On 25 January 1850, the vessel Atlantic docked at St George’s harbour, at the capital of Grenada. Aboard were 259 recaptured Africans: one-third were women and girls, and two-fifths of the recaptives were under fifteen years old.Footnote ¹ The Atlantic arrived a month after the Brandon and Ceres, and ten months after the Clarendon. Arriving via Sierra Leone and St Helena, these four vessels between them conveyed a total of 1,055 recaptives. Witnessing the Atlantic’s arrival – which he later described as a ‘touching’ and ‘memorable’ scene – was John Candler, a representative of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, who was then travelling throughout the British Caribbean to observe and report on the aftermath of emancipation.Footnote ² Intent on seeing at first hand shipboard conditions, Candler hired a small boat and recruited a group of former recaptives, likely from the earlier emigrant vessels, to row him across to the incoming ship. His curiosity satisfied, Candler departed the ship, observing with interest on the journey to shore that his recaptive crew and the new recaptives exchanged conversation before together they ‘burst out into a cheerful African song’.Footnote ³

The absence of first-hand accounts by recaptives inevitably means their perspectives of and responses to their new circumstances are unknown, and researchers are left reliant on the subjective biased accounts of witnesses, in the main white males such as Candler, immigration officials, plantation owners and personnel, naval recruiters and officers, and travellers. Candler’s account offers a rare and reductive description of recaptives; his favourable impressions of their arrival and reception paints a picture of hopeful individuals, eagerly looking forward to their new prospects, and the promise of their new future as free agents – at liberty to find their own waged labour, live where they pleased, choose a spouse without needing permission, and determine their own paths. Yet Candler’s sketch fails to convey the fear and apprehension, the depths of psychological and physical traumas, the despair of captivity, the pain of separation from loved ones in their homelands, and the rigours of the middle passage and the second middle passage (their recapture by the West Africa Squadron and subsequent transhipment on emigrant vessels) to the Americas.Footnote ⁴ It even neglects contemplation of the future awaiting the newly arrived migrants on the Atlantic: their impending coercion into new forms of bonded labour on Grenadian plantations. For recaptives in the Atlantic world, the process of abolition was ‘simultaneously an act of emancipation and colonization’.Footnote ⁵

Nevertheless, Candler’s report speaks to an instructive theme in the liberated African experience – the solidarity that supported and sustained them in their struggles to live, labour, and love with dignity. Most newly arrived recaptives found people from their own region, with whom they shared common elements of culture and language.Footnote ⁶ While Candler’s observation does not mention the language of the recaptives, it is possible to deduce this through examining the vessels’ geographic origins. Except for the Ceres, which sailed from St Helena carrying West Central Africans, it is probable that Yoruba was the common lingua franca shared by these recaptives: 30 per cent of recaptives on the Brandon were labelled as Hausa or Yoruba by the Sierra Leonean emigration agent. The ethnicities of Africans on the Atlantic and the Clarendon went unrecorded, but Yoruba people were well represented at liberated African reception depots and settlements in Sierra Leone during the mid nineteenth century. Indeed, it has been estimated that one-third of all Africans arriving at Freetown, Sierra Leone, spoke Yoruba.Footnote ⁷ It is entirely possible that the song Candler heard was sung in Yoruba.

Recaptives forged new bonds, shared songs, and memories with others beyond their ethno-linguistic groups at multiple points along the journey: during the route to the coastal points, while confined on the African coast, aboard slave ships before interception, in reception depots in Sierra Leone, St Helena, and Havana, on Caribbean-bound emigrant vessels, while awaiting ‘distribution’ to plantations as indentured labourers, or recruitment to the West India Regiment. Severed from their homelands and often their families and friends, these kinship bonds would be crucial for community building. Documentary sources, including missionary correspondence, surgeons’ notes, military accounts, and newspapers, illuminate their experiences on arrival in Grenada. The bonds they created and sustained during their coercive enlistment, the exploitative indentureship system, and their revolt in an 1837 mutiny in Trinidad were essential to their survival.

Arrival into Unfreedom

The condition of recaptives on arrival speaks to the psychological and physical traumas they endured. It also calls into question their ‘free’ status in Grenada. The first recaptives to Grenada arrived aboard the Negrinha, an intercepted Spanish slaver in September 1836, still bearing fresh physical and psychological scars of their capture. Having observed their arrival, the island’s lieutenant governor later described the ‘wretched state’ of the 335 survivors. They had endured a traumatic forty-day journey, packed tightly together on the ship’s lower deck, which measured twenty-four inches in height. The suffering of adult males was further exacerbated: they were ‘heavily ironed’, and to forestall the possibility of onboard revolt, they had all been shackled.Footnote ⁸ Thirty of their number perished during the crossing from the African coast, and after disembarkation in Grenada, sixteen were discovered to be physically and mentally impaired and had to be committed to a hospital or asylum.Footnote ⁹ When the Phoenix, a Portuguese slaver, was captured near Grenada’s coast the following month, onboard were 484 recaptives who were subsequently landed on the island.Footnote ¹⁰ Thirty-two Africans died during the voyage, and once landed, another forty required hospitalisation or had to be cared for by ‘humane persons’.Footnote ¹¹ In May of the following year, 280 African recaptives were disembarked from the Florida, another Portuguese slaver. During the forty-six-day journey, twenty-three succumbed having contracted an unspecified sickness, and another two passed away from dysentery.Footnote ¹²

Methodist ministers on the island described the ‘wretched’ state of the Africans and the misery and degradation they endured during the crossing on the Florida.Footnote ¹³ Imprisoned on the ship, recaptives were seated on the deck’s floor, their heads between their knees, packed as closely as possible.Footnote ¹⁴ The disoriented recaptives who arrived in 1836–7 suffered humiliating and brutal indignities – including branding with searing hot irons to mark them as property – not too dissimilar to the intrusions endured by newly landed enslaved peoples during the legal slave trade. In fact, mortality rates on slave ships during the era of abolition tended to increase: longer journey times, often the outcome of an extended pursuit by the West Africa Squadron, could drastically affect the level of provisions, and result in more deaths. Further, ‘tight-packing’ in squalid and malodorous conditions encouraged the rapid spread of contagious diseases, and a higher proportion of physically vulnerable children pushed up mortality rates.Footnote ¹⁵

