In the eighteenth century there were at least nineteen terrible disturbances, sometimes called rebellions, sometimes conspiracies, to murder the whites, and in the thirty-two years of the nineteenth century that elapsed before the apprenticeship system that heralded the freeing of the slave was introduced, there were no less than six rebellions, conspiracies and mutinies, to say nothing of the isolated murders that must have been done and were not worth recording as history.
Not only were these rebellions sanguinary but they were expensive. The cost of putting down the last in 1832 was £161,596, without taking into account the damage sustained by property and the loss to the community of the lives sacrificed. If the black man suffered, white Jamaica too paid very heavily indeed for her slaves.
The Great Rebellion that was long remembered in Jamaica was the rebellion of 1760, and it broke out in St Mary's Parish on the Frontier Plantation belonging to a man named Ballard Beckford. The adjoining estate was Trinity, belonging to Zachary Bayley, the maternal uncle of Bryan Edwards the historian, but in his book we only get a tantalising account that sets us longing for more details.
Of the leaders, “their barbarous names,” says Bridges, forgetting that the white man had probably supplied those names, “were Tacky and Jamaica,” and Tacky was a man who had been a chief in “Guiney.” That, though Edwards did not know it, meant that he had been accustomed to a certain amount of savage grandeur; had been dressed in silk of bright colours, and wore a necklace of gold and anklets and armlets of the same metal. On his fingers and bare black toes had been rings of rough nuggets. He had been wont to ride in a hammock, as King George rides in his State coach, and with an umbrella carried by slaves high over his head; to the great discomfort of the slaves, but it had marked his high estate. He would move to the accompaniment of barbaric music and on great feast days, such as that of his accession, his “stool,” the symbol of his power, really a carved wooden seat, was literally drenched in the blood of many unfortunate men and women. I remember passing through an Ashanti town on the day of the Coronation of our present King. There was a great feast and all the minor chiefs for miles round had come in to celebrate and all the stools were soaked in blood—sheep's blood.
“Not long ago,” said the great chief, “it would have been men's.”
“Oh!” said the young doctor who was with me, “sheep's is better.”
“Perhaps,” said the African potentate doubtfully, and it was clear he was thinking regretfully of the days when there really would have been something like a decent sacrifice.
In Tacky's days, too, when the chief died, a great pit would be dug, his bier lowered into it and round it would be seated a large number of his harem who would accompany their lord and master as attendants to the shades, and lucky indeed might they count themselves if they had their throats cut first and were not buried alive.
Even so late as 1908 in Tarkwa I remember a chief—not a great one—dying, and at the same time there came to the District Commissioner a woman complaining that her adopted daughter, an euphemism for a household slave, had disappeared. And the District Commissioner said he was certain, though he could not prove it, that the girl had been stolen and sacrificed that the soul of the chief might not go unaccompanied on his last journey, as that troublesome British Government had set its face against the sacrifice of wives.
Clearly Tacky could not have objected to slavery as an institution, he only objected to it as applied to himself. And he was accustomed to bloodshed.