punch and Bacchus are Elderly and Weakly, which seems wrong somehow, and Ishmael is Infirm and a Runaway. Italy is Able, Spain is Distemper'd, and Portugal is Weakly. Germany is Old and Weak. Quaco's Jumbo is subject to Sores, and Creole Cuba's Cuffie is Weakly and a notorious Runaway. Poor Pope is lame in one hand, and so is Homer, while Kent, Duke, Guy, Prince, John, Morrice, and James, are “all of no use, being too young.”
Then we come to the women. There are 141 of them, 64 Field Labourers, 44 of whom are Able. Grace is a Driver and Elderly, and Delia and Dilligence are both Elderly. Baddo and Creole Betty are Old and Weakly, Lilly is Elderly and Sickly. Little Dido is “Weakly & Runaway.” Woman is Field Cook for the Small Gang, Silvia is Nurse to the young Children in the Field. Luida's Nancy is “Superunuated.” Little Yabba is lame in her hip, Chloe is Weakly and Worthless. Little Benebah is Runaway and Worthless, Strumpet is Able, a Runaway--could one expect much from a woman called by such a name?--and that Whore was also Runaway and Worthless seems but a confirmation of the old saying about giving a dog a bad name and hanging him. But Lady, too, is Runaway; perhaps she was sickly and not equal to the work they expected of her. We may judge that the writer who recorded those dead-and-gone black labourers was not a lettered man, for he writes down Psyche, “Sychke.” But Psyche has always been a difficulty. Miss Maxwell Hall on Kempshot Pen has a cow so named, and periodically she goes through her cattle with her headman. She keeps her list and he presents his. Psyche he had written “Sikey,” and the young lady coming upon it among the “S's” murmured to herself:--
“Psyche, yes, 'p,' of course.” He was an observant man, and the next time the list was presented to her Psyche had been written “Spikey”!
Perhaps the overseer did not do so badly with “Syclike.”
Little Abba, a field cook, has lost one hand. Apparently they did not trouble much about the field-labourer's food, hardly more than they did about the book-keeper's. Simbry is Elderly and a Gandy, which appears to have been a midwife. Poor Pallas is weakly. Sicily, old and weakly, cuts grass for the stables; Abbas Moll, Invalid, “Sores,” washes the bags. I hope they weren't used for anything important. Olive is blind, and no less than thirteen are “superunuated,” while twenty-eight, among them Behaviour, Friendship, and Phebas, are “of no use, being very young.” Later on, “Little Friendship's” death of fever and a sore throat is recorded. Here, too, are Quadroon Kitty, Quadroon Molly, and Quadroon Bessy, nearer the white man than the black but still slaves.
George Doubt expended his negroes freely.... Thirty negroes, fifteen men and fifteen women, were bought on the 2nd March 1787. They were “late the property of Mr Alex. Stanhope dec'd, bo't of Edward Brailsford, Esq.” Why the difference in the titles I don't know. They were all marked “Able” when they were bought, but in 1789 the men are reduced to thirteen, and Toby, who was a Mason, is now old and infirm; England, a sawyer, is old and infirm; Roger, a field negro, is now “little worth”; Dick is sickly and Cæsar is Able, but evidently he did not like Worthy Park, for he is always running away. Prince, now in the overseer's stables, is of little worth; Cuffic is dead and York is now represented by a little child.
And of the women, Flora is sickly and Delia is dead, and there is a sinister entry against Fidelia--“Died, reduced by lying in the bushes.” Why did Fidelia leave her home and lie in the bushes till she was so reduced she died?
But it is just the same tale with the older hands. I would condemn slavery on the Worthy Park slave book alone; and Worthy Park had not the bad reputation Bose Hall had, yet Quashie, who opens the book as able in two years, is old and infirm; Mulatto Aleck is infirm. Mulatto George, then able, is now subject to sores and “Bone ach.” Minuith has now become Minute, and from being a carpenter has become a watchman, which means he is good for nothing else. Joan's Cudjoe, the Head sawyer, has against him “Rheumatism,” and Darby, the Head Driver, formerly Able, is now “Ruptur'd.” Guy's Quashie and Creole Scotland are now both elderly. Pool and Waller the Boilers are sent to the field sometimes, a bitter come-down for them, and are both elderly and infirm. Nero has elephantiasis, Dryden is now cutting grass, M'herson is weakly, M'Clean is asthmatic, Don't Care is infirm, Juba's Quashie is dead. Perhaps the new overseer was a harder man, for I noticed that Quaco's Jumbo, who was originally described as “Weakly and a Runaway,” is now “Able but a Skulker.”
