Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica: Vineyard Pen, 1750-1751

Abstract

S LAVES and livestock were inextricably linked in the eighteenth-century British West Indies. As John Pinney, a Nevis planter, put it, and stock ... are the sinews of a plantation. In contrast to England, where land was of great value, a Caribbean estate, one attorney noted, was hardly worth the name unless animated. The primary sources of animation were human and animal labor, indispensable both in the field and in the factory. Consequently, humans and animals were the most valuable-and highly vulnerable-components of a plantation's movable equipment. For this reason, estate inventories consistently listed, first, the value of slaves and, second, that of livestock. Likewise, in describing the costs of establishing a Jamaican sugar plantation, Bryan Edwards, a late eighteenth-century historian of the British islands, succinctly labeled the most expensive item as Stock, by which he meant both domestic animals and slaves. Because of their signal importance, these two forms of capital were usually grouped in precise gradations according to their productive capacity: from strongest to weakest, from first gang to children, from working stock to calves. As units of power, they were subject to constant evaluations of their effectiveness, persistent weighings of their worth.' In the seventeenth century, Jamaica became known more for its livestock than for its slaves. Under the Spanish, Jamaica was an open-range ranching colony, with cattle, horses, and hogs running wild. After the British captured the island, settlers rounded up the remnants of the Spanish herds and built new, or commandeered old, cattle pens and hog crawls. The term driver originally meant one who caught wild horses and offered them for sale, and maroon' was early applied to a hunter of wild cattle. In i67I, Cary Helyar, a knowledgeable planter, observed that there were many ways to improvement . . . but a small stock of cattle is no bad beginning; here are good estates in that very thing mer[e]ly. The small capital requirements of ranch-