Land of hope and dreams: slavery and abolition in the Dutch Leeward islands, 1825–1865
The asymmetry of laws concerning the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves in the Atlantic world in the early-to-mid nineteenth century led to a range of responses on the part of inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin. These ranged from activism, adaptation, accommodation to, as this article highlights, maritime marronage on the part of the enslaved population of these islands. The Dutch Leeward islands have been understudied in the historiography of abolition and emancipation but, as this article will argue, they should be included into the larger story of how abolition was experienced on the local, regional, Atlantic, and international stages.
By all accounts, the night of the 27th of April 1844 was dark and cloudy in St. Eustatius (also known as Statia), the tiny Dutch Leeward island.1 The winds were blowing and there was little reason for anyone to be out and about. Yet many people, at least amongst the enslaved population of the island then totaling 1131, seem to have been abroad on the dim roads and wandering the shady fields.2 It was through these dark byways that London, a man belonging to Abraham Windfield, was walking. He was heading toward one of the coves that encircle the island. There he boarded a small, loosely moored boat and, with the help of Friday, a fellow slave, proceeded to sail around the island, picking up other slaves along the way, including Rosaline, his erstwhile lover, and her six children. In total, at least 11 people were crammed onto the open fishing craft heading to the nearby British island of St. Christopher.3 Had they reached this island, they would have been free.
Slave owners from non-British colonies such as St. Eustatius faced a new challenge: the British refused to return any slaves who made it to their territory, even if they paid the costs of tracking down the slaves and sending them back. Unfortunately, London, Friday, Rosaline, her children, and the other occupants of this small craft did not reach freedom on St. Kitts. The boat was old and leaky and took on water. They turned back to Statia and were captured at sunrise the next day. This was a personal tragedy for the people hoping to reach freedom on St. Kitts, a few hours away. Not only did they return to a life of enslavement, but at least two of them were sentenced to 50 lashes.4 As tragic as the story of London, Friday, Rosaline and the other would-be escapees is, it was hardly exceptional during the ‘long goodbye' to Atlantic slavery, beginning roughly after the Napoleonic Wars and ending when Cuba abolished slavery in 1886.5
Maritime marronage was, if not a regular occurrence, certainly not unheard of throughout the heyday of Atlantic slavery.6 What makes events such as those described above in St. Eustatius particularly noteworthy was how very unexceptional they had become, both before and after 1834. This article covers the period from 1825 when vital legislation went into effect in the British islands and 1863, when the Dutch abolished slavery in their West Indian territories. The relative frequency of maritime marronage had everything to do with the interconnected nature of the Leeward islands and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean as a whole.
This article argues that the highly uneven nature of laws regarding slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world led to a variety of responses on the part of inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin. These ranged from activism, adaptation, and accommodation to, as this article highlights, maritime marronage. The Leeward islands are an especially good case study for these responses because of their geographical situation, with the French, Danish, British, and Swedish islands within sight of each other. This article will also discuss how actors in the islands attempted to influence and steer the course of events toward their own interests, which in the case of the slaves’ owners was generally the quick abolition of slavery and emancipation of their slaves. Implicit in this discussion will also be the redressal of the near absence of St. Martin, St. Eustatius, and Saba in the historiography of Dutch Atlantic abolition and emancipation.7
The Leewards and Dutch historiography.
This relative absence of the Dutch Leeward islands is not hugely surprising, considering that the historiography of abolition and emancipation has been regarded as a Dutch colonial and imperial story. For the Dutch colonial empire in the Atlantic, Suriname and Curaçao were the ‘darlings of empire’.15 Colonial rule in the West Indies had been exercised from Suriname between 1828 and 1845 and from Curaçao until the 1950s with the other islands as subordinate. The Dutch Leeward islands, 900 kilometers away from the seats of colonial power, English-speaking, oriented toward the Anglo-American world, and economically marginal by the early nineteenth century, with comparatively small populations of enslaved people, seemed peripheral to the major issues concerning the Dutch West Indies, including slavery and emancipation.16 Yet if we shift the focus from the contours of the Dutch colonial empire and instead zoom in on the Leeward island chain, we will see that these islands were at the center of transnational and trans-imperial responses to slavery, abolition, and emancipation.
The Leewards were and are connected to each other by geography. But they were also connected by shared ethnicity, language, economic interests and threats to security such as war, revolutions, or slave uprisings. There was a porousness of the social, economic, and legal boundaries between these island colonies. Most had relatively weak administrative and military infrastructures, relied on foreign trade, and had a demographic composition at odds with their colonial political affiliations.17 For example, the spoken language of most of the inhabitants of these islands ostensibly controlled by Danes, Swedes, Dutch, or French was – and is – Creole English.