Philip, who was “Able,” is now “infirm,” and Pope, who only has one hand, is now “Able and Ill-dispos'd,” and no mention is made of an infirmity which certainly must severely handicap a slave.
And so it goes on. Villian is “Subject to Fits,” and Solomon is “subject to Bone ach,” a long list which makes us feel for the weary men and women who must turn out into the field at the blowing of the conch shell.
If you have any imagination at all there are many little pathetic histories in a slave book.
There was Dolly on Worthy Park Estate, entered in 1787 as in the overseer's house. She had a baby, Mulatto Patty, in all probability the daughter of the overseer. If she was he goes away and leaves her a slave on the plantation, for she is entered every year to the end of the record as “healthy, but too young to work.” Work is all that is expected of the white man's daughter. Poor little Patty! Her mother's two next children are presumably black, as their colour is not mentioned, which it would have been had they had any white blood in their veins; and presently poor Dolly is a field-labourer again, fallen from her high estate. For in Jamaica the house-servant ranks high in the social scale. That is why, I think, that the house-servants in Jamaica generally wear a handkerchief over their heads. The white bondservants did so because it was the custom of the time, and the black woman promoted from the field put a kerchief over her head and wore it as a sign of her higher social standing. The custom is dying hard, and it is a pity it should die at all, for the negro woman's hair is not her strong point and it is better covered.
Then Fogo, also in the overseer's house, had a boy named Charles Dale, and Charles Dale is the blacksmith upon the estate, but there is no record of little Charles being freed. In truth the father never counted. In a record of forty births on Worthy Park never once is he mentioned. The births are put down on one side of the page as “Increase of the Negroes,” and the baby is only mentioned because he is an asset, as he takes turn with the notice that so many negroes have been bought. On the other side of the page is invariably “Increase of Stock,” kept on exactly the same lines.
In the Rose Hall slave books, thirty years later in date, the births are put casually among the daily occurrences, just as the runaways are mentioned, or the fact that a certain runaway “Cæsar” or “Arabella” is “brought home.” And, perhaps, in the whole pitiful list in all the books, the only entry that looks well is that Betty Madge on Worthy Park has many young children and does not work.
The last man who makes entries in this book is rather fond of a gentle reproach. I don't like him, and I don't think the negroes could have liked him either, though I only judge by the handwriting and his brief remarks.
“Pheba Girl,” for instance, is “Able but a sad skulker,” and Lady is a “sad runaway.” Psyche has become “Sickie” and is sickly, and Belinda, who two years ago was a child, is now in the field. Poor little girl! Her life of labour has begun. It gave me great satisfaction to find that Congo Betty, who in the beginning was entered as “Able but a Runaway,” in 1789 ran away for good, apparently, for when the book closed she had not returned, having been absent for over two years. I hope she had not died, but was happy and comfortable in the hills. Perhaps she joined the Maroons, but I fear me not even her own people were likely to be kind to an elderly woman.
Others ran away, but they came back, poor things. Cæsar and Lady and Villian and Mary and October ran away all at one time. No mention is ever made of their return, but they did come back, for later they are served with clothing, and are mentioned in the lists of negroes on the estate. Man is a gregarious animal, and, I suppose, these poor things, skulking in the woods and mountains, missed their fellows, and so they dared the stocks and the lock-up and the stripes, which were sure to be their portion when they did come back. Lady came back once, for in June 1788 she had a baby girl. In January 1791 she is among the invalids and superannuated. But life among the sick evidently did not suit her--it probably was no bed of roses--for in the following September she left her three-years-old Diana and ran away, and when the book closed three months later she was still away.
