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Turnbull, David.Travels in the West: Cuba; with Notices of Porto Rico and the Slave Trade. 59-66. London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1840.
TRAVELS IN THE WEST.
_____________
C U B A
WITH
N O T I C E S O F P O R T O R I C O,
and the
SLAVE TRADE.
.
by
DAVID TURNBULL, ESQ. M.A.
Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of History
at Madrid, and of the Royal Patriotic and Economical Society
at the Havana.
____________________
Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
Burns.
____________________
LONDON:
Printed for
LONGMAN, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS,
Paternoster Row 1840.
As if to throw ridicule on the grave denials of all knowledge of the slave trade,
which are forced from successive captains-general by the unwearied denunciations
of the British authorities, two extensive depots for the reception and sale of newly
imported Africans have lately been erected at the further end of the Paseo, just
under the windows of his Excellency's residence, the one capable of containing 1000,
the other 1500, negroes; and I may add, that these were constantly full during the
greater part of the time that I remained at the Havana. As the barracoon,
or depot, serves the purpose of a market place as well as a prison, these two have,
doubtless for the sake of readier access, and to save the expense of advertising
in the journals, been placed at the point of greatest attraction, where the Paseo
ends, where the grounds of the Captain-General begin, and where passes the new railroad
into the interior, from the carriages on which, the passengers are horrified at the
unearthly shouts of the thoughtless inmates; who, in their eagerness and astonishment
at the passing train, push their arms and legs through the bars of their windows
with the cries, the grimace, and gesticulation, which might be expected from a horde
of savages, placed in circumstances, to them, so totally new and extraordinary.
These barracoons appear to be considered by the foreign residents as the lions of
the place. On the arrival of strangers, they are carried there as to a sight which
could not well be seen elsewhere. A barracoon was one of the first objects the Prince
de Joinville was taken to see on his first visit to the Havana. It was remarked that
His Royal Highness was much more popular among the Spaniards, on the occasion of
this first visit, than on his return from Mexico, after the capture of San Juan de
Ulloa, and the attack on Vera Cruz.
On entering one of the barracoons, which are, of course, as accessible as any other
market place, you do not find so much immediate misery as an unreflecting visitor
might expect. It is the policy of the importer to restore as soon as possible, among
the survivors, the strength that has been wasted and the health that has been lost
during the horrors of the middle passage. It is his interest, also, to keep up the
spirits of his victims, that they may the sooner become marketable, and prevent their
sinking under that fatal home sickness, which carries off so many during the first
months of their captivity. With this view, during their stay in the barracoon, they
are well fed, sufficiently clothed, very tolerably lodged; they are even allowed
the luxury of tobacco, and are encouraged to amuse themselves for the sake of exercise
and health, in the spacious patio, or inner court, of the building. I have
been assured, also, that after leaving the barracoon, and arriving at the scene of
their future toils, the Mayoral finds it for the interest of his master to treat
them, for several months, with a considerable degree of lenity, scarcely allowing
them, if possible, to hear the crack of the whip, and breaking them in by slow degrees
to the hours and the weight of labour, which are destined to break them down long
before the period which nature prescribes.
The inmates of these sad receptacles, from their age, demeanour, and appearance,
convey to the visitor a lively idea of the well organised system of kidnapping, to
which the trade has been reduced, in order to make provision in the interior of Africa
for the supply of the factories, and slave markets on the coast. The well understood
difficulty of breaking in men and women of mature age to the labors of the field
has produced a demand at the barracoons for younger victims, so that it is not, as
formerly, by going to war, but by the meaner crimes of kidnapping and theft, and
the still baser relaxation of social ties and family relations, that these human
bazaars are supplied. The range of years in the age of the captives appears to extend
from twelve to eighteen, and as the demand for males is much greater than for females,
the proportion between the sexes is nearly three to one, I had almost said, in
favor of the masculine gender. In fact this is pretty nearly the relative proportion
between the sexes on most of the estates throughout the island. The facilities still
left for the practice of the slave trade, and the consequent cheapness of young Bozals
at the barracoons, make it more for the interest of the planter to keep up the numbers
of his gang by purchase than by procreation. There are some so totally regardless
of every human sentiment, save the sordid sense of their own pecuniary interest that
they people their estates with one sex only, to the total exclusion of females, taking
care to prevent the nocturnal wanderings of the men, by locking them up in their
plantation prisons, called also barracoons, as soon as their daily labour is concluded.
