Writing in the mid 1840s, Henry Wise, an American consul in Brazil, observed that traders on the African coast were supplied with British-made goods, such as muskets, enslaved Africans were ‘shackled with British iron’, and British capital and credit remained integral to the traffic of other maritime powers. Further, British commercial interest in the illegal trade prevented some British crew from capturing or destroying foreign slave ships, less it reduced a lucrative source of British revenue.Footnote ¹ Wise claimed also that the crew of the Royal Navy West Africa Squadron, sent to ‘rescue’ captives from sea, also profited from this illegal trade; upon recapture the crew would receive prize monies if it was later proven that the ship was illegally trading. In fact, the Africans on board these ships were termed ‘prizes’.Footnote ² Illegal slave trading – mainly to Brazil and Cuba – was the source of indentured Africans in the Caribbean, and Wise strongly urged Britain against apprenticing Africans captured from slavers.Footnote ³

Wise was somewhat late in issuing his caution for Britain had long apprenticed and enlisted recaptives under the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, in 1840, a scheme to enlarge this practice had been sanctioned by the British Colonial Office. Under the terms of the 1840 scheme, if during adjudication it was determined that a vessel had illegally engaged in trading humans, the captives aboard were liberated. Yet the captives were denied the opportunity to return to their homelands, for once liberated, the recaptives were pressured into enlisting in the Royal Navy or the West India Regiments or contracted as labourers on British-owned plantations in Sierra Leone or the Caribbean. An estimated 52,000 recaptives were sent to the British Caribbean between 1807 and 1867; the majority in the period following the 1834 abolition of slavery and the ending of apprenticeship in 1838.Footnote ⁵ Thus, although British citizens were prohibited from engaging in the trade after 1807, British naval officers, merchants, and plantation owners continued to reap financial rewards from the ongoing trafficking of African people.

Africans were not the sole source of indentured labour in the British Caribbean. South Asian, Europeans, and Black peoples from other British Caribbean territories were recruited as labourers on Grenadian plantations, which in the words of one imperial official, were ‘scenes of former slavery’.Footnote ⁶ Correspondence between the Colonial Office and officials in Grenada, newspaper articles, and letters from planters, missionaries, anti- and pro-slavery parties indicate how such schemes came to fruition and how they were rationalised. Supporters and opponents of the immigration scheme shared a common concern: to bring civility to Africans, whether in the Caribbean or in Africa. Anti-slavery groups and missionaries who argued against indentureship likened the scheme to slavery, reasoning that it would violate the freedom of recently liberated Africans and inspire a revival of unwanted African cultural practices. Immigration officials focused on the economic and moral benefits of indenture: expanding sugar cultivation and civilising and evangelising Africans in an ‘English’ society. Ultimately, in 1840, the Colonial Office approved a scheme to import and indenture recaptive Africans from Sierra Leone and St Helena, and this decision brought hundreds of recaptives who made lasting contributions to Grenada’s religious matrix.

Abolition and the ‘Problem’ of Labour

With the exceptions of Bermuda and Antigua, apprenticeship ended in the British Caribbean territories in 1838. Estate owners and local officials anticipated formerly enslaved Africans would work ‘regularly’ and ‘quickly’ for wages, attempting to tie them to the plantation through oppressive labour contracts and irregular and subsistence wages.Footnote ⁷ Yet many freed people were determined to redefine their relationship to the plantation by engaging in provision-ground cultivation, negotiating for wages, the appropriation of land – through renting, leasing, or sale – and establishing free villages. Others were lured by the hope of higher wages and better opportunities in larger colonies in the region.

Plantation owners commonly cited labour shortages as a prime reason for sugar’s decline, but as will be shown in Chapter 6, this was, in fact, the least significant factor. More important reasons were the shortage of capital, slowness to modernise technology, antiquated production methods, absenteeism, ineffective estate management and organisation, estate indebtedness, and the competition posed by the introduction of beet sugar.Footnote ⁸ To supplement sugar imports entering Britain and to increase the revenue from sugar taxes, the Sugar Duties Act of 1846 was introduced by the British government. This removed the protection British planters had enjoyed and reduced the duty on other foreign sugar imports in 1844 and 1845: British planters were now required to pay the same rate of duty as Cuban and Brazilian planters, increasing the demand for sugar produced by enslaved peoples in those countries. The motivation behind this action was to deliver more sugar at lower prices to British consumers and to increase revenues to the British state. British Caribbean planters and their advocates vehemently opposed these measures, arguing that they would increase the illegal slave trade to Cuba and Brazil and lead to the economic and social decay of the British Caribbean. As historian William Green put it, ‘No previous action of the British parliament – neither the abolition of the slave trade nor of slavery itself – aroused such universal despair.’Footnote ⁹

To relieve British sugar planters, the imperial administration encouraged their adoption of the métayage system, whereby labourers received a portion of the commodity produced instead of cash.Footnote ¹⁰ Métayage was introduced in 1848, and became widespread throughout the British Windward islands. Another solution – a form of compensation – was the introduction of government loans to Caribbean colonies to encourage indentured immigration.Footnote ¹¹ Men, women, and children from Africa, India, China, Europe, and freed people of African descent from North America and the British Caribbean were recruited by estate owners. Métayage and other labour schemes encouraging migrant labour helped to increase the plantation workforce, and at the same time, undermine the bargaining power of freed peoples; these factors helped to mitigate economic disaster posed by the drastic fall-off of sugar production.Footnote ¹²