This shared language facilitated the movement of people across the imperial borders, and it was this movement that was one of the integral aspects of the Leeward's system. The fact that London, Rosaline, and Friday spoke Creole English, as did the residents of St. Christopher so tantalizingly close to Statia, no doubt made the decision to board the leaky old fishing boat and make an attempt at freedom easier. Incidents like these escaping Statians serve to question the notion of imperial sovereignty over discrete political and geographic units such as the Leewards. In fact, this movement often acted to expose just how tenuous imperial agents’ hold on power was, demonstrating as it did the strength of the informal networks that crisscrossed and often subverted official authority. This is a story that needs to be included in not just the Dutch historiography but also in the historiography of the other Leeward islands which also tends to mention Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin only in passing.18
Enabling escape: geography, information, and networks.
Columbus first sighted the Leeward Islands in 1493, but settlement began only after the British arrived in the seventeenth century. Though the various islands changed hands frequently through the centuries, their dry climate meant that their economic importance was small in comparison to Barbados and Saint-Domingue and mainland territories on the Caribbean rim such as Suriname and Guyana. The output of sugar produced on Dutch St. Martin's 18 sugar plantations did not equal that of one average Suriname sugar plantation during the same period.19 Nevertheless, the Dutch, British, French, Danes, and Swedes maintained their Leeward island colonies.20
The majority of these islands are within sight of each other. Nineteenth-century traveler George Coggeshall described how from St. Eustatius, ‘ … may be seen St. Christopher's, Saba, and, on a clear day, several other islands … From St. Martin's may be seen St. Bartholomew, Anguilla, and several other small islands’.21 This proximity meant that travel between the islands was relatively quick. Coggeshall narrates that he
… left St. Martin's in one of the packet-boats for St. Bartholomew, and in about six or eight hours beat up and got safe into St. Barts. It was less than a day from St. Barts to St. Thomas.
Travel was also frequent; between St. Barts and St. Martin, for instance, ‘ … sail-boats ply daily … ’.23 This travel was facilitated by the fact that
Creole English and Creole French are the general language of … all the islands in this vicinity: Nevis, St. Kitts, St. Bartholomew, St. Martin's, Santa Cruz, St. Thomas and many others: – in a word, the inhabitants of these islands converse in bad French and worse English.
Thus, it is not surprising that British abolition and emancipation in 1834 had a direct and immediate effect in the region that was not limited only to St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Anguilla, Montserrat, and Dominica. The effects of British policies had already been felt beforehand. In 1832, two years before British abolition went into effect, 19 slave owners from St. Eustatius sent a petition to King Willem I of the Netherlands. They wrote that
As colonists being immediately contiguous to several British islands, but particularly that of St. Christopher, where instructions are given and acted upon to set free all slaves from other islands coming among them, the temptation to quit servitude here and elsewhere and to obtain freedom under that Government is such … that very many of their slaves have been drawn away from this island to that of his Britanic majesty's of St. Christopher.
Although slavery was not abolished in the British colonies until 1834, according to the ‘Act to amend and consolidate the Laws relating to the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ which went into effect in 1825, it was against the law to return escaped slaves who arrived on British territory to their owners.26 Returning slaves to their owners was viewed as equal to the importation or export of slaves, which was outlawed in 1825. Making specific reference to their geographical situation, these 19 Statian slave owners presciently protested, ‘the government of Great Britain has adopted a line of policy such as must eventually … destroy not only their colonies in the West Indies, but also of other powers in the immediate neighborhoods of them’
The most immediate and visible effect of ‘the wily measures and deluding schemes of visionary enthusiasts and designing men of other nations', as the planters so contemptuously termed British abolitionists in the Leeward islands was on the slaves themselves.28 The slaves could and did flee to nearby British islands secure in the knowledge that British government officials would respond in a fashion similar to that of Captain General and Governor-in-Chief of St. Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla, C.W. Maxwell to Lt. Governor of St. Eustatius Spengler, who wrote on the 2nd of September 1825, that
Mr. Engle Heyliger … having exhibited to me a letter from St. Kitts in which he is informed that a negro man named Jacob, [and his other] runaway slaves Jack and College should give the necessary orders for delivering said runaways up
Only a day later, on the 3rd of September, a response time that emphasizes the proximity and close connections between the islands, Maxwell replied that
I have been instructed by the Minister for the Colonies that persons arriving in any of His Majesty's colonies from any foreign island or place where they were lawfully held in slavery are not to be sent back thither as slaves, or to be dealt with as slaves.30
In these small islands – Saba is only 13 sq. kilometers – news spread quickly, and the frequent and intensive connections between people on the Leeward islands facilitated this transmission of information. Slaves served as sailors on the vessels that plied the routes between the islands and would have passed on information in each port they entered.31 Moreover, the population of the islands who were already free formed, in the words of one inhabitant of the colonies, a ‘zwervende bevolking’ – a roaming group.32His testimony is borne out by the Commander of French St. Martin, who wrote to his colleague on the Dutch side in 1835 to say that he had noticed a great deal of communication between the blacks of St. Martin and Anguilla. In fact, this communication was so frequent and so well-known that it had drawn the attention of his superior, the Governor of Guadeloupe, 160 miles away. These newly-freed blacks from the British territories sailed between the islands and were ‘causing detrimental effects and having a negative influence on the slaves’.33 He meant that these ‘vreemde’ (alien) blacks were inciting the slaves on the French side to flee the 10 miles across the straights to freedom in Anguilla. French St. Martin's commander was not wrong. On the 1st of September of that same year, Thome, Breiser, Adee, Edward, Ellick, Robert, and Quashiba and her two children, Sammy and Jane, were reported as escaping to Anguilla via the French side of the island.
