CHAPTER V—THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
All up and down the roads of Jamaica tramp ceaselessly the dark people. In the towns now, I notice many of the men, when they have anything to carry, carry it in their hands, under their arms, or on their backs, but the women are not so progressive. I don't quite believe the yarn about the girl, who, having been sent to buy a postage stamp, put it on her head, with a stone to keep it in place, but, certainly, the women still adhere to the old African way of bearing a burden on their heads. From my verandah all day, and twenty times a day, I could see men arranging the load on their companion's head, and the woman accepting the help offered, and trotting along meekly behind the man, though he went empty-handed.
Men and women are in all shades, but mostly, of course, black, often with the woolly hair and thick coarse lips, that are considered typical of the negro. They are not. They are typical of men with low ideals. I have seen black men with faces as fine as the best Europeans, and I am sure that the features of a man's face are apt to be altered by his mode of life and his thoughts. Of course, it is his thoughts that do it, but his thoughts are produced by his environment. He is a wonderful man who is able to rise above the degrading environment forced upon him by circumstances. Up to the present the negro has been handicapped, and when I see a black man with a fine face, in my mind, I make him obeisance. He has come up a long way, far, far farther than his white prototype.
And his unwilling forebears were brought to Jamaica by the accursed Middle Passage.
It was so called because a ship went from England or America to the Guinea Coast, thence to the West Indies or wherever there was a market for slaves, which was seldom at her home port, and thence back empty to refit. Hence the Middle Passage, a term which, before I investigated the matter, always puzzled me.
The horrors of the Middle Passage were of no account to the men who did the trading. It was an uncomfortable job, as the Dutch Skipper Clause found, but there was money in it, men were not very tender even of each other in olden days, and they counted as little the pains suffered by the luckless people whom they held in bondage. Says Montesquieu, who was before his time, “Slavery is not good in itself. It is useful neither to the master nor the slave. Not to the slave because he can do nothing from virtuous motives. Not to the master, because he contracts among his slaves all sorts of bad habits, and accustoms himself to the neglect of all the moral virtues. He becomes haughty, passionate, obdurate, vindictive, voluptuous, and cruel.” He might have added that the men who made the slaves held a still worse position. Once we begin to investigate, we find that the captains of the slavers were almost invariably ruthlessly cruel.
Not quite all. There is mention made in the American Historical Record of David Lindsay, who in 1740 was trading on the Guinea Coast. Here is a letter written by one George Scott, who meeting Captain Lindsay at sea on the 13th June 1740, entrusts him with this letter and all his gold. He says he left Annamabu on the 8th May, and he had only reached 39.30° W. No wonder he reports that his voyage is miserable, and he has lost twenty-nine slaves out of a cargo of one hundred and twenty-nine. The surprising thing is that he can report that “the slaves we have now is all recovered.” The ships were tiny. David Lindsay, according to Spear, was in 1752 in command of the brigantine Sanderson, “a square stern'd vessel of the burthen of about 40 tons.” What a cockle shell! and he, too, writes from “Anamaboe, 28th February 1753.... The traid is so dull, it is actually a noof to make a man creasey.” He has been obliged to buy a cable, and he begs his owners “not to Blaim me in so doeing. I should be glad I cood come Rite home with my slaves, for my vesiel will not last to proceed farr. We can see daylight al round her bow under deck. However, I hope She will carry me safe home once more. I need not inlarge.” So he, too, lay outside the surf at Annamabu, he, too, walked on the bastion and discussed with the factors his chances. Oh, they were plucky men those first slavers, if they were brutes, but Lindsay I do not think was a brute. And on that last day of February 1753, there must have been quite a fleet of slavers. “Heare lyes Captains hamlet, James Jepson, Carpenter, Butler, & Lindsay. Gardner is dun.” “firginson,” he goes on with a pleasant disregard of the uses of capitals, “is Gon to Leward. All these is Rum ships.... I've sent a Small boy to my wife. I conclude with my best Endeavors for Intrust. Gentlemen, your faithful Servant at Comind, David Lindsay.