The gentleman was as black as a boot; but I suppose he had a drop of white blood somewhere in his ancestry. We took him on that valuation. He brought us through the streets of white houses with green shutters, where noisy crews of black men were haling sugar-barrels as big as cottages down to the wharves, and out into the sugar-cane plantations. We walked along the narrow lanes, cut through the green groves, and on either side the slaves were hard at work in the fainting heat, the men extinguished beneath wide, shallow hats as big as a cart-wheel, with a little red button in the centre; the women clad in blue stuff, with gaudy handkerchiefs bound about their heads.
Here were Christian serfs as well as heathen: white men brought from England and sold like any black stuff from the Guinea coast, sweating under the eye and the whip of the overseer.
“It’s a crime and a disgrace,” said Pomfrett, whose simple soul was quickly aroused to indignation. “How can they bear it? Why don’t they mutiny? Why don’t they kill the planter? Why don’t they kill themselves? And what sort of persons are these planters, to make slaves of white men?”
“The same sort of persons as the citizens at home, who make slaves of black men,” I said. “The same as your respected relative, Mrs A., for example.”
“Not at all—not in the least,” cried the ardent Pomfrett. “The blacks are born to it. They’re never so happy as when they’re slaves.”
“Cap’n Morgan, he was slave on plantation,” put in the negro, cheerfully. “Then he buccaneer. Afterwards he Governor Jamaica.”
“And afterwards he died in prison,” said Pomfrett.
“Po’ man,” said the black. “Massa Murch, he one of Morgan’s men,” he added.
We were naturally eager, upon this information, to see one who had sailed under that renowned admiral of the old buccaneers; who had taken part, very likely, in the sack of Panama, and seen the cities of Maracaibo and Gibraltar put to ransom in the teeth of the whole Spanish fleet.
“Morgan was a Bristol man, too,” says Pomfrett. “That’s a coincidence. But Murch must be an oldish man; it’s over thirty years since Morgan took to honest courses. I wonder how Dawkins came to know him.”