Chapter IV: The isle is past. And still in tranquil pride (5)

Naturalists and physicians, philosophers and philanthropists, may argue and decide as they please; but certainly, as far as mere observation admits of my judging, there does seem to be a very great difference between the brain of a black person and a white one. I should think that Voltaire would call a negro’s reason “_une raison très particulière_.” Somehow or other, they never can manage to do anything _quite_ as it should be done. If they correct themselves in one respect to-day they are sure of making a blunder in some other manner to-morrow. Cubina is now twenty-five, and has all his life been employed about the stable; he goes out with my carriage twice every day; yet he has never yet been able to succeed in putting on the harness properly. Before we get to one of the plantation gates we are certain of being obliged to stop, and put something or other to rights: and I once remember having laboured for more than half an hour to make him understand that the Christmas holidays came at Christmas; when asked the question, he always hesitated, and answered, at hap-hazard, “July” or “October.” Yet, Cubina is far superior in intellect to most of the negroes who have fallen under my observation. The girl too, whose business it is to open the house each morning, has in vain been desired to unclose all the jalousies: she never fails to leave three or four closed, and when she is scolded for doing so, she takes care to open those three the next morning, and leaves three shut on the opposite side. Indeed, the attempt to make them correct a fault is quite fruitless: they never can do the same thing a second time in the same manner; and if the cook having succeeded in dressing a dish well is desired to dress just such another, she is certain of doing something which makes it quite different. One day I desired, that there might be always a piece of salt meat at dinner, in order that I might be certain of always having enough to send to the sick in the hospital. In consequence, there was nothing at dinner but salt meat. I complained that there was not a single fresh dish, and the next day, there was nothing but fresh. Sometimes there is scarcely anything served up, and the cook seems to have forgotten the dinner altogether: she is told of it; and the next day she slaughters without mercy pigs, sheep, fowls, ducks, turkeys, and everything that she can lay her murderous hands upon, till the table absolutely groans under the load of her labours. For above a month Cubina and I had perpetual quarrels about the cats being shut into the gallery at nights, where they threw down plates, glasses, and crockery of all kinds, and made such a clatter that to get a wink of sleep was quite out of the question. Cubina, before he went to rest, hunted under all the beds and sofas, and laid about him with a long whip for half an hour together; but in half an hour after his departure the cats were at work again. He was then told, that although he had turned them out, he must certainly have left some window open: he promised to pay particular attention to this point, but that night the uproar was worse than ever; yet he protested that he had carefully turned out all the cats, locked all the doors, and shut all the windows. He was told, that if he had really turned out all the cats, the cats must have got in again, and therefore that he must have left some one window open at least. “No,” he said, “he had not left one; but a pane in one of the windows had been broken two months before, and it was there that the cats got in whenever they pleased.” Yet he had continued to turn the cats out of the door with the greatest care, although he was perfectly conscious that they could always walk in again at the window in five minutes after. But the most curious of Cubina’s modes of proceeding is, when it is necessary for him to attack the pigeon-house. He steals up the ladder as slily and as softly as foot can fall; he opens the door, and steals in his head with the utmost caution; on which, to his never-failing surprise and disappointment, all the pigeons make their escape through the open holes; he has now no resource but entering the dove-cot, and remaining there with unwearied patience for the accidental return of the birds, which nine times out of ten does not take place till too late for dinner, and Cubina returns empty-handed. Having observed this proceeding constantly repeated during a fortnight, I took pity upon his embarrassment, and ordered two wooden sliders to be fitted to the holes. Cubina was delighted with this exquisite invention, and failed not the next morning to close all the holes on the right with one of the sliders; he then stepped boldly into the dove-cot, when to his utter confusion the pigeons flew away through the holes on the left. Here then he discovered where the fault lay, so he lost no time in closing the remaining aperture with the second slider, and the pigeons were thus prevented from returning at all. Cubina waited long with exemplary patience, but without success, so he abandoned the new invention in despair, made no farther use of the sliders, and continues to steal up the ladder as he did before. A few days ago, Nicholas, a mulatto carpenter, was ordered to make a box for the conveyance of four jars of sweetmeats, of which he took previous measure; yet first he made a box so small that it would scarcely hold a single jar, and then another so large that it would have held twenty; and when at length he produced one of a proper size, he brought it nailed up for travelling (although it was completely empty), and nailed up so effectually too, that on being directed to open it that the jars might be packed, he split the cover to pieces in the attempt to take it off. Yet, among all my negroes, Nicholas and Cubina are not equalled for adroitness and intelligence by more than twenty. Judge then what must be the remaining three hundred!