Similar conditions pertained among recaptured Africans on the Louise Fredericke (1839). Unlike previous ships, the Louise Fredericke was an emigrant vessel conveying Africans who were recaptured on the slaver Sierra del Pilar (1839), en route to Havana. Anticipating the Louise Fredericke’s arrival, Dr Madden, the Superintendent of the recaptives at Havana, wrote to the governor of Grenada, bringing to his attention a girl identified only as ‘no. 101’. Madden requested that due to her ‘condition’ she should be afforded ‘any kindness of treatment’ that could be extended on arrival in Grenada. Possibly Madden remained ignorant of her name, but by cross-referencing the identifier no. 101 with the registers of the Havana Mixed Commission where the Sierra del Pilar was condemned, we know her African name was Agutoré as she told an African interpreter and as was recorded by a Spanish-speaking clerk.Footnote ¹⁶ Her declared age – fourteen – may have been a guess, likely based on her height.Footnote ¹⁷ Along with her recaptive shipmates, Agutoré’s ethnicity was identified as Nago (Yoruba). She was among the 169 recaptives landed with documents indicating their emancipation, having survived the horrific middle passage, brutal recapture, the arduous adjudication onboard the HMS Romney at Havana, and eventual transhipment to Grenada. Tragically though, Agutoré’s infant did not survive, having drowned during the Sierra del Pilar’s recapture.Footnote ¹⁸ Hearing of the loss of Agutoré’s child, Madden was moved to appeal to the governor of Grenada to intercede on behalf of the bereaved mother. Historian Martine Jean has argued that the records of liberated Africans taken at adjudication – such as the Havana liberated African registers – are mortuary archives, for some recaptives perished soon after being declared free.Footnote ¹⁹ Liberated African registers are also an incomplete record of mortality as they do not record individuals, like Agutoré’s child, who died before their emancipation.

As stated by the historian Sowande’ Mustakeem, tragic deaths caused survivors to suffer ‘psychological imbalances similar to symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and postpartum depression’.Footnote ²⁰ Certainly, trauma and stress prevailed among the newly landed, and was probably compounded by grief over the unbearable loss of a loved one. Madden makes no further mention of Agutoré, the grieving mother, and it is not known what provision, if any, was made to accommodate and support her in Grenada. Nevertheless, the single brief glimpse of Agutoré provides some insight into how the lives of bonded peoples were, to use Mustakeem’s expression, ‘unmade’ on the slave ship.Footnote ²¹ Family bonds, such as the most intimate relationship between a mother and child, were ironically and tragically severed during the precarious process of liberation. Agutoré’s tragic loss also forces a gendered consideration of liberation: if freedom for many mothers meant having the capacity to care for their children, what did it mean for Agutoré who had lost her child – possibly the sole family member to have accompanied her – during the process of liberation?

The story of the Louise Fredericke recaptives is also one of community building: as Vincent Brown described, captive Africans constructed ‘fleeting, makeshift community amid the chaos of the slave trade’.Footnote ²² Such communities may have been encouraged by the recaptives’ shared ethno-linguistic past, but many were also forged during the uncertain and arduous voyage. Madden highlighted the case of a man identified as ‘no. 3’, who was among those appointed as headmen of the recaptives.Footnote ²³ The Havana registers record this man as Allai (his African name), around twenty years of age, and described as bearing long stripes from chest to belly (probably referring to the body scarification practised by many groups, which signify ethnic and lineage identities).Footnote ²⁴ Observing Allai’s suffering from partial paralysis, Madden attempted to keep him at Havana until his health improved, but the strong-minded Allai ‘could not be prevailed upon to remain behind his companions’ who were departing for Grenada.Footnote ²⁵ Madden compromised, and recommended that Allai be sent directly to the hospital for care on arrival.

The superintendent also commented on the extremely strong bond between Efuyumicá and Ulagüe that persisted through recapture and adjudication. Madden described the two nine-year-old girls, who were headwomen, as ‘remarkably intelligent’ children: ‘They pass for sisters and have never been separated either onboard the Pickle, or the Romney.’Footnote ²⁶ Falling short of a directive, Madden added: ‘And I trust they will not be separated in Grenada’.Footnote ²⁷ Whether Madden’s wish for the ties of affection between the friends to be preserved was respected is not known: often in fragmentary sources there is rarely ever any further mention of individuals who briefly capture the attention of officials. What became of these two remarkable young friends is unknown, but perhaps Madden’s hope that they were able to remain together in friendship was realised.

As discussed in this chapter’s opening, the portrayal of liberated Africans as jubilant arrivants is a common trope in the narratives of those who observed emigrant vessels arriving at Grenada between 1849 and 1863 after the African immigration scheme was sanctioned. It was claimed that the recaptives aboard the Clarendon (1849) appeared healthy and cheerful, and reportedly spoke favourably of the care and attention received during their passage.Footnote ²⁸ John Candler wrote approvingly of the Atlantic’s general appearance and upkeep, which he described as clean, spacious, and well ventilated; perhaps its ordered appearance unduly influenced his perceptions of the well-being of the Africans onboard. Candler noted they were still at their morning breakfast of cassava and saltfish, appeared contented and happy, and clapped their hands in joy or relief at having arrived safely after a long and gruelling journey.Footnote ²⁹ The Barbara Campbell, the last ship to arrive in Grenada carrying liberated Africans, was noted to be ‘lavishly supplied with stores and implements of cooking’ for the recaptives’ ‘comfort and convenience’.Footnote ³⁰ That the vessels appeared clean may in part be attributed to the crews’ efforts to maintain a healthy shipboard environment to forestall the spread of disease on emigrant vessels. Apart from wanting to preserve their own well-being, crew members received financial incentives for encouraging the careful and benevolent treatment of the recaptives: the surgeon and captain on the Tartar (1860), for example, both received a bonus of one dollar for each healthy recaptive landed.Footnote ³¹

However, these descriptions by observers of the happy demeanour of recaptives should be considered in light of their onboard experiences before their vessels finally arrived in port. The mortality rate of liberated Africans detained in reception depots awaiting resettlement or shipment at mixed commission courts reveal rather sombre statistics. Between 1848 and 1850, mortality rates of recaptives at these sites were about three-quarters of the level experienced during the transatlantic slave trade. Although mortality rates declined as a result of administrative changes between 1851 and 1865, the process of liberation tended to exacerbate their mental and physical suffering and increased death rates.Footnote ³² To summarise, as Jean has pointed out, between capture and adjudication, African men, women, and children suffered or died due to ‘inaction, violence, and exceptions’ engrained in international laws.Footnote ³³

It is possible to discern from the records that, as with the Africans recaptured and sent to Grenada between 1836 and 1839, the liberated Africans arriving after the sanction of the emigration scheme in 1840 also experienced poor health onboard migrant vessels. The imperative to meet demands for free labour throughout the Americas was prioritised over the well-being of newly freed individuals. In some cases, after disembarkation from slavers at mixed commission courts, recaptives who had not yet fully recovered from sickness were nevertheless bundled onto emigrant ships. Many recaptives who boarded the Ceres (1849) at St Helena, for example, were initially refused health and fitness certificates.Footnote ³⁴ Some recaptives on the Barbara Campbell (1863) came directly from the hospital in St Helena, as ship captains struggled to make up their quotas for the ship. Indeed, with the exception of the Ceres, the mortality rate on the Barbara Campbell was the highest among the Grenada-bound vessels since the scheme was approved.Footnote ³⁵ The boarding of sick and diseased recaptives highly suggests at least some Africans were boarded without giving their free consent to emigrate. Others continued to be troubled by poor health long after arrival in Grenada: the male African labourers indentured in January 1850 to the Grand Bay Estate, Carriacou, were notably industrious. But the health of the women prompted some concern, apparent from their description as still in a ‘very weakly state’ and unable to do any laborious work some eighteen months after their arrival.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, a local official acknowledged that many recaptives on emigrant vessels were likely to require dietary and medical attention for some time after landing.Footnote ³⁷ Perhaps the women at Grand Bay Estate, psychological and physically weakened, resisted the strenuous labour requirements at Grand Bay Estate.