The proximity of the islands certainly made escape easier.35 Family connections were also of great importance. In 1840, five years after she had escaped the island, Quashiba's lover, Matthew Stancliff, sailed to St. Martin to help her sister, Minny, and Minny's children escape. What this and countless other cases illustrate is that slaves from the Dutch Leeward islands escaped to the British islands, particularly St. Kitts and Anguilla, and then sought to bring over their families. The relative ease with which this was attempted, if not accomplished, does highlight some of the hallmarks of the Leewards. It emphasizes that the proximity of the islands was key in facilitating escapes. This nearness helped foster and facilitate family connections among enslaved and free peoples of the islands, as well as the transmission of information about anything from the shifts in laws to the presence of various people such as the Governor's son who might hinder or help them.
The flight of slaves from the Dutch to the French side of St. Martin was easiest and most alarming to Dutch slave owners. This is because St. Martin is an island shared between the two nations with an impossible to patrol land border.37 Emancipation came relatively quickly to the French islands in 1848.38 But talk of French emancipation had been circulating for some time and the slave owners on the Dutch side of St. Maarten had already been concerned about possible massive escapes of their slaves to the French side of the island.39 They suspected that when the French abolished slavery, a similar stance would be taken toward the return of slaves as the British had done earlier. This suspicion was substantiated. According to Article 7 of the decree issued on the 27th of April 1848, the soil of France and its colonies emancipated any slave who touched it.40 The French Governor made clear that he would enforce this article. He would not send any runaway slaves back to the Dutch side of the island nor could people from the Dutch side enter French territory to retrieve their slaves. He wrote that, ‘A principle cannot bend before the inconvenience arising for … [the slave owners] who live near a free country.
f information was easily transmitted across the sea, albeit over short distances, it was that much more easily passed between people on the same island on which there were no real borders. The white residents of the Dutch half wrote an urgent letter to the colonial government about the
‘ … highly excited feelings of all the Slaves in this colony, loudly and vehemently demanding to be placed on a footing of freedom, with their neighbours, proof of which, that the gangs of several estates of Cul de Sac in the Dutch part of this Island, are now in the public roads and have struck work’.
With knowledge of freedom so close by, it was to be expected that slaves on the Dutch side would walk to freedom. Lucas Percival, owner of the sugar plantation Diamond, had indeed lost the entirety of his slave work force.43 What is, perhaps, most surprising was that more slaves did not leave the Dutch side. The fact that the entire slave population of Dutch St. Martin did not move to the French side has to do with a combination of factors: the erroneous expectation of a quick Dutch abolition, the resulting de facto but not de jure emancipation of the slaves on the Dutch side who were treated as though they were free after 1848, and, probably most importantly, the lack of means to sustain themselves on the French side of the island. In fact, a number of slaves (exact figures not available) apparently left the Dutch side in 1852 but returned of their own accord the following year because they could not support themselves.44
But this is not just a story of maritime marronage from the Dutch islands. In the Leewards, it was as impossible to isolate any of the colonies from the effects of British emancipation. Maritime maroonss from the Dutch Leeward islands also literally washed up on the Danish islands. In 1836, the Lt. Governor on Saba received a letter from the Governor of St. Thomas and St. John saying that they had captured six slaves belonging to Henry Johnson Hassell of Saba in a boat in one of the outer bays of St. Thomas.45 A month earlier, a slave name Bomber, also from Saba, had arrived on the Danish islands.46 They believed that the slaves had been intending to reach Tortola or one of the other British islands where they would be free. British Tortola was only 22 miles from St. Thomas and, at their closest points, only around 5 miles from St. John's. The Governor of the Danish islands offered to send these slaves back to the Dutch islands as long as they would be reimbursed for the costs. This was because the Danes did not abolish slavery until 1848, so the Dutch could depend on, ‘the friendly understanding which so happily exists between our respective governments' and rest assured that, unlike in the British territories, their slaves would be returned to them
The slaves on the Danish islands, then numbering around 22,000, would have been as aware of how temptingly close freedom lay as were those on the Dutch Leewards.48 By 1845, there were instances of slaves escaping from the more distant St. Croix, 45 miles away, to Tortola. In the same year, there was a simultaneous escape of 37 slaves from St. John.49 Senior Danish colonial official Louis Rothe remarked that, ‘the moment the English flag is raised on the colonies’ forts, slavery would be abolished without regard to the consequences, and such questions as compensation for loss’.50 A Danish frigate was deployed to stem the flow of slaves with little success. Their escape to the English islands was facilitated by the fact that they spoke English. Coggeshall observed when he visited St. Thomas in 1831 that
the government officers and garrison are Danes and converse in the Danish language. The mercantile classes generally speak English, French, and Spanish, while the masses speak Creole French, English, and Spanish, intermixed with the African lingo. So when a stranger visits the marketplace, or any other public assembly, he is almost deafened with the confused jargon of discordant sounds, which remind one of ancient Babel.
