THE WEST INDIES.
During this year the West India colonists were discontented, and complained of distress, while at home they were regarded with suspicion by the religious and antislavery public, as designing, if possible, to restore slavery.
The immigration of hill Coolies from India into several of the colonies, which was promoted by the West India legislative bodies at the public expense, increased this jealousy towards the planters. The taxes to meet the expenses incidental to the immigration were levied in such a manner as to fall especially upon the emancipated negro, to compete with whose labour the Coolie was imported. This irritated the classes in England whose dispositions were unfavourable to the planter. The press, the pulpit, and missionary meetings denounced the Coolie trade and traders, and, in terms of eloquent indignation, represented the negro inhabitants of the West Indies as still subjected to the plunder and persecution of a tyrant race. The Coolie immigration was depicted as rivaling the slave-trade in atrocity, and its failure was boldly predicted on every religious platform. These predictions certainly were fulfilled—the Coolie speculation was a failure. A writer of that date, well acquainted with the facts of the case, thus noticed them:—“One of the most recent efforts made to substitute free for slave labour in the West Indies, it will be recollected, was the bringing of a number of hill Coolies from India for this purpose. The experiment has miserably failed, as acknowledged by the chancellor of the exchequer in his speech on the introduction of the sugar duties bill, now in progress through parliament. The Coolies were conveyed to Demerara from Madras in ship-loads to supply the labour market in British Guiana, at the expense of that colony; and, as our correspondent learned, at a rate which even reached the Negro himself, against whom they came to compete. Many agents were employed in their importation, and large bounties were given; such temptations led parties to crowd the colony with numbers of miserable persons, quite unable to perform any laborious employment. It was the general opinion that, owing to physical inability, scarcely one in a hundred of these Coolies was fit for manual labour; and whilst our correspondent was at Demerara a law was issued by the governor granting permission for labourers to enter Guiana from certain countries only, omitting the East Indies. The wretchedness of these immigrant Coolies was truly distressing; numbers of them might be seen wandering about, and living in the open air on charity, in George Town, congregating about the market-house and elsewhere, many of them covered with sores, and all but naked. Hospitals were subsequently provided for them in different places, in which they were maintained at the public expense; and by this means they were removed from about the town and frontier of the colony. Mr. Stocqueler, in his very useful ‘Oriental Interpreter,’ refers to the Coolies in connection with the Bheels, a race of people who inhabit the northern part of the chain of Ghauts, running inland parallel with the coast of Malabar. On one side they are bordered by the Coolies, and on another by the Goands of Goandwana. They are considered to have been the aborigines of Central India, and, with the Coolies, Goands, and Ramooses, are bold, daring, and predatory marauders—occasionally mercenaries, but invariably plunderers. There are, however, many shades of difference in the extent of the depredations of these several people, in which the balance of enormity is said to be considerably on the side of the Bheels. They are, nevertheless, described as faithful when employed and trusted; and the travellers who pay them their choute, or tribute, may leave untold treasure in their hands, and may consider themselves as safe with them as in the streets of London. Their word is sacred, their promise unimpeachable.’”
There was another class of immigrants who were found more useful, the Portuguese, from Madeira. They were highly prized by the Demerara planters; but even among them the mortality was very considerable.