The planters, when they were able, visited the ships to see the new importations and decide for which they should bid at the coming sale, but in later times the slaves were taken straight to the vendue master and sold in the public slave market. There used to be a large slave market at Montego Bay, quite close to the water, so that the merchandise might be rowed ashore, and the gentlemen from Success and Contentment and Retrieve, from Iron Shore and Retirement and True Friendship—thus they name plantations in Jamaica—came crowding to fill up the gaps in their hands, to buy Madam a serving wench, or young master a boy to wait upon him.
They stood there in rows, naked savages, men and women with clean cloths round their loins, and boys and girls stark. Their shackles had generally been struck off because a quiet and peaceable slave was more valued than one who had to be kept in restraint. There were shade trees growing round the marketplace, and the sun flickered down through their leaves and made patterns on the shapely dark bodies, and the buyers examined them exactly as they would have examined a horse or a cow they wanted to buy.
The buyers had certain preferences. In spite of an evil reputation, “the Koromantyns,” says Bryan Edwards, “are distinguished from all others by firmness both of body and mind, a ferociousness of disposition; but withal, activity, courage, and stubbornness,” and this, while it made them dangerous, made them good labourers. The Papams or Whidahs, those who came from the coasts between Accra and all along by Keta and Togoland and Dahomey, “are accounted most docile.” The Eboes from Calabar and the swamps round the mouths of the Niger “were valued the least, being feeble, timid, despairing creatures, who not infrequently used to commit suicide in their dejection,” which perhaps was not surprising if they could not work and knew what they had to expect if they did not.
The people from the Gaboon country, at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea, were said to be invariably ill-disposed, and lastly, those from the Congo and farther south from the coasts of Angola, though counted less robust than the other negroes, were more handy as mechanics, and more trustworthy. So the gentlemen, crowding to the sales, had some idea of the quality of the goods they had come to buy.
The value of a slave increased as the years went on. In 1689, I believe, a slave could be bought for £7, but of course £7 was a great deal more money then than it is now. Then a good negro rose to £20. In 1750 a planter writes, “Bought ten negroes at £50 each”—which, Edwards says, was the common price in 1791; boys and girls cost from £40 to £45, while an infant was worth £5. After that they rose in value rapidly, and before Edwards had finished his history in his estimate of the expenses of a sugar plantation, he values the negroes at £70 apiece; while in 1832, just before the Emancipation, when the planters expected compensation for the loss of their labour, the value of a slave sometimes rose as high as £110 per man.
Because of the perquisites of the officers, only the healthy slaves were offered for sale at first, but the sick, injured, and weakly were by no means wasted. Indeed, even in those hard-bitten times, the disposal of the sickly slaves was often considered a scandal. They were generally bought up by speculators who sometimes tended them, sometimes did not, simply made what they could out of them. If the lot of the healthy slaves was hard, that of the newly arrived and sickly was terrible, till death released them from their sufferings. And in every ship we may be sure there were sick.
I do not find any record of slave risings on the arrival of the ships. It seems as if the black men, dazed and frightened, unaccustomed to their new surroundings, submitted quietly enough. It was not until they were on the estates, had time to look round them, had hoes and knives and machetes put into their hands, that they realised the comparative weakness of the whites, and the chance they had of freedom. They might be met any day, a band of stalwart black savages clad only in loin cloths, the women, apart with their babies seated on their hips, leading older children by the hand, marching along the white roads, clambering up the steep mountain paths to the estate that was to be their destination, with a white man on horseback following slowly, and one, or two, or three black drivers, according to the number of the new slaves, with whips, old slaves who could be trusted, marshalling them. Sometimes they sang, and always they went better to some sort of music, but I do not think they were often very rebellious. The first bitterness of the enslavement had passed. Here was solid ground beneath their feet again, a companion they were accustomed to, beside them, pleasant sunshine and a cooling breeze, and it might be worth their while to see what the future held for them.
Arrived at the estate, the newcomers were very often handed over individually to some slave accustomed to the plantation, who showed them the ropes, and possibly heard tales of the country from which he had been torn long ago.
They were practically dumb these first comers. They did not understand the language; even the old hands only grasped the words of command, and though they thoroughly understood the uses to which a knife might be put, a hoe they would certainly regard as a woman's implement.
Of course their masters took no heed of that, any more than they considered the slave's feelings when they made over a fierce Ashanti or Mendi warrior to a mild Joloff, or gave a Mandingo from the north, who was likely to be a Mohammedan and might even be able to read and write Arabic, into the charge of an Eboe, who was a savage pure and simple, and probably remained a savage after years of plantation labour. To do them justice, I expect these gentlemen from Amity, or Rose Hall, or Good Hope, had about as much idea of the map of Africa as I have of the contour of the Antarctic Continent—less very likely; and that these people were separated as widely by the countries of their birth as they themselves were from England, never occurred to them. I don't suppose they would have bothered if it had. But certain differences were forced upon them. And for the proper working of their plantations, they must needs take note of those differences. As a rule, they were not intentionally cruel, but they regarded the slaves as chattels.