This knowledge of a profusion of languages meant that it was quite easy for the slaves of the Danish islands to know of the growing public outcry against slavery in Denmark itself – an outcry that emerged for a variety of pragmatic, economic, humanitarian and political reasons.52 This outcry was a catalyst for the abolition of slavery in the Danish islands in 1848, after which they, too, became safe havens for slaves escaping from the Dutch Leeward islands.
Swedish St. Barthélemy (St. Barts), only around 23 miles from Anguilla, experienced a similar trajectory as did its neighboring islands in the Leewards. Slaves such as Thomas and Peter, who fled their owner, R. Dizney, on St. Barts in an open boat, sought freedom on the British islands.54 Likewise, various slaves seeking freedom in the British territories were pushed by similar currents, weather, defective boats, or lack of navigational skills to St. Barts. Once there, they could expect to be sent back. The Commander of the French side of St. Martin warned of a boat with escaped slaves heading toward St. Barts and was assured by his associate on the Swedish island that should the boat arrive, the slaves would be treated as French property, meaning that they would be returned immediately.55 This regional cooperation between the commanders would relatively abruptly come to an end, however. The approximately 530 slaves on St. Barts were freed by the end of 1847.56 Denmark was forced to speed up the already-planned abolition by an uprising in St. Croix and followed suit quickly in 1848, as did France also in 1848. Once the Danish, Swedes, and French abolished slavery in quick succession, it was on the Dutch islands alone that slavery still existed in the Leewards.
Officials, planters, and the unenviable inevitability of the ending of slavery
How many slaves actually made it to freedom? The slave population on all three islands declined between 1844 and 1852, before increasing slightly in 1862 on the eve of Dutch emancipation
This decline between 1844 to 1854 occurred despite a positive birth versus death rate for all three islands – a decline that slave owners and local officials credited to slaves who escaped.57 Although it is impossible to come up with any sort of exact figure for the number of slaves who escaped, it is possible to say with a fair degree of certainty that the number of slaves who escaped in the 1840s and 1850s was never higher than a few percent yearly, at best. When estimates for manumissions and the number of slaves sold, illegally or legally, are factored in, it would have been expected that the population would have been even lower than it actually was – approximately 1688 for St. Maarten, 1088 for St. Eustatius and 611 for Saba.58 This means that, on average, one or two dozen enslaved people may have made a bid for freedom in any given year, escapes which must have had an important psychological effect on both the slaves and their owners. But it is very doubtful that these escapees ever comprised any significant percentage of the total enslaved population
This suggests that even if a fair number of slaves did leave the islands, they either returned or were replaced. The importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited and as one inhabitant of St. Eustatius testified in response to a question about the import of illegal slaves onto the islands, ‘it's too small a place and everyone would know’.59 The proximity of the British islands and the Royal Navy which was ever vigilant in patrolling for illegal slave traders meant that the likelihood of there being any meaningful number of slaves brought onto the Dutch Leeward islands was slim, at best. The increasing restrictions on selling slaves between the Dutch West Indian islands made intra-colonial transfers cumbersome. All of which points to the fact that although slaves did escape, their overwhelming presence in the archival documentation expresses more of a fear than a reality.
The frequent references to attempts at escape by enslaved peoples do not reveal, then, an actual problem in keeping a stable population of slaves, especially in light of the concomitant decline in plantation agriculture.60 Instead, they demonstrate the tensions between the concerns of the imperial metropole, the colonial government in Suriname and, later, Curaçao, the local officials, and, of course, the slave owners. Sometimes their interests overlapped, but often they did not. Situated as they were in a region in which maintaining slavery after British emancipation in 1834 was difficult, the local officials and especially the white and free inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands found themselves increasingly taking matters into their own hands.61 This included attempting to get slavery abolished quickly.
