Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (39 page)

Down they marched, down the winding track through the mountains, fortified by their own concoction of rum and gunpowder, and keeping their spirits up too with the music of drum and fife. Once there were rumours of a Government force coming to meet them, and they hid for a time in the bush: but friends joined them as they passed, villagers ran flatteringly out to watch them, and as they entered the little town of Morant Bay, clustered on a bluff above the sea, a large crowd assembled to the beat of the drum, pressing around those motley militants—who, waving their pikes and cutlasses still, shouting and singing and blowing their horns, marched along the modest main street of the town and burst into the square before the Court House.

The scale of the ensuing tragedy was very small, no more than a flicker of the imperial drama. The Court House was a trim and authoritarian little building up a double flight of steps. Chickens scrabbled among the outhouses on the left of the square, and the Anglican church stood to the right. Behind the Court House, among a huddle of indeterminate administrative buildings, a cannon looked out to sea. Symmetrical, confined and rather pretty, the square was just the place for violent action, especially in the tetchy and humid afternoon of a Caribbean October day.

The magistrates were in session inside the Court House, but Morant Bay had been warned of Bogle’s approach, and a line of redcoated Volunteers was drawn up at the end of the square. They fired a single volley, dispersing the sightseers but having little effect upon the rebels, before they were assaulted by a shower of stones and bottles, and swept aside with bludgeons, machetes and even a fish-spear. Before long the Court House was on fire. The magistrates were forced from room to room until at last they made a break for it, stumbling out of the burning building to run the gauntlet of the mob, hide in backstreets, seek shelter in neighbouring houses, or lie low in the bush. Most of them were caught. Some were chopped to pieces with machetes, some were bludgeoned to death, one had his throat cut and his mouth wrenched open with a stick. In all seventeen whites were killed and thirty-one wounded (and one black man was murdered too—he was said to have ‘a black skin and a white heart’).

The rioters were exuberant. They left the burning building and the shambled square, and went off to release the prisoners in the town gaol: since they were not rebelling against Queen Victoria, they said, they would respect her property, and the convicts were told to discard their prison uniforms. Then off they went again up the long winding track to Stony Gut, blowing their horns triumphantly now, dusty, bloodstained and ecstatic. They had harmed no women or children in Morant Bay; they had done very little looting; they had carefully spared the two white doctors of the town; but they undoubtedly saw themselves as the advance guard of a negro crusade, its purpose a little vague but its spirit truly evangelical. When they reached the clearing in the forest, they filed into the fortress-chapel for a religious service. It was three o’clock in the morning, and the scene must have been weird—all those black exalted peasants, sweating from the day’s bloodshed and emotion, kneeling in the lamplight in their silent fastness. Bogle himself addressed the congregation, as its pastor and commander, and gave humble thanks that ‘God had succeeded him in this work’.
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Eyre interpreted the divine intention otherwise, for the news from Morant Bay raised some terrible questions. Was this the start of the threatened insurrection? Was it part of a general conspiracy? The Governor very properly took no chances. Martial law was declared throughout the county of Surrey, the eastern third of Jamaica, except in Kingston itself: and the regular troops of the Crown, about 600 strong, were swiftly mobilized to contain the rising. They occupied the coastal towns of Surrey, and closed the passes through the mountains to the north. In addition the Maroons, who stayed loyal to their British treaty, supplied some 300 formidable if unorthodox soldiers, while the frigate
Wolverine
and the gunboat
Onyx
ferried troops, provided landing parties and maintained communications between Kingston and Morant Bay.

It was rainy weather, and the campaigning was tough. In the hill country, its hot jungly terrain intersected by deep ravines, tracks were often washed away by a single torrential storm. At best they were deep in mud or blocked by landslides. One can imagine the opinions of the soldiery in 1865, loaded down with pack and musket, stacked up with extra rations of beef and rum, hacking and cursing their way from valley to valley, village to village, sometimes for days at a time without taking their boots off. Many were veterans of the Mutiny, and by and large they were not of a liberal temper. When they came to a negro village, they burnt it. When they chalenged a black man on the march, they flogged him if he stopped, shot him if he ran.

