Authors: William Dietrich
He cocked his head, regarding her intelligence as an unexpected and rather alarming curiosity. “No reform is needed. It’s no different than mastering a herd of farm animals. Slave and master have come to a rough understanding of each other. Conveniently, the black regiments keep the peace and defend the island; they’re the only units that withstand yellow fever. Obedient, too. I’d rather lead a black regiment than a white one. Here, I mean.” He fanned himself. “Not in England.”
“So you appreciate their sacrifice?” Astiza asked.
He frowned. “There’s a natural order in the West Indies, Mrs. Gage. Without the whites, there is no market. Without the blacks, there is no product. The French toyed with upsetting this power structure on Saint-Domingue with wild talk of revolutionary freedoms, and the result has been a massacre of planters and a decade of devastating war. Here, all know their place, which is precisely why Britain is fighting the frogs. The goal is to preserve order. We Antiguans represent, I think, the front line of civilization.”
“With whip and chain,” Astiza said. My wife is blunt, and I love her for it.
“With class and station. Black freedom, Mrs. Gage? Go see how it works in Africa. It’s a hard life the slaves lead, but a safe one if they allow it. No cannibalism. No tribal war. And don’t think they don’t enslave one another; they came to our slave ships already in chains, led by their own people or the Arabs. Their plantation life is hard, ma’am, but a blessing for them as well. They have a chance to save their own souls from eternal damnation. The pregnant ones are even exempt from flogging. You’ll see.”
We spent the night in the officer’s quarters at English Harbor, shutters flung wide to catch some breeze despite the doctor’s warning, and our bed tented by mosquito netting. The plank floors and brick walls were no different than a good hotel in England, except the ceilings were higher and the prints of ships and royalty had more mildew. Tree frogs set up a roar like surf after the sun went down.
The long shady porches were a concession to the climate, however, and before retiring we sat to contemplate a landscape as vivid as an opium dream. Life bent to the sun as it did in Egypt. If this were hell, it was a rather languid and nurturing one, and we sipped punch and watched boats on the water with release mixed with impatience. Somewhere little Harry was waiting, we hoped, and we hoped he was near. There was relief at having successfully crossed the ocean, disquiet that we must journey farther to find our son, restlessness that it took so much time to track him, and apprehension that such a journey would take us to Saint-Domingue, a hellhole of war and torture. Yellow fever had killed the French general; would it kill Astiza, Harry, and me?
Given the climate, we set out for Carlisle before dawn, at the coolest time of day. A black domestic in waistcoat and bloused shirt drove our carriage. Dinsdale sat beside with two pistols and cutlass in his belt and a musket lashed upright beside him like a lamppole. Astiza and I were behind, clutching the broad straw hats we’d been issued as protection against the sky.
The first quarter mile into the forest was like entering ink until the day began to lighten, and even then the jungle made a dark tunnel as we worked our way up a hill to overlook the harbor. Once away from the water the sea breeze completely vanished so that even the dawn air seemed oppressive. But then we cleared the ridge crest, the trees disappeared, and the wind resumed. The morning suddenly felt fresh. Behind us, the crowded bay looked idyllic with its anchored ships. Ahead was a rolling landscape of seemingly endless sugarcane, each hill crowned with a stone windmill, their great sails majestically wheeling. For a while we were quite comfortable, and maybe Antigua wasn’t entirely the hell the English claimed.
“The Spanish quite naturally skipped over these small islands and headed for larger Cuba, Hispaniola, Mexico, and Peru,” Dinsdale narrated as we clopped along. “The Carib Indians who lived in the Windwards and Leewards were fierce, and their little knobs of green seemingly useless. But then English, French, and Dutch colonists began to pick up these Spanish leftovers and tried everything they could think to survive. First the Caribs and wild pigs were hunted down and exterminated, creating space for farming. When ordinary crops didn’t take hold, we attempted tobacco, coffee, cocoa, indigo, ginger, and cotton. And when all of those products failed to compete with Virginia and Brazil, we tried sugar. A ton from every acre!”
“Which made these islands wealthy?” I asked politely.
