“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.”
