And she hoped—for what? That perhaps at last she might find favour in some young buck's eyes, and so be able to talk to her sisters and her friends, and above all to her brothers, as if it were she who were conferring the favour and this young man had fallen a victim to her charms. When he came awooing in earnest he likely had, for the odds were heavy against her. Marriage was out of fashion. The young planter did not wish to marry. It was an age of so-called gallantry—of intrigue, and once the negro slaves were introduced, he formed connections with his own women slaves that gave him entire satisfaction.
How often I wonder did the girl take off the gown put on with such high hopes with a bitter sense of failure, a failure that might not ever be put into words, and all the bitterer for that. And the oftener she did it, and the fainter her hopes, the more dreary would be her feelings. Her own helplessness, her own uselessness, though she would not put it that way, made her hard on the luckless girl who waited on her, made her curtail her scanty liberty, beat her, or starve her ruthlessly.
But there were not always white women in a planter's household. Even now in Jamaica there is a proverb that says rudely that the two worst things on a pen are a goat and a white woman—that is what made these girls' chances so poor.
Of course I am describing extreme cases. There were girls who were wooed and won, as there were women, I expect, who never neglected their toilet even when they were alone. But considering the climate, it was not unnatural they should pass the day in a dressing-gown which has been described as a sort of nightgown wrapped round them. In all the world there are born slatterns, and I can easily imagine the women of those first settlers drifting into very easy-going ways. In my own household we two women wakened at dawn and stood on the porch in our nightgowns wondering what the new day would bring. A nightgown and loose hair and bare feet seemed the proper costume. It is not too cool when the fresh morning air plays around you, it is quite enough when the heat of the day is upon you. Jamaica calls for some loose and airy costume.
I have always been curious about the indentured white servants who were brought to the plantations in the West Indies and America to do the work of artisans and labourers, and I have been able to find little about them.
The first were evidently those Irish sent out by Cromwell. And after that beginning almost every ship brought its quota of servants, as they called them, in contradistinction to the slaves.
“Scarce a ship arrives,” says Lesley, “but has passengers who design to settle, and servants for sale. This is a constant supply and a necessary one,” meaning that they considered the white race must die out unless constantly renewed. Servants in those days were always aplenty. Sometimes these servants were convicts, sometimes they were only prisoners for debt, sometimes they were political prisoners, sometimes, I am afraid, they had been kidnapped, and sometimes like a well-known man, Sir William Morgan, they had sold themselves into slavery to get away from a life in England grown intolerable. That any men should have done so throws a sinister light on the life of many men in those times, for if the life of a negro slave was hard—and God knows it must have been—in no sense can it have approached the hardships of the lot of the white bondservant.
“Another ship brought in a multitude of half-starved creatures,” writes Lesley on another occasion, “that seemed like so many skeletons. Misery appeared in their looks, and one might read the effects of sea tyranny by their wild and dejected countenances. 'Tis horrid to relate the barbarities they complained of. A word or a wrong look was constru'd a design to Mutiny, and Hunger, Handcuffs and the Cat o' Nine Tails was immediately the punishment.” True, he adds, “'tis only aboard a few vessels such cruelties are practised.”
When they arrived, they were not landed at once; they must not leave the ship for at least ten days after she had entered the port. The master of the ship, merchant or importer of the white servants, had not the right to sell any before that time had elapsed under a penalty of £10 for every one so sold, and their keep was paid by the factor or seller. Why this was, I do not know. It might have been to give the most distant planters a chance to buy or it may have been in the interests of the servants themselves, so that any man who had been unlawfully smuggled aboard might have time in which to have his case investigated. Still, we may pity those poor bondsmen sweltering in their cramped quarters, but I suppose we may give the authorities credit for some little effort to do them justice.
Once they were landed their hard lot had begun, a path which often led straight to the grave.