“My mulatto housemaid,” says he, “is always called 'Miss Polly' by her fellow-servant Phillis.”
The last entry in the Worthy Park slave book with George Doubt as Superintendent—I feel as if I knew George Doubt—was on the 28th June 1791. Then apparently something happened, and Arthur M'Kenzie made his moan about the careless way in which the inventory was taken. When the returns for the last quarter 1791 are sent in to the Vestry there is quite a new departure. The “White People” are headed by Pose Price, Esq., and the Rev. John Venicomb bracketed together as having arrived on the 1st December, and we immediately imagine the son of the proprietor accompanied by his bear leader. But there is a still greater departure from the usual run of things on the 23rd of the same month when Edward Phelps and Sussannah Phelps are set down. So that the very last entry of white people in the book mentions a woman!
Was it all worth while? Even after I have read the whole very carefully. I am not in a position to judge. Only it seems to me the expenses were very great. Not only was there the upkeep of these people, but they were always buying new negroes and in addition to that quite a considerable sum was paid out to negroes hired—slave gangs—to do the jobs for which those on the estate had neither strength nor time.
Occasionally we get the returns. In January 1790 James Fraser, one of the six overseers, certifies that the crop returns are 248 hogsheads, that is 124 tons of sugar, and 85 puncheons of rum. Set that against the 510 tons of sugar and 301 puncheons of rum which Mr Fred Clarke gives me as the returns from the same estate in the year of our Lord 1920. Of course to compare exactly, I should have the wages returns of the present day, the cost of improved machinery and various other things, but looking at it from the point of view of an outsider it certainly looks as if it were not worth it.
Very, very slowly we move towards perfection, but we do move. Perhaps one hundred and thirty years hence, some writer will read of 1921 with as much wonder as I read in this old slave book of a day that is done.
CHAPTER VII—SLAVE REBELLIONS
Considering that every Great House was surrounded by hundreds of these alien dark people, most of them dumbly resentful of their condition, it is to me a little surprising that the white man ever brought out his wife and children to share his home. And yet he did sometimes. Of course, nothing is more certain than that we grow accustomed to a danger that is always threatening. There are people who take matches into powder factories and those who dwell on the slopes of Vesuvius and Etna. From the earliest days the Jamaicans had been used to forced labour, they were very sure they could not work the plantations without it, and that the slaves had to be broken in and guarded, came all in the day's work.
The first difficulty after the buying of the slaves was what they called the “seasoning.” The earlier settlers first used the word, but it came to be applied specially to the settling down of the slaves, though it seems to me simply to mean the survival of the fittest. A certain number of newly arrived slaves were sure to die. It was not the climate that killed them, but the breaking in of a free savage unaccustomed to work, at least not to work with the regularity, and at the times the white man expected of him. He was an exile, he was lonely, he was driven to this hated work with the whip, he could not understand what was said to him, he could not make his wants known, and soon realised it would avail him little if he did, and he pined and died.