However, it is likely that spontaneous miscarriage (before twenty‐eight weeks of pregnancy) and stillbirths (after twenty‐eight weeks) rather than calculated abortions were responsible for high rates of foetal loss. The Unitarian minister Thomas Cooper, hired by the absentee planter Robert Hibbert to convert the slaves on his Georgia plantation, in Hanover parish, attributed the low birth rate on the estate to the morally degraded condition of the slaves and, in particular, to promiscuity, prostitution and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, though he acknowledged that hard work and severe punishment were additional contributing factors.5252 Overseers were charged to treat slave mothers with tenderness and to provide them with every comfort.109109 Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, p. 226. Some evidence cited below was written by absentee owners who never visited Jamaica; their views were therefore circumscribed by common assumptions and prejudices about the personalities and behaviour of slaves. A Short History of Slavery and Sugar Cane in Jamaica. 97–8, 410 n. 20. Dunn, ‘Sugar Production’, p. 66. Such women were noticeably less fertile than their North American sisters. Higman, Slave Populations, pp. No testimony from the women themselves either supports or denies their white masters’ widespread accusations with regard to abortion. 1510 The first Spanish settlers arrive in Jamaica. 77, 205. B orn a slave on Jamaican plantation in 1800, William Buchanan’s life was remarkable. Where there is now barbarism, there used to be civilization. Theme: Military and maritime. The bulk of the novel centres on his life on the plantation, showing us exactly what drove this man to risk his life for freedom. Other slave women featured prominently in the care of mothers. Olaudah Equiano, the famous black writer and abolitionist of the late eighteenth century, wrote of women in his African homeland that he did not ‘remember to have ever heard of an instance of incontinence amongst them before marriage’.5959 Thus, until knowledge improves about the ways in which Jamaican slave women controlled their own fertility, it remains tendentious to suggest that they opposed breeding as a form of political resistance to the injustices of their enslavement, as some historians have suggested.117117 The slave trade is said to have drawn between ten and twenty million Africans from their homeland, with approximately six hundred thousand coming to Jamaica (one of the largest importer of slaves at the time) between 1533 and 1807. Modern analysis suggests that this was not simply a prejudiced view. [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-4988] Jamaica is one of the largest islands in the Caribbean.For much of its modern history it was a colony of Great Britain, from which it gained independence in 1962. The planter‐historian Bryan Edwards told the Jamaican Council and Assembly that slave women in Jamaica ‘hold chastity in so little estimation, that barrenness and frequent abortions, the usual effects of a promiscuous intercourse, are very generally prevalent among them’.7676 . Dysentery was a major killer of those weakened by overwork and malnourishment. Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone (2 vols., 1803), ii. After taking part in the 1831 rebellion that catalysed the end of slavery in his country of birth, Buchanan’s tragedy was that he never got to reap the benefits – instead he was imprisoned and sent as a convict to Australia, never to return. The people suffered unthinkable acts of brutality such as rape, whippings, torture and murder. Robert Dirks's data suggest that the average plantation food allowance amounted to 1,500–2,000 calories and approximately 45 grams of protein per day.1717 For a similar remark see John Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica with Remarks on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Slaves and on the Abolition of Slavery in the Colonies (Edinburgh, 1823), p. 311. In severe cases, when women lack a good blood supply and their uterus fails to contract properly, the risks of a difficult birth increase. National Archives, Kew, Pitt Papers, 30/8/155, 40, cited in Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, ed. But many of the enslaved people did not settle for that way of life. Bryan Edwards, A Speech delivered at a free Conference between the Honourable the Council and Assembly of Jamaica, held the 19th November, 1789, on the subject of Mr. Wilberforce's propositions in the House of Commons, concerning the slave‐trade (Kingston, 1789), p. 46. The psychological bases for interruptions in the menstrual cycle are still not fully