In protest against the Sugar Duties Act, British Caribbean planters pressured the imperial government to intensify efforts to suppress the slave trade, a process which began in 1807.Footnote ¹³ Through administrative, diplomatic, and naval pressure, the government attempted to halt the slaving activities of other nations still engaged in the transatlantic trafficking of Africans.Footnote ¹⁴ Several treaties were negotiated which sought to bind other nations to agreements to end the trade: Portugal (1817 and 1842), Spain (1817 and 1835), the Netherlands (1818), Brazil (1826), and the United States (1862). These treaties led to the establishment of several bilateral Courts of Mixed Commission such as the Anglo-Portuguese and Anglo-Spanish in Freetown (Sierra Leone) and the Anglo-Spanish Courts in Havana (Cuba). Similar courts were also established in Luanda (Angola), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Surinam, Cape of Good Hope, Boa Vista (Cape Verde Islands), Spanish Town (Jamaica), and New York.Footnote ¹⁵ The West Africa Squadron was deployed to patrol the Atlantic waters and to capture ships suspected of breaching these agreements.Footnote ¹⁶ The squadron would take these prizes, including the captain and their cargoes of enslaved peoples to these courts for adjudication. At these sites, officials decided the fate of recaptured Africans: they could either be ‘liberated’ or sent into a life of enslavement in places such as Brazil or Cuba. In either case, mortality was high because captives often died on prize ships while awaiting adjudication, following liberation, and while being sent into slavery or indentureship in the Americas.Footnote ¹⁷

Civilising Recaptives: A Rationale

If the indentureship and enlistment of recaptive Africans were ‘part of the foreign slave trade’, as the American minister in Rio de Janeiro asserted, how then did its supporters rationalise the migration of recaptives?Footnote ¹⁸ Authorities found justification for the continued and involuntary transatlantic movements of African peoples in their civilising mission: an ideological project through which European colonial authorities sought to impose cultural, economic, and military control over supposed savage and barbaric Africans and others deemed racially inferior to whites. The civilising mission could be achieved through teaching Africans ‘European folkways: wage work, scheduled and timed labour, dress, consumption, and church attendance’.Footnote ¹⁹ Initially, the idea that Africans could be civilised in British settlements in West Africa was favoured: Thomas Buxton, co-founder of the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain, believed the suppression of the slave trade was achievable through the introduction of ‘legitimate commerce’ and Christianity into Africa.Footnote ²⁰ Buxton hoped the Niger River Expedition of 1841 would result in the development of plantations in West Africa, where African workers would produce crops for export in their homeland, and thus do away with justification for their transatlantic trafficking.Footnote ²¹

Running counter to Buxton’s plans for Africa were the proposals put forward by Alexander Barclay, the Commissioner General for Immigration. He favoured the ‘free’ immigration of Africans from the continent to the Caribbean to suppress the illegal slave trade. If successful, that would mean an end to westernised settlements of liberated Africans such as Sierra Leone that Buxton wished to extend elsewhere in Africa.Footnote ²² However, the high mortality of Europeans caused the failure of Buxton’s Niger expedition; quick to exploit the disaster, the British government and advocates of immigration mobilised to build support for their case, arguing the futility of introducing modern agriculture, commerce, and Christianity into West Africa.Footnote ²³

Barclay and others argued for the immigration of free African workers into the post-emancipation Caribbean as a labour supply that would facilitate the expansion of sugar cultivation and enable planters to compete successfully with sugar produced by enslaved labourers in Brazil and Cuba. They justified their proposal as a ‘humanitarian argument’: there was a greater likelihood that Africans could be civilised in an ‘English dominated society’ in the Caribbean than in West African settlements.Footnote ²⁴ Lord Stanley, the Secretary of State for War and Colonies, and a key player in the campaign against the slave trade, gave his support to the scheme. Stanley favoured a ‘frequent and systematic intercourse’ between Africa and the West Indies, which he believed would bring to Africa the ‘blessings of civilisation’.Footnote ²⁵ The notion that Africans could best be brought into civilisation in the Caribbean was the basis on which the Colonial Office sanctioned labour emigration from Sierra Leone to British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica in 1840.Footnote ²⁶

The benefits of such a scheme, it was argued, could also extend to the African-descended population in the Caribbean. Expressing interest in the recent recaptives in Sierra Leone and St Helena, the immigration agent for Grenada urged that the importation of new migrants was not only vital to prevent a further decrease in sugar production, but also necessary to enable planters to provide for the ‘improvement’ of the formerly enslaved, ‘who would be reduced to the greatest state of barbarism’ if planters abandoned cultivation.Footnote ²⁷ African immigration was intended to sustain sugar cultivation and, by extension, the European presence – preventing the formerly enslaved from descending into a ‘mimicry of civilization’.Footnote ²⁸ Further, the benefits of immigration would not be confined to the West Indies; civilisation would ‘flow back from hence [the Caribbean] to Africa’ through the return of free African migrants, the Christianised ‘sons’ of Africa.Footnote ²⁹

As Lord Stanley recognised, the immigration of Africans to British colonies – ‘the scenes of former slavery’ – would ‘always [be] liable to suspicion and to misconstruction on the part of foreign powers’.Footnote ³⁰ In order to prevent it becoming a ‘disguise of slave-trade’, Stanley proposed that African migrants should give their consent to their participation in these schemes and be provided with a paid return passage. Lord Russell, another important figure in the anti-slavery campaign, remarked that should a sizable number of captured Africans arrive in the British Caribbean: ‘Our whole policy in putting down the slave trade would be exposed to suspicion, and we might not improbably be told, that we were indirectly recruiting our own possessions with compulsory labour by the very means which we employed to suppress the traffic of other nations.’Footnote ³¹

To forestall such accusations, such emigration had to be restricted.Footnote ³²

Opponents of African immigration to Grenada also entered into debates on the civilisation of African-descended peoples in the Caribbean. Immigration, the Anti-Slavery Society feared, would introduce a ‘purely pagan element likely to prove seriously detrimental in its influence to the Creole population’.Footnote ³³ In 1837, following the arrival of the third ship of recaptured Africans, a group of concerned individuals stressed the ‘mischievous effects’ of ‘suddenly discharging from control’ persons from Africa among the ‘imperfectly civilised population of Grenada’. It was feared that these ‘new Africans’ would have a deleterious influence on the labourers ‘unfitting them for the new condition [emancipation]’, and reversing the good works done towards ‘making them free, honest and industrious’.Footnote ³⁴

