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

An Introduction to the Plantation Journals of
Prospect Sugar Estate, Jamaica
Prospect is the name of a sugar estate that once operated in the parish of
Portland in the north-eastern corner of Jamaica. 1 For five decades prior to the
abolition of slavery in 1834, this plantation was the home and workplace of a
population numbering up to 162 enslaved men, women, and children. 2 Approximately
half of Prospect’s inhabitants were born into slavery, most of them on the property
itself; the others were forcibly shipped to Jamaica from Africa in order to replenish a
labour system unable to reproduce itself naturally. Condemned to a lifetime of toil,
the majority of the enslaved worked in the cane fields, boiling house, and crushing
mill to produce rum and sugar for the benefit of absentee owners in Britain.
Much remains to be discovered about the inhabitants of this previously
unstudied sugar estate. This introduction is based on a general survey of a batch of
manuscripts preserved in the Barclays Group Archive, Manchester. 3 The collection
primarily consists of eight volumes describing the daily operation of the plantation
between 1784 and 1793. 4 Some insights into the later history of Prospect (from 1817
until 1834) have also been gleaned from the slave registration and compensation
commission records preserved in the National Archives in London. 5
Provenance is the first issue that must be addressed when encountering a
new documentary hoard. The precise circumstances under which the manuscripts
came into the possession of Barclays are not known, but it is clear that the Bank has
provided the materials with a resting place for a great many years. In Matthews and
Tuke’s 1926 history of Barclays, the documents are mentioned briefly:
It must not be inferred from this catalogue of famous names that the Bank did
business only with people at one end of the social scale; the majority were not
notable, like many who have been mentioned, nor even notorious, like poor
Comte d’Orsay; but one at least has left behind him some interesting books and
papers. This gentleman, who was one of the earliest customers, was the owner
of a plantation, and as such was an employer of slave labour. Amongst his
papers is his stock book, the first page of which contains an account of the
slaves for the year 1784. The fact that the succeeding pages deal in a similar
way with horses, cattle and implements shows that the slaves were looked upon
merely as part of the livestock on the property. 6
Matthews and Tuke discreetly omitted to name the owner of Prospect Estate,
referring to him only as a ‘gentleman’, but they did suggest a route by which the
papers were acquired by the Bank; namely, as part of a miscellaneous deposit by
one of its earliest customers. The owner of Prospect can now be revealed as the
London and Kingston merchant, Stephen Attlay, who in an account current of 1785-6
was accorded the title of ‘Esquire’. Over the years, many strange items have been
left in safe deposit boxes across the world by banking clients who, for a variety of
reasons, have never returned to claim them. Do the Prospect papers fall into the
category of misplaced personal effects?
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