7 - Antislavery

Summary

[A]t my first coming to the island, a common flogging of a Negro would have put me in a tremble … but by degrees and custom it became so habitual, that I thought no more of seeing a Black man's head cut off, than I should now think of a butcher cutting off the head of his calf[.]

Testimony of Henry Coor (1791)

The archive for Smeathman's four years in the West Indies is smaller than that for West Africa but we know from what has survived that he toured extensively around the ceded islands of Grenada, Tobago, Dominica, and St Vincent. These islands, obtained from France as a result of the Treaty of Paris (1763), had attracted many British investors during the 1760s, lured by assurances of good land and excellent returns. In contrast, the older islands were suffering a severe decline in soil fertility due to deforestation and sugar monoculture, leading to plague-like insect infestations. As early as the 1680s, the exhausted soils of Barbados had reached a critical point. To remedy this the planter Edward Littleton wrote of the ‘mighty labour’ of collecting and applying thirty cartloads of dung to fertilize an acre of ground. In a revealing analogy, in which the slaves are imaged as both the saviours and the destroyers of the ground, he claimed that the application of the dung was a job at which his ‘Negroes work … like Ants’.3 Although the ‘new islands’ (as Smeathman called them) were not free of insect plagues, the problems were not as long-standing, and remedies were actively sought. One of the reasons why Smeathman lingered in the West Indies was the Grenadian planters’ promised prize of £20,000 for whoever succeeded in exterminating the sugar cane ants. Neighbouring Tobago, where Smeathman also spent a good part of his time, was also under siege.

Although Grenada and Tobago were small islands like the Bananas, they were markedly different in so far as they were rapidly evolving societies ripe for the naturalist's exploration. Not only did they offer Smeathman models of colonization, they also promised to enhance his knowledge and understanding of climate, tropical plantation agriculture, and the most efficient methods of organizing labour. His timing for making observations was not good, however, since his arrival in mid-1775 coincided with the first military engagements of the American revolution.