The proprietors of plantations and all other slaveholders in the Dutch Leeward islands were well aware that their days as owners of humans were numbered. As the Statian planters quoted above complained in 1832, ‘the government of Great Britain … adopted a line of policy such as must eventually … destroy not only their colonies in the West Indies, but also of other powers in the immediate neighborhoods of them’. But the economies of the islands were already in trouble anyway, and many of slave owners were in dire financial straits.63 This was certainly the case among their neighbors in the British islands of Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis and St. Kitts.64 Likewise for the three Danish islands of St. Croix, St. John and St. Thomas, who had seen their prospects dim with the gradual end to mercantilism in the nineteenth century, this meant that their function as free ports was becoming obsolete. This was also the case for the Dutch islands, especially St. Eustatius. The Dutch Leewards were also affected by the continued shift in Dutch imperial interest to the East Indies in the nineteenth century. Suriname was viewed as the only promising colony in the West Indies at all The owners of slaves on the islands realized that the end of slavery was a foregone conclusion. With the insular economies in trouble, slave ownership became ever less rewarding. On St. Martin, slave owners calculated that the value of the plantations had been reduced to about a quarter of their value before the emancipation of slaves on the French side.65This claim was not exaggerated. Union Farm, a 180 acre sugar plantation with 58 slaves, sold for f 8000 in 1851. Twenty-two years earlier, it had sold for f 30,000. Thus, it is not surprising that slave owners sought to sell their human ‘capital’, whether legally or illegally, but the prospects were not promising.
he price of slaves had plummeted. A male slave field laborer between 20 and 30 years old sold for f 340 in St. Eustatius in 1843. In 1853, such a slave would have only brought his owner f 85.66 Similarly, in Saba, a 31 year old male field hand sold for f 230 in 1843, while a 34 year old male field hand would only fetch f 104,40 in 1851.67 And even before the de facto emancipation of slaves on the Dutch side of St. Martin, the price of slaves had dropped precipitously. A male field hand on the island was sold for f 400 in 1843, while a similar slave's value had declined by close to two-thirds in 1847 to a mere f150.
Even had selling slaves been at all lucrative, it was neither simple nor straightforward. The British had been remarkably effective in not only stopping the trade in enslaved Africans coming from Africa itself, but also in applying diplomatic pressure on other nations to tighten their laws on the sale of slaves within their own territories. Thus the Dutch acceded to British pressure and mandated that, after 1831, the sale of a slave outside the Dutch West Indies required a special permit from the Colonial Office. Within the Dutch Antilles, a fee had to be paid for the export of slaves to another Dutch West Indian colony, and required written permission as well as a deposit of f 1000. No fees were required to transport slaves ‘for personal use', that is, house slaves, from one Dutch colony to another but this same deposit of f 1000 had to be made. This deposit was forfeited if no evidence was provided that the slave had been transported to the colony listed in the documents.
n 1828 Johannes van den Bosch, who had been sent to the Dutch West Indies in order to make recommendations for their improvement, suggested preventing the export of slaves to other colonies but to stimulate slave imports from the Dutch islands to Suriname, which was experiencing a boom in coffee production and a subsequent shortage of labor. Therefore, the transport of a slave out of Suriname was taxed at f 100 but every slave that was brought into Suriname was awarded with a premium of f 25 and of f 12,50 for a slave aged between 12 to 16.70 Some Leeward islanders sought to take advantage of this rule. In 1841, David Nisbet of St. Martin requested permission to send 28 of his slaves to Suriname.71 H.D. de Geneste wanted to follow suit and transport 12 of his slaves to Suriname, as did A.T. Crenyshoff.
There was hardly any local market anymore, so Leewards’ slave owners had to trade their slaves elsewhere. This was something the British were particularly worried about, and the Governor-General was specifically asked to make sure that ‘all measures were being taken to ensure that the outlawed slave trade was not being continued’.73 The British were worried with good reason. Despite their best efforts, the trade in people went on, carried out by Spain, France, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States. Enslaved people were brought to the French colonies in the Caribbean until the 1830s and to Cuba into the 1850s. Spain did not sign a treaty with Britain to end the trade until 1867.
