Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

There was always a shoal of buyers. Roystering Cavaliers and prim Roundheads crowded down to the ship and the servants passed before them and were examined, men and women, as if they had been so many horses or cattle. It must have been a bitter pill for the gentlemen of Monmouth's following, fallen from their high estate and passed from hand to hand by these men whom once they would have regarded as far below them, only fit to sit at table with their servants, and bitterer still must it have been for the women. And though there was competition for them you might buy a good artisan for £40, an ordinary labourer for £20, and I am afraid the higher rank a man had held in England the lower would be his value in Jamaica, at least before negro slaves became numerous.

Every servant had to serve according to contract, if there was no contract, for four years, but if he was under eighteen he had to serve seven years, and convicted felons, of course, for the time of their banishment. Fancy buying the services of a good carpenter for £10 a year and his keep! It must have been cheap even when money was worth so much more.

All authorities agree that these bondservants were cruelly ill-used. It was generally understood that while a man looked after his black slave, who was his for life, it was to his interest to get as much as he could out of his bondservant whose services were his only for a limited period. Thus it was that they were worked very hard indeed, so hard that often in sheer self-defence when the end of his time was approaching, a man would prevail upon his master to re-sell him for a further term of years to some other man. And often the servant died before the years were passed. I have found no record of what a woman brought, but I expect that Madam often commissioned her husband to bring her a quiet, middle-aged woman, not too good looking—though she probably didn't put it quite in those words—to tend the children and do the sewing. And the younger men, I expect, looked at the girls and suggested the propriety of a new waiting-maid to their fathers, or possibly, if they had houses of their own, bought them themselves. Oh, I can see bitter depths of degradation that lay in wait for some of those younger bondwomen.

One might think, considering how valuable was the worker, it would have been easy to escape and work as a free labourer. But the authorities had provided for that. At the expiration of his time his master had to give the servant £2 and a certificate of freedom, and whoever employed any free person without a certificate from the last employer forfeited £10. Who then would take any risk when for so little more he could have a servant of right?

Each servant was to receive yearly three shirts, three pairs of drawers, three pairs of shoes, three pairs of stockings, and one hat or cap, little enough in a climate like Jamaica where the need is for plenty of clothes, washed often. The women were supplied proportionately. As a matter of fact the men often had no shoes, and were dressed, says Lesley, in a speckled shirt, a coarse Osnaburg frock (Osnaburg seems to have been a coarse sort of linen, something, I take it, like the dowlas of which we make kitchen towels), buttoned at the neck and wrists, and long trousers of the same, and they had bare feet unless they could contrive sandals. The women wore generally a striped Holland gown with a plain cloth wrapped about their heads, such as every negro maid wears nowadays.

There were regulations for their feeding too. By these, each servant was to have 4 lbs. of good flesh or good fish weekly, and such convenient plantation provisions as might be sufficient. Most plantations had a “mountain” attached where the slaves grew their provisions, the cattle were turned out to recruit, and hogs were raised, and in a country like Jamaica there should have been no difficulty in supplying plenty of meat. But practically, I am afraid, it was not often supplied, and the 4 lbs. of good flesh became Irish salt beef, which was admittedly very coarse, and as it had often been months on the way, was probably a great deal nastier than it sounds.

The poor bondsman found himself hemmed in by all manner of regulations. No one could trade with a servant—or slave for that matter—without the consent of the master on penalty of forfeiting treble the value of the thing traded and £10 in addition. Human nature was frail, and if a freeman got a woman servant with child he had to pay £20 for the maintenance of the woman and child or serve the master double the time the woman was to serve. If he married her though, lucky woman, after he had paid that £20 she was free; if they married without the master's consent the man had to serve two years.

True, he had some privileges this luckless bondservant. He could not be whipped on the naked back without the order of a justice of the peace under a penalty of £5; less, you see, than a man had to pay for trading with him without the consent of his master. And sometimes, of course, he was a favourite; Lesley says he has known servants to dine “on the same victuals as their master, wear as good clothes, be allowed a horse and a negro boy to attend them.” But to me this only emphasises how much the unfortunate servant was dependent for his comfort, his happiness, his success in life, not upon his worth but upon the caprice of the fine gentleman who was his master. If he were “stupid or roguish” he was hardly used, often put in the stocks and beaten severely, and he got nothing to eat but the salt provisions and the ground food the law insisted he should have, and at the end of his four years naturally, if his master would not give him a character, nobody could be found to employ him. His lot was worse than that of the black slave, whom custom and public opinion decreed should not be cast off in his old age whatever his record.

How low was the status of a bond-servant is told by a chance remark of Lesley's, who says that Sir Henry Morgan was at first only a servant to a planter in Barbadoes, and “though that state of life be the meanest and most disgraceful, yet he caused to be painted round his portrait a chain and pothooks, that marked the punishment to which he was like to be subjected in those days.”

That little story made me change my opinion of Sir Henry Morgan. He climbed by piracy, and then he put down piracy with a high hand, hanging the less fortunate of his fellows. But since he was not too proud to be reminded of the lowly position from which he had sprung, there must have been reason in what he did.