The Sugar Islands (20 page)

No new European colonists came out; one by one the colonists of purely European descent went home, and for those who remained the social line between those that were of pure European descent and those that had intermarried with Creoles of African extraction grew more and more difficult to draw. By the eighteen-forties the fourth period had begun; the period of decline, the period that has not yet ended.

The first and Spanish period is one of the least creditable in Europe's history. The aborigines of the northern islands, His-paniola, Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, bore as far as we can gather at this late day a strong resemblance to the Polynesians. They were of a clear brown complexion. They had straight black hair, broad faces, and flat noses; they altered the shape of their heads, depressing their scalps in childhood with a wooden frame, a procedure that so strengthened the skull that blows from a Spanish broadsword often broke the blade off at the hilt—a Spanish comment and complaint that provides a symptomatic testimony to Spanish treatment. By European standards they were not facially beautiful. But they had fine dark eyes and friendly smiles. They were tall, they moved gracefully, and every observer is agreed as to their attractiveness. Christopher Columbus wrote in his report to Ferdinand and Isabella: ‘So loveable, so tractable, so peaceable are these people that I swear to Your Majesties that there is not in the world a better nation nor a better land. They love their neighbours as themselves and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle and accompanied with a smile.'

Something of their dignity may be gathered from the speech of welcome made to Columbus by one of the chiefs in Cuba:

‘Whether you are divinities or mortal men, we know not. You have come into these countries with a force against which, were we inclined to resist it, resistance would be folly: we are all therefore at your mercy. But if you are men subject to mortality like ourselves, you cannot be unapprised that after this life there is another, wherein a very different portion is allotted to good and bad men. If therefore you expect to die and believe with us that everyone is to be rewarded in a future state according to his conduct in the present, you will do no hurt to those who do no hurt to you.'

Everything that is to be read about these Indians reminds us of the Polynesians. They were unambitious, happy, and pleasure-loving. They supported themselves mainly upon maize. They had made no attempt to develop the resources of the soil, though they possessed some skill in the fashioning of domestic furniture, and made Columbus a present of some handsome ebony chairs. They would dance from dusk to dawn, often in large companies of many thousands. They amused themselves with a fibre football, which they kicked over their shoulders with the backs of their heels, maintaining it in the air for long periods. They welcomed the proud Spaniards as gods descended from the skies.

The Spaniards, however, suffered from the obtuseness of those who consider themselves a master race. They looked on the Indians as inferiors by whom they were owed, as a right, service and submission. They considered themselves, moreover, the subjects of a holy mission. They had crossed the ocean with great skill and courage, at considerable danger and discomfort, to spread the glory of Ferdinand and Isabella, to add to their Majesties' possessions, to acquire wealth, to preach the gospel, and to convert the heathen. Their first investigations convinced them mistakenly that the islands generally and Hispaniola in particular were rich in gold. It seemed to them only proper that the Indians should work for them in the mines; and their fury was limitless when the Indians failed to recognize their role of servitors, refusing to work, escaping into the hills, often committing suicide. Nor could the Indians be made to appreciate the application to themselves of the foreign creed which approved such practices and in which the Spaniards diligently and patiently endeavoured to instruct them. When the Spaniards, in order to encourage the remainder to work and pray, roasted a few dozen over a slow fire, having gagged them first so that their screams should not disturb their officer's siesta, the survivors grew resentful, and whenever a bunch of them happened upon a solitary Spaniard, slaughtered him. The Spaniards thereupon ordered that for every European killed, a hundred Indians should be burnt and disembowelled. It was all very much what was to happen in Europe four centuries later; only for the Indians there was no rescuing D-Day. But within twenty years the entire Indian population of Hispaniola had been wiped out.

How many Indians were liquidated during those early years it is impossible to assess. It has been said that there was originally in Hispaniola alone a population of two million. It is hard to believe that there were so many, and it is hard to see how this figure was arrived at, but there is much evidence to show that the islands were well-populated. Europe has often been criticized for the havoc that its traders wrought in the South Sea Islands, and there can be no question that the Polynesians, after receiving the benefits of Western civilization, deteriorated in health and morals. But everything that traders and missionaries did in the Pacific seems trivial in comparison with this extermination of an entire race. The only excuse that can be offered for the Spaniards is that, suffering under the delusion of being a master race, they did genuinely believe that salvation for the Indians could only lie through conversion to Christianity. It all happened, it must be remembered, in the days of the Inquisition. The medieval conscience was different from the twentieth-century conscience. One has to try to see historical events from the angle at which they appeared to contemporary observers.

A century later a similar fate was to befall, at the hands of the French and the English, the original Carib inhabitants of the Windward and Leeward Islands; but there the situation was somewhat different. In the first place, the islands were not nearly so densely populated. Barbados and Antigua are reported to have been uninhabited; and, secondly, the Caribs were a warlike race that was constantly raiding the northern islands and had possibly at an earlier period captured its own homesteads from the Indians. A few Carib settlements are still to be seen in Dominica. But the mild, dark-skinned, straight-haired creatures of today, who seem so out of place among the hardier Africans, are very different from the skilled warriors who resisted the foreign colonists. They were tall and brown, with shining, long black hair that they dressed daily with great care, and only cut short when they were in mourning. Like the Indians they altered the shape of their heads, but in an opposite manner—that is to say, by placing boards on the forehead and on the back of the head of the growing child, so that in adult life their heads had a box-like look. They scarred their cheeks with deep incisions, which they painted black. They also inscribed black and white circles round their eyes. They were beardless, removing all
superfluous hair. Many of them perforated the dividing cartilage of their nostrils and inserted a fishbone or a piece of tortoiseshell. They made bangles for their arms and ankles out of the teeth of their dead enemies. Their children were taught the use of the bow and arrow by having their food suspended from trees out of reach, and having to go hungry till they could shoot it down. A boy before he was admitted to the rites of manhood underwent a cruel initiation ceremony. The Caribs were zenophobic and loved fighting. It was a long and bitter battle that they fought from their strongholds in the hills against the English and the French. In St. Vincent they were unsubdued at the time of the French Revolution.

