Island on Fire by Tom Zoellner

Author:Tom Zoellner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

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Whenever Jamaica’s governor thought a certain document was so important that his bosses in London should see it, he attached it to his regular dispatches sent via cargo ships, usually in special pouches kept in the captains’ quarters. Lord Belmore apparently felt this way about a handwritten transcript dated April 19, 1832, and titled “The King against Samuel Sharpe,” which became a permanent part of the Colonial Office records for that year.64

A total of eleven men testified against the prisoner Samuel Sharpe in the limestone courthouse in Montego Bay.65 A clerk recorded their statements in a staccato patter heavy with dashes. The witness of Edward Hilton, for example, read, “Sharpe had a short gun—saw him come up—he put the others before and he was behind—he commanded them and they did as he told them—they called him schoolmaster.”66

Five enslaved men testified that they had seen him carrying weapons at various points, and two put him directly at the scene of the murder of a white man. One of the witnesses, Edward Barrett, had himself been spotted carrying a gun during the violence, which would have meant a certain death sentence. His testimony against Sharpe may therefore have been coerced with his life hanging in the balance, and the testimony of all the others also has the flavor of coaching and collusion. Five of the witnesses belonged to a single master. Only two witnesses were called for the “evidence called in defense” and they offered nothing exculpatory—only that they had seen Samuel Sharpe at Ginger Hill Estate during the revolt, but that they saw him swear no oaths. Sharpe himself was not allowed to testify, and the entire proceedings appear to have taken less than two hours. Even so, this was the longest trial of any rebel ever recorded, and the one for which the authorities provided the most documentation.67

The jurors signed his death warrant that same afternoon:

Tried and found guilty the nineteenth day of April 1832. Sentence: That the said Negro man slave named Samuel Sharpe be taken hence from the place from whence he came and from thence to the place of Execution at such time and place as shall be appointed by His Excellency the Governor and there to be hanged by the neck until dead—Valued by the jury at the sum of sixteen pounds ten shillings current money of Jamaica.

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