possessed over their negro bondsmen. Down to 1805, the utmost punishment assigned by law to the murder of a black man was a fine of £11 sterling, and so many difficulties were in the way of conviction, even if the murder was sudden and patent to all, that the law was hardly ever enforced. No penalty at all was allotted to slower and more cruel modes of killing by overwork, and castigation for failure in completing it. The slave's only defence against the ill-treatment of his master was in his value as a beast of labour, and so long as new victims could be easily and cheaply procured from the coast of Africa, it was often most economical to work the old ones to

premature death. It was poor consolation to the negroes to reflect, if they were not too ignorant for even this reflection, that the cruelties heaped upon them reacted upon their masters and produced their own degradation.

Those masters, however, reaped great profits; and during the seventeenth century Barbados, hardly larger than the Isle of Wight, was, after the settlements on the continent of America, the most important colonial possession of Great Britain. The wise rule inaugurated by Lord Willoughby, and carried on for the most part by other governors, under whose administration there occurred no special incidents that need to be recorded, aided it in the path of wealth, and rendered it alike famous as a resort of adventurers and as a source of profit to the mother country.

CHAPTER III

JAMAICA AND THE BUCCANEERS.

COLUMBUS IN JAMAICA-ITS GOVERNMENT BY THE SPANIARDSCROMWELL'S CONQUEST-THE MAROONS-THE BUCCANEERS-THE EXPLOITS OF SIR HENRY MORGAN-THE CONNECTION OF JAMAICA WITH THE BUCCANEERS-ITS EARLY PROGRESS-THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1692, AND SUBSEQUENT DISASTERS.

[1605-1694.]

HE early history of Jamaica, including matters of more varied interest, differs widely from that of Barbados. This island, being about a twentieth of the size of Great Britain, is nearly forty times as large as its eastern rival. It was discovered by Columbus in 1494, and in it, being driven thither by a storm in 1503, he took refuge for more than a year from the ingratitude of King Ferdinand of Spain and the cruelty of his agents, barely supported by the charity of the gentle Indians upon whom his great exploit was to bring misery and extermination. "Let the earth, and every soul in it that loves justice and mercy, weep for me," he wrote from his place of exile; "and you, oh glorified saints of God, that know my innocence and see my sufferings here, have mercy! For, though this present age is envious or obdurate, surely those that are to come will pity me, when they are told that Christopher Columbus rendered greater services than ever mortal man did to prince or kingdom, yet was left to perish,

without being charged with the least crime, in poverty and misery, all but his chains being taken from him, so that he who gave to Spain another world, had not safety in it, nor yet a cottage for himself. And surely," he added, with prophetic truth, "such cruelty and ingratitude will bring down the wrath of Heaven, so that the wealth I have discovered shall be the means of stirring up mankind to revenge and rapine, and the Spanish nation hereafter suffer for what envious, malicious, and ungrateful people do now."

Jamaica, not having the gold which the Spanish adventurers chiefly sought, was not troubled by them for a few years after Columbus's return to Spain; and when in 1509 his son Diego began to colonize it, the governor whom he appointed, Juan de Esquimel, proved more merciful than most of his countrymen. "The affairs of Jamaica went on prosperously," says the historian Herrera, "because, Juan de Esquimel having brought the natives to submission without any effusion of blood, they laboured in planting cotton and raising other commodities which yielded great profit." His successors, however, were of different disposition. They practised in Jamaica cruelties as harsh as those by which the neighbouring islands were depopulated, and with like result. When Columbus visited the island its inhabitants, supposed to be more than sixty thousand in number, were "a tractable, docile people; equal to any employment; modest in their manners; of a quick and ready genius in matters of traffic, in which they greatly excelled the neighbouring islanders; more devoted also to the mechanic arts;

SPANISH WORK IN JAMAICA.

31

more industrious; and surpassing them all in acuteness of understanding."1 By 1558 they were nearly all killed out, and what might have been a thriving possession of Spain, had for its only tenants a scattered population of degraded negroes and of enervated Europeans, idle in everything but the exercise of their evil passions. Sir Anthony Shirley, with a small force, pillaged the island in 1605, and about forty years afterwards it was treated in the same manner by Colonel Jackson. In 1655 it contained only some twelve or fourteen hundred Spaniards, and about an equal number of negro slaves.

In that year it was captured, almost without a blow, by a force of seven thousand Englishmen sent out by Cromwell. Many Puritans resorted to it, both from England and from Virginia and the other settlements in America, during the Commonwealth and after the restoration of Charles II.; but its progress was not at first very rapid. Placed by Cromwell under military rule, the soldiers refused to become colonists. The other residents quarrelled with them, with one another, and with the authorities at home; and all were harassed by the guerilla warfare kept up by the negro slaves of the Spaniards, who, taking refuge in the mountains, and there organizing themselves into a fierce body of lawless warriors, came to be known as Maroons. "Their sudden and unlooked-for emancipation," it has been said of these Maroons, "bestowed by no generous impulse or deliberate act of high principle, but simply resulting from circumstances over which neither slaves nor slave-holders had any control,

1 Long, "History of Jamaica," vol. iii. p. 951.

produced its natural results. The inestimable prize of freedom they resolved to hold at all hazards, and though a portion of them accepted the offers of pardon made by the English, the majority viewed all friendly overtures in the light of treacherous endeavours to entrap them again into bondage. They and their descendants maintained for nearly a century and a half their position among the mountain fastnesses, whence, with occasional intervals of peace, they harassed the settlers by their predatory expeditions, often attended with bloodshed, undeterred by the cruel punishment which attended them if captured in open hostilities, or tracked to their caves by bloodhounds. These latter auxiliaries were frequently employed in chasing the original Maroons, as well as runaways from the negroes imported by the new colonists, by whom their numbers were subsequently augmented." 1

Another race of lawless warriors was connected at this time with Jamaica, and, while hindering its peaceable development, helped to make it an important possession of Great Britain. These were the Buccaneers, successors to the piratical adventurers in the West Indies, of whom Sir Francis Drake was the first great leader. Drake's piracy was prompted by patriotic zeal for the overthrow of Spain and Spanish tyranny, even more than by mere desire of gain. Gain, much more than patriotism, actuated those who followed his example.

The buccaneers 2 began to make a new trade for

1 Montgomery Martin, "The West Indies," p. 22.

2 The term buccaneer was adopted from the Carib Indians, who called the flesh which they prepared boucan, and gave to the hut