After disembarkation, the paid interpreters on emigrant vessels assisted the immigration agents in classifying Africans – most likely into groups according to age and gender. Following classification, they were distributed to planters and other interested parties.Footnote ³⁸ Information concerning the interpreters who journeyed with Grenada’s recaptives is scarce; however, two cases demonstrate that, similar to recaptives, interpreters could find themselves in restrictive circumstances on arrival. In December 1849, three Kru men – John Thomas, Henry Johnson, and James Dury – journeyed on the Brandon from Freetown, Sierra Leone, as interpreters. Originating from Liberia, Kru men were renowned for their seafaring skills, and the demand for their labour led, in the late eighteenth century, to the establishment of a community of Kru in Freetown. ‘Kroo Town’ was formed in 1816 to meet the demands of ever-increasing numbers of Kru labouring in the timber industry and on merchant and Royal Navy ships. Within a few short years, the population of Kroo Town had rapidly increased, and by the 1820s, there were said to be more than 2,000 Kru in Freetown.Footnote ³⁹

During the suppression of the slave trade, Kru ship labourers were in great demand by Royal Navy squadrons.Footnote ⁴⁰ On the Brandon, which reportedly carried 70 per cent Mende speakers and 30 per cent Yoruba or Hausa speakers, the Kru’s proficiency in English, and their understanding of other major languages spoken in the multi-ethnic colony of Sierra Leone would have made them invaluable as interpreters.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, one of the interpreters had previously made three voyages to England from Sierra Leone.Footnote ⁴² By arrangement, the Kru interpreters were to be provided with free passage back to Sierra Leone on the Brandon; for some reason, they were unfortunately left behind when the Brandon sailed from Grenada. Grenadian officials concluded that these men were ‘engaged on very unfavourable terms’ in Sierra Leone and were the victims of trickery by the Brandon’s master.Footnote ⁴³ As a solution to their predicament, officials suggested they be provided with accommodation and given employment; while it is not known how the interpreters viewed their circumstances, it is probable they had no intention of settling in Grenada because with the arrival and subsequent departure of the Atlantic a month following the arrival of the Brandon, they returned to Sierra Leone.Footnote ⁴⁴

Even interpreters found their autonomy restricted. On an earlier emigrant ship, the Louise Fredericke (1839), interpreters’ freedom was constrained on arrival in Grenada. In June 1839, 172 emancipados and a detachment of the 2nd West India Regiment embarked on the Louise Fredericke at Havana.Footnote ⁴⁵ Among them were a sergeant and four soldiers who acted as interpreters – all former recaptives recruited from captured slave ships illegally operating in Caribbean or Sierra Leone maritime waters.Footnote ⁴⁶ The emancipados on board were identified as ‘Nago’ (Yoruba), and the soldier-interpreters probably shared similar backgrounds with the recaptives.Footnote ⁴⁷ During their seventeen-day stay on the Romney, a receiving hulk for recaptives at Havana, and while on the twenty-two-day journey to Grenada, African soldiers and emancipados forged bonds, probably based on their shared heritage. Some were of a more intimate nature, as was the case with a sergeant and two soldiers from the Romney who accompanied the recaptives on the vessel. Sergeant Eden and a liberated African woman, Alade, aged seventeen, sought permission from the lieutenant governor of Grenada to marry, as did the soldiers, a corporal, and a private who desired to be wed to recaptive women. Their marital hopes were disappointed, for their requests were refused when the soldiers could not produce the requisite evidence from their regimental commanding officer. In the event, none of the prospective grooms could offer proof that they were not already married.Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite the bonds of intimacy formed with recaptive women, African soldiers were not at liberty to realise their marital aspirations, as can be inferred from events that occurred in 1850 in the St George’s barracks.Footnote ⁴⁹ In that year, concern was expressed following ‘improper connections’ between recaptive women from the Brandon (1849) and the Ceres (1849) and African soldiers stationed in the barracks. Governor Colebrooke of Barbados who also administered the Windward Islands, discouraged unions between recaptive women and soldiers, anxious that soldiers could move on to other duty stations and leave behind wives and children to be maintained by employers and local government.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, whether indentured servants or enlisted men, the capitalist expansion of the empire through agriculture and the imperative to become the undisputed police of the empire was prioritised over the recaptives’ freedom. Accounts of camaraderie and marital and familial ties cemented under these constraints demonstrate the agency and resilience of recaptured Africans.

Grenada’s Recaptives, African Dynamics, and Trinidad’s First Black Revolt

Recaptives who arrived in Grenada on the Negrinha, the Phoenix, and the Florida in 1836–7 were met by recruiters for the 1st West India Regiment: one-fifth of these recaptives subsequently enlisted in the regiment in Trinidad. When the Negrinha and the Phoenix arrived, they were met by Major Chadds, who had already recruited some recaptives – mainly young males – under his command. From the Negrinha, some forty ‘willing and fit’ Africans were enlisted, along with a further seventy-six (including three women) from the Phoenix.Footnote ⁵¹ Another 112 males from the Florida were ‘voluntarily’ recruited in 1837.Footnote ⁵² The degree of choice and free will driving decisions to enlist is questionable. In the late nineteenth century, Major A. B. Ellis of the 1st West India Regiment expressed scepticism about the ‘voluntary’ nature of enlistments. Ellis wrote that a dearth of recruits encouraged the regiment to enlist Africans recently liberated from foreign slave ships but he admitted that the ‘formality of asking these men [the captured Africans] whether they were willing to serve was never gone through, many of them did so unwillingly’.Footnote ⁵³ Yet another contemporary account confirmed many recaptives were ‘most imprudently induced to enlist as recruits’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Despite being formally free, many recaptives were pressured into enlisting at a time when the majority of the formerly enslaved population were still subjected to a form of bonded labour – apprenticeship (which ended in 1838). Thus, in post-emancipation Grenadian society, although ‘liberated’ from enslavement, recaptive Africans faced new forms of unfreedom. They were not alone in their predicament; in Trinidad, scores of unfree recaptives were similarly enlisted throughout the Caribbean, while others were recruited at Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Some recaptives might indeed have freely enlisted, perhaps in hope of learning a new maritime trade or skill. Dr William Birell, surgeon of the 76th Regiment, insisted that the terms and conditions of enlistment were fully explained to the newly landed peoples through an African interpreter. Writing from Dominica in 1837 where 93 Africans were recruited, the sergeant recalled the case of one recaptive who, changing his mind about enlistment, threw away his enlistment ticket; the unnamed African’s request was duly honoured and he joined other recaptives who also refused to enlist. This event unfolded in the ‘presence of the whole of the Africans’, apparently proving the ‘cheerfully and willingly’ voluntary enlistment of Africans at Dominica.Footnote ⁵⁵