Similarly, in an 1859 letter, a group of missionaries voiced their objections to African immigration. Writing in response to the 1859 Jamaican Immigration Bill which proposed the further importation of Africans (including 8,000 to Grenada and St Lucia), the missionaries noted the current abuses of the scheme and the high mortality among new immigrants. They argued, like the Anti-Slavery Society, that the immigration scheme scarcely differed from the slave trade.Footnote ³⁵ They exposed what they perceived as the inherent incongruities of the scheme, contending that it was contradictory to ‘save’ Africans from slavery, only to then ‘violate their first right as a free man, to dispose of themselves’.Footnote ³⁶ They emphasised that imposing a tax on the labouring population to meet the cost of indentured African immigration would unfairly reduce the income of African Caribbeans, preventing their ‘social advancement’.Footnote ³⁷ Some argued too that immigration would introduce heathenish Africans who did not recognise the ‘moral and religious obligations’ of a Christian society.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, a memorial addressed to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, described the system as ‘akin to slavery’, and warned against the ‘introduction of herds of pagans and idolaters’. They argued that the presence of new African immigrants would injure the ‘moral and religious interests’ of the population and retard the advancements towards civility of the settled Africans.Footnote ³⁹ The fear among missionaries, anti-slavery groups, and James Stephen, the permanent under-secretary for the colonies, was that African immigration would ‘encourage a revival of obeah and other unwanted African cultural practices in the Caribbean’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Dissenting voices against immigration were few, and as the mission to introduce waged work, Christianity, and other European ways of living, complemented demands from planters and the Colonial Office for labour, the immigration of Africans was sanctioned in 1840.

‘Saving’ Africans, Then Violating Their Freedom: African Immigration Schemes

Even before the 1840 scheme, African men, women, and children were apprenticed on the island. The act for the abolition of the slave trade provided that Africans either be enlisted or apprenticed for up to fourteen years. In Sierra Leone, between 1808 and 1825, around 20,500 Africans destined for plantations across the Americas were liberated; some were enlisted in the military, but the majority were indentured as apprentices to residents, for periods ranging from three to nine years.Footnote ⁴¹ In the British Caribbean, between 1807 and 1819, around 3,250 Africans were enlisted in the military or apprenticed under 14-year terms. These earlier recaptives were seized from foreign slavers which were adjudicated at vice-admiralty courts in Tortola, the Bahamas, and Antigua or in mixed commissions at Havana or Sierra Leone.Footnote ⁴²

Under the terms of the act to abolish the slave trade, five Africans in Grenada – Cumba, Yuamba, Congo, Egno, and Ukeroa – had been apprenticed for fourteen years between 1814 and 1816.Footnote ⁴³ Archival sources are silent on the circumstances of their recapture and their apprenticeship experiences, though the governor-in-chief of the Windward Islands later remarked the length of their indentureship had rendered these early apprentices ‘broken in spirit’ and a ‘worn out, abject and degraded class’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is clear then that although British colonial officials defined indentureship as free labour, such schemes were de facto unfree labour. As will be seen, Africans recaptured at sea and sent to Havana and St Helena or directly to Grenada had no choice. Those recruited at Sierra Leone were often coerced, and even when they voluntarily consented, they were sometimes not fully cognisant of the terms of employment. Labourers faced severe working and living conditions. They were indentured to an employer for up to five years and punished by fine or imprisonment for any violations of that contract.Footnote ⁴⁵

Under the revised Anglo-Spanish slave treaty of 1835, the Royal Navy brought Spanish slavers for adjudication at the Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission Courts in Sierra Leone or Havana. Those emancipated – emancipados – were despatched to British colonies.Footnote ⁴⁶ Noting the successful 1835 introduction of emancipados from Havana to Trinidad, in 1836, Wells, the manager of Bacolet Estate, moved a motion in the House of Assembly for the introduction of one thousand emancipados to be sent from Havana to Grenada. Meeting approval from the Colonial Office, Wells applied for fifty Africans to be distributed among several estates under his management. Looking forward to their arrival three months later, he happily noted: ‘They will be of very little expense to us, and are (if I may use the term) ready-made labourers.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Officials proposed that as the pre-emancipation apprenticeship system was still in place, the terms to be served by recaptive Africans should not end before the praedial labourers’ term, due to expire in 1840. Otherwise, ‘great dissatisfaction would prevail should the [apprentices] be held in bondage after the liberation of the Africans’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although there were no recaptive African arrivals from Havana in 1835, 172 emancipados liberated by the Court of Mixed Commission at Havana were despatched on the Louise Fredericke to Grenada in 1839. Some of these emancipados were employed as domestics, but the great majority were distributed to estates where they entered ‘mutual contracts’ as agricultural labourers.Footnote ⁴⁹ Wells unsuccessfully applied for a portion of these recaptives for the Bacolet Estate.Footnote ⁵⁰

Between 1836 and 1837, over 1,000 Africans were sent to the island on the slave vessels Negrinha, Phoenix, and Florida, which had been recaptured by the British Navy near Grenada’s coast. Recaptives over fourteen years were apprenticed as indentured labourers for six months and children for at least three years. Well’s Bacolet Estate indentured six African children (four boys and two girls) from the Florida in 1837.Footnote ⁵¹ Fortuitously, the number received in Grenada was disproportionate considering its size and its labour needs: out of the recaptives sent to British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Dominica, and Grenada between 1834 and 1839, British Guiana, the largest territory, received 3 per cent and Grenada 27 per cent.Footnote ⁵² Grenada thus received nearly half of its liberated Africans before the scheme was sanctioned in 1840. Thus, following the British 1807 prohibition of its own 300-year-old transatlantic slave trade, Africans continued to be transhipped to Caribbean plantations to work as unfree labourers alongside the formerly enslaved.