Another motive for the continuance of the slave trade is to be found in the well-known
fact, that a state of hopeless servitude has the effect of enervating the slave,
and reducing the physical power of his descendants far below the average of his African
ancestors. At Demerara, Honduras, and Trinidad, to which colonies the greater part
of the captives emancipated by the courts of mixed commission within the last few
years, have ultimately found their way, I was assured that the labour of eight emancipated
Africans was considered equal to that of twelve of the apprenticed laborers born
in the colony; and on the same principle, a Bozal African, fresh from one of the
market places of the Havana, commands an average price of twenty-four ounces of gold
when sold by retail; whereas a Creole of similar age is not worth more than twenty.
On this ground, the keeper of one of these market barracoons with whom I chanced
to enter into conversation on the subject of his trade, concluded an argument in
favour of its perpetuity, by laying it down as a proposition not less capable of
mathematical demonstration than any of the problems of Euclid, that the difference
of four ounces between the value of the Creole and the Bozal made the suppression
of the traffic a matter of hopeless, irremediable, and perpetual impossibility!
As applied to negroes, the terms Creole and Bozal are pretty nearly antithetical.
It is true that when a horse is spoken of the phrase un caballo Bozal means
merely that he has not been sufficiently broken in; but it is otherwise with the
poor African, who is spoken of as a Bozal long after he has lost all his natural
spirit. The term Criollo, or Creole, is applied in Cuba, as in the other islands
of the West Indies, not to men and women merely, white, black, or brown, but to domestic
animals in general, and even to plants and trees, natives of the soil.
As soon as the period of seasoning and probation has elapsed, the unhappy slave is
made to feel all the horrors of his condition. In Cuba and Porto Rico, and probably
also in the Brazils, that condition is unspeakably aggravated by the fact, that simple
slavery exists in these countries in connection with the slave trade. There the planters
find it more for their interest to import fresh slaves from Africa, than to maintain
or increase their numbers in the ordinary course of nature, according to the system
so successfully practiced in the Carolinas and Virginia, Kentucky and Maryland. The
severity of the penal enactments of the United States against importation, has given
rise to the domestic slave trade of America, some of the features of which are nearly
as disgusting, although not so murderous, as the regular African traffic.
When I was at the Havana, the average price of Bozal negroes when purchased at wholesale
by the cargo, was at the rate of from 300 to 32O dollars a head, whereas I have had
the misfortune to witness the sale of slaves by auction when three times the price
had been offered in the streets of Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere in that section
of the Union. This practice of selling men and women by auction in the public streets,
and the indecent personal examination to which it gives rise, surpasses in shamelessness
all the atrocities of the Havana, where the sales are made within doors, and are
comparatively private.
The purchasers at these slave auctions are mere dealers or traders who are only not
pirates under the American law, because their transactions are completed on shore.
In all other respects they resemble the Portuguese slaver, who buys his cargo on
the coast of Africa and sells it in the best market he can find. The planters in
Louisiana, and along the banks of the Mississippi are pretty much on a par with those
of Cuba and the Brazils; with this difference, that as the prime cost is greater
compared with the food and maintenance of the slave, they cannot afford to work him
to death in so short a time. As to the men of Maryland and Virginia, who push the
auri sacra fames so far as to raise the negroes like other stock for the market,
we must go to the interior of Africa to find their parallel.
The people of the United States content themselves with an endeavour to protect their
own shores from pollution, by declaring that their citizens expose themselves to
the pains of piracy by engaging in the African slave trade. Among their own citizens,
however, it is a matter of serious doubt whether this extreme penalty is attended
with all the efficacy which it must have been the intention of the authors to produce.
It is said that a difference of sixty-eight dollars a head, between the value of
the native Negro and the imported African, insufficient at the Havana to determine
the perpetual continuance of the slave trade, in the face of risks very little inferior
to those arising from the operation of a law, highly penal,indeed, but not very sternly
administered. It is not easy to believe that the settlers along the shores of Florida,
Alabama, or Louisiana, who daily purchase men, women, and children, just torn from
the ties of kindred and the bosom of their families, should feel any very serious
qualms of conscience at an acquisition which was to entail no greater misery on the
sufferers, and which was moreover to obtain for the acquirer a saving not of 68,
but of ten times, nay, of fifteen times 68 dollars a head. I do not mean to assert,
with anything like confidence, that the African slave trade is actually carried on
in the rivers or on the shores of the United States; but this I will say, that the
temptation is strong; that the risk is not great; and that from the acknowledged
practice of the country, any moral consideration sufficiently powerful to prevent
it is wholly out of the question.