Beyond Birell’s favourable report, there is substantial evidence to suggest that some viewed enlistment as a new form of enslavement, and as African Grenadians had done during centuries of captivity, they also found ways to resist their condition. In 1837, some recaptives who had been enlisted in the regiment at Trinidad rose in mutiny, driven, according to the historian Thomas August, by anger at the speed and nature of their involuntary enlistment, and moreover, by being forced to work as labourers rather than as soldiers, and also in protest at the harsh treatment received – including corporal punishment – for infractions. Recaptive Africans who had enlisted in Grenada were critical actors in the mutiny that became known as Trinidad’s ‘first black revolt’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Beginning on the night of 17 June in St Joseph, the mutiny continued into the morning of the following day, as those involved continued in pursuit of their declared goal, which was to march eastwards towards ‘Guinea’ (Africa).Footnote ⁵⁷ Led by Daaga (also known as Donald Stewart, his anglicised name), an adopted son of a ‘Paupau’ king, around 280 of the mutineers sung a war song of the ‘Paupaus’ – peoples originating near Little Popo and Great Popo in the present-day Republic of Benin – which soon turned into a war cry.Footnote ⁵⁸ A ‘Yarraba chief’ named Mawee, whose anglicised name was Maurice Ogston, was identified as another ringleader of the mutiny.Footnote ⁵⁹

Through an interpreter, the journalist Edward Joseph, who was living in Trinidad and published an account of the island in 1838, questioned the captured Daaga about his role in the affair. According to Joseph, the ‘seeds of the mutiny were sown on the passage from Africa’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Daaga told Joseph that he had himself captured peoples from the Yoruba country, had taken them towards the coast, and sold them to slave traders. Unfortunately, on his most recent slaving venture, Daaga experienced an ironic reversal of fortune, for he and his Paupau guards were lured on board a Portuguese slaver and transported with his Yoruba captives over the ‘great salt water’.Footnote ⁶¹ Daaga and his captured Africans were victims of transatlantic enslavement. When the slaver was intercepted by British cruisers, Daaga’s fortunes briefly appeared to have changed for the better, when he, his bodyguards, and the Africans he had captured were liberated and sent to Sierra Leone. Along with other men of his ‘tribe’, Daaga was recruited in Freetown in January and sent from there to Trinidad.Footnote ⁶² At some point – it is not clear whether on the slaver or the emigrant vessel – Daaga’s former captives confronted him, and perhaps fearing for his life, Daaga appeased the angry men by promising to attack the Europeans during the night – when they arrived in the ‘white man’s country’.Footnote ⁶³ He further promised if the ‘Paupaus and Yarrabas’ followed his lead, he would fight for them all to return to ‘Guinea’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Formed within West Africa, the varied ethnic allegiances and political struggles carried out by these recaptives emphasise how African histories contoured American incidences of resistance.Footnote ⁶⁵

According to Joseph, Daaga could not ‘comprehend that his new captors liberated him’ and he regarded the British as the ‘more successful rivals’ to the Portuguese.Footnote ⁶⁶ From this account, insight can be gleaned into Daaga’s perspective on liberation: first, it did not lessen his disdain for white men, because in his view, he had merely swapped one set of white masters (the Portuguese) for another (his British captors); and second, Daaga viewed his recruitment into the West India Regiment as a form of bondage that gives credence to the term ‘recaptured’.

Returning to the events of the mutiny itself, the rebels set fire to the accommodation used by the African soldiers, seized arms and ammunition, and exchanged fire with the militia. Eventually, Daaga was captured and some of his mutineers fled. Others who managed to evade capture regrouped under Mawee’s leadership, and set out on an ill-fated march towards Africa. Mawee and the remaining mutineers were eventually captured or killed; six others committed suicide rather than submit to execution by their British captors. Three of the rebels, including the two leaders Daaga and Mawee, were executed, and others were sentenced to transportation to an unidentified location for life.Footnote ⁶⁷

Many rebels were among the 426 recaptives recruited into the 1st West India Regiment in Trinidad between 1836 and 1837.Footnote ⁶⁸ The majority were recruited from Grenada: 228 from the Negrinha, the Phoenix, and the Florida, and another ninety-three from the slaver Don Francisco, captured and taken to Dominica. It is difficult to identify the slaver from which the remaining recaptives came, but is possible these recaptives were recruited at Sierra Leone, as was the case with Daaga and his guards.Footnote ⁶⁹ In any case, many accounts of the mutiny were careful to stress the involvement of Grenada’s recaptives. The Port of Spain Gazette confidently informed its readers that the mutineers comprised ‘200 raw recruits, liberated Africans from Grenada’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Another account identified the mutineers as 200 recaptives earlier liberated from a Spanish slaver captured by HMS Vestal. This claim is not without some merit because the Negrinha and the Empress, two illicit Spanish slavers, were recaptured by the Vestal that year. Surviving records indicate that the captives ‘rescued’ from the latter were sent to the Bahamas via Havana.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, it is reasonably certain the slaver was the Negrinha. However, Colonial Office correspondence stated that only forty Africans were recruited from the Negrinha and that among the mutineers were some of the ninety-three Don Francisco recaptives recruited in Dominica in April 1837.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, Joseph’s account of the mutiny described the rebels as recaptives from both Grenada and Dominica.Footnote ⁷³

Identifying the ethnicity of the mutineers could help reveal the role of Grenada’s recaptives in the affair. The leadership role of the ‘Paupaus’ and ‘Yarrabas’ was apparent from descriptions of the event.Footnote ⁷⁴ Sociolinguist Maureen Warner-Lewis maintained that the rebels’ war song, attributed to the ‘Paupaus’, highlights the ‘multi-ethnic linkages’ among the Gbe and Yoruba speakers of the Slave Coast.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is likely Africans on the Phoenix, the Florida, and the Don Francisco were of these ethnic groups. As shown, recruits from the Phoenix, which departed from Little Popo on the Slave Coast (present-day Togo), were likely to have been predominately Gbe speakers, possibly with some Akan- and Ga-Adangme-speaking captives transferred from Gold Coast ports.Footnote ⁷⁶ Europeans referred to peoples from Little Popo and Great Popo as originating from the ‘Paupau’ or ‘Popo’ nation.Footnote ⁷⁷ In addition, close to half of the 1836–7 recruits journeyed on the Florida, which departed from Lagos at a time when unprecedented numbers of Yoruba speakers were being sent through that port following Oyo’s collapse.Footnote ⁷⁸ Further, as the historians Robin Law and David Eltis noted, in the nineteenth century, Yoruba speakers would have also been present at Ouidah, the port of origin of the Don Francisco, the slaver from which 93 out of 426 recaptives were recruited.Footnote ⁷⁹