Sierra Leone served as chief reception depot and a location for settling Africans recaptured by the British Navy. A British vice-admiralty court was established in 1808 to condemn illegal trading ships and was replaced by the joint Courts of Mixed Commission in 1819.Footnote ⁵³ Just under 100,000 recaptured Africans landed at Freetown between 1808 and 1863.Footnote ⁵⁴ Recaptured Africans could remain onboard the ship in the harbour at Freetown for several weeks while the ship’s status was adjudicated. Once landed, they were handed over to the ‘Captured Negro Department’ in the Liberated African yard, renamed the ‘Liberated African Department’ in 1822.Footnote ⁵⁵ Local officials desired that recaptives either serve terms of apprenticeships or enlist in the West India Regiments – and, indeed, most men under thirty were forcibly enlisted.Footnote ⁵⁶ However, apprenticeship and enlistment was infrequent: before the immigration scheme received sanction in 1840, most men, women, and children went directly to recaptive villages from the Liberated African yard.Footnote ⁵⁷

The volume of newly freed Africans provoked anxieties that their numerous presence would create ‘a very large and unwieldy mass of people’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Authorities in Sierra Leone turned their attention to how the arrivants might be ‘disposed of’ so they would not ‘retrograde in the woods, into a state of nature and barbarism’ or ‘become vagrants about Freetown and the more populous villages’.Footnote ⁵⁹ On the other side of the Atlantic, officials were concerned with rescuing West Indian planters and investors from the predicted economic fall-out from emancipation. In 1840, sanction was given to a proposal for African immigration from Sierra Leone to the West Indies from 1841. Eight years later, the emigrant ship the Clarendon (1849) arrived under this scheme. Between 1841 and 1863, an estimated 15,000 recaptives were liberated in Sierra Leone and shipped to the British Caribbean.Footnote ⁶⁰ The migration of recaptives to the Caribbean from 1840 fell under the auspices of the newly created Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (CLEC), and a government emigration agent was appointed to oversee the procedures and regulations. Private persons in Britain also chartered merchant ships on behalf of British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. These three colonies bore the cost of transport, and each appointed their own emigration agent.Footnote ⁶¹

Recruitment initially focused on recaptives already settled in the villages of Sierra Leone. Eligibility to participate in the immigration scheme required recaptives to have resided for at least six weeks in Sierra Leone. British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica absorbed around 90 per cent of the recaptive Africans transported to the British Caribbean under the 1840 scheme: British Guiana received 13,969 recaptured Africans; 10,003 went to Jamaica; and Trinidad and Tobago received 8,385. This was because the demand for labourers was particularly acute due to the large numbers of workers moving away from contracted estate labour. On the islands of Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia, and St Kitts, due to their smaller population, the loss of labour on estates following emancipation was less severe than in the larger territories. Thus, only after 1849, when the government moved to defray the cost of transportation in a bid to assist the plantocracy, were Africans sent to these smaller territories; between them they received 10 per cent of all recaptives sent to the British Caribbean during the lifetime of the scheme, with Grenada receiving the majority – 4 per cent.Footnote ⁶²

The promised advantages of emigrating to the Caribbean were attractive – an abundance of work, good wages, food allowances, medical attendance, and the absence of compulsory labour. ‘Represented in glowing language’, they were said to have ‘produced an electrical effect’ among the liberated African population of Sierra Leone.Footnote ⁶³ Although most recaptives who immigrated to the Caribbean at this time did so voluntarily, others were drawn by inflated promises, coercion, and misrepresentation. Indeed, an advertisement addressed to liberated Africans at Waterloo and Regent Town in Sierra Leone for emigration to Trinidad was recalled by the colony’s governor who believed the advert offered unrealistic promises. Potential emigrants were assured that should they ‘behave good’, they would be rewarded with good wages, a house, a farm, and regular allowances of rum and saltfish.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similar notices were circulated with the hope of attracting liberated African migration to Demerara, and another appeal for labourers to work in Jamaica was addressed to former Jamaican Maroons residing in Sierra Leone.Footnote ⁶⁵

An initial demand for emigration in 1841 was soon followed by a notable decline. The Colonial Office, the receiving colonies, and officials in Sierra Leone devised a delegation system whereby residents would appoint certain persons – headmen – to board the first ships to Demerara, Jamaica, and Trinidad. In 1841, these delegates went free, on the understanding that they would return to Sierra Leone with positive accounts of the sugar colonies. In Demerara, the scheme was recognised by liberated Africans to be dominated by ‘artifice’ because the returning delegates dressed in elaborate uniforms.Footnote ⁶⁶ It did little to encourage immigration when the returning Jamaican delegates were shipwrecked while returning to Sierra Leone, or when the Trinidadian counterparts did not return, which exacerbated ambivalence surrounding the scheme.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, as Monica Schuler has noted, rather than encouraging large-scale emigration, the delegation system aided the circulation of stories about the harsh reality of West Indian life.Footnote ⁶⁸

In 1844, the arrival of an emigrant ship from the West Indies prompted agreement by the Board of Council that liberated Africans over twelve years of age were to be offered two alternatives: they could emigrate or remain in Sierra Leone but they would be responsible for providing ‘entirely for themselves’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Recruiters often targeted the most vulnerable population – child pupils attending liberated African schools.Footnote ⁷⁰ Children under the age of twelve could stay in Sierra Leone or leave, on the same terms as older youth and adults, though this arrangement was not agreed by the Board of Council.Footnote ⁷¹ Generally, however, schemes that were reliant on forcing Africans to emigrate met with limited success, for the narratives of overwork and poor treatment which circulated widely generated reluctance among the recaptives to emigrate. Disappointed by their low interest, the colonial government withdrew government transport, resuming the system of privately chartered ships.Footnote ⁷²