And it was to the Spanish Caribbean colonies that some slave owners in the Dutch Antilles hoped to sell their slaves. In a petition in 1831, the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico were named as the most frequent destination for slaves sold from Curaçao.74There was a great need for labor in these islands because new sugar plantations were being set up and the Royal Navy had put a chokehold on imports of people from Africa, leading to a chronic shortage in labor. In July 1847, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs received messages from Puerto Rico that a large number of slaves had been brought to Puerto Rico from Curaçao, a number of whom would shortly be taken to Cuba. In this and subsequent messages, the British ambassador strongly urged that exports of slaves from Curaçao be stopped. The first missive from 1847 also noted that an attempt to get slaves from St. Martin and St. Eustatius was unsuccessful
It stands to reason that slave owners in the Leewards, far closer to Cuba and Puerto Rico than Curaçao, would try to sell their slaves there. Owners of slaves in the Leeward islands such as George Borrow of St. Martin, who asked permission to take nine slaves to Puerto Rico in 1835, sought to offload their slaves in the vibrant Spanish market.75Likewise, in this same year, Santiago Fernandez transported 12 of his slaves from St. Martin to Puerto Rico.76 Yet if there were any slaves from the Leewards sold there after 1835, they have not been found in the archival documentation. This is probably because, as the Lt. Governor in Curaçao had noted the year before, the British regulations had had an effect on the importation of slaves from the Leeward islands: ‘no slaves from the Leeward islands are admitted to the Spanish islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico; the slaves from this colony [Curaçao], though, are admitted’.77 Nonetheless, from 1845 to 1847, the Governor of Puerto Rico authorized the landing of Africans under the guise of Creole slave imports from the Dutch, Danish, and French Caribbean
There was even official recognition of the practice of illegally selling slaves in the Leeward islands. The Colonial Secretary decried the growing trend of cheating the colonial coffers out of their dues by selling slaves on the black market.79 There were rumors amongst the slaves that they could be sent to the United States. The Governor of St. Croix wrote the Commander of Saba informing him that 12 slaves from his island had arrived there in an open boat. They claimed that they fled to avoid being sold by their owners to American captains to be carried to the United States.
But it was to St. Thomas that the most slaves were transported, almost certainly to be sold onwards. St. Thomas was a well-known entrepot for the sale of slaves and, in fact, brokered the slave trade to Puerto Rico.81 In a petition from 1831, St. Thomas and St. Croix were named as the most popular destinations for slaves shipped by their owners from Curaçao after Cuba and Puerto Rico.82 Renkema believes that most of these slaves were sent as ‘servants’ or house slaves.83 Yet there were at least 54 slaves from the Leewards sent to St. Thomas between 1835 and 1846 in addition to the 252 from Curaçao that Renkema records from 1831–1847.84 It is doubtful that there were so many inhabitants of Curaçao and the Leewards migrating to St. Thomas to necessitate this many servants. Moreover, there was a fraudulent traffic in so-called ‘domestics’ within the Caribbean after 1825 which exploited a loophole in the British laws regarding the intra-colonial slave trade.
This was acknowledged quite openly by slave owners on the Leeward islands such as Cornelius de Wever of St. Eustatius, who stated that he wanted to sell his slaves Maria and Adeliza in St. Thomas to clear his debts. He admitted that there was no chance of selling them in any of the Dutch Leeward islands. De Wever was not only allowed to sell his slaves, but he was also permitted to ship them to St. Thomas without paying the usual fees and taxes on the export of slaves with the understanding that the proceeds from the sale of the slaves would go toward clearing his debts on St. Eustatius.
Since selling slaves was difficult both due to increasing British pressure and because there was little or no market on the islands themselves, an increasing number of owners in the Leeward islands took matters into their own hands and began to transport their slaves to British territories where they would be free, thereby effecting a de factomanumission and avoiding the cost of manumission in situ.87 There were 36 instances of slaves being legally transported from the Dutch to the nearby British islands between 1835 and 1846.88 These were people such as Keturah Mitchell of St. Eustatius who asked to send the slave Karen Hopper to St. Christopher ‘so that she will be free upon her arrival’. These numbers do not include the owners who likely turned a blind eye or even actively encouraged their slaves to escape. This was because, as Keturah Mitchell stated in her request, ‘no one can afford to manumit their slaves’.
The local Lt. Governors in the Dutch Leewards recognized this fact. Keturah Mitchell's request may have been the last straw for the Lt. Governor of St. Eustatius. He wrote to the Governor in Suriname that there had been a great many requests to send slaves to St. Christopher, almost certainly to avoid the costs of manumitting them on Statia, which was more than the fees they would have paid for exporting a slave. He went on to voice his fear that these sorts of actions were depopulating the island, depriving it of much-needed laborers and artisans and were also depriving the colonial coffers. He therefore asked for approval to reduce the costs of manumission to make it less than the costs for exporting slaves. These local officials also wanted to get rid of the deposit that had to be paid when one manumitted a slave.
What is particularly interesting about this letter is that both the local officials and the owners of slaves were united against the representatives of the colonial government in Suriname. They recognized the reality on the ground – that slaves were becoming a financial burden rather than an economic advantage – and dealt with it in their own way. They took advantage of geography to transport their slaves to British colonies to be rid of them. They were also keen to manumit them, though it was likely that the local officials were keener to encourage manumission than were the slave owners as their island budgets depended on the taxes and fees paid for manumission. Their agitation bore fruit. After receipt of this letter, the Governor-General lowered the cost of manumitting slaves by half, thus making the manumission of slaves on the Dutch islands cheaper than transporting them to the British islands.91 In 1850, the fees for manumitting slaves were done away with entirely.