Colonel Bush, commander in charge of the detachment of the 1st West India Regiment in Trinidad, refuted suggestions of the predominance of Yorubas in the mutiny, insisting instead that the greater number of rebels were ‘Popos, Congos, and Eboes’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, that groups from the Slave Coast were involved is not surprising, considering their well-known military prowess.Footnote ⁸¹ Other officers claimed that in fact the Yoruba recaptives had defended the officers’ quarters.Footnote ⁸² Nevertheless, at least one of the key figures of the revolt was Mawee, who was described as a Yoruba chief. In summary, the recaptives who landed in Grenada between 1836 and 1837 – especially those originally departing from Lagos and Little Popo – are likely to have played a role in the mutiny, whether in defence of their officers or as rebels. The 1837 mutiny provides some evidence of the struggle to secure freedom following liberation, the role of African political and ethnic dynamics, and the influence of Grenada’s recaptives within the Eastern Caribbean Sea.

Giving Planters a Share of a ‘Great Boon’: Allocation to Plantations

Between 1836 and 1839, 1,040 recaptives from the Negrinha, the Phoenix, the Florida, and the Louise Fredericke were indentured in Grenada. Generally speaking, estate managers wanting to offer labour contracts to liberated Africans were instructed to apply to the stipendiary magistrates. The magistrates held jurisdiction over the allocation of recaptives to planters and tried to distribute them widely between estates. However, the arrival of the Louise Fredericke in 1839 notably departed from the usual procedures. Responsibility for allotting the Louise Fredericke’s recaptives rested with Lieutenant Governor Doyle as the 169 recaptives were emancipados, sent via Havana at his specific request. Doyle’s allocation of these recaptives attracted criticism and the lieutenant governor was accused of favouritism, for as one planter complained, the distribution of the new labourers was most unfair: of the 169 newly imported Africans, over forty had been allocated to a single individual, thirty to another, and so on, while other planters did not receive any labourers.Footnote ⁸³

To avoid accusations of favouritism, it was more common for recaptive Africans to be distributed across several estates in small groups. In 1836, it was recommended that the Negrinha recaptives be distributed around the island in groups not exceeding twenty people.Footnote ⁸⁴ With Africans sent via Sierra Leone on the Brandon (1849), the Clarendon (1849), and the Atlantic (1850), allocations varied, usually in groups ranging from four to twenty-two people.Footnote ⁸⁵ Africans sent via St Helena were allocated in small groups – commonly in pairs – due to their smaller numbers on these ships.Footnote ⁸⁶ The Tartar (1860), which conveyed Africans to St Vincent and Grenada via St Helena, used a distribution method described as ‘scattering’, which was not done, according to the lieutenant governor, in the interests of the immigrants, but to prevent complaints of favouritism by giving ‘every planter a share of what is admitted to be a great boon’.Footnote ⁸⁷

The manner of such allocations impacted relationships forged during transportation to Grenada. Onboard the Athletoe (1862), recaptives spent twenty-five long days at sea, where they forged new friendships or strengthened existing connections. The ship’s surgeon reported that in the evenings, the recaptives were very sociable and greatly ‘enjoyed their dance and singing’.Footnote ⁸⁸ On arrival in Grenada, as was common with emigrant vessels from St Helena, the Athletoe recaptives were separated and placed individually, in pairs, or in groups of three on estates.Footnote ⁸⁹ As will be later discussed, liberated Africans sought to force changes to the patterns of distribution in order to have the opportunity to visit their countrymen and women and other shipmates.

In most cases, care was taken to keep families together, and where possible, to maintain friendship groups. Following the arrival of the first emigrant vessel, the Clarendon, Lieutenant Governor Hamilton issued a strict warning to the special justice of the peace and the police magistrate that should any recaptives be connected by marriage or consanguinity, or should any of the labourers evince a ‘reasonable’ desire to remain together, separation was to be avoided.Footnote ⁹⁰ Colebrooke remarked that recaptives sent from Sierra Leone and St Helena to St Lucia, St Vincent, and Grenada had had their ‘family ties respected, and even their wishes consulted’ when they expressed a desire to settle together.Footnote ⁹¹ However, it is likely this directive was not applied to the 1860–3 recaptives who were widely distributed in smaller numbers, often in pairs.

According to the historian Edward Cox, the distribution of Africans among the estates partly reflected the competition for their labour by the 1840s in conjunction with the magistrates’ perception of the ‘generally satisfactory state of affairs on the estates’.Footnote ⁹² However, Africans were distributed widely and thinly for two additional reasons. Firstly, the settling of small numbers of recaptives together with former enslaved persons was perceived as ideal. Under such an arrangement, liberated Africans would then be ‘diffused’ among the African Grenadian population and ‘soon learn to act and think as they do’.Footnote ⁹³ In 1836, Lieutenant Governor Doyle remarked that small group distribution was beneficial as it aided in the ‘more speedy civilisation’ of liberated Africans.Footnote ⁹⁴

A second related reason for distributing the newly arrived recaptives in small groups is related to the demographics of the recaptured Africans. As common during the transatlantic slave trade, a gender imbalance was evident, with males outnumbering females, an issue that regularly received attention from officials in Trinidad and the Bahamas.Footnote ⁹⁵ For instance, among the 1,035 recaptives indentured on estates on the island in 1849–50, there were 430 men, 161 women, 325 boys, and 119 girls.Footnote ⁹⁶ Official attention often focused on the difficulties new males might encounter in finding wives and forming families.Footnote ⁹⁷ To that end, the Joint Committee of the Council and Assembly of Grenada suggested in 1836 that liberated Africans from Havana sent to the British Caribbean should be ‘dispersed throughout the country’ so that the smaller numbers of women would not cause ‘inconvenience’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Changing employers to find a spouse was one such inconvenience to colonial authorities. In 1851, the magistrate for St Andrew reported that the gender imbalance among recaptives led to changes among them that would otherwise not occur. These were motivated by the desire to find spouses among their countrymen and countrywomen.Footnote ⁹⁹ Relatedly, missionaries who opposed the introduction of liberated Africans framed their debates connecting gender imbalance to ideas of civilisation and progress. Some spoke of the ‘evils’ that would arise from the ‘introduction into a civilised and progressive community of a class of persons composed chiefly of males, who do not recognise these moral and religious obligations’ of the population.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Recaptives were thus distributed in small numbers to avoid accusations of favouritism, but also to aid in their ‘civilisation’.