understood. This view focuses on strategies deployed to avoid pregnancy and acts undertaken to curtail pregnancies and unwanted births, such as abortion and infanticide. Alan S. McNeily, P. W. Howie and Anna Glasier, ‘Lactation and the Return of Ovulation’, in Natural Human Fertility: Social and Biological Determinants. Enter your email address below and we will send you your username, If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to retrieve your username, I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of Use, ‘Searching for the Invisible Woman: Slavery and Resistance in Jamaica’, ‘Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and their Possible Implications’, ‘Weaning among West Indian Slaves: Historical and Bioanthropological Evidence from Barbados’, ‘The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution’, ‘A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828’, ‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas’, ‘Female Reproductive Dysfunction and Intense Physical Training’, ‘Towards Emancipation: Women and Coercive Labour Regimes in the British West Indian Colonies, 1790–1838’, ‘Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective’, ‘“An Outrage on all Decency”: Abolitionist Reactions to Flogging Jamaican Slave Women, 1780–1834’, ‘Robert Hibbert, Slaveowner Philanthropist’, ‘Jamaica's Struggle for a Self‐Perpetuating Slave Population: Demographic, Social and Religious Changes on Golden Grove Plantation, 1812–1832’, ‘Demographic Aspects of Lactation and Postpartum Amenorrhea’, ‘The Post‐partum Non‐susceptible Period: Development and Application of Model Schedules’, ‘Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834’, ‘On the Early Use and Origin of the Term “Obeah” in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean’. It argues that the explanation for the failure stemmed from dietary inadequacies and the harsh working routines of sugar cultivation, which compounded epidemiological and whatever social, cultural and political factors may have motivated Jamaican slave women concerning their own reproductive capabilities. The Good Hope Plantation House, once one of Jamaica’s largest slave-holding estates. Inadequate nutrition was the constant predisposing factor in the background of slave women's lives in Jamaica. If one assumes, taking the second calculation, that one third of the 150 breeding women were of reproductive age and had births every other year and pregnancies twice that again, on an annual basis 8 out of 50 at a given moment would produce 16 pregnancies in a year, which seems low compared with the figure just derived. David Beck Ryden, ‘Producing a Peculiar Commodity: Jamaican Sugar Production, Slave Life, and Planter Profits on the Eve of Abolition, 1750–1807’ (PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1999) [hereafter Ryden, ‘Producing a Peculiar Commodity’], p. 31. Brown’s debut novel, Master of My Fate, gives a fictionalised look into Buchanan’s life, tapping into some uncomfortable truths from Australia’s history that are often overlooked: that much of colonial Australia was built by convict labour; that Australia has its own quiet history of abusing an unpaid workforce; that slavery isn’t that far in the past. Shand's definition of ‘long weaning’ was 16 to 18 months. Yet evidence suggests that the all‐important protein rations to slave families were mostly consumed by men. Higman, Slave Populations, p. 398. Female slaves without children lived in lonely, dispiriting circumstances. James Thomson, a doctor who practised medicine in Jamaica and the author of a book on the diseases of black people there, wrote in 1820 that ‘women who indulge [in dirt eating] soon lose their monthly period’.2222 Less cautious statements can also be found: slave women, realizing the planters’ need after 1807 to reproduce the slave population, ‘sought to free their previously enchained wombs, refusing to bear children who would, themselves, be enslaved’.121121 Planter attempts to improve delivery conditions for slave mothers with lying‐in rooms seem infrequent and ineffective, and midwives appear to have been more caring than planters realized. 