“This morning a little brown girl made her appearance with an orange bough to flap away the flies.”
It had been impressed upon him that he courted death if he drank orangeade, if he walked in the morning after ten or went out in the cool of the evening, “be exposed to the dews after sundown” they put it. But he dares to write: “The air too was delicious, the fragrance of the sweetwood and other scented trees, but above all of the delicious logwood of which most of the fences in Westmoreland are made, composed an atmosphere such that if Satan after promising them a buxom air embalmed with odours, had transported Sin and Death thither the charming people must acknowledge their papa's promise fulfilled.” It reads quaintly now. Sin—sin is so much a matter of the standard we set up. If the slave had copied the planter, no master would have considered him anything but a very sinful slave; and death—death is often very, very kindly.
Lewis enquires into the condition of the people. His attorney had written to him regularly of the care he expended on the negroes, but he had been away much of his time managing other estates, and had delegated his authority to an overseer who treated the people so harshly that at last they left the estate in a body and threw themselves on the protection of the magistrate at Savanna-la-Mar, “and if I had not come myself to Jamaica, in all probability I should never have had the most distant idea how abominably the poor creatures had been ill-used.”
Now this marks a distinct advance since the times when the savages, speaking a jargon no one cared to understand, were driven to work with a whip.
Lewis, to the intense surprise of his compeers, objected to the use of the whip.
“I am, indeed, assured by everyone about me, that to manage a West Indian estate without the occasional use of a cart whip, however rarely, is impossible; and they insist upon it that it is absurd in me to call my slaves ill-treated, because when they act grossly wrong they are treated like English soldiers and sailors. All this may be very true; but there is something to me so shocking in the idea of this execrable cart whip that I have positively forbidden the use of it on Cornwall; and if the estate must go to rack and ruin without it, to rack and ruin the estate must go.”
But, of course, all men were not as broadminded as Lewis. Bridges, who wrote twelve years later, could never mention a negro without adding some disparaging adjective, “the vigilance which African perfidy requires.”
“Experience proves that a strange uniformity of barbarism pervades them all; and that the only difference lies in the degrees of the same base qualities which mark the negro race throughout.”
“The salutary measures were of little avail in winning over by indulgence, or restraining by terror the impracticable savages of Africa.” Such are a few of the gems dispersed through his work. He could see no good in a black man, except that his thews and sinews were necessary to the development of the country, and he grudged them even that measure of praise.
In the ten years between 1752 and 1762, 71,115 negroes arrived in the island, “forced upon Jamaica by British merchants and English laws,” says he, though when England wanted to stop this inflow and to prohibit the slave trade, the Jamaican planters objected very strongly. They wanted these unwilling colonists. But since the majority of them were men, young, strong and lusty, and the Europeans were but a handful, it was necessary they should be ruled with a rod of iron. Bridges probably was right when he says that any relaxation was promptly attributed to fear. They had to be governed by fear and the people who are governed by fear, are crushed, broken, destroyed. How thoroughly destroyed we may see by reading statistics of the increase among the slaves, once the importation from Africa had ceased.