APRIL 23.

In my medical capacity, like a true quack I sometimes perform cures so unexpected, that I stand like Katterfelto, “with my hair standing on end at my own wonders.” Last night, Alexander, the second governor, who has been seriously ill for some days, sent me word, that he was suffering cruelly from a pain in his head, and could get no sleep. I knew not how to relieve him; but having frequently observed a violent passion for perfumes in the house negroes, for want of something else I gave the doctoress some oil of lavender, and told her to rub two or three drops upon his nostrils. This morning, he told me that “to be sure what I had sent him was a grand medicine indeed,” for it had no sooner touched his nose than he felt some-thing cold run up to his forehead, over his head, and all the way down his neck to the back-bone; instantly, the headach left him, he fell fast asleep, nor had the pain returned in the morning. But I am afraid, that even this wonderful oil would fail of curing a complaint which was made to me a few days ago. A poor old creature, named Quasheba, made her appearance at my breakfast table, and told me, “that she was almost eighty, had been rather weakly for some time past, and somehow she did not feel as she was by any means right.”

“Had she seen the doctor? Did she want physic?”

“No, she had taken too much physic already, and the doctor would do her no good; she did not want to see the doctor.”

“But what then was her complaint?”

“Oh! she had no particular complaint; only she was old and weakly, and did not find herself by any means so well as she used to be, and so she came just to tell massa, and see what he could do to make her quite right again, that was all.” In short, she _only_ wanted me to make her young again!

APRIL 24.

Mr. Forbes is dead. When I was last in Jamaica, he had just been poisoned with corrosive sublimate by a female slave, who was executed in consequence. He never was well afterwards; but as he lived intemperately, the whole blame of his death must not be laid upon the poison.

APRIL 30.

A free mulatto of the name of Rolph had frequently been mentioned to me by different magistrates, as remarkable for the numerous complaints brought against him for cruel treatment of his negroes. He was described to me as the son of a white ploughman, who at his death left his son six or seven slaves, with whom he resides in the heart of the mountains, where the remoteness of the situation secures him from observation or control. His slaves, indeed, every now and then contrive to escape, and come down to Savannah la Mar to lodge their complaints; but the magistrates, hitherto, had never been able to get a legal hold upon him. However, a few days ago, he entered the house of a Mrs. Edgins, when she was from home, and behaving in an outrageous manner to her slaves, he was desired by the head-man to go away. Highly incensed, he answered, “that if the fellow dared to speak another word, it should be the last that he should ever utter.” The negro dared to make a rejoinder; upon which Rolph aimed a blow at him with a stick, which missed his intended victim, but struck another slave who was interposing to prevent a scuffle, and killed him upon the spot. The murder was committed in the presence of several negroes; but negroes are not allowed to give evidence, and as no free person was present, there are not only doubts whether the murderer will be punished, but whether he can even be put upon his trial.

MAY 1. (Friday.)