At the end of the 1840s, the numbers of recaptives seized by naval patrols and sent to Sierra Leone increased for a short period. This was driven by the expansion of the slave trade towards Brazil and Cuba because of the rising demand for sugar triggered by the Sugar Duties Act of 1846. The imperial government encouraged the Kru people on the coast of present-day Liberia to emigrate to the Caribbean on the HMS Growler, a government-owned steamer.Footnote ⁷³ Having completed just two transatlantic journeys between 1847 and 1849, the Growler was discontinued in the wake of concerns that the scheme encouraged kidnapping and further anxieties over the high mortality and sickness of both crew and passengers.Footnote ⁷⁴

New claims of substandard conditions aboard privately chartered emigrant vessels emerged – the outcome of intense competition to provide ever more migrant workers for the West Indian colonies.Footnote ⁷⁵ The government responded by resuming control over the costs of transportation, and at the same time endeavoured to relieve pressure on West Indian proprietors facing economic precarity consequent to the Sugar Duties Act and the resultant market depression.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1849, the British government signed the first exclusive African emigration contract with Hyde, Hodge and Company, a London-based firm, giving permission for licenced private ships to resume the transportation of Africans from the Liberated African yard in Sierra Leone. Five ships were immediately utilised: the Glentanner, the Brandon, the Fame, the Clarendon, and the Atlantic, all outfitted for the Caribbean, now considered the principal destinations for recaptive Africans liberated by the British Navy. It is noticeable that the recruiters still prioritised the emigration of newly liberated Africans, directly from the yard.Footnote ⁷⁷

It was from among these newly liberated Africans in the yard – those who had recently disembarked from slave ships – that Grenada’s indentured labourers were recruited. Recaptives from Sierra Leone were swiftly conveyed to Grenada on three ships: 20 March 1849 (the Clarendon), 17 December 1849 (the Brandon), and 20 January 1850 (the Atlantic).Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, in February 1850, before the Atlantic’s arrival, emigration officials remarked that Grenada had ‘received as many emigrants as the other three islands put together [St Kitts, St Lucia, and St Vincent] with the possibility of another and very large arrival [the Atlantic]’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This oversupply of new African labourers had not been planned, and to address concerns arising from unexpectedly large number of recaptives, it was announced that a considerable period of time should elapse before any further ships were sent.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the event, the Atlantic was the last ship from Sierra Leone, and Grenada did not receive any more recaptives until 1860, when they were conveyed via St Helena.

Recaptives could be detained for one to three months while awaiting the arrival of emigrant ships. New arrivals were kept in quarantine and isolated, exposed almost exclusively to the West India Regiment and plantation recruiters. Their choices were few; to emigrate, enlist, or ‘fend for themselves’, with no exceptions for children.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, many of the recaptives from Sierra Leone were children. So intense was the coercion, that many of those who did migrate to Grenada, did so under duress. More than half of all recaptives chose settlement in Sierra Leone or enlistment in the army rather than migration to the West Indies.Footnote ⁸² In 1849, out of 1,008 recaptives in the yard at Sierra Leone, 705 refused to emigrate or enlist, and were released without any means of support. According to a Colonial Office memorandum, ‘precautions were taken to prevent the use of coercion or undue influence’ towards recaptives, and the numbers of those who declined to emigrate or enlist was read as evidence that ‘they did really exercise a choice’.Footnote ⁸³ However, as Schuler stressed, this choice was made under great pressure; recruitment among the newcomers in the reception depot involved ‘subterfuge, duplicity and if necessary, force’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Sierra Leone officials harboured suspicions that newly liberated Africans were being discouraged from emigrating by those already settled in Sierra Leone, by missionaries, and by Africans employed by the Liberated African Department. In 1850, Governor MacDonald reported with a degree of ire that the newly liberated Africans were ‘tampered with and their minds possessed against emigration by their country people’, who sought to obtain the labour of new arrivants.Footnote ⁸⁵ It was claimed too that under the cover of sermonising, Wesleyan missionaries warned liberated Africans against migrating. Irritated, MacDonald suggested that ‘nothing but perfect isolation’ could secure their emigration.Footnote ⁸⁶ MacDonald believed ‘native subordinates’ – paid overseers and interpreters employed by the Liberated African Department – ‘advised’ recaptives to be wary of enticements to immigrate, ‘before our faces, and without fear of detection’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Having similar linguistic backgrounds, but perhaps more crucially, sharing the experience of displacement and liberation, interpreters were well-positioned to influence the recaptives’ ‘choice’ of settlement or emigration. To counter anti-emigrant warnings of missionaries and settlers, MacDonald proposed that in future Africans should be conveyed directly from the slavers to emigrant ships; allowing them to embark in the yard was risky, for there they could be too easily influenced by anti-emigrationists. Nevertheless, MacDonald continued to stress that intending emigrants should give their consent prior to departure.Footnote ⁸⁸

Africans were also coerced to migrate from St Helena. By 1841, the West Africa Squadron had succeeded in the suppression of most of the slave trade north of the equator, and now refocused its efforts to territories south of the equator. The Slave Trade (Portugal) Act 1839 authorised the Navy to detain vessels engaged in the slave trade under the Portuguese flag, or those without flags, and to bring them before a British vice-admiralty court for adjudication. The Slave Trade (Brazil Act) 1845 further empowered the Navy to capture Brazilian slavers, both north and south of the equator, and bring them for adjudication before vice-admiralty courts. The Acts prompted a move towards vice-admiralty courts, and use of St Helena as a venue and receiving depot. Mass disease, malnutrition, overcrowding, and death characterised the daily experience at Lemon Valley and Rupert’s Valley, the island’s two reception depots.Footnote ⁸⁹ Poor diets and malnutrition were evident before embarkation and death from scurvy was common.Footnote ⁹⁰ A report from the Rupert Valley depot stated that mortality rates there were greater among liberated Africans than the overall number of enslaved Africans conveyed to Brazil and Cuba.Footnote ⁹¹ Indeed, one-third of recaptive men, women, and children who were landed at St Helena died; between 1840 and 1867, around 8,000 Africans were buried at the depots.Footnote ⁹²