268, 314–15, 321; Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge, 1984) [hereafter Kiple, Caribbean Slave], p. 133. Whether self‐abortion, abstinence or infanticide were political strategies pursued by slave women in Jamaica cannot be verified from surviving evidence. From Afro-Barbadian slave to wealthy brothel owner in 1700s, how Rachael Pringle Polgreen rose to prominence This is the only African city to make the top 5 world’s most creative cities list Higman, Slave Populations, pp. Thomson pointed to the ‘early and unbound indulgence in venereal pleasure [as] a common cause of sterility. Whereas they had a life outside of being enslaved,” Brown says. In the second half of the eighteenth century 40 to 50 per cent of the slaves on Jamaican sugar estates were women, but gross reproduction rates did not reflect this relative parity among the sexes.11 Concerned with the need to boost natural increase in the slave population once slave imports came under abolitionist pressure in the 1780s, planters promoted pro‐natalist policies long before the official government policy of ‘amelioration’ came into effect in the mid‐1820s. Numerous infectious diseases, beyond morbidity attributable to malnutrition, also afflicted slave women in Jamaica. In this line of analysis, slave women assume the major role in determining the predisposition to pregnancy and the decisions then taken about babies over the nine‐month cycle and in the first weeks of life.1212 White sojourners in the Caribbean were unaccustomed to seeing women unclothed in public, and they equated their own lascivious reaction to the casual exposure of flesh by Afro‐Caribbean women with lax sexual mores on the part of the women they observed.4949 Syphilis in the last six months of pregnancy harms the foetus and usually results in stillbirth. Surrey Records Centre, Thomas Samson to Henry Goulburn, 28 April 1813, 11 Aug. 1815, Goulburn Collection, III/3H. Slaves lived largely an isolated life on plantations, cut off from the normal social relations of free society. These practices, it is argued, stemmed from African cultures and served as carry‐overs brought by slaves to Jamaica via the transatlantic slave trade.1313 Research uncovered a handful – but it was Buchanan’s story that stood out. Certainly, planters were concerned over the lengthy lactation of their female slaves. Not only does malnutrition disrupt the regular menstrual cycle, but it can also delay the age of menarche and hinder post‐partum recovery, thereby depressing fertility and thus limiting further pregnancies.2626 Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, Edward East to Anna Eliza, duchess of Chandos, 23 Sept. 1778, Stowe Collection, Brydges Correspondence, STB box 25: Jamaican estates. John Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations relative to the West India Islands (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1817) [hereafter Williamson, Medical Observations], ii. Contemporary observers pointed to irregularities in the menstrual cycle as inhibiting Caribbean slave women's reproduction. Severe beatings could sometimes lead to a prolapsed uterus. Slaves left virtually no testimony on the issues discussed in this article. On Caribbean whites, see Johnson and Watson, eds, The White Minority; Ward, Emancipation and the Planters, Lewis, Pro-Slavery Ideology, Jones, Mapping Racial Boundaries; Lambert, The Master Subject.On the question of Jamaican planters’ culture and identity in the eighteenth century, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves; Burnard, A Matron … Data for Worthy Park plantation, in St Thomas‐in‐the‐Vale parish, shows that by 1834 the birth rate among creole mothers had surpassed the creole death rate, indicating that slaves on that sugar estate were approaching natural reproductive increase.3838 Bilby, Kenneth M., ‘On the Early Use and Origin of the Term “Obeah” in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean’, Slavery and Abolition, xxii (2001), 87– 100. But the comparison should not be pushed too far. Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville, Fla., 2002), p. 197. . Chang, M. C., ‘Demographic Aspects of Lactation and Postpartum Amenorrhea’, Demography, vii (1970), 255– 71. The early months of pregnancy are those when women are most susceptible to miscarriage, yet female Jamaican slaves, pregnant or not, were subject to excessive stooping, carrying of heavy weights, and unceasing compulsion to work during the crop period. Slave women in the British Caribbean endured material conditions far from easy or pleasant, but they were not systematically starved or locked up as happened in the concentration camps.2828 Tetanus was a major killer of slave babies. Significant variation limited the completeness of birth registration; a few masters registered children born dead, but most recorded slave births only after the child had survived at least a week, thus concurring – or at least coinciding – with Africa‐derived delays among their slaves in embracing hopes for an infant's survival. Rose Price's information on births and miscarriages at Worthy Park in May 1795 provides uniquely precise, if limited, information on the extent of miscarriage. Williams, Baumslag and Jelliffe, Mother and Child Health, pp. Full registration requirements for slaves after 1817 meant, however, that six triennial censuses of the entire British Caribbean slave population are available for the final two decades of slavery. They applied the classic slave myth of animal‐like sexual promiscuity to a stereotyped ‘black woman’. 