“So it promised, but wage earners quit the work, and indentured servants fled. The cane fields are hot, dusty, and endless. We finally copied the Portuguese and brought in slaves from Africa. They endured the heat that killed the white man, subsisting on the corn, plantain, beans, and yams that white workers threw away. The blacks consume loblolly, a cornmeal mush, and even maize right from the cob, eating the kernels like animals. The planters are not ungenerous. They give their slaves a tot of rum on Sundays and even meat, if a cow or sheep takes sick. Breadfruit, too, the plant that Bligh was after in Tahiti. And the blacks are rather clever in their own way; they make alcohol called mobby from sweet potatoes, and perino from cassava. They’re even allowed to have their own thunderous dances that put our revelry to shame. Yes, we’re tolerant here in Antigua. And the Negro is everything the European laborer is not: sociable, adaptable, enduring, kind, domesticated, and disciplined. A white man wants treasure. A black wants a hut.”
“You seem quite the student.”
“We learn our slaves the way an Englishman learns horses: The Whydahs and the Pawpaws are the most tractable, the Senegalese the brightest, and the Mandingos the gentlest, but they are prone to worry. The Coromantees are courageous and faithful, but they are also stubborn. The Eboes are despondent; they don’t last. The Congos and Angolans are good in groups, but stupid individually. All these characteristics are reflected in their pricing. The Negroes are marvelous in their own way. They hardly need clothes or tools. The planters give them a hoe, an ax, and a curved cane knife called a bill, and get ten hours good labor, even with a two-hour break at the hottest time of day.”
“And what are the planters doing?”
“Seeing to accounts and organizing amusements, like all rich men.”
We were quiet a moment. “Every fortune is built on a crime,” Astiza finally said.
Dinsdale wouldn’t take offense, which is perhaps why he had the job of squiring visitors around. “And what is yours, sitting high with me in this carriage?” he asked rhetorically. “Bargaining with Bonaparte, from what I hear.” Seeing me startled, he continued, “Yes, I’ve heard of the reports to the governor; little is secret on Antigua.” He shrugged. “I’m the son of a landlord in the Midlands, and our vicar there takes heavy rents from the poor to live like a comfortable squire. Not exactly what Jesus preached. Our ships are ruled by the lash and noose, as you’ve just seen. Our infantry is mostly forbidden to marry, and beaten bloody at the least excuse. France tried to abolish such distinctions and had chaos. Now Napoleon is setting things to right. For the life of me, I don’t see why we’re fighting him. He’s trying to reestablish slavery in Saint-Domingue, which is exactly what needs to be done.”
Dinsdale clearly thought himself a realist, but a realist who did not have the imagination for an alternate reality. It’s a pessimistic view, but I understand the fear of conservatives. The more I see of the world, the more I believe civilization is a thin varnish on a hulking cabinet of human passions, fears, and cruelties: a dark armoire that hides the truth of our natures, ominously thumping to get out. Our natural barbarism is barely held in check by priests, hangman, and potential humiliation.
“You are not a liberal, Captain,” I said mildly.
“I am practical. I study the Gospels, but I live in Antigua.”
“Can blacks ever be free?”
“If they are, the economy of sugar is at an end. No freeman can afford to grow it. The former slaves will live in emancipated poverty, on islands dreaded as incubators of disease. No man will ever come to Antigua for pleasure. Only for profit.”
“There’s no voice for abolition here?” The subject was becoming a heated one in England, I knew. Taking ideas from France, men were agitating for the end of the slave trade, or even the end of slavery entirely. All the revolutionary tumult in the world has brought remarkable notions.
“There are Quakers, who are politely ignored. Parliament, however, is full of dangerously utopian ideas that attack free market values, fostered by comfortable liberals with no sense of reality. West Indies society is one of necessity, Mr. Gage. Send a white regiment here, and as many as nine-tenths are dead in a year of yellow fever. But the blacks are bred to it. Necessity, Mr. Gage, necessity. And don’t forget that a tenth of them have managed to win their freedom, thanks to the mercy of their masters. They are the carters, the carpenters, the shepherds, and the fishermen. You’re an American, believing in freedom? It’s freedom, is it not, for we Antiguans to have the right to develop our own society, in our own way? Freedom to make an honest living, even if it does involve the purchase and nurturing of slaves?”
Dinsdale, clearly, was impervious to irony.
So we bounced along without comment for a while. Astiza and I both sipped some punch of water, lemon, and Madeira. We often had to drink in the humidity, giving our journey a drugged drowsiness even in early morning.
“The windmills make it look like Holland,” my wife finally observed. Their great sails were all pointed exactly into the wind, a trick I didn’t understand yet, turning with tireless efficiency in the trades. Even at great distance, you could hear the squeal of their gears and rollers.