No revengeful Queen’s battalion in Oudh or Rajputana behaved more ferociously than these embittered soldiers. ‘Hole is doing splendid service’, reported the Deputy Adjutant General to his superior, ‘shooting every black man who cannot account for himself (sixty on the line of march).’ ‘I must tell you,’ wrote a private soldier to his parents in Hampshire, ‘that I never see such a site before as we are taking them prisoners by a hundred per day—we saved them for the next morning to have some sport with them. We tied them up to a Tree and give them 100 lashes, and afterwards put a shot into their heads.’ One captured rebel was used as a rifle target, the firing party shooting him at 400 yards. A servant of Bogle’s was tied to an officer’s stirrup and made to divulge the names of rebel conspirators—‘a revolver now and then to his head causes us thoroughly to understand each other’. A woman at Stony Gut was flogged to make her reveal Bogle’s whereabouts: she got twenty-five lashes first, another twenty-five a quarter of an hour later, another twenty-five half an hour later still, and was then left all night with a rope round her neck as an earnest of things to come.

Down in Morant Bay, courts martial quickly disposed of prisoners. They were held under the aegis of the Provost Marshal, who had fought in the charge of the light Brigade, had won a Victoria Cross, and was probably not quite sane—a year later he killed himself. Negroes were flogged for neglecting to remove their hats in his presence or answering back. One man was hanged because he ground his teeth. The court martial members were junior army and navy
officers, and they handed down death sentences with a merciless panache—the condemned men being hanged symbolically from the ruined courthouse arch (generally by sailors, for as the president of the court once observed, ‘they are handier with ropes than soldiers are’). All in all, retribution was terrible in Surrey County. Martial law continued in force for its maximum legal period, thirty days, and 439 negroes were shot or hanged. Some 600 more were flogged, mostly without trial, and about 1,000 dwelling-places were destroyed. The rebellion was suppressed absolutely. No resistance was offered after the first few days, the rest of Jamaica remained peaceful, and the soldiers were perfectly frank about their punitive measures, evidently assuming that nobody who mattered would object.

Bogle himself was soon caught. They gave him the distinction of hanging him from the yard-arm of the
Wolverine
, lying in Morant Bay: and his settlement at Stony Gut was razed to the ground, farmhouse, chapel and all, leaving only a jumbled pile of stones over which the green ground-foliage soon encroached.
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Eyre assumed that Gordon was the real force behind the rebellion, and put out a warrant for his arrest. Four days later he gave himself up at the military headquarters in Kingston. This placed the Governor in a quandary, for there was no martial law in Kingston. A trial there would be a protracted and messy affair, embroiled in politics, religion and every manner of local side-issue. Besides, Gordon had not been near St Thomas-in-the-East during the troubles: the evidence for his complicity was largely circumstantial, and in Kingston, before a properly appointed court of the Queen’s Justices, he might well be acquitted.

But Eyre was perfectly certain of the man’s moral, if not his legal guilt, and in this he was probably right. Gordon often talked freely of insurrection—he had publicly called the Governor ‘an animal … voracious for cruelty and power’—he had encouraged Bogle in his activities at Stony Gut—he was a sworn enemy of the magistrates at Morant Bay, There is even evidence that he was in touch with the black Government of Haiti. Eyre was determined that no quibbles of legalism would save this villain from his deserts: he had clearly made up his mind that the man must hang, and applied to the task his stubborn will and his lonely sense of duty.

He decided to take Gordon to Morant Bay, and have him tried there by court martial. He must have known that this was illegal, but he presumably supposed that the end would justify the means. Nobody, after all, had been blamed for far graver irregularities during the suppression of the Mutiny: Hodson had gone unpunished for the murder of the princes, was even hero-worshipped for it—‘I cannot help being pleased’, he had written, ‘with the warm congratulations I receive on all sides for my success in destroying the enemies of our race’. Together, then, Eyre and Gordon embarked upon the hard-working
Wolverine
and sailed out of Kingston Harbour—out into the bay where, looking back towards the island, captor and captive could see the mysterious mass of the Blue Mountains rising range upon range above the filthy city, sheltering in their thick bush and high dark forests all the secret resentments of the blacks.