This morning I signed the manumission of Nicholas Cameron, the best of my mulatto carpenters. He had been so often on the very point of getting his liberty, and still the cup was dashed from his lips, that I had promised to set him free, whenever he could procure an able negro as his substitute; although being a good workman, a single negro was by no means an adequate price in exchange. On my arrival this year I found that he had agreed to pay £150 for a female negro, and the woman was approved of by my trustee. But on enquiry it appeared that she had a child, from which she was unwilling to separate, and that her owner refused to sell the child, except at a most unreasonable price. Here then was an insurmountable objection to my accepting her, and Nicholas was told to his great mortification, that he must look out for another substitute. The woman, on her part, was determined to belong to Cornwall estate and no other: so she told her owner, that if he attempted to sell her elsewhere she would make away with herself, and on his ordering her to prepare for a removal to a neighbouring proprietor’s, she disappeared, and concealed herself so well, that for some time she was believed to have put her threats of suicide into execution. The idea of losing his £150 frightened her master so completely, that he declared himself ready to let me have the child at a fair price, as well as the mother, if she ever should be found; and her friends having conveyed this assurance to her, she thought proper to emerge from her hiding-place, and the bargain was arranged finally. The titles, however, were not yet made out, and as the time of my departure for Hordley was arrived, these were ordered to be got ready against my return, when the negroes were to be delivered over to me, and Nicholas was to be set free. In the meanwhile, the child was sent by her mistress (a free mulatto) to hide some stolen ducks upon a distant property, and on her return blabbed out the errand: in consequence the mistress was committed to prison for theft; and no sooner was she released, than she revenged herself upon the poor girl by giving her thirty lashes with the cattle-whip, inflicted with all the severity of vindictive malice. This treatment of a child of such tender years reduced her to such a state, as made the magistrates think it right to send her for protection to the workhouse, until the conduct of the mistress should have been enquired into. In the meanwhile, as the result of the enquiry might be the setting the girl at liberty, the joint title for her and her mother could not be made out, and thus poor Nicholas’s manumission was at a stand-still again. The magistrates at length decided, that although the chastisement had been severe, yet (according to the medical report) it was not such as to authorise the sending the mistress to be tried at the assizes. She was accordingly dismissed from farther investigation, and the girl was once more considered as belonging to me, as soon as the title could be made out. But the fatality which had so often prevented Nicholas from obtaining his freedom, was not weary yet. On the very morning, when he was to sign the title, a person whose signature was indispensable, was thrown out of his chaise, the wheel of which passed over his head, and he was rendered incapable of transacting business for several weeks. Yesterday, the titles were at length brought to me complete, and this morning put Nicholas in possession of the object, in the pursuit of which he has experienced such repeated disappointments. The conduct of the poor child’s mulatto mistress in this case was most unpardonable, and is only one of numerous instances of a similar description, which have been mentioned to me. Indeed, I have every reason to believe, that nothing can be uniformly more wretched, than the life of the slaves of free people of colour in Jamaica; nor would any thing contribute more to the relief of the black population, than the prohibiting by law any mulatto to become the owner of a slave for the future. Why should not rich people of colour be served by poor people of colour, hiring them as domestics? It seldom happens that mulattoes are in possession of plantations; but when a white man dies, who happens to possess twenty negroes, he will divide them among his brown family, leaving (we may say) five to each of his four children. These are too few to be employed in plantation work; they are, therefore, ordered to maintain their owner by some means or other, and which means are frequently not the most honest, the most frequent being the travelling about as higglers, and exchanging the trumpery contents of their packs and boxes with plantation negroes for stolen rum and sugar. I confess I cannot see why, on such bequest being made, the law should not order the negroes to be sold, and the produce of the sale paid to the mulatto heirs, but absolutely prohibiting the mulattoes from becoming proprietors of the negroes themselves. Every man of humanity must wish that slavery, even in its best and most mitigated form, had never found a legal sanction, and must regret that its system is now so incorporated with the welfare of Great Britain as well as of Jamaica, as to make its extirpation an absolute impossibility, without the certainty of producing worse mischiefs than the one which we annihilate. But certainly there can be no sort of occasion for continuing in the colonies the existence of _do-mestic slavery_, which neither contributes to the security of the colonies themselves, nor to the opulence of the mother-country, the revenue of which derived from colonial duties would suffer no defalcation whatever, even if neither whites nor blacks in the West Indies were suffered to employ slaves, except in plantation labour.

MAY 2.

