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By Root 1254 0

self-indulgence possible was a merciless crop. Columbus had considered Jamaica the most beautiful island he had seen in the Indies. But before the fields could be planted the land needed to be cleared, dug and manured. At harvest time the cane had to be hacked down, stripped of its leaves, carried to the mill, crushed and cooked. In the early days of the plantations the labour was provided by prisoners, vagrants and indentured workers brought out from the British Isles, who toiled in the fields for a set number of years in exchange for a new life at the end. But white labourers needed to be constantly replaced. How much easier to make the back-breaking toil the task of people who could be kept at it for life, and anyway did not need to be paid. The men and women with black skins who had been seen by white adventurers along the coast of Africa would be much more resilient. Furthermore, some of the African kings were already in the habit of seizing captives and then selling them into slavery. In the 1560s Sir John Hawkins, one of the greatest of the seafarers to emerge from the English West Country, had pioneered a triangular trade, in which vessels sailed from England to Africa with a cargo of goods to be traded in Africa, picked up slaves for sale in the Spanish colonies of the Americas as a second consignment, and then returned home with a third cargo, offering a potential profit on every leg.

The British were not the first people into the slave business (some of Hawkins’s slaves been captured from the Portuguese). But they came to dominate the trade. Indeed, one of the reasons that privateering began to trouble governments was the damage that investors claimed it did to trade in human beings when in retaliation the Spanish refused to buy the slaves the British had gone to the trouble of shipping across the Atlantic. Under the treaty which ended the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the British demanded – and got – the Spanish contract to import slaves to their territories in the Indies. Slaving now became huge business. In the 1740s, British ships transported 200,000 men, women and children, and Liverpool was well established as the country’s leading slaving port. An estimated 85 per cent of the textiles manufactured in Britain were now being shipped to Africa on the first step of the triangular trade, and in 1772 ‘an African merchant’ claimed to the government that the slave trade was ‘the foundation of our commerce, the support of our colonies, the life of our navigation, and first cause of our national industry and riches’. In the 1780s the slavers carried the staggering total of three-quarters of a million people across the Atlantic, half of them in British ships. The estimated total number of human beings torn from their homes to be turned into beasts of burden thousands of miles away is reckoned at 11 million.

Every single one of those millions was a personal tragedy of broken families, to say nothing of the physical suffering of all those involved. Even those who might have managed to stay in contact were often separated at the slave marts into which they were driven on arrival in the West Indies. Few even retained the dignity of their own name and language. On the plantations, they were woken by a bell or conch shell at perhaps four in the morning and then worked from dawn to dusk. Overseers and drivers divided the slaves into three gangs – the first, comprising the strongest men and women, did the heaviest work of digging the soil, manuring, planting and then, at harvest time, cutting their way through the fully grown fields, carrying the cut cane or toiling in the sweltering factories where it was crushed, boiled, cooled into crystals and packed. The second gang, comprising teenagers, nursing mothers and old people, followed them through the fields, clearing the debris. A third gang, of very young and very old, fed the slaves and livestock, either watching their future life acted out before them or waiting for the point when feebleness made them of no further use to their owner. Disease and hardship demanded