Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

And the end of these women? No one has ever told us of their end. I remember when I was in Sekondi a sad-faced mulatto woman with the remains—only the remains—of great beauty about her, though possibly she was barely thirty-five, and the nursing sister shook her head over Adjuah.

“She is going to die,” she said. “She does not care to live.” It appears she had lived with some white man who had been fond of her as he passed by, and she had given him her whole soul. Then came the inevitable, the time when he departed for Accra, and Adjuah was distracted. She could not believe he had left her for ever, and she, too, started along the coast for the distant town. Like many another loving woman she felt if he could only see her all would be well. But barely a day's journey along the coast came the great Prah river, and it passed her powers to cross it. She waited there for days, and then, reluctantly, all along the burning sands she crawled back wearily to the shelter of the woman she knew would care for her, and there she waited listlessly—to die. Is that what happened to these little girls flaunting it so proudly in their silken clothes? Indeed, worse things might happen to them. Possibly they were sold as slaves; most surely their children were, for it is said in Jamaica that every overseer and book-keeper took a mistress from among the slaves, a girl who came to him gladly for the betterment of her lot, but she knew and he knew that their children must be born into servitude, and the father, when the time came for him to go, left them as lightly as he would so many cattle.

Spear, in his book on the American slave trade, tells how, in the days when the trade was being suppressed, the British warship Medina, on boarding a slaver off the Gallinas River, found no slaves on board. “The officers learned afterwards, however, that her captain really had had a mulatto girl in the cabin. He kept her for some time after the cruiser appeared, but seeing that he was to be boarded, and knowing that the presence of one slave was enough to condemn the ship, he tied her to a kedge anchor and dropped her into the sea. And so, as is believed, he drowned his own unborn flesh and blood, as well as the slave girl.” Think of the state of public opinion when a whole crew could stand calmly by, or even give a hand to perpetrate such an atrocious deed. Is it any wonder that, on any land where was such slavery as this, there seems to have fallen a curse; less favoured lands have flourished, but gorgeous tropical countries, where vegetation runs riot, have not kept abreast in the race. Surely those unconscious little girls, unconscious of their own woes, sometimes the pampered slave, bound to be the out-cast slave in the end, have brought a curse upon them. It broods over Africa. It is here in Jamaica, it will take much wisdom and many many years to work it off.

Of course it was not only the women who suffered. Slavery was the custom of the time, and men and women alike were chattels. It was the pitiful pretence to place and power that makes us feel more keenly the case of these little girls who were wives and yet no wives, and gained honour for a brief season by being associated with the white men.

And in Annamabu came home to me clearly, the cargoes, the thrice-accursed cargoes these men had set their hearts upon, the cargoes that were the raison d'être of these heavily armed castles. In Phillips' day a really good negro might be bought on the Coast at a cost of about £4 for the most expensive, while he might be sold for about £19 in Jamaica or Barbadoes.

“I had two little negro boys presented to me here,” says he with a certain satisfaction, “by our honest factors, and two more at Cape Corso.” Nobody considered the feelings of the boys torn from their homes. And well might he be pleased, for these presumably were his private property, and not to be accounted among the cargo. When Ansumanah, my own serving boy, sat in the shade at the bottom of the flight of stairs that led up to the bastion, I remembered Phillips' two little boys who had attended their master here. The stone steps are worn, worn in the years by the passing of many unshod feet, sad and glad and hopeful and despairing, but what had the little boys that Phillips was taking to the Indies to hope for?

Exactly at Annamabu he did not gather his slaves, but a little farther along the Coast. Here he took on board 180 chests of corn with which to feed them. The little squat ship having laid in her provisions, went slowly along the coast, and in the daylight the people came off in their canoes, and at night they lighted fires along the shore as a sign they had something to trade, and their trade goods were always the same, gold, elephants' teeth, that is, ivory, or men, and generally they required the captain to come down over the side of his ship and drop three drops of sea water in his eye as a pledge of friendship and of safety for them to come aboard, “which” says Phillips, “I very readily consented to and performed in hopes of a good market.”

Sometimes he got ivory, but his ship was a slaver, slaves she was looking for and slaves she would get, for might was right and wars were perpetually waged—by the black men be it understood—in order that there might be plenty of the commodity. The commodity, being flesh and blood, suffered.

“The master of her brought in three women and four children to sell,” he remarks casually of a canoe that hailed him from the shore, “but he asked very dear for them and they were almost dead from want of victuals, looking like mere skeletons and so weak they could not stand, so that they were not worth buying. He promised to procure us two or three hundred slaves if we would anchor and come ashore and stay two or three days, but, judging what the others might be by the sample he brought us, and being loth to venture ashore upon his bare word, where we did not use to trade and had no factory, we sent him away and resumed our voyage.” He has left us a very graphic account of the manner in which he and the captain of the East Indian Merchant bought their wares. The slaves were evidently got in small parcels, secured in the factories and shipped off on calm days, for the surf of the Guinea Coast would not always allow of a landing. Where they kept them at Annamabu or in the dominant factory at Koromantyn, I do not know, probably in the court-yard or in the dark dungeons, dark and hot and airless that surrounded it, and the reek of them must have gone up to heaven, calling down a curse upon those captors who were apparently so unconscious of wrongdoing. At Whidah, to which Phillips traded from Annamabu, it is not very far away, there was only a small factory, and the local chief or “king” collected the slaves for sale and kept them in a “trunk,” which Phillips and the captain of the East Indian Merchant, attended by their respective doctors and pursers, visited daily to make their purchases.

The purser's business was to pay for the goods I suppose, and the surgeon he considers absolutely necessary.