CHAPTER XXVI. JAMAICA.
Jamaica, the chief of the British West India Islands, was discovered by Columbus on his second voyage, in May, 1494, and was taken from Spain by the English in May, 1655, during the reign of Oliver Cromwell. It thus became an appendage to the British crown, after it had been in the possession of Spain for one hundred and forty-six years. The number of slaves on the Island at this time was about fifteen hundred.
Morgan, a notorious pirate and buccaneer, was knighted and made governor of the Island in 1670. Lord Vaughan succeeded Morgan, and under his administration the African Company was formed, and the slave-trade legalized; Africans were imported in large numbers, and the development of the natural resources of Jamaica greatly increased the wealth of the planters.
The number of slaves annually imported into the Island amounted to sixteen thousand,[42] so that within thirty years the slave population had increased from ninety-nine thousand to upwards of two hundred thousand, whilst the total numerical strength of the whites did not exceed sixteen thousand.
From this time down to the year 1832, it presented a succession of wars, usurpations, crimes, misery, and vice; nor in this desert of human wretchedness is there one green spot on which the mind of a philanthropist would love to dwell; all is one revolting scene of infamy, bloodshed, and unmitigated woe; of insecure peace and open disturbance; of the abuse of power, and of the reaction of misery against oppression. In 1832 an insurrection of the slaves occurred, by which the lives of seven hundred slaves were sacrificed, and an expense, including property destroyed, of one hundred and sixty-two thousand pounds sterling.
The total importation of slaves from the conquest of the Island by the English to 1805, amounted to eight hundred and fifty thousand, and this added to forty thousand brought by the Spaniards, made an aggregate of eight hundred and ninety thousand, exclusive of all births, in three hundred years. The influence which the system of slavery spread over the community in Jamaica and the rest of the British West Indies, was not less demoralizing than in Hayti and the other islands.
Crimes which in European countries would have been considered and treated as a wanton insult to society at large, did not exclude the parties from the pale of respectable society, or generally operate to their disadvantage among the female portion of the community.
The reckless destroyers of female innocence and happiness united in the dance, mingled in public entertainments, and were admitted at the social board, and were on terms of intimacy with the younger branches of families.[43]
The intermediate colors between the whites[44] and pure blacks, were denominated as follows: A Sambo is the offspring of a mulatto woman by a black man; a mulatto is the child of a black woman and white man; a quadroon is the offspring of a mulatto by a white man, and a mestee is that of a quadroon woman by a white man. The offspring of a female mestee by a white man being above the third in lineal descent from the Negro ancestor, was white, in the estimation of the law, and enjoyed all the privileges and immunities of Her Majesty’s white subjects; but all the rest, whether mulattoes, quadroons, or mestees, were considered by the law as mulattoes or persons of color.