“There’s no waterpower here, and in fact, drought is our biggest enemy. The only way to crush the cane is with the power of the sea breeze.”
The sugarcane was like an eight-foot wall on either side of our red dirt road. The sun rose above the stalks and we put on our hats. Then we heard a horn, and another, and another.
“Conch shells,” said Dinsdale. “The slaves are being called to work.”
Insects began to rise with the sun. We waved and slapped.
“The gnats and mosquitoes are the most constant,” Dinsdale said. “At the beaches and in the mangroves you see the land crabs—white, sickly, and hideous. Always wear shoes and stockings against chiggers, which can be agonizing. We also boast woodlice, bedbugs, lizards, and cockroaches that look hatched from lobsters. In the plantation houses the servants keep them at bay, but you’ll see field slaves with faces furrowed by cockroach scars. The creatures come at them at night when they sleep on the dirt of their huts. Ants, too, of course, billions of them. Termites. Wasps. Snakes.”
“Are you trying to frighten my wife, sir?”
“Certainly not, and I mean no offense. It’s simply that England paints a lyrical picture of the planter’s existence as a life of leisure, when, in fact, it is one of constant struggle. The spoonful of sugar in a cup of London tea has an epic story behind it. No European understands the real cost of cake.”
“You have fire as well, it seems.” Astiza was gazing beneath the brow of her wide planter’s hat as columns of smoke began to rise from distant fields.
“We burn the fields after harvest. It’s the only way to keep down the snakes and rats. We lose a third of our crop to vermin. At Carlisle, they put a bounty on rats—a cob or a crust for each one—and slaves caught thirty-nine thousand of them. Can you imagine? We joked they were breeding the pests. Sugarcane takes fourteen to eighteen months to ripen, and everything is done by hand, not the plow, so we have to keep animal invaders in check. Losing a slave to snakebite is more expensive than losing a horse. We burn the fields to make them safe.”
We passed some blacks planting new cane in a harvested field. Their skin glistened in the hot sun, hoes swinging up and down in ceaseless rhythm. Black overseers watched from horseback in the shade of a giant tree left standing for lunchtime shade. Clay jars lined the furrows, but whether the water was for the plants or the planters I didn’t know. The men were in loincloths, dust turning them red. The women were naked to the waist, some stooping with babies tied to their backs.
“A white man is lucky to live five years in this climate,” Dinsdale said. “But if he does, he can increase his fortune fivefold.”
We entered jungle again, a steamy corridor of plants snarled and voluptuous. Flowers erupted like dots of light. The mosquitoes became even more incessant, and we sweated in quiet misery.
“Apply vinegar for the bites,” the captain offered.
Then we began passing into lawns, a grand clearing in the forest. At its center was a stately house like a mansion in heaven. The plantation home was wrapped in a cool two-level porch, each window bordered with shutters, the clapboards painted a gay yellow and wicker chairs and hammocks beckoning us to rest. Huge tropical trees surrounded it with shade. A flower garden was a quilt of color, and a stream flowed into an artificial pool. It was an oasis.
“Carlisle mansion,” Dinsdale said. “Now you can discuss your real business with the governor.”
A
chief occupation of the planters of Antigua is dinner, a ceremony occupying three to five hours at the height of the day’s heat. Lord and Lady Lovington, corpulent yet dapper in their fine London clothes, greeted us enthusiastically on their shady veranda. Like all colonists, they were eager to hear the latest gossip from London and Paris. Fashion comes to the West Indies six months late, meaning winter costumes arrive just as the tropical summer deepens, but no planter can resist wearing them, everyone sweating without embarrassment.
Our hosts were as amiably tipsy as we from the water purified by wine and rum, imbibed from dawn to dusk to hydrate perspiring bodies. The governor and his wife were in their sixties, successful but not entirely secure; they were political survivors who had reluctantly sided with Prime Minister William Pitt in order to win appointment to a governorship that provided salary and brought them back to island landholdings burdened by debt. The truth was, for every planter who got rich, another went bankrupt, and Lovington returned to Antigua to prevent his plantation from declining into ruin. The jungle, storms, war, and the gyrations of markets were always threatening to destroy what had been built; and dreams of retiring to London were thwarted by the difficulty of managing holdings from thousands of miles away. The constant financial risk of the planter’s life gives island gaiety a sharp edge. I knew the demeanor from the swells I’d encountered at gambling tables. They are cocky, but desperate.