The gender composition of the recaptives reflected American demand and African regional preferences.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Mid nineteenth-century Grenadian planters were no exception: they regularly requested young, male Africans. Nathaniel Roach, magistrate of St Patrick and St Andrew, remarked, ‘no better immigrant could be procured for our climate than young, healthy, Africans – of superior nation or tribe – as some tribes are much better disposed, mentally, than others are. Females must, of course, accompany the other sex; but, judging from experience, most of the adult females are lazy and of little use.’Footnote ¹⁰² While Roach believed some ‘tribes’ were better suited to plantation labour than others, frustratingly, he did not identify the ‘tribes’ to which he referred, leaving no insight into the ethnicities of recaptives in St Patrick and St Andrew. Significantly, Roach clearly preferred young men, characterising African women and girls as ‘lazy’ and useless, which may be read as a gendered form of resistance to the rigours of plantation labour.

A New Form of Apprenticeship

The contractual obligations of liberated Africans were shaped by the terms of the apprenticeship period and the responses of African Grenadians. The first wave of liberated Africans arrived in Grenada during the four-year apprenticeship period stipulated in the 1833 act. Under this new mode of bonded labour, the coercion of African Grenadians continued as planters resorted to various means to maintain and reproduce the estate labour force.Footnote ¹⁰³ Formerly enslaved labourers met the efforts to coerce and exploit the terms of their apprenticeship by resorting to the same methods of non-violent resistance they had employed under slavery, which had helped to wear down the planters’ preference for unfree labour; they worked slowly, performed tasks badly, broke implements, feigned sickness, stole property, absconded from plantations, took their grievances to magistrates, and in some instances, found ways to claim and obtain their freedom.

The attenuated ending of the apprenticeship system in 1838 throughout the British Caribbean colonies marked the formal end of enslavement, and in theory, the end of forced labour. However, although emancipation wrought important changes, in many territories, freed men and women found themselves at the thin edge of the wedge in their labour negotiations with unscrupulous planters, who in some instances, happened to be their former owners. The planters employed various means to coerce the new waged workers into accepting terms and conditions unfavourable to them: irregular and low wages, withdrawing allowances of house and land, introducing a labour-rent system, and imposing severe punishment in the form of fines and imprisonment for contract breaches. In turn, to secure their hard-won freedom, African Grenadians employed various strategies, which would shape post-emancipation society and economy. They wholly or partially withdrew from work, attempted to negotiate better wages and conditions, engaged in provision-ground cultivation, appropriated land, established free villages on the edge of estates, and migrated to Trinidad, where opportunities were said to be plentiful. Liberated Africans who went to Grenada from 1836 appreciated and appropriated these strategies to achieve a measure of agency in determining their working and living conditions.

The terms of engagement during apprenticeship were similar to those later imposed upon the recaptive Africans during their indentureship such as a nine-hour working day, fines and imprisonment for breaches of contract, and again, they could bring their grievances to be heard before magistrates.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 1846, an act modelled on the Master and Servant Act of 1839 was passed, which stipulated that employers who enticed or inveigled servants under contracts would be fined and workers who breached their contract would face imprisonment and hard labour.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These terms of indentureship were intended to reinforce the pre-existing exploitative master–servant relationship, and it was under such terms that recaptive Africans arriving in Grenada after 1836 were pressured into labour agreements typically lasting from six months to three years.

As elsewhere in the British Caribbean, liberated Africans sent to Grenada before the 1840 indentureship scheme were subject to terms of apprenticed labour under the Slave Trade Abolition Act of 1807.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This was distinct from the apprenticeship system defined by the 1833 act for the enslaved of Grenada. Under this earlier apprenticeship system, between 1836–7, recaptives from the Negrinha, the Phoenix, and the Florida who were over fourteen years of age were apprenticed as labourers for periods of six months on estates or apprenticed to ‘other respectable and responsible persons’, such as merchants, carpenters, clerks, barristers, printers, masons, magistrates, postmasters, bakers, shopkeepers, priests, and reverends.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Children under fourteen were similarly apprenticed to a range of employers, though for a minimum of three years.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ African youth over fourteen years of age were to receive a weekly wage of four pence.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The acting collector and the controller of customs served as guardians for recaptives, providing clothing, food, vaccinations, and medical attendance on arrival, and were authorised to arrange contracts of apprenticeship with employers on behalf of the new labourers. Officials considered that six months would be time enough for the labourers to ‘be in a situation to make contracts for themselves’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

However, in May 1838, Secretary of State Lord Glenelg wrote to the governors of the West India Colonies prohibiting the apprenticeship of any future recaptives landing directly from slavers in the region. Apprenticeship was considered no longer necessary for it was readily apparent that Africans had no difficulty finding occupation and subsistence as hired servants or labourers without a binding contract. Instead, except for very young children who were apprenticed, officials were to be appointed in each colony to make on behalf of newly landed Africans ‘the best contract for service’: they were permitted to ensure contracts were duly executed.Footnote ¹¹¹ Thus, in 1839, when recaptive Africans on the Louise Fredericke landed in Grenada, their contracts as agricultural labourers with estate proprietors were described as ‘mutual contracts’.Footnote ¹¹²

The nature of these contracts, particularly the absence of permanency, greatly concerned some parties. The editor of the Grenada Free Press and Public Gazette wrote in 1836 that he was anxious for the legislature to place liberated Africans under its provision to prevent them contributing to the ‘vast number of idle vagabonds who already infest the streets of St George’s’.Footnote ¹¹³ In the same newspaper the following year, doubts were expressed whether the introduction of people from ‘the wilds of Africa’ would prove beneficial to Grenada because of the short-term nature of their initial contracts.Footnote ¹¹⁴ After the African immigration scheme was sanctioned in 1840, these work agreements were extended, and adult Africans arriving in Grenada in 1849–50 signed contracts for twelve months.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Similarly, African youth over fifteen were indentured for one year, and younger children were indentured until they reached that age. In the case of very young children, the stipendiary magistrates could act as their ‘guardians’ or ‘in loco parents’ and execute contracts on their behalf.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In some cases, children could be indentured until they were eighteen years old with the consent of a parent, or where both parents were deceased or absent, with the approval of the stipendiary magistrate.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Hugh Henwood, who represented the interests of twelve estates, reported that children from the Brandon (1849) were informed they were free to go where they pleased following the termination of their indentureship – and had moved to various locations. However, many months afterwards, liberated African children were re-indentured, ‘in some instances against their inclinations’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Many planters and officials called for the extension of the period of indentureship to aid the ‘civilisation’ of new African arrivals. In 1837, such a call specified an extension to three years on the grounds that it would provide recaptives additional time to become ‘sufficiently civilised or enlightened’ to obtain contracts for themselves.Footnote ¹¹⁹ A longer indenture was also thought to assist in securing a steady supply of plantation labour.Footnote ¹²⁰ Specifically, by defraying the employers’ cost of basic provisions, it would provide a form of compensation to planters while new arrivals were becoming acclimatised to plantation work, or in the likely event of them quitting their employment on expiry of their twelve month indentureship.Footnote ¹²¹

