Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

We can sympathise with the man who felt that no torments were too great for savages such as these, and with others who were certain that a repetition of such atrocities must be guarded against at any cost.

And so by a law passed in the West Indies in 1722, “any Negro or other slave withdrawing himself from his master for the term of six months, or any slave who was absent and did not return within that time every such person should suffer death.”

And coming back, of course, he might suffer a good deal. So that the unfortunate slave was ever between the devil and the deep sea. But slowly as we read the records, we can see the status of first the coloured man, and then the black man improving. In the beginning these Africans who up till the Abolition of the Slave Trade could speak but little English, and always spoke to each other in their own tongues, were simply dumb beasts of burden, necessary for the improvement of the colony, even as a certain number of horses and cattle and other stock were necessary. Always they were treated as inferior beings, even when they were desperately feared. Gossipy Lady Nugent talks of them as one would an intelligent, rather lovable dog or horse, and spares a little pity for their hard lot.

“The mill is turned by water,” she writes about a visit to a sugar estate, “and the cane being put in on one side, comes out in a moment on the other, quite like dry pith, so rapidly is all the juice expressed, passing between two cylinders turning round the contrary ways. You then see the juice running through a great gutter, which conveys it to the boiling house. There are always four negroes stuffing in the canes, while others are employed continually in bringing in great bundles of them.... At each cauldron in the boiling house was a man with a large skimmer upon a long pole, constantly stirring the sugar and throwing it from one cauldron to another. The man at the last cauldron called out continually to those below attending the fire to throw on more trash, etc., for if the heat relaxes in the least, all the sugar in the cauldron is spoiled.... I asked the overseer how often his people were relieved. He said every twelve hours; but how dreadful to think of their standing twelve hours over a boiling cauldron, and doing the same thing.” (A woman before her time was Lady Nugent.) “And he owned to me that sometimes they did fall asleep and get their poor fingers into the mill; and he showed me a hatchet that was always ready to sever the whole limb, as the only means of saving the poor sufferer's life. I would not have a sugar estate for the whole world!”

This perhaps explains why in the slave books the slaves seem to be so often lame in a hand, or with only one hand. And yet there was no possibility of refusing the work. They must do it.

Lady Nugent pitied, Matthew Lewis tried to remedy, the evils. He was particularly kindly, and was hated by the planters as making dangerous innovations in the management of an estate, and allowing much more latitude than others were inclined to think wise. They probably said he had not to live in the island; he would go back to England and allow them to reap what he had sown. But he certainly reaped for a time himself; his overseers could get no work done, and on one occasion after his arrival the women refused to carry away the trash, “one of the easiest tasks that could be set. In consequence the mill was obliged to be stopped; and when the driver on that station insisted on their doing their duty, a little fierce young devil of a lass, Whaunica, flew at his throat and endeavoured to strangle him.”

And again we find him writing: “Another morning with the mill stopped, no liquor in the boiling house, and no work done.” The whole estate was suffering from a bad attack of what the negroes call “bad manners,” that is ingratitude, for if ever a man tried to help them, Lewis did.

“My agent declares,” he goes on, “that they never conducted so ill before; that they worked cheerfully and properly till my arrival, but now they think that I shall protect them against all punishment, and have made regularly ten hogsheads of sugar less than they did before my coming upon the estate.”

He appears to have been a man of means, and in that he was an exception. I am sure that nearly all the planters felt they needed every penny their estates would produce, many were already deeply dipped, and few and far between were those who could afford to try experiments in the cause of right. But Lewis persevered, and I am glad to think that in the end he was no loser, his negroes worked, and his estates did pay.

He actually on one occasion dismissed a bookkeeper for having ill-treated a negro, and took the evidence of four negroes against the denial of the accused—and this in a time when a negro's evidence was inadmissible!