Though there were 202 manumissions on St. Martin alone between 1844 and 1853, neither freeing slaves legally nor selling them, whether legally or illegally, ultimately solved the Dutch Leeward island slave owners’ problems to their satisfaction.92 Owning humans was no longer profitable. Therefore, they began to call for emancipation provided that they would be indemnified by the government in The Hague for their slaves – a financially more advantageous solution for them than to continue to watch their ‘human capital’ decline in value, especially as many of them needed to pay off the mortgages on unprofitable plantations.93 Some slave owners had too many mouths to feed with expensive imported foodstuffs, particularly during the frequent droughts and bad harvests. Moreover, part of the slave force had become superfluous as its owners increasingly made their money in non-agricultural and less labor-intensive activities like shipping and trade.94 Emancipation with compensation served their interests well.
Events caught up with the slave owners on the Dutch side of St. Martin when the French abolished slavery in the spring of 1848. After a series of urgent meetings, the planters of the island wrote to the Governor that from the 1st of August of the same year they would treat their slaves as hired workers. They had decided on this because they feared losing not only their property but also their lives.95 After their fellow slaves on the French side of the island had been freed, slaves on the Dutch side refused to work and, in the words of one desperate missive, ‘the spirit of insubordination rules and they are guilty of rebellion’.96 And it was not just on St. Martin. Only two days after the planters of St. Martin sent their letter, the Commander on Saba wrote to ask if the owners on Saba could also take such measures.97 Likewise, the Lt. Governor on St. Eustatius read out a proclamation in English in which he stated in no uncertain terms that the slaves on his island had not been emancipated.98
The slave owners in Saba and Statia did not, in the end, take the bold step of treating all their slaves as free but these examples do illustrate that there were difficulties in keeping part of the population enslaved. This realization was reinforced by the lackluster response from the colonial government. The Governor-General in Suriname responded in desultory fashion that perhaps the events in St. Martin would encourage the planters there to be kinder to their slaves. He approved sending only one small boat but no troops to help quell the unrest on the island, remarking that the inhabitants needed to ‘be more alert themselves’.99 There was nothing new here. Inhabitants of the islanders had been more or less responsible for their own defense and any efforts to stem the flow of escaping slaves for a decade.
In 1840, a corps of mounted volunteers was set up in St. Eustatius to stop slaves from fleeing. This did not help. In the five months after the installation of this volunteer corps, 22 slaves from St. Eustatius escaped to St. Kitts. A petition was made by 11 slave owners (who said they comprised 3/4ths of the slave ownership on the island) asking for an armed boat to patrol the seas around the island. The petition went to the Governor-General in Paramaribo, but there does not seem to have been any action taken.100 This recognition that the colonial government was not going to help in preventing slave escapes led the local officials to levy a tax on the islands’ slave owners in order to fit out an armed ship to patrol between Saba and St. Eustatius, again with little success.101 The Lt. Governor on St. Martin even wrote to the Governor that
… with so small a force, as I have walking around on my streets, my chances of success in preventing the desertion of slaves by guarding the port are slim … it is unpreventable that the residents of this colony are unprotected from losing all their slaves, with their total ruin as a consequence. I end my letter with the request that the Government do as much as possible to give the residents of this colony protection – as much protection as they give those of the primary colonies (‘hoofdkolonies’) where the impressive might of the Royal Navy is always present.
Thus, even before the upheavals in the spring and summer of 1848, both the white residents and the local officials already knew that they could not depend on the colonial government, that they would have to pay for their own protection, and felt that colonists living in the ‘hoofkolonies’ – Suriname and Curaçao – received more care than they did.
Therefore, it likely came as no surprise to Leeward islanders when the Minister of Colonies, in response to the request that the slaves on St. Martin be emancipated, wrote that they could not be emancipated because then they would have to be freed on the other islands and in Suriname and that there was not enough money to compensate all the slave owners in the Dutch West Indian possessions.103 Nevertheless, the Minister of Colonies turned a blind eye to events in St. Martin and did not intervene in their de factoemancipation. In fact, in an ironic twist 15 years later, the Ministry of Colonies tried to argue that the slaves on St. Martin had indeed been fully in emancipated in 1848. This argument was made in order to avoid indemnifying the slave owners of St. Martin for their slaves. Clearly, then, there was a divide between the interests of many inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands, both black and white, free and enslaved, and the colonial officials. The inhabitants of the islands wanted a quick end to a system of forced labor that was both inhumane and had become logistically and economically unsustainable. The colonial officials, on the other hand, sought to prolong slavery as long as possible to avoid the high costs of indemnification, but also because they favored the needs of the ‘hoofdkolonie’ of Suriname, where slavery was still seen as necessary.