Following the suppression of the Brazilian slave trade between 1850 and 1851, the main source of liberated Africans began to fall. To satisfy planters, the Colonial Office authorised the extension of indentureship in 1853 to three years.Footnote ¹²² This came into effect in 1860, as the next African migrants landed on the island. After 1862, contracts were extended to five years. However, the paucity of documented sources for the third wave of immigration to Grenada (1860–63) means that it is not known if or how immigrants from the Athletoe (1862) and the Barbara Campbell (1863) were affected by this extension.Footnote ¹²³

Labouring on the ‘Scenes of Former Slavery’

Africans were indentured to a wide range of recruiters. When the Negrinha arrived in September 1836, creating ‘no little sensation in the island’, planters and other interested parties (including a baker, a storekeeper, a carpenter, a tailor, a member of the police force, a magistrate, and a minister of religion) were keen to recruit the services of the new migrant workers.Footnote ¹²⁴ A Methodist minister, John Wood, applied to Doyle for the care of a young man, whom he promptly renamed after himself. Wood wrote that the youth had previously been under the care of a missionary at the ‘American settlement in Africa’ – likely Liberia, where there were several American mission stations.Footnote ¹²⁵ As a result, although there were numerous requests for the young man, he reportedly ‘refused to go to anyone but a Missionary’.Footnote ¹²⁶

The majority of recaptives laboured as fieldworkers, cultivating and manufacturing sugar on plantations in the chief sugar-producing parishes of St Andrew and St Patrick. As reported in the 1848 statistical returns, between them, the two parishes produced more sugar than any other, jointly producing 63 per cent of the island’s total sugar that year. The next most important and profitable export was rum, the most valuable by-product of sugar. Again, the St Andrew and St Patrick parishes were responsible for producing the major proportion – 68 per cent – of the island’s rum.Footnote ¹²⁷ Given their predominance and importance in sugar and rum production, the two parishes received large numbers of recaptives. With the commencement of Indian immigration in 1857, St Patrick and St Andrew would also absorb most of the new Indian labourers. Between 1849 and 1850, recaptured Africans laboured in all districts of Grenada: 37 per cent in St Patrick; 22 per cent in St Andrew; 18 per cent in St George; 11 per cent in St David; 11 per cent in St John and St Mark; and 1 per cent on the island of Carriacou.Footnote ¹²⁸

The small numbers of recaptives sent to Carriacou may be attributed to several factors. First, the island was a ‘miniature plantation’ economy, ten times smaller than mainland Grenada, and so required less labour.Footnote ¹²⁹ Second, Carriacou’s sugar production declined more rapidly following emancipation; between 1835 and 1839 sugar (muscovado) fell by 59 per cent in Carriacou and by 26 per cent on the mainland.Footnote ¹³⁰ Many Carriacou planters abandoned the island, while others employed a few recaptive Africans on the remaining sugar estates. On mainland Grenada, recaptive Africans worked on sugar and cocoa plantations, the island’s main replacement crop after emancipation. Cocoa production had doubled during the 1820s and increased significantly between 1835 and 1849.Footnote ¹³¹ Third, output of cotton, Carriacou’s secondary crop also dropped significantly – by 45 per cent between 1835 and 1839; because of its different climate, the island did not produce replacement crops. On Carriacou, formerly enslaved peoples primarily cultivated cotton, whereas recaptive Africans were employed on the remaining sugar plantations.Footnote ¹³²

The nature of agricultural work performed by the liberated Africans depended on their classification as labourer. In 1863, first-class labourers – the majority of recaptives – were assigned to digging cane holes and other heavy work on the sugar estates; second-class labourers, ‘men of weaker frames’ and/or female labourers, weeded or cleared the cane fields. Children aged eight to twelve and infirm adults were third-class labourers, tasked with work such as stock-keeping.Footnote ¹³³ Children too young to be under contract were employed as ‘voluntary’ labourers on plantations.Footnote ¹³⁴

Available sources on the contractual obligations of Africans indentured from 1849 provide much greater detail. From Monday to Friday, the labourers were required to work a nine-hour day, presumably apart from Christmas and other holidays. Their contracts specified that they were to receive a ‘comfortable house’, food allowances, clothing, and medical care. Each labourer aged fourteen years and over was to be allotted a quarter of an acre of land for the cultivation of ground provisions, and after three months, was to receive a weekly allowance of food and three pence per week. After six months, they would receive the current rate of wages (ten pence in 1849), in lieu of food, soap, and the weekly allowance. Food allowances consisted of three pounds of saltfish, one pound of fresh or salted beef or pork, and two pints peas or beans, along with thirty pounds of yam or plantains, or sweet potatoes, or fourteen pints of cornmeal, or seven pounds of wheaten flour, rice, or farine. Children were to receive a proportionate allowance of food. Adults were also entitled to one pound of tobacco in the first three months of their indentureship.Footnote ¹³⁵

In practice, however, the quantity and quality of provisions varied. For example, Charles Shuldham Fraser, stipendiary magistrate of the parish of St George, declared that the labourers were entitled to a house and garden, and wages only after six months of service.Footnote ¹³⁶ In some cases, wages were delayed until their provision grounds were bearing in order to relieve planters who were ‘hand feeding’ newly arrived Africans by providing them food, clothing, medical attendance, moral and religious instruction, and accommodation.Footnote ¹³⁷ In addition to these provisions, employers were to allow sufficient time and opportunity for the education and Christian instruction of Africans, and to provide a ‘decent and Christian burial’ for the dead.Footnote ¹³⁸ Officials and employers could be fined if they prevented children under fifteen years of age from attending education and Christian instruction one afternoon each week.Footnote ¹³⁹

In some respects, the contractual requirements of indentured Indians who arrived from 1857 shared similarities with those agreed for their African counterparts. Like the recaptive labourers, Indian arrivants signed indentureship contracts on arrival in Grenada.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ They were required to work nine hours a day – but for six days a week. A breach of contract, such as unauthorised absence or misconduct, could result in a fine or imprisonment, with or without hard labour. In addition to wages of 10d. a day for an adult male (which rose to one shilling in the 1880s), indentured Indians received provision grounds of at least one acre, free housing, and medical attendance.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In contrast to the recaptive labourers, Indians were required to work for a minimum of five years, whereas the majority of liberated Africans were indentured for six months to three years. Unlike African immigrants, Indian labourers were permitted holidays or days to observe religious festivals.Footnote ¹⁴² Indian labourers also received Christian instruction, with the Presbyterians leading proselytisation.Footnote ¹⁴³ Crucially, indentured Indians were eligible to claim passage back to India after five years of indentureship and another five years of residence. However, as noted in the previous chapter, officials contrived various schemes to induce Indians to remain on the island. On Grenada, 91 per cent of Indian labourers settled permanently, or migrated to British Guiana and Trinidad. In the broader British Caribbean, around one quarter to one-third of labourers returned to India.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

