1839.] Colonial Government and the Jamaica Question.
the foreign slave colonies which is almost incredible; and augmented to an extent which it is piteous to think of, both the number of blacks who are annually torn from their homes and their children in Africa, and the barbarity with which they are treated in their passage to the American shores. Twelve years ago, the only exports of Puerto-Rico were cattle and coffee, and the only sugar she received was from importation. In 1833 she exported 33,750 tons—more than a sixth of the whole British consumption. The export of sugar from Cuba was, on an average of 1814, 1815, and 1816, 51,000 tons; in 1833 it had risen to 120,000 tons. In 1814, 1815, and 1816, the average exports of sugar from Brazil was 26,250 tons; in 1833, though a bad year, the exports were 70,970 tons. The increase, since the Emancipation Act passed, has been still greater but no official accounts of these years have yet been made public.[1]
As might well have been expected, this prodigious increase in the produce of the foreign slave colonies, consequent on the progressive decline, and at length the almost total stoppage, of industry in the British settlements, under the influence of fiscal oppression and emancipation madness, has been obtained only by a vast increase in the importation of the African race, and a terrific addition to the sum of human suffering. The raising of sugar, by the stationary, domestic, half-civilized English serf, who had ascended a few steps on the ladder of freedom, having ceased, or evidently approaching cessation, the void has been supplied by an extraordinary multiplication of African savages, who are now treated and worked with a severity, compared to which, the condition of our domesticated slaves was Paradise.—"Great and deplorable as were the sufferings of the captives in crossing the Atlantic, in the large and capacious Liverpool slave-ships, they are as nothing compared to those which have since been, and are still, endured by the negroes in the hands of the Spanish and Portuguese traders, where several hundred wretches are stowed between decks in a space not three feet high; and in addition to the anguish inseparable from a state of captivity, they are made to endure, for weeks together, the horrors of the black-hole of Calcutta. Nearly two hundred thousand captives, chained together in this frightful manner, now annually cross the Atlantic; and they are brought, not to the comparatively easy life of the British West India Islands, but to the desperate servitude of Cuba or Brazil; in the latter of which several hundred negroes are worked, like animals, in droves together, without a single female among them, and without any attempt to perpetuate their race; they are worn down by their cruel taskmasters to the grave by a lingering process, which on an average terminates their existence in seven years!"[2]
What does Mr Buxton, a most unexceptionable authority on this point, say to the amount of this fortuitous increase of the foreign slave trade of late years? "Twenty years ago, the African Institution reported to the Duke of Wellington, that the number of slaves who annually crossed the Atlantic was 70,000. There is evidence before the Parliamentary Committees to show, that about one-third was for the British islands, one-third for St Domingo; so that, if the slave trade of other countries had been stationary, they ought only to import 25,000; whereas, the number landed in Cuba and Brazil alone is 150,000 annually; being more than double the whole draft on Africa, including the countries where it had ceased, when the slave trade controversy began. Twice as many human beings are now its victims as when Wilberforce and Clarkson entered on their noble task; and each individual of this increased number, in addition to the horrors which were endured in former times, has to suffer from being cribbed up in a narrower space, and on board a vessel where accommodation is sacrificed to speed. Painful as this is, it becomes still more distressing if it shall appear that our present system has not failed by mischance, or want of energy, or want of expenditure; but that the system itself is erroneous, and must necessarily end in disappointment."[3]
The remedy which Mr Buxton and
