A review of: “For the Health of the Enslaved” by Niklas Jensen
Reviewed by Dr Colin Michie
The life, lore and culture of the Creole peoples of the Caribbean is today being better understood and expressed than ever before. Through access to digitised resources the impact of blending English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish colonial pursuits with that of Africans transported against their will into Slavery is now enabling academics to explore and expose the Creole reality through the study of governmental archives, newspapers, diaries and the like.
Slaves on Caribbean estates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were rarely healthy. Their numbers did not increase. This situation challenged plantation managers, local administrators and colonising powers. More slaves had to be imported and purchased at increasing expense. Slave health became a matter for regulation.
The Royal Danish West Indian Company occupied the Caribbean islands of St Thomas in 1672 and St John in 1718. They purchased Santa Cruz, named by Colombus in 1493, but renamed St Croix, from the French in 1733. Slaves were freed on these islands after a revolt in 1848. During the Great War in 1916, following a referendum, they became the United States Virgin Islands. Because slaves there were the private property of their owners, administrators could only exercise their control through legislation. This dictated slave health issues such as nutrition, the plagues of smallpox as well as the challenges of midwifery and childbirth. Niklas Jensen details these Danish regulatory systems with other eurocreole regimes, providing many fascinating insights.
Adequate nutrition was a significant problem for the enslaved. Some British administrations, such as those in the Leeward islands, Barbados Demerara-Essequibo Berbice and the Bahamas allotted rations as well as provision plots that slaves could cultivate. Other plantations on Jamaica and the windward islands provided plots, but no rations. The French Code Noir dictated a distribution of rations with occasional provision of land, although eventually slaves were all provided with plots too. The Danish stipulated both rations (predominantly cornflour and salt fish) and plots be delivered. Provisions in the form of yams were the most frequently cultivated on these slave lands although many other vegetables and fruit seem were grown and bartered. It seems probable that available protein and calories were low however, particularly as most worked as manual labourers. Micronutrients such as iron, vitamins or essential fatty acids are difficult to estimate. Following a drought in 1817 that destroyed crops on the slave plots, an official proclamation increased the ration that owners had to provide for slaves, establishing a minimum allowance, a position unique in the Caribbean. Slave complaints relating to ration sizes on some plantations were examined and plantation owners held to legal sanction.
The smallpox virus brought by sailors infected the enslaved. It exterminated great swathes of Amerindians in the Caribbean basin and the American mainland. It remained endemic in Europe until the eighteenth century, where it killed mostly children. The process of variolation had been known to African and Asian nations at the time of the slave trade. Variolation involved using material from the lesions of a mild case of smallpox to inoculate individuals who had not met the disease. Variolation was widely practised in the Caribbean, but it ran the risk of causing illness and outbreaks of the disease. Edward Jenner described the value of employing the less dangerous cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox in England in 1798. Cowpox was maintained in ‘arm to arm’ variolation system across the Atlantic to North America. From 1803 this process was applied by the Danish administration to vaccinate volunteers; one individual took the virus to Puerto Rico too. At the same time a Spanish expedition transported cowpox around the world using an arm to arm process. in Later, statutory vaccination ‘for the public good’ was instituted by the Danes, together with quarantine precautions for sailors, the combination of which effectively protected all on these islands.
Enslaved populations did not expand rapidly, if at all, because of low rates of pregnancies and high neonatal and infant mortalities. Babies died in particularly large numbers in their first weeks of life from infantile tetanus, caused by contamination of the umbilicus. This illness was also known as lock-jaw, trismus, jaw-drop, mal de machoir, eight-day seizures or pasmo. Its impact is difficult to estimate exactly because most afflicted infants died before they were named or registered. Overseers often punished mothers and their slave midwives for deaths from this disease, although the underlying cause was overcrowding and a lack of water and sanitation in the slave housing. The Danish solution to these problems was to develop more robust obstetrics, with government-sanctioned appointments and training for slave midwives, just as in Denmark. Similar systems were being encouraged at this time by doctors across the Antillean seas in Venezuela, on Barbados, and in Iceland, another Danish island in the cold north Atlantic. The Danish (along with the other colonising administrations) did not succeed with this endeavour in the Caribbean, although they did construct maternity wards and train more midwives.
Persistence with a regulatory environment in the Danish West Indies ensured some health improvements in enslaved populations. Abolition was, however, the crucial next step in this journey. Those bleak early days of Creole survival in a colonised land are greatly illuminated by this remarkable text.