Though, apparently, they superannuated the slaves very young, we may be very sure they did not superannuate them before they were actually obliged, so that we find they were old and useless when they should have been in their prime. A slave had no proper stimulus to labour. As a rule, he was assured of enough to eat when he was too old to labour, and practically he had little more at any stage of his career.
The deaths, of course, came in under “Decrease of Negroes,” and they died so often of “Old Age,” poor things, that I wonder what constituted “Old Age” in those days. But sometimes they died of “yaws,” and “a consumption,” and “Pluresy.” Sometimes the children died of “Worm fever,” of “Locked Jaw,” “of Fever and Sore Throat,” “of Cold and Sore Throat,” and Little Prince was drowned. One of the men named Dick has my sincerest sympathy. He is bought from Brailsford as “Able,” a couple of years later he is “sickly,” then he has “Bone ach,” and finally on the 1st April 1791 he is entered as “Died of a sudden death,” which is crossed out, and “an Asthma” put instead. He evidently struggled in agonising fashion at intervals, till at length his heart gave out and he was at peace.
And one of the sad untold stories of the book lies behind the entry on the 24th January 1791: “By Hang'd himself in the woods, one of the new negro men bought of Bainford.” He had been bought on the 5th of the same month, and he waited hopelessly, or perhaps hoping, nineteen days, and then he ended it, because for a slave there was no future to which it was worth looking forward. He is entered in the book as remorselessly and as carefully as the steer Hymen who “broke his neck in the Penn.”
Very occasionally does the decrease of the slaves come from the slaves being freed. But once or twice it does. In the year 1787 Mulatto Nelly and Quadroon Kitty and Quadroon Bessy were “manu-mized,” and Mulatto Nelly is sent away. Perhaps the father desired to cut off from his little daughters all slave influence, even that of their mother; for I presume Nelly was their mother. And I wonder were the little girls the daughters of Mr Doubt, for really it does not look as if the other men could afford to free their children.
They do not give us an inventory of the furniture of the Great House, but in the overseer's house most things are set down when the book opens. In the hall, in addition to tables and chairs and a “Beaufett,” they had six silver tablespoons and five silver teaspoons, five cups and saucers, fifteen wine-glasses, four tumblers, and one wine decanter. In the overseer's room he had a mahogany bed and a small mahogany bed, and, of course, a feather bed--every room except the hall had one of these luxuries. In August in Jamaica! With the shutters close for fear of the slaves!! In the Great House at the Hyde the bedrooms were strangely small and confined when compared with the hall out of which they opened, and I said so once to the doctor. He laughed. He knew his old-time Jamaica.
“The men who built in those times,” said he, “didn't worry about bedrooms. The dining-hall was the thing! They sat there and drank rum punch till--well, till it didn't matter whether they slept under the table or were bundled out into the garden!”
But even if they were, shall we say “merry,” at Worthy Park, I think the feather beds must have been aggravating things.
The overseer kept in his room, too, the brands with which they marked the slaves--at least such, I suppose, were one silver mark L.P. and one silver stamp L.P. He had a “Sett of Gold Weights and Scales”--I presume for weighing gold, and not made of the precious metal, though where they got the gold to weigh I do not know; and there was a keg of gunpowder and thirty-three gun flints, kept there, I suppose, to be under his eye.
The doctor was not of much consequence, if we may judge of the furnishing of the “Doctor's Chamber.” It had only a “common bed” and little else except the linen chest, in which there were fifteen pairs of fine sheets which strikes me as lavish in contrast to the paucity of everything else. There were eleven fine pillow-cases, one pair of Osnaburg sheets, two pillow-cases of the same stuff, two fine tablecloths, to be used on gala days I expect, and seven Osnaburg tablecloths. But there were only three Osnaburg towels, so that I am not surprised at the next entry, “1 Jack towel & the other cut for hand towels.” Seven glass cloths might be managed with, I suppose, but why enter “1 do. useless and 2 useless sideboard cloths”?