380, 436. 1494 Christopher Columbus lands in Jamaica. That these women were often elderly, however, does not necessarily mean that they lacked ability; they were in fact likely to have gained effective experience in midwifery. That’s what kept driving me through the story.”, • Master of My Fate by Sienna Brown is out now through Vintage, I needed to deal with my destructive demons before I could write about my past | Vicki Laveau-Harvie, Clunes: the tiny gold rush town with a little writers' festival and a big bookshop. Thus, female slaves, let alone pregnant slaves, received inadequate calories in the British Caribbean. Black drivers, who often administered floggings, were just as harsh to female as to male slaves. “It’s always an assumption that [slavery is] an African American/North American thing,” she says. Some slave censuses detailed the large number of Igbo slaves on various plantations throughout the island on different dates throughout the… Practical Rules for Management, p. 134. If infant mortality is estimated at 50 per cent, these women were giving birth every other year. Continuing high mortality, especially among ageing African slaves, contributed significantly to this fall. Planters commonly designated infirm and elderly women as hospital and children's nurses. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, pp. Early Jamaica. B. W. Higman (Kingston, 1983), p. 3. Data from three sugar estates indicate that many pregnancies either never reached term or resulted in the birth of chronically weak infants. Traditionally in West Africa men had taken priority in helpings from the cooking pot. Matthew Gregory (‘Monk’) Lewis, the novelist and absentee Jamaican proprietor, summarized the problem: when visiting his sugar estate in Westmoreland parish in 1817, a property with 330 slaves and more women than men, he noted that ‘in spite of all indulgences and inducements, not more than twelve or thirteen children have been added annually to the list of births’. If these birthing facilities, evidently provided by planters, were connected directly to the slave hospital or hothouse, the women raised the ‘greatest objection’.110110 114, 200. After 1807, with the legal end of the British slave trade, the situation changed. The evidence for the post‐abolition nineteenth‐century British Caribbean suggests that breastfeeding periods varied considerably but that the average nursing cycle lasted less than in earlier, pre‐natalist, periods – about eighteen months.6565 Early inhabitants of Jamaica named the land "Xaymaca", meaning "land of wood and water". Thomson, Treatise on Diseases, p. 117. J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery: The Process of Amelioration, 1750–1834 (Oxford, 1988) [hereafter Ward, British West Indian Slavery], p. 179. Ibid., pp. Many biological obstacles to reproduction and cultural practices limiting fertility lack convincing evidence, given the intimate nature of the subject. So many documented material and epidemiological factors contributed to the low reproductive capacity of slave women that self‐induced abortion or abstinence is unlikely to have contributed significantly. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville, Va., 1993) [hereafter Dunn, ‘Sugar Production’], p. 62. 800 AD A people called the Arawaks lived in Jamaica. They were rarely issued shoes or stockings and consequently were prone to cuts and bruises, which could turn into septic sores or gangrene. The precarious health of women slaves, aggravated by pregnancy, with the rigours of childbirth, lengthy lactation and an early return to field work, left many female slaves in a constant state of nutritional depletion. Gilbert Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (1811) [hereafter Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica], p. 12. The best studies of obeahmen deal with their presence in Barbados, though they were also part of black society in Jamaica: see Handler, Jerome S., ‘Slave Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834’, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, lxxiv (2000), 57– 90; and Handler and Dadzie, Stella, ‘Searching for the Invisible Woman: Slavery and Resistance in Jamaica’, Race and Class, xxxii (1990), [hereafter Dadzie, ‘Invisible Woman’], 21– 38; and studies by Orlando Patterson, Selwyn H. H. Carrington, Jennifer L. Morgan, and Verene A. Shepherd, cited in nn. 117–21 below. He owned 240 female slaves at the time, of whom 72.5 per cent had reached or passed through their childbearing years. Power dynamics are a chief concern of the novel. 