They were like figures in a morality play, the two passengers: both religious and indeed self-righteous men, both deeply committed to causes: one representing, if at many removes, the autocratic certainty of empire, the other expressing, if incoherently, the lost pride of primitive sovereignty. A storm allegorically blew up, too, as they sailed along the coast, and kept them tossing and miserable outside Morant Bay. When they disembarked upon the little quay, they both looked distressed. Eyre was a tall thin man, narrow-chested, dry-looking, heavily bearded and powerfully nosed, his movements oddly awkward, the look in his eye introspective but improving. Gordon, led ashore by guards, looked paradoxically kindred. He too had a desiccated air, if we can judge by his photograph,
his face too lacked warmth or humour, his mouth was set forbiddingly, as in caricatures of hell-fire evangelists, and his steel-rimmed spectacles look in the pictures as though they might ominously glint.

Gordon was led ashore through a crowd of sailors. They abused him as he passed, and behaved as though they would happily tear him limb from limb. The British sailor was a rough diamond in the 1850s, and the language used that day, thought one eye-witness, was ‘hardly the thing to put to paper’. ‘
Would you like a taste of the cat, you old bastard?’ ‘By Jesus, you’ll catch it!’ ‘Set the bloody dogs on him!’ ‘You won’t be long here, you old windbag, we’ll soon string you up!
’ Gordon winced to each epithet, and Governor Eyre the vicar’s son, we may reasonably surmise, preferred not to hear.

Gordon’s judges were two naval lieutenants and an ensign of the West India Regiment. The principal charge was high treason. Most of the evidence presented was, by formal legal standards, inadmissible. The trial lasted six hours. The sentence was inevitably death. ‘General Nelson has just been kind enough to inform me,’ Gordon wrote to his wife, ‘that the court-martial … has ordered me to be hung, and that the sentence is to be executed in an hour hence: so that I shall be gone from this world of sin and sorrow.’ It was a grey overcast September morning; the clouds hung heavily over the hills; they took him up the steps of the Court House, bound his hands and feet, and hanged him from the arch.

Governor Eyre, having delivered his charge to judgement, did not wait for the execution, but returned to his palace in Spanish Town. There the news of Gordon’s death was brought to him. In a very real sense it was his own death too. For the rest of his life he was haunted by the fact of that court-martial in Morant Bay, which ended his career as absolutely and almost as squalidly as if he had himself dangled, noosed and pinioned, from the arch of the Court House door.

He lived in some splendour in King’s House. In those days it was the finest Government House in the West Indies, and pictures of its
entrance hall show it terrifically dignified, with doric columns and chandeliers and galleries and enormous royal portraits. Nelson and Rodney were both received there: so was Captain Bligh, when he arrived with his cargo of breadfruit trees from the Pacific (only to find that the West Indians preferred the plantain anyway).

Among its gilded splendours Eyre brooded in anxious isolation, as he waited for official reaction to his measures. He was an early victim of an imperial dilemma that would grow more perplexing as the years passed—the conflict between means and ends. The British had often acted cruelly, in pursuit of what they honestly believed to be their civilizing mission, but in the old days of slow communications and instant responsibility, the public at home had often been unaware of it, or at least remained indifferent. Now the whole blaze of public scrutiny could be directed in a matter of days upon the actions of a distant and harassed pro-consul, and to some people at home the very Empire itself, forcibly held together by the Power whose prerogative it was to teach the nations how to live, seemed a contradiction in moral terms.

Eyre was hailed by the whites of Jamaica, and by many of the blacks too, as the saviour of the colony. Without doubt many European lives were saved by the severity of his action, and possibly a general rebellion really was averted. At the same time Eyre took advantage of the situation to win once and for all the perennial battle between Governor and settlers. As soon as the rebellion was over he summoned the Assembly and persuaded its members, after two centuries of fiercely defended independence, to abdicate their powers to the Colonial Office—tacit recognition that the plantation empire was dead, that the whips and chains of slavery really must be buried, and that the relationship between black and white had moved into another phase.