It is evident that in July 1791 something happened to the ruling power on Worthy Park, for another inventory is taken of the household goods and slaves, and one, Arthur McKenzie, who is not otherwise mentioned, remarks in a thin straggling hand: “N.B.--By the sundries found in and about the works, the written account is very eroneous,” (so he is pleased to spell the word), “in particular speaking Table linen, Glass, Mugs, Cups, Musquito Netts, &c., &c.--Arthur McKenzie.”
Then underneath, “Was obliged to purchase Sheeting” (oh, how careless they must have been with those sheets), “Tablecloaths & Butter, Candles, and send 3/4 of the Soap sent to the Great House for the Works; buy also knives, forks, spoons & send 6 silver spoons from the 18 at the Great House.--1st August '91.”
I don't wonder at his having to purchase knives, for the “Boy's Pantry” was certainly scantily furnished except in the matter of “Wash hand basons” of which there were ten, but four were sent to the Great House. There were “9 Earthen Dishes and 6 shallow plates, 1 Tureen, 8 Pewter dishes and only 3 new knives and 3 new forks, 3 old knives and four useless,” so it rather looks as if once the overseer and a couple of book-keepers had been provided with a knife and fork apiece, the rest of the company, and there must have been some occasionally, had to eat their food with their fingers.
In the “Dry Store” they had all sorts of things. Notice Posts, though considering not half a dozen people on the estate could read, I wonder what they wanted notice posts for. They had “Shovels and Broad Axes, Bullet Moulds, Old Bayonets, Negro Hatts and Iron Crows.” The Herring Store did not contain herrings, at least when the inventory was taken, but had four large empty oil jars, half a barrel of turpentine, alum, roach alum, whatever that may be, and lamp-black. These do not seem to be exactly in their right place in the herring store, but Thomas Kitson examined the inventory and found it correct.
They did use a great many barrels of herrings, for the _Betsey_, Captain Laurie from London, and the _Diana_, Captain Thomas Seaward from Cork, brought out their stores, Osnaburg and baize and “Negro hatts” and check from London, and salt beef and pork and herrings, to say nothing of tallow and candles and soap from Cork. That they should need to bring fish to an island where the sea teems with it, and beef and pork to a place where the cattle and swine would run wild and multiply in the woods if they were left to themselves, is a curious commentary on the wasteful fashion in which the country was managed.
Again and again it is entered that the herrings served out were bad or “mash'd,” but I am afraid the slaves got them all the same. Possibly they did not consider that bad herrings constituted cruelty to a slave. The pork and beef were for the white men, and a great deal of the unappetising stuff they seem to have eaten. In one year the Diana brought out 15 barrels of beef and 70 barrels of herrings, 4 firkins of butter and 6 kegs of tallow; yet they bought 2 1/2 barrels of beef from Kingston, 2 kegs of tallow and 5 firkins of butter. That they should have bought in the same year a cask and two-thirds of a tierce of codfish, and 4 barrels of American herrings is not so surprising considering the disparity between the negroes and the white men who at most numbered seven. In three months they served out to the slaves 20 barrels of herrings.
There is an echo of the famine that struck the island in 1786 when 15,000 slaves died of starvation, for in 1790 they bought for the use of the slaves 11,800 lbs. of cocos, that is a root not unlike a yam, 1400 lbs. of yams, and 500 plantains, which last, I suppose, were stems of plantains, as 500 plantains would not have gone far. Worthy Park had a “mountain” like many other estates, for often the cattle are entered as having died of “Poverty and Meagreness on the mountain,” or as falling into the sink hole on the “mountain,” and presumably the slaves had grounds there where they grew provisions, but as in famines of a later date, the yams failed, and there were no heads to plant for the new crop which may possibly account for the large number of cocos bought.
Once a year the negroes were served out “cloath-ing.” An ordinary man or woman got 6 yards of Osnaburg, 3 yards of baize, and 1 “hatt,” but the principal men and women got a little more. Lucretia serving at the Great House once got 12 yards of Osnaburg, and most of the tradesmen, the carpenters and the sawyers and blacksmiths, got 10 yards and sometimes 6 yards of check as well.