Between 1840 and 1867, St Helena’s vice-admiralty court condemned more ships – 450 – than any other British possession, and over 25,000 surviving recaptives were liberated.Footnote ⁹³ Unlike Sierra Leone, St Helena was small and limited in resources to provide a permanent home for the recaptives.Footnote ⁹⁴ Around 3 per cent of those liberated settled permanently in the island. Some were employed as servants or apprentices, mostly in agricultural and domestic positions; disabled, sick, elderly people, and those physically unable to endure the arduous journey to the Caribbean, also settled. A few hundred recaptives were recruited into the British military in the early 1860s. Although voluntary, it is likely that the recruits had little understanding of the nature of their enlistment.Footnote ⁹⁵ The vast majority of newly freed Africans – just over 17,000 – were conveyed to the British Caribbean.Footnote ⁹⁶ Five ships were despatched to Grenada from St Helena between 1849 and 1863, carrying 17.4 per cent of Grenada’s recaptives: the Ceres (1849); the Tartar (1860); the Akbar (1861); the Athletoe (1862); and the Barbara Campbell (1863). The number of those emigrating contrasts with the many thousands of liberated Africans who settled in Sierra Leone, and relatedly, the relative wealth of information about their settlement and migration.

For the majority of recaptives at St Helena, the choice was ‘emigration or destitution’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Orphans were unable to exercise this choice: In his capacity of lawful guardian, the governor of St Helena made the decision to emigrate on their behalf. In 1844, rations were cut to encourage recaptives to emigrate.Footnote ⁹⁸ Africans who agreed to emigrate were separated from the general population and fed a more nutritious diet.Footnote ⁹⁹ In some cases, some poorly recaptives were boarded on emigrant vessels despite their ill health, sometimes with fatal consequences. After five Africans died at sea aboard the Barbara Campbell (1863), the ship’s surgeon explained they had been among several recaptives removed directly from the hospital to the ship to satisfy demands to sail with a full complement of passengers.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ An entry from the medical journal of the Barbara Campbell lists one of the surviving recaptives: Moongah, an African man, received treatment for influenza, a disease rampant among recaptives in St Helena.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The health of emigrants who boarded the Ceres (1849) certainly presented a cause of concern for Dr Rawlins, the surgeon in charge of the establishment at Rupert’s Valley. Forty-five emigrants were unable to board the ship because of sickness; of the ninety-one who did embark, Rawlins deemed over sixty unfit for embarkation, and refused to grant the requisite health and fitness certificates. Convinced more emigrants could be embarked for the labour-hungry Caribbean plantations, Patrick Ross, the governor of St Helena, appointed a committee of three medical officers to examine the state of health of unfit emigrants. Guided by the committee’s report, the governor authorised their emigration. However, the ill health of the emigrants is reflected in the mortality rates on the Ceres: during the journey to Grenada six Africans died, the highest mortality rate reached during the importation of Africans to Grenada following the inauguration of the 1840 scheme.Footnote ¹⁰²

Resistance to emigration at St Helena is evident in the riots and the aversion to baptism within Rupert’s Valley in the early 1860s. In March 1861, the reception depot was full of some 250 recaptives, liberated at the end of the previous year. Described as ‘mutinous and rebellious’, some were locked in the barracks at night as punishment.Footnote ¹⁰³ Arriving at the depot later that month, Reverend Piers Claughton, the bishop of St Helena, was attacked with stones thrown by the recaptives. The following day, a riot occurred. Recaptives attacked staff at the depot, and the situation was quelled only when police arrived. Some rioters escaped into the island’s interior, but others were placed in stocks. The archaeologist Andrew Pearson argued that the rioters had no desire to overtake the depot: they wanted to express resentment at their confinement and night-time imprisonment. The other disturbance occurred in 1863 when Africans assaulted the hated overseer of the depot. Later, the recaptives were enlisted or sent to the Caribbean, and a detachment of troops was stationed in the depot.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

It is possible liberated Africans emigrating from St Helena arrived in Grenada already baptised as Christians. Bishop Claughton was appointed the first bishop of St Helena in 1859, and by the first quarter of 1860, it was reported he had baptised ‘no less than five hundred liberated Africans’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This is a significant number of baptisms, considering that during 1860, 1,328 Africans had emigrated from St Helena to the British West Indies (in 1859, just four emigrated).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the depot’s garden, ‘hasty instruction’ was followed by ‘dramatic mass baptisms’ to coincide with the sailing of immigrant ships. In one case, during an unexpected visit from Bishop Claughton, recaptives absconded, motivated by the belief that a ship had arrived to convey them to the Caribbean. Between 1859 and 1863, recaptives were baptised with the help of an interpreter, who was later discovered to have been less than truthful about the level of understanding Africans possessed about Christianity.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Africans were not the sole group who began their journey towards Grenada at St Helena. On the Athletoe (1862), sixty recaptives from St Helena journeyed with 377 Indians from Calcutta (seven Indians died during the journey), along with one interpreter and three topasses (descendants of Portuguese men and local women in maritime Asia).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ On this ethnically and culturally diverse ship, African and Indian immigrants interacted although they were separated by a grating. According to the surgeon’s report, one of the ‘coolie’ topasses could speak a language understood by an African named Zinga, one of the head overseers appointed for the African immigrants.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Beyond Africa: Other Forms of Unfree Labour

