That this was used fairly often there is no doubt. There is the testimony of Captain Frazer, accounted one of the most humane men in the trade. It had been said of him that he had held hot coals to the mouth of a recalcitrant slave to compel him to eat. He was questioned on this point but he denied it, and presently—I am telling the tale as the great abolitionist told it—the true story came out.
“Being sick in my cabin, I was informed that a man slave would neither eat, drink, nor speak. I desired the mate and surgeon to try and persuade him to speak. I desired that the slaves might try also. When I found he was still obstinate, not knowing whether it was from sulkiness or insanity, I ordered a person to present him with a piece of fire in one hand and a piece of yam in the other, and to tell me what effect this had upon him. I learned that he took the yam and began to eat it, but he threw the fire overboard.”
These were the tender mercies of the kind. Few slaves could expect so much consideration.
There was a slave ship once struck on Morant Keys, not far from the east end of Jamaica—again I get my information from Clarkson. The crew, taking care of their own skins, landed in their boats with arms and provisions, and with incredible brutality—save that nothing a slaver did would now strike me as incredible—left the slaves on board still in their irons. This was in the night; and when morning broke they saw that the slaves, who must have been capable men, had not only managed to get free, but were busy making rafts on which they placed the women and children, swimming themselves beside the rafts, and guiding them as they drifted towards the island whereon were the crew. They should have been hailed as heroes and helped, but the crew were afraid—whether rightly or wrongly I cannot say. Certainly you could hardly expect men who had been left heavily ironed to drown, to deal very tenderly with the men who had calmly acquiesced in their death. At any rate, the story goes the white men feared, not that the black men would attack them, but that they would consume the water and provisions that had been landed. They resolved to destroy them as they approached the shore, and they killed between three and four hundred; and out of the whole cargo only thirty-three were saved to be brought to Kingston and sold.
To me it is a strange thing that I cannot explain to myself, that our pity is more easily aroused by the story of one individual case than by the tale of suffering in the mass. It was an awful thing to leave those helpless people confined and shackled, and at the mercy of the winds and waves; it was still worse to shoot them down when by their own pluck and intrepidity they had succeeded in saving themselves. There were little children amongst them, and they too must have been shot down; they too must have raised despairing little hands to brutes who knew not the meaning of the word pity. But somehow even that, terrible as it is, pales before the conduct of a brutal slaver, the last I shall tell of the many brutalities of the Middle Passage. It was told in Parliament at the end of the eighteenth century, told probably reluctantly, for much of the evidence was dragged out of unwilling witnesses who feared for themselves. They were surgeons, or ships' officers, or seamen, and their livelihood depended upon their keeping in with captains and shipowners.
There was a baby of ten months old, a chubby little round-faced helpless thing. It “took sulk and would not eat,” Clarkson puts it. How should it eat when what it wanted was milk, and what it got was rice or pulse, poor baby. And that tiny child that brutal monster flogged with a “cat,” swearing he would make it eat or kill it. “From this and other ill-treatment,” says Clarkson, not specifying the ill-treatment, “the child's legs swelled. He then ordered some water to be made hot to abate the swelling. But even his tender mercies were cruel, for the cook, putting his hand in the water, said it was too hot. Upon this the captain swore at him, and ordered the feet to be put in. This was done. The nails and skin came off. Oiled cloths were then put round them.” And then, as if that were not enough, the child was tied to a heavy log, and apparently the brute who had charge of his destinies forgot all about it for a little while. It must have eaten something, perhaps its mother had a little, for the captain did not notice it for two or three days; then its pitiful crying, I suppose, called his attention to it, and he “caught it up again and repeated that he would make it eat or kill it. He immediately flogged it again, and in a quarter of an hour it died.”
Now I am aware that cases of individual cruelty may happen at any time in any place. But against that is the fact that this brutality was committed openly upon the deck of the slaver, the officers and crew saw it, and not one of them raised a hand to help a helpless baby who was being cruelly done to death. More—when the story came out nothing was done to the man who has left such a memorial behind him, and no one seemed surprised at this.
I apologise for this chapter, it is so full of horrors. But seeing the people who have made Jamaica their own, writing about them I am of necessity compelled to tell the whole story, for it seems to me they cannot be properly understood—their kindliness, their subserviency, their cheerfulness, even their insolence and their dishonesty—unless we examine the way in which their forbears first came to Jamaica.