“I spent,” says that intelligent witness, “the beginning of this year in Cuba, with a view of ascertaining the preparations which were being made in that island to meet the opening of our markets. To an Englishman coming up from Grenada and Jamaica, the contrast between the paralysed and decayed aspect of the trade of those colonies, and the spirit and activity which your measures had infused into that of the Havannah, was most disheartening.
“The town was illuminated when I landed, in consequence of the news of high prices from England. Three splendid trains of De Rosne’s machinery, costing 40,000 dollars each, had just arrived from France, and were in process of erection; steam-engines and engineers were coming over daily from America; new estates were forming; coffee plantations were being broken up; and their feeble gangs of old people and children, who had hitherto been selected for that light work, were formed into task-gangs, and hired out by the month to the new ingenios, then in full drive.
“It was crop time: the mills went round night and day. On every estate (I scarcely hope to be believed when I state the fact) every slave was worked under the whip eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and, in the boiling houses, from five to six p.m., and from eleven o’clock to midnight, when half the people were concluding their eighteen hours work, the sound of the hellish lash was incessant; indeed, it was necessary to keep the overtasked wretches awake.
“The six hours during which they rested they spent locked in a barracoon,—a strong, foul, close sty, where they wallowed without distinction of age or sex.
“There was no marrying amongst the slaves on the plantations; breeding was discouraged; it was cheaper and less troublesome to buy than to breed. On many estates females were entirely excluded; but an intelligent American planter told me he disapproved of that system; that the men drooped under it; and that he had found the most beneficial effects from the judicious admixture of a proportion of one ‘lively wench’ to five males in a gang of which he had had charge. Religious instruction and medical aid were not carried out generally beyond baptism and vaccination.
“Whilst at work the slaves were stimulated by drivers, armed with swords and whips, and protected by magnificent bloodhounds.”
Gentlemen who clamoured for emancipation, in this way is the sugar which you are daily consuming made! You would not have it when produced by slaves in your own colonies, and under the humane protection of your own overruling laws; you are content to take it now—at the instigation of Mr Cobden and his confederates, without the slightest scruple or remorse for having ruined thousands of your countrymen—because you can have it cheaper through the sweat and the life-blood of the slave! Is this morality? Is it justice? Is it even—to descend to lower motives—wisdom? Can you not see before you the time when, after the West Indian colonies are abandoned, a gigantic monopoly will accrue to the slave-growing states, and the sugar, for the paltry saving on which article all has been sacrificed, again become as dear, possibly much dearer than before? Recollect it is not an article like wheat, or any common species of food, which can be reared upon every soil. There is but one region of the earth in which it can be grown, and even there it cannot be grown profitably, except through a large expenditure of capital, and by means of an almost limitless command of labour. Cuba and Brazil have both. Our colonies had both in sufficiency, until, by cutting off the one, you almost annihilated the other. Go one step further, or rather continue in the course you have begun a very little longer, and the capital of the West Indian colonies will be wholly and irretrievably dissipated. Irretrievably—for, after what has passed, it is in vain to think that any British subject will again embark his capital in such a trade, with no better security than that of our fiscal laws, fluctuating every year under the influence of short-sighted agitation, and regulated by men whose sole intelligible principle is the continued possession of power. Once let our colonies be annihilated—their capital of nearly two hundred millions be swallowed up, principal and interest—their market, which took from us annually three millions and a half of British manufactures, closed—and the inevitable result will be a monopoly of sugar to the slave-growing states, high prices, and in all probability, which the bullionists ought to consider, a perpetual drain of gold.
We have quoted only a fraction of the evidence of Jacob Omnium with regard to the present aspect of affairs in Cuba. Much there is of painful and even sickening detail as to the treatment of the slaves, in order that an augmented supply may be thrown in upon our now unscrupulous market, for which we must refer our readers, if they wish to peruse it, to the pamphlet itself. But lest it should be thought that such testimony merely applies to the condition of the unhappy slaves at present in Cuba, we shall go further, and show that the late measure of the Whig Government has given a tenfold additional impetus to the slave trade; and that all our efforts to restrain it—efforts which, at the smallest calculation, cost this country annually a sum of half a million—are, as they must be under such circumstances, wholly futile and unavailing.
“In February last,” says the author of the above letter, “the market value of field negroes had risen from 300 to 500 dollars—a price which would speedily bring a supply from the coast. The accounts thence of the number of vessels captured, and of the still greater number seen and heard of, but not captured by our cruisers, bear ready witness to the stimulus which you have afforded to that accursed trade. It is only during the last year that we hear of steam-slavers, carrying nine hundred and fifty slaves, dipping their flag in derision to our men of war.”
The list of the slave captures between October 1846 and April 1847 amounts to no less than twenty-four vessels, from which between two and three thousand slaves were taken. This hideous amount of living cargo was crowded into five vessels, the other nineteen having been captured empty. This, however, is understood to be a mere fraction of the whole amount, and that the recent seizures have been much more numerous. One of our ships, the Ferret, is said to have taken no less than six slave vessels since she has been upon the coast.