I gave my negroes a farewell holiday, on which occasion each grown person received a present of half-a-dollar, and every child a maccaroni. In return, they endeavoured to express their sorrow for my departure, by eating and drinking, dancing and singing, with more vehemence and perseverance than on any former occasion. As in all probability many years will elapse without my making them another visit, if indeed I should ever return at all, I have at least exerted myself while here to do everything which appeared likely to contribute to their welfare and security during my absence. In particular, my attorney has made out a list of all such offences as are most usually committed on plantations, to which proportionate punishments have been affixed by myself. From this code of internal regulations the overseer is not to be allowed to deviate, and the attorney has pledged himself in the most solemn manner to adhere strictly to the system laid down for him. By this scheme, the negroes will no longer be punished according to the momentary caprice of their superintendent, but by known and fixed laws, the one no more than the other, and without respect to partiality or prejudice. Hitherto, in everything which had not been previously deter mined by the public law, with a penalty attached to the breach of it, the negro has been left entirely at the mercy of the overseer, who if he was a humane man punished him slightly, and if a tyrant, heavily; nay, very often the quantity of punishment depended upon the time of day when the offence was made known. If accused in the morning, when the overseer was in cold blood and in good humour, a night’s confinement in the stocks might be deemed sufficient; whereas if the charge was brought when the superior had taken his full proportion of grog or sangaree, the very same offence would be visited with thirty-nine lashes. I have, moreover, taken care to settle all disputes respecting property, having caused all negroes having claims upon others to bring them before my tribunal previous to my departure, and determined that from that time forth no such claims should be enquired into, but considered as definitively settled by my authority. It would have done the Lord Chancellor’s heart good to see how many suits I determined in the course of a week, and with what expedition I made a clear court of chancery. But perhaps the most astonishing part of the whole business was, that after judgment was pronounced, the losers as well as the gainers declared themselves perfectly satisfied with the justice of the sentence. I must acknowledge, however, that the negro principle that “massa can do no wrong,” was of some little assistance to me on this occasion. “Oh! quite just, me good, massa! what massa say, quite just! me no say nothing more; me good, massa!” Then they thanked me “for massa’s goodness in giving them so long talk!” and went away to tell all the others “how just massa had been in taking away what they wanted to keep, or not giving them what they asked for.” It must be owned that this is not the usual mode of proceeding after the loss of a chancery suit in England. But to do the negroes mere justice, I must say, that I could not have wished to find a more tractable set of people on almost every occasion. Some lazy and obstinate persons, of course, there must inevitably be in so great a number; but in general I found them excellently disposed, and being once thoroughly convinced of my real good-will towards them, they were willing to take it for granted, that my regulations must be right and beneficial, even in cases where they were in opposition to individual interests and popular prejudices. My attorney had mentioned to me several points, which he thought it advisable to have altered, but which he had vainly endeavoured to accomplish. Thus the negroes were in the practice of bequeathing their houses and grounds, by which means some of them were become owners of several houses and numerous gardens in the village, while others with large families were either inadequately provided for, or not provided for at all. I made it public, that from henceforth no negro should possess more than one house, with a sufficient portion of ground for his family, and on the following Sunday the overseer by my order looked over the village, took from those who had too much to give to those who had too little, and made an entire new distribution according to the most strict Agrarian law. Those who lost by this measure, came the next day to complain to me; when I avowed its having been done by my order, and explained the propriety of the proceeding; after which they declared themselves contented, and I never heard another murmur on the subject. Again, mothers being allowed certain indulgences while suckling, persist in it for two years and upwards, to the great detriment both of themselves and their children: complaint of this being made to me, I sent for the mothers, and told them that every child must be sent to the weaning-house on the first day of the fifteenth month, but that their indulgences should be continued to the mothers for two months longer, although the children would be no longer with them. All who had children of that age immediately gave them up; the rest promised to do so, when they should be old enough $ and they all thanked me for the continuance of their indulgences, which they considered as a boon newly granted them. On my return from Hordley, I was told that the negroes suffered their pigs to infest the works and grounds in the immediate vicinity of the house in such numbers, that they were become a perfect nuisance; nor could any remonstrance prevail on them to confine the animals within the village. An order was in consequence issued on a Saturday, that the first four pigs found rambling at large after two days should be put to death without mercy; and accordingly on Monday morning, at the negro breakfast hour, the head governor made his appearance before the house, armed cap-a-pee, with a lance in his hand, and an enormous cutlass by his side. The news of this tremendous apparition spread through the estate like wildfire. Instantly all was in an uproar; the negroes came pouring down from all quarters; in an instant the whole air was rent with noises of all kinds and creatures; men, women, and children shouting and bellowing, geese cackling, dogs barking, turkeys gobbling; and, look where you would, there was a negro running along as fast as he could, and dragging a pig along with him by one of the hind legs, while the pigs were all astonishment at this sudden attack, and called upon heaven and earth for commiseration and protection,--

“With many a doleful grunt and piteous squeak,

Poor pigs! as if their pretty hearts would break!”

From thenceforth not a pig except my own was to be seen about the place; yet instead of complaining of this restraint, several of the negroes came to assure me, that I might depend on the animals not being suffered to stray beyond the village for the future, and to thank me for having given them the warning two days before. What other negroes may be, I will not pretend to guess; but I am certain that there cannot be more tractable or better disposed persons (take them for all in all) than my negroes of Cornwall. I only wish, that in my future dealings with white persons, whether _in_ Jamaica or out of it, I could but meet with half so much gratitude, affection, and good-will.

THE END.