“The distinguishing features of the Gold Coast negroes are firmness of mind and body, ferocious dispositions, but, withal, activity, courage, and stubbornness, which prompt them to enterprises of difficulty and danger, enabling them to meet death, in its most horrible shape, with fortitude or indifference.” This, he goes on to relate, was shown in the rebellion of 1760. A negro, who had been a chief of his tribe in Guinea, was imported with a hundred of his countrymen into Jamaica, and sold together to the owner of a plantation, on the frontier of St Mary’s Parish. At his instigation, although they had received no ill-treatment since their arrival, they revolted. Gathering themselves together in a body they proceeded at midnight to Port Maria, where they slaughtered the sentinel, and went off with all the arms and ammunition they could lay hands on. Here they were joined by many runaway slaves, and, retreating to the interior of the island, they killed everybody they met, leaving desolation in their track.
At a plantation called Bellard’s Valley they surrounded the overseer’s house at four in the morning, butchered every soul on the place with the utmost savagery, and actually drank the blood of their victims mixed with rum. Wherever they went the same ghastly tragedies took place. In one morning they murdered forty whites and mulattoes.
At length Tacky, the chief, was fortunately killed in the woods; some of the principal ringleaders were taken at the same time, but, as there was every appearance of a general insurrection breaking out in the various adjacent plantations, the authorities decided to make a few terrible examples of the most guilty.
However horrible the details are, one feels that no more blame can be attached to those who framed such sentences than to those officers in the Indian rebellion of 1858 who condemned Sepoys to be blown from the cannon. One of these Guinea slaves was condemned to be burnt, two others to be hung up in irons and left to perish. The former was compelled to sit upon the ground, his body being chained to an iron stake.
One wonders if he had such a thing as a nervous system at all, for he complacently looked on as the fire was first lighted at his feet, and without a groan saw his legs reduced to ashes, after which, says Bryan Edwards, “one of his arms getting loose he flung a brand from the fire into the face of the executioner.” The two which were hung up alive were indulged, at their own request, with a hearty meal just before being suspended on a gibbet which was put up in the parade of Kingston. From the time they were first placed there until the time they died, not a word of complaint did they utter, excepting to remark upon the chilliness of the night. All day long they amused themselves in talking to their brother Africans, who were permitted by the authorities, “very improperly to surround the gibbet. On the seventh day,” says Edwards, whose description is that of an eye-witness, “a notion prevailed amongst the spectators that one of them wished to communicate an important secret to his master, my dear relative, who, being in St Mary’s Parish, the commanding officer sent for me. I endeavoured by means of an interpreter to let him know I was present, but I could not understand what he said in return. I remember that both he and his fellow-sufferer laughed immoderately at something that occurred—I know not what. The next morning one of them silently expired, as did the other on the morning of the ninth day.”
In the Museum which is attached to the Institute and Library of Kingston a gruesome relic is exhibited. It represents an iron cage, and was unearthed some years ago in the parish of St Andrews. It encloses the bones of a woman, and is constructed so as to fit the human body with bands around the neck, breast, and loins; there are bars to confine the legs, and stirrups for the feet, which have sharp pikes to press into the soles of the occupant’s feet. There is a ring at the top of the structure to suspend it gibbet-wise. One can well understand the reluctance and the dread with which the sugar-planters regarded the passing of the Emancipation Bill.
To be overrun by a newly-liberated race of semi-savages was not an exhilarating thing to contemplate. Their standpoint was a very different one in all its bearings than that of the benevolent aristocrats in England, who discussed the measure at their ease, mutually congratulating themselves and the nation that at last they had obeyed the promptings of conscience.