Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

There is a story told by Bryan Edwards, to illustrate the superior pluck of the Koromantyns, but it also shows us the standing of a slave very well indeed:—

“A gentleman of my acquaintance who had purchased at the same time ten Koromantyn boys, and the like number of Eboes, the eldest of the whole apparently not more than thirteen years of age—caused them all to be collected and brought before him in my presence to be marked on the breast. This operation is performed by heating a small silver brand, composed of one or two letters, in the flame of spirits of wine, and applying it to the skin which is previously anointed with sweet oil. The application is instantaneous and the pain momentary.” So Mr Bryan Edwards but he was in no danger from a branding iron. “Nevertheless, it may be easily supposed that the apparatus must have a frightful appearance to a child. Accordingly, when the first boy, who happened to be one of the Eboes, and the stoutest of the whole, was led forward to receive the mark, he screamed dreadfully, while his companions of the same nation manifested strong emotions of sympathetic terror. The gentleman stopped his hand. But the Koromantyn boys, laughing aloud, and immediately coming forward of their own accord, offered their bosoms undauntedly to the brand, and receiving its impression without flinching in the least, snapped their fingers in exultation over the poor Eboes.”

The natives of Africa are often much worse marked than any small silver brand could mark them merely by way of ornament, and many a time do we see white men who have submitted to the more painful operation of tattooing merely for—well, when I'm put to it I really don't know why a white man allows himself to be tattooed.

You will find it said that the majority of people were good to their slaves, that it was their interest to be good to them. True, but unfortunately we have only to look round us to see how often nowadays a horse, or indeed any helpless creature dependent upon some careless man's good-will, is ill-used, even though ultimately that ill-usage means a loss to the owner. And so it was in Jamaica: a man did the best he could for his slaves, his favourites were pampered, but when it came to a pinch the slaves suffered. There was a terrible famine in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth century; England had decreed that there should be no trade with her revolted colonies, supplies were therefore more restricted than they need have been, and it is recorded that the slaves died by thousands. Again and again we are told how, even in normal times, the slave spent his midday rest hour either in the bush picking berries and wild fruits with which to supplement his scanty fare, or else in searching the rubbish heap at the planters' door for gnawed bones which were ground small and boiled down to get what sustenance there was in them. No one troubled about a slave; some men would get a reputation for ill-treating their slaves, but no one thought of interfering.

Besides, as I have remarked before, the pens and estates were so isolated. Anything might have happened to a slave on one of those estates, and it would have been long before rumour carried the tale to the next estate.

And there was another side of the picture, the side at which the planter looked, especially when he thought of bringing a wife to his lonely Great House set high on a hill-top or a jutting rock. He was surrounded by some hundreds of these alien people, dumbly resentful of their condition—he didn't put it like that—ill-conditioned ruffians he probably called them, and he never knew when the worst might not influence the rest. And they were armed with machetes and knives and hoes and spades, for purposes of agriculture certainly, but agricultural implements make excellent weapons of offence in the hands of a fierce Timini or Krobo warrior. “He travels the fastest who travels alone,” as Kipling sings, and many a man thanked God he had no wife or children.

He took to himself one of the dark women, and in later times there were the mulattoes and quadroons to be had for the choosing.

We can easily see why the presence of a white woman was resented upon an estate. If the owner chose to live with some brown or yellow girl he naturally objected to his underlings choosing a mode of life which would be a reproach to him, and if he brought out a wife all those who had no wives felt that Madam exercised an undue espionage over their mode of life.

“In my drive this morning met several of the unfortunate half black progeny of some of our staff,” writes Lady Nugent, “all in fine muslin lace, &c., with wreaths of flowers in their hats. What ruin for these worse than thoughtless, young men.” If she wrote thus, she probably did not refrain from comment at the time, and doubtless her comment was resented.

“Soon after my arrival,” writes Matthew Lewis, “I asked my attorney” (an attorney in Jamaica is the man who manages the estate for an absentee owner) “whether a clever-looking woman who seemed to have great authority in the house belonged to me.”