In the “Dry Store” they had all sorts of things. Notice Posts, though considering not half a dozen people on the estate could read, I wonder what they wanted notice posts for. They had “Shovels and Broad Axes, Bullet Moulds, Old Bayonets, Negro Hatts and Iron Crows.” The Herring Store did not contain herrings, at least when the inventory was taken, but had four large empty oil jars, half a barrel of turpentine, alum, roach alum, whatever that may be, and lamp-black. These do not seem to be exactly in their right place in the herring store, but Thomas Kitson examined the inventory and found it correct.
They did use a great many barrels of herrings, for the Betsey, Captain Laurie from London, and the Diana, Captain Thomas Seaward from Cork, brought out their stores, Osnaburg and baize and “Negro hatts” and check from London, and salt beef and pork and herrings, to say nothing of tallow and candles and soap from Cork. That they should need to bring fish to an island where the sea teems with it, and beef and pork to a place where the cattle and swine would run wild and multiply in the woods if they were left to themselves, is a curious commentary on the wasteful fashion in which the country was managed.
Again and again it is entered that the herrings served out were bad or “mash'd,” but I am afraid the slaves got them all the same. Possibly they did not consider that bad herrings constituted cruelty to a slave. The pork and beef were for the white men, and a great deal of the unappetising stuff they seem to have eaten. In one year the Diana brought out 15 barrels of beef and 70 barrels of herrings, 4 firkins of butter and 6 kegs of tallow; yet they bought 2 1/2 barrels of beef from Kingston, 2 kegs of tallow and 5 firkins of butter. That they should have bought in the same year a cask and two-thirds of a tierce of codfish, and 4 barrels of American herrings is not so surprising considering the disparity between the negroes and the white men who at most numbered seven. In three months they served out to the slaves 20 barrels of herrings.
There is an echo of the famine that struck the island in 1786 when 15,000 slaves died of starvation, for in 1790 they bought for the use of the slaves 11,800 lbs. of cocos, that is a root not unlike a yam, 1400 lbs. of yams, and 500 plantains, which last, I suppose, were stems of plantains, as 500 plantains would not have gone far. Worthy Park had a “mountain” like many other estates, for often the cattle are entered as having died of “Poverty and Meagreness on the mountain,” or as falling into the sink hole on the “mountain,” and presumably the slaves had grounds there where they grew provisions, but as in famines of a later date, the yams failed, and there were no heads to plant for the new crop which may possibly account for the large number of cocos bought.
Once a year the negroes were served out “cloath-ing.” An ordinary man or woman got 6 yards of Osnaburg, 3 yards of baize, and 1 “hatt,” but the principal men and women got a little more. Lucretia serving at the Great House once got 12 yards of Osnaburg, and most of the tradesmen, the carpenters and the sawyers and blacksmiths, got 10 yards and sometimes 6 yards of check as well.
“The negro women,” says Lesley, writing as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, “go many of them quite naked. They do not know what shame is, and are surprised at an European's bashfulness, who perhaps turns his head aside at the sight.... Their Masters give them a kind of petticoat, but they do not care to wear it. In the towns they are obliged to do it, and some of them there go neat enough; but these are the favourites of young Squires who keep them for a certain use.”
They must have been a forlorn and ragged crew of savages the book-keepers saw out into the fields every morning at daybreak. They evidently made them work in the hot and glaring sunshine, holeing for canes, cutting canes, and carting manure on their heads, this last a job much hated, and the whites never remembered, if they ever knew, that no black man or woman works of his own free will in the glare of the tropical sun. On the Gold Coast I have heard the people going out into the fields long before daylight, but I have never seen men or women working hard during the midday hours. This is only common sense, and possibly much of the sickness that decimated the slaves was due to this cause. There is a record of one humanitarian who discovered that it would be well to provide nurses for the infants. Every woman had to go back to field work a fortnight after her baby was born. She must needs take the child, and so great was the heat that sometimes the mother when she had time to attend to it found that the little one on her back was dead!
And yet these slave-owners desired children very much and they deplored the deaths as so much money gone from their pockets, just as man now-a-days regrets when his calf or his foal dies. They grumble very much because the slaves do not increase as they think they ought. They gave no thought to morals, and anybody might father a woman's child. But considering all things I think they grumbled unreasonably. No wild animals increase rapidly in captivity, but in five years there were forty children born on Worthy Park, that is nearly 23 per thousand—not so very bad considering that the rate for London in the year 1919 among a free people was 24.8. But this was discounted by the number of deaths in infancy. Matthew Lewis tells of the ravages of tetanus among the newly born on his estate in the beginning of the last century, and neither he nor any one else had an idea of the cause or how it might be prevented.
The midwife, the “Garundee,” told him that till after the ninth day they had no hope of the newborn babies. It was, had she but known it, a sad commentary on her own want of cleanliness.
The children of the white men had perhaps a better chance of being reared than those of the slaves, because the women who lived with them had an easier time. Their children were slaves like the others, but it was the custom not to put them to field work; the boys they made artisans and the girls were trained as house-servants, and Lewis says the other slaves paid them a certain deference, always honouring the girls with the title of “Miss.”