Between 1838 and 1917, in addition to recaptive Africans, an estimated 429,000 Indian adults and children – and 40,000 Europeans, 17,900 Chinese, and 1,800 previously enslaved Africans from North America – were recruited as labourers in the British Caribbean.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Planters on the British-held island of Mauritius turned to India for labour following the 1834 abolition of slavery. British Caribbean planters followed suit, with Indian labourers first sent to British Guiana in 1838. The destruction of local industries, loss of land, heavy taxation, and other circumstances caused by British imperialist penetration into India, and calamitous natural hazards, led to many Indian peoples, particularly those in rural areas, becoming landless and unable to support themselves. Such personal and economic hardships pushed many Indians to migrate overseas.Footnote ¹¹¹ An investigation of the Mauritian labour scheme in 1838–9 reported abuses in recruitment and on estates, prompting the Indian government to prohibit overseas emigration in 1839. Following several changes in recruitment strategies in 1842, the ban was lifted, and in 1843, emigration resumed to Mauritius and to British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica in 1845.Footnote ¹¹² Between them, British Guiana and Trinidad received 98 per cent of Indian immigrants sent to the British Caribbean.Footnote ¹¹³ Although the labour situation was more acute in the larger territories, the urgent demand for labourers in the smaller colonies was heard by the Colonial Office, and in the mid to late 1850s, Indian labourers were sent to St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent, and Grenada.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Grenada received its first Indian labourers nearly twenty years after their migration had commenced elsewhere in the region. On 1 May 1857, the Maidstone landed on the island with 289 Indian survivors of a traumatic ninety-day journey from Calcutta, during which nearly a quarter of the passengers died. A further migratory stream from India followed in the wake of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Grenadian planters were quick to suggest that transportation, rather than death, should be punishment for ‘mutinous Sepoys’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ With self-serving interest, the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Grenada unsuccessfully requested 2,000 of the transported mutineers.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Indian government banished mutineers to a penal settlement on the Andaman Islands rather than to the sugar colonies. Yet in the aftermath of the uprising there was an increase in Indian immigration to Mauritius and the British Caribbean. Some mutineers did reach overseas sugar plantations and were reported by colonial newspapers as influential in provoking strikes and labour agitations. The migration spike however was largely a result of other factors: increased demand for recruits and a rise in sugar prices coincided with the economic dislocation caused by months, and in some locations, years of disruption throughout India, led rural population to migrate in greater numbers in the late 1850s and early 1860s.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Between 1857 and 1885, 3,200 Indians were recruited from Calcutta and Madras.Footnote ¹¹⁸ They were indentured for three to five years on Grenadian sugar and cocoa plantations, where conditions were extremely severe.Footnote ¹¹⁹ That many succumbed to the harsh and unsanitary conditions of indentureship was inevitable; it was reported that in some Grenadian estate hospitals, Indian labourers were given uncooked food or none at all. On one estate in 1866, the death rate among a group of recent arrivals was 40 per cent.Footnote ¹²⁰ In a letter to the secretary of the state of the colonies, one observer complained of the material conditions of indentured Indian labourers, describing Indian immigration as a ‘revival of the slave trade under a new name’.Footnote ¹²¹

The positive impact of Indian immigration on sugar production was observed just a year after the scheme commenced. In 1858, the lieutenant governor of Grenada noted that the locality where the Maidstone emigrants were indentured had experienced an increase of the sugar crop that year, compared to the previous year.Footnote ¹²² Also in 1871, the lieutenant governor commented that these labourers were a great benefit to the colony, as the additional labour caused several abandoned estates to be reclaimed. He claimed that he had been informed that very few desired to return as they became ‘acclimatised’ and settled.Footnote ¹²³ However, while personal attachment to Grenada was a factor in the decision to remain on the island, planters and the Colonial Office induced Indian immigrants to stay in Grenada following expiry of their indentureship. Indian labourers sent before 1858 were initially required to serve a five-year indenture, following which they had to reside for another five years in Grenada, until they were eligible for a free return passage.Footnote ¹²⁴ Later it was stipulated that Indian labourers had to work under annual contracts during the five-year residential period before their return passages were paid.Footnote ¹²⁵ In 1871, an act was passed to encourage workers to surrender their right to return after a three-year indentureship, and re-indenture for a further five-year period in exchange for land or single payment.Footnote ¹²⁶ Indeed, it was not until 1868, more than ten years following the arrival of the first ship, that the first immigrants – seventy-six in total – returned home to India.Footnote ¹²⁷ In all, 278 were repatriated home; an estimated 91 per cent settled in Grenada.Footnote ¹²⁸ In the wider British Caribbean, 35 per cent of Indians were repatriated to India between 1838 and 1920.Footnote ¹²⁹

Between 1834 and 1845, just over 4,500 Europeans were rushed to the region to provide additional labour on plantations.Footnote ¹³⁰ After the introduction of apprenticeship in 1834, John Wells the manager of Grenada’s Bacolet Estate wrote to London discussing the introduction of German and English labourers, particularly for the manufacture of sugar and rum during crop time.Footnote ¹³¹ However, this plan did not materialise because the Governor of Grenada failed to secure a loan from the British government.Footnote ¹³² In 1839, Wells himself requested two Scottish ploughmen be indentured to him to help work his estate grounds; his request was denied, though he noted other properties under his charge received three Scottish labourers, each contracted to serve a period of three years. The news that Maltese labourers would not be sent to Bacolet Estate came as a relief to Wells, who described the ‘dissatisfaction and trouble’ on their introduction in 1834.Footnote ¹³³ Failing to fulfil the expectations of the planters, their contracts were dissolved by mutual consent in 1841, after which many of them migrated to Trinidad.Footnote ¹³⁴ The few who remained became hucksters and porters, and some became wealthy shopkeepers.Footnote ¹³⁵ Their success as hucksters was so great that they had reportedly driven out nearly all of the ‘native’ vendors from out of the trade.Footnote ¹³⁶

