Blood Legacy by Alex Renton

Author:Alex Renton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786898876
Publisher: Canongate Books

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* A common problem among enslaved people on the plantations, often blamed on witchcraft and sometimes savagely punished. Soil-eating is now recognised as a mental health condition and known as pica. It is brought on by stress and emotional trauma.

CHAPTER 11

THE END OF THE BRITISH TRADE

A superannuated planter

As the nineteenth century began, Sir Adam was ageing. He complains frequently of his gout and bowel afflictions; he has trouble with his teeth and then with the dentures (made by a celebrated physician in Paris) that replace them. Retired from Parliament in 1796, he is still busy, though he seems less certain in his dealings with the plantation and its problems. His concern as his eighth decade begins is to put his Scottish estates in good order for the nephew he has designated his heir – James, his brother Charles’s son. Another project is a legal challenge to obtain the title Earl of Glencairn for succeeding Fergusson generations.

Sir Adam writes twice a month or more in this period to ‘dear James’. This favoured nephew had returned from Calcutta, aged thirty-two, in 1797, in order to marry and prepare to take over as head of the family. The letters are kindly, full of advice on life, the management of money, health, friendship and so on. There is some political gossip (James’s account of the scandal around Lady Hamilton’s adultery with Admiral Nelson raises Sir Adam’s eyebrows in 1804). Sir Adam’s letters often end with ‘love to the little ones’, about whose health he worries. There is little talk of business and none at all of slavery or sugar.

The letters show a warm side of the man that is not, naturally enough, evident in any of his business correspondence. The family appear to love him back; they can laugh a little at him. In 1803 his sister Helen, Lady Hailes, writes to her nephew and son-in-law James warning that Sir Adam may be lonely: he has invited all the family to visit Kilkerran. Will we ‘ever get away?’, she wonders: ‘Sir Adam seems to wish and expect never to be left alone and certainly it will be the duty of some of us to be always with him.’ 1 His sister Jean was indeed always with him until she died in 1804.

Sir Adam can be passionate, too, in pursuing the righting of a perceived wrong, either to the family or to those less fortunate whom he deems worthy. This tendency appears once or twice in the Jamaica letters, but only on behalf of his white workers, such as the ploughman David Dunbar. He died after a few years’ work at Rozelle, and left £40 to his mother back in Ayrshire. Sir Adam is furious when he discovers that the Jamaican executors have not paid the sum to ‘this poor family’ and pesters until that happens. Compassion for the enslaved people is conspicuously lacking, by contrast, beyond the very occasional qualms he expresses about separating families.

Seen through the letters to his family and to friends

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