“The negro women,” says Lesley, writing as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, “go many of them quite naked. They do not know what shame is, and are surprised at an European's bashfulness, who perhaps turns his head aside at the sight.... Their Masters give them a kind of petticoat, but they do not care to wear it. In the towns they are obliged to do it, and some of them there go neat enough; but these are the favourites of young Squires who keep them for a certain use.”
They must have been a forlorn and ragged crew of savages the book-keepers saw out into the fields every morning at daybreak. They evidently made them work in the hot and glaring sunshine, holeing for canes, cutting canes, and carting manure on their heads, this last a job much hated, and the whites never remembered, if they ever knew, that no black man or woman works of his own free will in the glare of the tropical sun. On the Gold Coast I have heard the people going out into the fields long before daylight, but I have never seen men or women working hard during the midday hours. This is only common sense, and possibly much of the sickness that decimated the slaves was due to this cause. There is a record of one humanitarian who discovered that it would be well to provide nurses for the infants. Every woman had to go back to field work a fortnight after her baby was born. She must needs take the child, and so great was the heat that sometimes the mother when she had time to attend to it found that the little one on her back was dead!
And yet these slave-owners desired children very much and they deplored the deaths as so much money gone from their pockets, just as man now-a-days regrets when his calf or his foal dies. They grumble very much because the slaves do not increase as they think they ought. They gave no thought to morals, and anybody might father a woman's child. But considering all things I think they grumbled unreasonably. No wild animals increase rapidly in captivity, but in five years there were forty children born on Worthy Park, that is nearly 23 per thousand--not so very bad considering that the rate for London in the year 1919 among a free people was 24.8. But this was discounted by the number of deaths in infancy. Matthew Lewis tells of the ravages of tetanus among the newly born on his estate in the beginning of the last century, and neither he nor any one else had an idea of the cause or how it might be prevented.
The midwife, the “Garundee,” told him that till after the ninth day they had no hope of the newborn babies. It was, had she but known it, a sad commentary on her own want of cleanliness.
The children of the white men had perhaps a better chance of being reared than those of the slaves, because the women who lived with them had an easier time. Their children were slaves like the others, but it was the custom not to put them to field work; the boys they made artisans and the girls were trained as house-servants, and Lewis says the other slaves paid them a certain deference, always honouring the girls with the title of “Miss.”
“My mulatto housemaid,” says he, “is always called 'Miss Polly' by her fellow-servant Phillis.”
The last entry in the Worthy Park slave book with George Doubt as Superintendent--I feel as if I knew George Doubt--was on the 28th June 1791. Then apparently something happened, and Arthur M'Kenzie made his moan about the careless way in which the inventory was taken. When the returns for the last quarter 1791 are sent in to the Vestry there is quite a new departure. The “White People” are headed by Pose Price, Esq., and the Rev. John Venicomb bracketed together as having arrived on the 1st December, and we immediately imagine the son of the proprietor accompanied by his bear leader. But there is a still greater departure from the usual run of things on the 23rd of the same month when Edward Phelps and Sussannah Phelps are set down. So that the very last entry of white people in the book mentions a woman!
Was it all worth while? Even after I have read the whole very carefully. I am not in a position to judge. Only it seems to me the expenses were very great. Not only was there the upkeep of these people, but they were always buying new negroes and in addition to that quite a considerable sum was paid out to negroes hired--slave gangs--to do the jobs for which those on the estate had neither strength nor time.
Occasionally we get the returns. In January 1790 James Fraser, one of the six overseers, certifies that the crop returns are 248 hogsheads, that is 124 tons of sugar, and 85 puncheons of rum. Set that against the 510 tons of sugar and 301 puncheons of rum which Mr Fred Clarke gives me as the returns from the same estate in the year of our Lord 1920. Of course to compare exactly, I should have the wages returns of the present day, the cost of improved machinery and various other things, but looking at it from the point of view of an outsider it certainly looks as if it were not worth it.
Very, very slowly we move towards perfection, but we do move. Perhaps one hundred and thirty years hence, some writer will read of 1921 with as much wonder as I read in this old slave book of a day that is done.