There was one other significant difference in the contractual agreements between indentured Indian and African labourers. Planters might try to evade the Indian labourers’ right to free passage home, but at least the entitlement had been agreed and written into the contract so there was some recourse to the magistrates. For indentured recaptive Africans, however, there was no contractual provision for return passage and there is no documented evidence that they ever returned to their African homelands.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Those who were sent between 1836 and 1839 – the majority of whom embarked on Grenada’s shores directly from slave ships – were not given the opportunity to return home. The African immigration scheme was sanctioned in 1840, and in the early 1840s, liberated Africans who emigrated to British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad (and from 1847–9, also the Kru emigrants who arrived at those colonies via HMS Growler), were entitled to free return passage. A change of policy from 1848 retracted this provision, and previously eligible recaptives could no longer exercise their right to free homeward passage.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ From 1839 to 1848, there was a hiatus in the recruitment of recaptives to Grenada. Those who arrived after 1849, conveyed on emigrant vessels at the expense of the British government, were also denied the right to free return passage to Sierra Leone.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Similarly, liberated Africans who arrived in Grenada via St Helena were deprived of return journeys.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In the broader British Caribbean, between 1843 and 1867, one-third of all recaptives – British Guiana, 6,792; Jamaica, 1,848; and Trinidad: 3,194 – returned to Africa, and others after the indentureship scheme ended.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

As with enlistment, there was some doubt cast on the voluntary nature of indentureship, and many harboured reservations over whether Africans actually understood the terms of their contracts. Five men, five women, and five children (four boys and one girl) from the Atlantic (1850) were indentured on the Grand Bay Estate and the Mount Pleasant Estate in Carriacou. John Gurley, stipendiary magistrate of Carriacou, complained that these new arrivants were ‘being guided to make a cross to an instrument [sign a contract], with the contents of which he is utterly unconscious and unacquainted’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ He added that the absence of an interpreter in Carriacou meant they could not be properly assisted, for they were all of different ‘tribes’ and unable to understand each other’s language.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Gurley maintained that none of the recaptives understood the ‘nature of the rights or obligations’ by which they and their master were said to have ‘mutually and voluntarily bounded themselves’.Footnote ¹⁵² He was particularly concerned about the severity of penalties attached in accordance with the Master and Servants Act, which included a fine of five pounds and thirty days imprisonment with hard labour.Footnote ¹⁵³ As stipendiary magistrate, it was his responsibility to preside over cases of contract breach, and Gurley realised that many Africans who appeared before him had not wilfully transgressed but had little comprehension of which offences constituted a breach of contract. The offences were not deliberate but the result of their inability to understand English, and Gurley clearly judged that under the circumstances, they could not fairly or rightly be punished for an offence of which they were ignorant. He therefore requested an interpreter be hired to help Africans understand the terms and conditions of the legal contract to which they were signatories. For unknown reasons, Gurley’s request was denied, though a compromise was reached: in future, Africans conveyed to Carriacou would be assigned an interpreter.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The above observations on the nature of Africans’ comprehension of their contracts point to the linguistic diversity of the 1849–50 arrivals. Nevertheless, in 1850, W. Hutcheson, the stipendiary magistrate for St David and St George, professed that an interpreter was only needed on Carriacou as no other stipendiary magistrate had reported the necessity for an interpreter that year. Indeed, Hutcheson claimed that in the mainland parish of St David, which had received 115 African labourers between 1849 and 1850, he himself had encountered ‘no difficulty’ in helping new African indentured labourers to understand their contracts, as they were helped by ‘older Africans of their own tribes’ who acted as interpreters to ‘make them clearly understand’ the terms of their contractual obligations.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Despite the heterogeneity of liberated Africans in Grenada, their demographic concentration in St David made it relatively easy to find other Africans willing to act as interpreters for the new arrivals.

The following year, however, Hutcheson had clearly come to appreciate that the absence of interpreters was a source of problems, and in part-concession proposed that henceforth, newly arrived Africans receive sufficient education in the English language to facilitate understanding of their indentureship contracts. Perhaps he realised – belatedly – that ‘so many different nations’ of Africans in the St David and St George parishes inevitably meant tremendous financial expenditure because to fully meet the needs of each nation would ‘require an interpreter almost for each’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In his report the subsequent year, Hutcheson complained that the mixture of French Creole with their ‘native’ languages made it impossible to understand Africans appearing in court, for the Creole interpreters were not versed in any of the African languages.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The acquisition of French Creole by liberated Africans reveals the persistence of that language from the seventeenth century. It also demonstrates that, like enslaved peoples, recaptive Africans added their own languages to this established lingua franca.

Native interpreters proved difficult to find since the Africans belonged to ‘various nations’ and spoke an array of different languages.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ To solve the problem, Hutcheson recommended that in future, liberated Africans to Grenada should be selected from a single ‘nation’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Whether his proposal was given any consideration is not clear, for there is no evidence that immigration officers on Grenada gave any consideration to preferences for particular ethnic groups. Moreover, the next wave of African immigration commenced in 1860, when recruitment focused solely on West Central African recaptives at St Helena who shared similar linguistic backgrounds.

Historians are left to draw on the experiences of liberated Africans from documentary sources such as immigration reports, travel accounts, and plantation records due to the absence of first-hand accounts. Such documents often refer to dire conditions: the levels of morbidity and mortality during the middle passage, the point of capture, the process of recapture and adjudication, and during transhipment to the Americas. However, these sources, especially those that portray a jubilant arrival, skew our understanding of the experiences of liberated Africans, particularly their emotional pain. The experience of Agutoré – the young recaptive mother who lost her child – offers us a rare glimpse into the personal tragedies suffered during the process of liberation, and encourages historians to further meditate on the meaning of freedom. Freedom was nominal – although liberated, the survivors were denied agency to determine where and, to a large extent, how they would live out the rest of their lives. Coerced into migrating to Grenada, they discovered that they had exchanged their liberated status for a quasi-slave existence, whether it was cutting cane on a plantation or serving in the West India Regiment. To give meaning to and survive their new circumstances, recaptives drew on their shared histories and new realities to manifest to their incomplete freedom. For some it took the form of partaking in the multi-ethnic mutiny of 1837 in Trinidad, for others it meant striving to make permanent through marriage the bonds forged during the traumatic and precarious journey from their homelands to Grenada.

On Grenadian plantations, liberated Africans laboured under conditions shaped by enslavement and apprenticeship: they were denied return passage to Africa, pressured into contracts fashioned by terms established during apprenticeship, laboured alongside formerly enslaved, housed in dwellings of those formerly enslaved, and primarily cultivated and manufactured sugar. The newly landed relied on recaptives who had arrived earlier to understand their contractual engagements and continued to speak various African languages, adding their own languages to the already established Grenadian Creole. These commonalities in their conditions and the ways they sought solidarity would prove important in shaping their responses to the challenges of indentureship.