24–5. It was not until the mid‐1820s, when the Jamaica Assembly, in spite of its early manifest concern with overseer brutality, partially adopted the government's policy of amelioration, that natality was officially encouraged.116116 Irregularities in the menstrual cycle, notably those attributable to psychological stress, though difficult to document, may be presumed. Paul Edwards (1989), p. 8. White overseers and black slave drivers showed little accommodation in disciplining pregnant women. Post‐partum taboos against a mother's resumption of intercourse during the period of nursing young children are well attested for numerous societies around the pre‐modern world. In the 1790s ordinances were enacted for the provision of suitable lying‐in wards, and some planters erected structures separate from the slave hospital for this purpose.111111 Extended lactation and taboos against post‐partum intercourse may have contributed to wide child‐spacing, but they may equally have represented desperate measures taken by mothers to protect their malnourished infants and themselves under the deprivations of slavery. “It’s always the same no matter what the circumstances,” she says eventually. 116–18; Bush, ‘Hard Labor’, p. 202. By the time Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 any improvements in Jamaican slaves’ diet were probably mitigated by increased demands on their work routines as planters sought to maximize the productivity of the labour forces they already owned. One modern historical hypothesis to explain the poorer reproductive record of West Indian slaves compared with their North American counterparts argues that these fertility differentials can be explained, at least in part, ‘by the differences in the period of childspacing’, and that ‘the latter were partially determined by lactation practices’. In particular, it focuses on the extent to which slave women's cultural and political preferences may explain poor fertility among Jamaican female slaves compared with the difficult material circumstances of slavery that constrained reproductive rates beyond their control. Their descendants are still fighting for recognition. Contemporary writings offered contradictory accounts of the difficulties that slave women, seen as ‘blacks’, suffered during childbirth. In the BBC documentary “Slavery In Jamaica,” the rise and fall of the Beckford family is used to illustrate the plantation system. D. B. Jelliffe (1968), p. 265. The records for Mesopotamia show that three mothers out of seventy‐two (just over 4 per cent) died in childbirth.103103 Slavery in Jamaica was one of the worst kind imaginable. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller (Athens, Oh., forthcoming). Excessive labour also contributed to low slave natality. The ‘others’ unidentified here may have been the ‘obeahmen’, or alleged practitioners of African remedies, sometimes accused of helping slave women in pursuing this choice.7878 Yet the policy was not successful because the slave population declined in all save one of the British Caribbean islands in the years leading up to slave emancipation in 1834.66 The contemporary evidence is mainly taken from the writings of white planters, doctors and estate attorneys that dominate the documentary record on slavery in British America. Jamaica has a vivid and painful history, marred since European settlement by an undercurrent of violence and tyranny. 218. Reddock, Rhoda E., ‘Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective’, Latin American Perspectives, xii (1985), 67– 8. “It was deep and dark,” Brown says of the research. Docudrama about a trans-Atlantic slave ship voyage of black slaves from the West Coast of Africa to the Caribbean, a part of the triangular slave trade route called the Middle Passage. Bush, Slave Women, pp. That they were sometimes infirm, or weakened by the rigours of their labours, does not imply that they were uncaring. Rates of reproduction under Jamaican slavery Experiment 1830–1865 ( Oxford, 1976 ), pp grew to 9,504 1673! Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards ( Kingston, 2000 ), p... Of maternal mortality in the fields in wet clothes period of slavery of... Third‐World countries today are caused by post‐partum haemorrhage right to suckle them off... 347–78 ; Ward, British slave trade is largely responsible for bringing to the prevailing low of... 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