This second period of West Indian history, during which the French and British divided the Windward and Leeward group, is in many ways the most romantic period of the four. It is this period that provides the material for all those serial stories of buried treasure and galleons stranded in the Sargasso Sea with which our boyhoods were entranced. To every young Englishman of spirit, the Spanish Main was a ‘finger beckoning to adventure'. There was glamour there and danger and high reward. The Spaniards had made the usual ‘Whitehall error' of imagining that the lives of colonists living three thousand miles away and in the tropics can be ordered by minutes and memoranda drafted in city offices in a temperate climate. The bureaucrats of Cadiz insisted that their colonies should only trade with the mother country, and regarded as privateers the ships of all other nations. The colonists, on the other hand, were eager to welcome the Dutch, French, and English merchants who brought the goods on which their comforts and often their existences depended. It was in fact a ‘free for all'. Every Englishman, Frenchman, and Dutchman was likely, if he were captured by the Spaniards, to be tortured and put to death. The Spanish Main was not only filled with pirates, waiting to pounce upon Spanish convoys, but with honest merchantmen trading from Bristol and Brest and Amsterdam, as well as with peaceful emigrants seeking ‘the land of opportunity'. The
Mayflower,
for instance, had it been intercepted by the Spaniards, might have been regarded as a privateer. No Englishman knew what support he would receive from his own Government. He did not know if he would be treated as a patriot or a pirate. His position was that
of an agent in the Secret Service, who is recompensed when he succeeds and unacknowledged when he fails. Drake was knighted. Raleigh was beheaded.

Nor had England, distracted as she was by civil war, any settled colonial policy. Vincent T. Harlow's book on Christopher Codrington gives a significant picture of the difficulties that a serious English administrator had to face during the French Wars at the end of the seventeenth century, when the soldiers' pay was six years in arrears and ‘colonial governors were required to enforce unpalatable laws while drawing inadequate salaries'. It is remarkable that under such conditions the foundations of the British Empire were laid, that Jamaica was captured from the Spaniards, and that Barbados, Antigua, Nevis, Montserrat, and half of St. Kitts were colonized. As Harlow has said, however, ‘a defective machine works tolerably well in the hands of skilful mechanics', and in the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan era many of the finest Englishmen in the country's history were seeking their fortune across the seas.

Vast fortunes were to be made during the next hundred years. It was only recently that Europeans had had an opportunity of enjoying warm, sweet drinks—until the seventeenth century they had subsisted on beer and wine—and there was an unlimited demand for sugar, for coffee, and for cocoa. The big landowners lived in state, attended by many slaves, entertaining in a Trimalchian manner.

The foundation of their prosperity was the slave trade. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, twenty thousand slaves a year were being transported to the British colonies in America and in the Caribbean. Bryan Edwards states that shortly before the American War of Independence the cities of Liverpool, London, Lancaster, and Bristol were operating in this trade alone a fleet of nearly two hundred vessels, with accommodation for fifty thousand slaves. Other countries were engaged as well, and British ships did not by any means trade only with British colonies. Forty factories, as they were called, were maintained on the coasts of Africa, of which seventeen were owned by the British and fifteen by the Dutch. It was estimated that seventy-four thousand slaves were shipped annually across the Atlantic. And it is important to remember that populations at that
time were everywhere much smaller than they are today, the population of England and Wales being, in 1750, about six million!

Judged by contemporary standards, the slave trade cannot be regarded as anything but one of the most criminal enterprises that Europe ever undertook. It must be remembered, however, that no one at the time felt that it was wrong. Africans were apparently not considered altogether human, and in 1517 Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapa, who was greatly shocked at the treatment the Indians were receiving in Hispaniola, proposed as a solution of the problem that each Spanish resident should be allowed to import a dozen negro slaves. Later he was to regret this suggestion. But the fact that such a proposal was made by a good and holy man is an indication of the ideas prevalent at the time. African negroes were looked upon as animal machinery; when there was a shortage of labour it was only good business to transport supplies of it.

The average man today is appalled by such brutally elementary logic. But it is well for us to remember that we cannot tell how posterity is going to judge our present actions. To very many people, at this moment of writing, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is ethically justified because it shortened the war and saved the million or so American and British lives that would have been lost in the invasion of the Japanese mainland. It is possible that different opinions will be held in two hundred years' time. And it is very necessary in considering the slave trade, of which present conditions in the West Indies are the direct consequence, to keep in mind the scope of the eighteenth-century conscience.

It is also necessary to remember that practically every account we have of the actual working of the slave trade is based either on the propaganda organized by the abolitionists or the defence put forward by the planters. The abolitionists argued their strong case well. Diagrams were produced showing how negroes were packed close in holds, three feet high, without light or air or sanitation, their ankles manacled by chains that, as the ship rolled, cut into their flesh. Laid on their right sides to make easier the action of the heart, they were arranged in the fashion of spoons, the bent knees of one fitting into the hamstrings of the next. These gruesome diagrams were accompanied by telling descriptions of
how the negroes were nourished on rotten rice and tainted water; of how, though they were taken on deck each morning and soused with water while the holds were scrubbed, the stench grew so overpowering that ‘a slaver' could be smelt a mile away. Pamphlet after pamphlet has described the horrors of the ‘middle passage', maintaining that fifteen per cent, of the cargo died on the journey over.