The slave owners on the Leeward islands and the local officials knew that the end of slavery was a foregone conclusion. There were clear tensions between the imperial metropole, represented by governance from first Suriname and later Curaçao, and the people, both officials and inhabitants, in the Leeward islands. The interests of the metropole and its representatives in the colonies, far away geographically, linguistically, and culturally, was to preserve slavery in Suriname. The inhabitants on the Leeward islands were situated in a geographical space in which maintaining slavery after British emancipation in 1834 was next to impossible. Moreover, the economics of a plantation system were no longer sustainable. Their constant complaints about escaping slaves and their calls for help went largely unheeded.
Conclusion: do London and Friday matter?
On that dark and cloudy night in St. Eustatius, London, Friday, Nelson, Rosaline, her children, and several other enslaved people set out on their ill-fated bid for freedom on nearby St. Christopher. We know that they were caught, two of them were sentenced to 50 lashes, and then they disappear from our historical gaze, ignored in the writings of officials who deemed them to be of no importance in the larger scheme of the events they reported. But were these officials right?
In a statistical sense, London, Friday, and their friends and family and friends did not matter. Even had they made it to St. Christopher, they would have only comprised a tiny percentage of the overall enslaved population on St. Eustatius or the other islands – a population that stayed remarkably stable and even grew between 1825 and 1863. They were part of a relatively constant, but small group of maritime maroons whose escapes were compensated for by the natural birth rate and, possibly, by the return of maroons.
For T.G. Heyliger, Ph.H. Moore, and Mrs A. Luren, the attempted escape of London, Friday, and Rosaline mattered a great deal. The fact that their slaves could attempt to reach freedom by rowing a few miles to another island was a clear example of the shifting circumstances thrust upon them by British abolition and emancipation. That they lived in a region in which geography facilitated information transmission, family connections, and economic networks only exacerbated the effects of these circumstances. These people's attempt to escape would have emphasized to them that their days as the owners of humans were likely numbered. They saw emancipation and abolition unfold on the islands of other nations – islands they could see on a clear day. The attempted escape of slaves such as London, Nelson, and Rosaline mattered because it compelled these owners to assert themselves over and against an uncaring and out-of-touch colonial government. The slave owners organized and paid for their own defenses in what turned out to be a vain attempt to stem the small but continuous flow of slaves. When they realized that the end of slavery was a foregone conclusion, they tried to sell these slaves, either legally or illegally. They shipped slaves to islands where they would be free, either because they could not sell them or because the costs of manumission were too high. And they petitioned for and eventually got a reduction in these manumission costs. Most spectacularly, the slave owners of St. Martin ultimately abolished slavery, de facto if not de jure. These owners were outside the formal hierarchy of political decision-making but could and did steer the course of events toward their own interests, with some degree of success.
Meanwhile, Friday, London, and Rosaline also mattered, as a group, if not as individuals, for the local officials on the Dutch Leewards. These local officials were in the unenviable position of negotiating between the competing interests of slave owners, colonial officials in the metropole, their representatives in Suriname and Curaçao, and their cohorts on neighboring islands. They had also been given the task of enforcing regulations for the protection of the slaves themselves. They were frequently caught between a reality they saw on the ground – a reality inexorably intertwined with the geography of the Leewards – and the dictates of a distant colonial authority. This meant that these local officials frequently practiced a sort of connivance. They turned a blind eye to suspicious requests such as those of Mrs Luren, to send large number of slaves as ‘domestics’ to St. Thomas, almost certainly in actuality destined for the thriving slave markets of Puerto Rico and Cuba.104 The local officials also advocated on behalf of the islanders. This was clearly the case for the white, slave owning population. The officials asked for additional funds for protection of the islanders, for changes in fees, taxes, and legislation, and responded to the requests from the islanders. But they also sometimes tried to mitigate the harshness of slavery by over-ruling requests from slave owners for strict punishments.105
Finally, London, Friday, Nelson, Rosaline and all the other slaves from the Dutch Leeward islands who tried to escape matter because their attempts to reach freedom are a lens through which we can see how the Leewards worked as a geographical space. The relative frequency of maritime marronage has everything to do with the interconnected nature of the Leeward islands. This article presents a case study of the consequences of the British and subsequently Danish, Swedish, and French, abolition of the slave trade and emancipation of the slaves for the Dutch Leeward islanders – enslaved and free, black, white and colored. It has shown the fragility of geographical borders between freedom and slavery and how the uneven nature of the interpretation and practice of the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves played out.
Reacties
Een reactie posten