Between 1846 and 1851, 601 Portuguese men, women, and children arrived from Madeira under indenture. Portuguese migrants on the Rio Douro suffered particularly severe conditions: overcrowding and disease led to the shipboard deaths of 43 out of the 183 immigrants. Many who survived the arduous and perilous transatlantic crossing succumbed to poor living conditions on the island.Footnote ¹³⁷ Although perceived to have failed as agricultural labourers, preferring employment as shopkeepers and assistants on sugar estates, planters held these Portuguese in high regard, as it meant that Black labourers who previously occupied these non-agricultural roles were now available in larger numbers as fieldworkers.Footnote ¹³⁸ Indeed, the planters’ recourse to immigrant labour was double edged: freed Black peoples who had formerly held those positions found their bargaining power seriously weakened. Portuguese immigrants were employed in large numbers on cocoa estates, and, as the enslaved had done for centuries, they too cultivated their own provision grounds. In addition, like their counterparts in Demerara, St Vincent, and other colonies, the Portuguese in Grenada became involved in internal markets.Footnote ¹³⁹ One local newspaper noted that following the introduction of the Portuguese, the island had become ‘overrun by peddlers and hawkers’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Despite their general satisfaction with migrant Indian and European labourers, planters nevertheless retained a preference for African migrant workers. A newspaper commentator wrote that Portuguese and Indian workers were ‘worse than useless’ and demanded an initial one thousand labourers from West Africa to strengthen ‘planters’ hands’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In the words of Thomas Hankey, immigrant agent for Grenada, Africans were ‘absolutely necessary’ to prevent the decrease of the island’s sugar production.Footnote ¹⁴² Africans were preferred because they were cheaper: unlike Indian migrants, Grenadian recaptives were not entitled to free passage home – a financial advantage for the planters.Footnote ¹⁴³ Indeed, during the economic depression of the late 1840s, African immigrants were favoured because of the planters’ reluctance to important the more expensive Indian labourers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The issue of expense was critical: Britain desired cheap labour in order to build a fully developed capitalist regime that could successfully compete with the slave-based economies of Brazil and Cuba.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For instance, one merchant held that African immigration to the Caribbean was justified for ‘every hand abstracted from sugar cultivation in our colonies without substitute makes room for a fresh slave on a foreign soil’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Paradoxically, it was the illegal slave trade, particularly towards Brazil and Cuba, which supplied African labourers to British sugar colonies. In the mid nineteenth century, the Royal Navy intercepted vessels trafficking Africans, thus providing thousands of recaptives as indentured labourers on British Caribbean plantations.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Brazil reluctantly agreed to end slave trading in 1826, and Brazil’s forced transportation of African peoples became illegal in 1830. However, prohibition was not enforced, and a substantial trade persisted from the West Central African coast to Brazil, which was eventually suppressed between 1850 and 1851.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Trade towards North America occurred on a smaller scale though by 1808, it had reduced significantly; in 1860, the last recorded slave ship landed in the United States.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In contrast, traffic in captives towards Cuba between 1859 and 1861 was at its highest in forty years. However, the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 and the signing of the Anglo-American treaty in 1862, which allowed British cruisers to search suspected US slavers, deprived the Cuban slave trade of American ships and capital. These events accelerated the demise of the Cuba trade.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Suppression of these slave trades meant that supplies of Africans for the Caribbean were severely limited, and the scale of African immigration dropped between 1852 and 1857. Indeed, between 1851 and 1859 no recaptive Africans were sent to Grenada. Colonies instead began to use the loan guaranteed by the imperial government for the introduction of immigrants so interest in Indian labourers resurged in the wider Caribbean – a change reflected in the commencement of Indian immigration into Grenada in 1857.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Labour was also drawn from other British Caribbean islands. Between mid 1851 and mid 1852, planters in St Andrew and St Patrick brought over three hundred labourers from St Kitts, St Martin, and Anguilla, among them formerly enslaved Africans, Portuguese, and other Europeans.Footnote ¹⁵² In the last decades of the nineteenth century, some immigrants were procured from the neighbouring islands of Barbados and St Vincent.Footnote ¹⁵³ Planters investigated other sources of labour, all of which proved fruitless. In 1851, an act was passed to encourage the introduction of free people of African descent from the United States and Canada to work as agricultural labourers or mechanics.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Still frustrated by the failure of efforts to secure local labour, in 1856 Grenadian planters considered the introduction of people from the Cape Verde islands. Being of ‘African blood’ and ‘tropical birth’, they were thought to possess an advantage over the Portuguese.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As late as 1874, planters hoped the Anglo-Asante war in West Africa would lead to the displacement of the Fantee peoples, who could then be sent to the island.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Finally, in the late 1870s, requests were made for Chinese workers, including 313 from Cuba, though the costs of their passage were prohibitively high.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Despite these various schemes pursued by the Colonial Office and local government, demand for labourers remained high until the 1870s. The largest migratory movements from India and Africa had a positive though temporary effect on sugar production throughout the region, but their numbers proved insufficient to have a permanent impact on the sugar industry. African immigration was particularly constrained: the suppression of the illegal traffic meant there were limited numbers of African recaptives in reception depots in Sierra Leone and St Helena. Often, a receiving colony might receive no more than a few hundred African peoples in any one year.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In addition, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters, following the expiration of their indentureship, many Africans preferred to be independent smallholders, rather being employed regularly under contract. Another commodity which did not require continuous labour or advanced technology was needed.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Grenadian planters shifted towards the cultivation of cocoa, a fortuitous decision, for by the 1870s, cocoa had overtaken sugar as the main export crop and facilitated the emergence of an independent peasantry.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Following abolition in 1807, Grenadian planters continued to benefit from unfree forms of labour as thousands of adults and children were drafted from Africa, Europe, India, and elsewhere in the British Caribbean to toil under harsh and exploitative conditions. Recaptives were sent before the 1840 scheme to plantations, European homes, carpenter workshops, shipyards, and other places of indenture, effectively sites of ongoing enslavement, as they worked alongside enslaved and apprenticed African Grenadians. The experience of post-1840 arrivants was comparable to those sent before the scheme: inveiglement and high mortality and morbidity characterised the experiences of recaptive Africans who boarded ships at Havana, Sierra Leone, and St Helena. Furthermore, some Africans at St Helena resisted emigration by rioting and absconding. Ultimately, Africans were pressured into enlisting or emigrating, and were denied the opportunity to return to the places they called home. So they stayed in Grenada, introducing new African cultures that, while undesirable to the plantocracy, were appealing to African Grenadians.