An introduction to the plantation journals of the Prospect ... - Microform

Montpelier had 426 slaves in 1817 and New Montpelier 303 slaves, Craton, Invisible Man,
48; Barry Higman, Montpelier Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom,
1739-1912 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1998), 37. See also Michael Craton and James Walvin, A
Jamaican Plantation: A History of Worthy Park, 1670-1970 (London, 1970).
43
For a discussion of the general problems of interpreting plantation records, see Craton,
Invisible Man, 387-93.
44 For interplay between Prospect and Dirty Pen, see Barclays Archive 0627-0023, October
1782, f.2. In addition, a few slaves were sent to Port Antonio to handle the export crop or to
learn a trade. The slave listing of 1788 records that Scotland and Wiltshire were ‘at trade’
(Scotland is later described as a carpenter), while the 1793 list states that two slaves,
Sawney and Elick, were ‘at the Folly Point’ (Folly Point was located at the head of the
peninsula guarding the harbour of Port Antonio), Barclays Archive, 0627-019.
45 Higman, Slave Population, 48-9; Craton, Invisible Man, 87.
46
In the case of babies living only a short time, the unknown deaths cancel out the unknown
births.
47 Craton, Michael, ‘Death, Disease, and Medicine on the Jamaican Slave Plantations: the
Example of Worthy Park, 1767-1838’, Histoire-Sociale – Social History (1976), 18, 237-55.
48 In both datasets, the proportion of deaths of infants and children aged five or under
accounted for roughly one fifth of total recorded mortality.
49 Philip D. Morgan, ‘Task and Gang Systems: The Organisation of Labor on New World
Plantations’, in Stephen Innes ed., Work and Labor in Early America (North Carolina, 1988),
192-3, 204; Higman, Slave Population, 23-4.
50 Edwards, History, vol. ii, 128-129.
51 Flora is named the ‘driver after the children’ in the 1793 occupational listing. In 1788, Flora
was described as a field slave, in 1791 as a ‘field cook’, and in 1792 as a driver. Her age is
given as forty years in 1788, and, as an older woman in Prospect’s population, it is not
surprising that there is no record of her giving birth between 1784 and 1793.
52 Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600-1914 (London,1996), 18.
53 Barclays Group Archive, 0627-0023.
54
In other lists the proportion of female field labourers is less, but always well in excess of
50%.
55
Marietta Morissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean
(Kansas, 1989), 7, 9, 37, 65-75.
25