Kierkegaard's Muse by Garff Joakim;

Author:Garff, Joakim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

THE WHITE GOLD—A DARK CHAPTER

The Spaniards were the first to import slaves from Africa to the Virgin Islands—the first load arrived already in 1517—and this black workforce helped to make Spain a Great Power in the course of the sixteenth century. Spain’s success caused Britain, France, and Holland to take an interest in the profitable islands and the fight for the colonies was on. Denmark’s participation in this orgy of greed under far-off skies had its beginning under Christian IV at the start of the seventeenth century, but it was only when St. Croix came into Danish hands in 1733 that sugar production got properly under way. The island was measured and partitioned into plantation areas, the so-called estates, which were offered for sale on conditions so favorable that Dutch and French planters also found themselves drawn to the island. After coming under state administration in 1755, sugar production rose from 700 tons to more than 20,000 tons in 1812.

An increase of that magnitude was possible only through the steadily growing number of African slaves brought over to the labor-hungry colonies. The crossing from Africa to the West Indies was a voyage of 4,000 nautical miles and took, on average, a good three months. Millions of slaves never reached the destination but died of dysentery, yellow fever, smallpox, or trichinosis, took their own lives, were shipwrecked, or were killed during slave uprisings, which the crew feared more than the plague. Precautionary measures were therefore taken. A large wooden wall was erected in the middle of the deck across the entire ship’s beam so that the white crew, who generally kept to the aft of the ship, were segregated from the slaves. The wall was furnished with small cannons, the so-called swivel guns, aimed at the part of the deck where the slaves were allowed to come up for air. The highest ranking on board got a commission for the sale of slaves, so a high death rate meant a significant loss of revenue, and for this reason peas were generally used in place of bullets in order to cause minimal harm. In serious cases, whole containers of boiling water could be emptied on the desperate insurgents.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.