“… has not been …”
“… una de rosas.”
“… one of roses. ‘My bed here has not been one of roses.’ It has not been a bed of roses for you.”
“Absolutely. I was hoping the Chinese would also grow vegetables. The Negroes don’t really know, and the planters won’t allow them to sell anything they grow. They say that after Haiti they don’t want their Negroes to get any ideas. But I think they just want to grind the Negroes down, and they don’t know where to stop. In my three years here I have seen more of human turpitude than in the rest of my life.”
Miranda said, “Turpitude. I know the word. But I’ve never heard anyone use it in conversation.”
“I suppose it’s because I’ve spent three years framing that sentence. I constantly speak it in my mind. It comforts me. The French aristocrats we’ve assembled here have tainted everybody. You’ve been to France, you’ve been a general in their army. I am not telling you anything you don’t know. The French aristocracy don’t come out well, General. I can’t understand them. They feel rich only if everybody else around them is in rags. They feel secure and well-bred only if everybody else is degraded. I understand now why they had the revolution in France. Then they had the same revolution all over again in Haiti, but a much nastier one. And now they’ve almost had one here. And they’ve involved me in it.” Hislop struck his breast, and then struck it regularly as he spoke. “I had to get the troops out at midnight and go around picking up the ringleaders. If there is an investigation I will have to bear the responsibility. I and I alone. That’s what Gourville and Montalembert and Luzette and the others think. They think they will simply stand aside, as they did with Picton. But I don’t intend that to happen. I’m a military man. I’m responsible for the defence of this territory and for public order. I know nothing about the management and care of Negroes. I am not required to know anything about that. Garrow, the London lawyer, made it pretty clear at the Picton trial. I have the full transcript. I have studied it. An official who exceeds the law, Garrow said, is responsible for his action. So the planters of the Council and the jailer and everybody else have to take their share. They don’t like what I am saying, but I have made my position clear. If you stay here long enough, General, you will find that I am not the most popular man on the island.”
Miranda said, “Is there going to be an investigation?”
“Who can tell? There may well be. The news from London has been very strange.”
“Is there a lot to be investigated? Was it very bad?”
“Three hanged. The heads spiked, the bodies hung in chains in the square.”
“The bodies of pirates hang from gibbets on both banks of the Thames, half-way up to London.”
“A lot of people mutilated. It’s what they do in the islands.”
“How do you mutilate them?”
“You cut off the ears. I’ve seen it in other places. In some of the very small islands they slit the nose, but here they just do the ears.”
“I never saw that in Venezuela. But I can’t trust my memory now. But if a punishment is customary, it’s customary. You’re too nervous, General. A rebellion is a rebellion.”
“It’s what I tell myself in my better moments. And Lord Castlereagh, the colonial secretary, sent his approval. He said he knew that that class of the community had to be watched. But if there’s an investigation, what’s that approval worth? If I am asked to state what law I was following when those men were given a hundred lashes and had their ears cut off, I wouldn’t be able to say. All I would be able to say is that I followed the Council and the planters, and the jail staff seemed to know what to do. I never looked for the laws. I don’t even know what laws we are operating here. The territory was Spanish until nine years ago. It might go back to Spain at the end of the war, or it might be given to the French in exchange for something somewhere else. No one knows. If you say that the laws should be Spanish, there is no one here to tell me what those laws are. The lawbooks and the lawyers are all on the other side of the Gulf. A military governor can only follow the advice of responsible citizens. That’s what Tom Picton did, and that’s what I did after him. And you know the full bill against Picton. Thirty-seven charges. Execution without trial, false imprisonment, torture, burning alive. Bail set at forty thousand pounds. The man ruined, his life darkened these last three years.”
“You’ve been here too long, General. You’re too jumpy. You can’t compare yourself to Picton. He was notorious. And most of those charges related to the regiment. The others were thrown out. There was a charge of using torture against a young mulatto girl in a case of petty theft. But that’s going to be thrown out too.”
“General, didn’t they tell you in Barbados? The trial came up at the end of February, before Lord Ellenborough. General Picton was found guilty.”
“At one time I would have liked to hear that. I thought that Picton had done me much harm and I thought I had a score to settle with him. But I don’t think like that now. You can waste too much time settling scores. You can forget what you really have to do. He’ll appeal, of course.”
“He’ll appeal. But he’s ruined. And the planters who sat in the jail and had the people tortured, and devised ways of burning people alive — they’re free men. Picton didn’t build the jail. It was there when he came, with the jailer and the torture chambers, the special hot rooms. The planters had set it up. They paid the jailer fees for torturing or flogging Negroes. For the torture of the mulatto girl the planter who was the chief magistrate at the time paid the jailer sixty reales, about six dollars and sixty cents. Nobody’s been investigating that planter, or the others. They’ve not been on forty thousand pounds bail. They’re loyal to no one except themselves, those French aristocrats. If you stay here long enough your mind begins to go. You lose faith. You lose your way.
“I’ll tell you. We had an invasion scare here last year. First it was the French. Then it was the Spaniards. The Spanish admiral Gravina appeared in these waters with quite an armament. I don’t have to tell you how small our military establishment is, and how vulnerable we are to any sustained assault. We clearly can’t defend the whole island — two or three hundred miles of coastline, some of it very difficult, and so much of the island is uninhabited anyway — so I thought we should decide in the Council what we were going to try to defend. I thought it made more strategic sense to defend the naval harbour at Chaguaramas. It’s a small area and it’s very defensible. If you defend the ships, they live again to fight another day. The planters said no, the duty of our military establishment was to defend property.
“Now, General, you have been following the debates about slavery and the slave trade in England. And I don’t have to tell you that when planters talk about ‘property’ and ‘the free transfer of property’ and ‘a free supply,’ they are simply finding a way of not saying ‘Negroes’ or ‘slaves.’ They are not even talking about land. Most of them got the land free when they came. The Spaniards, to develop the island, offered a settler sixteen acres for every Negro he brought in. A white settler got thirty-two acres for himself, a free man of colour sixteen acres. Many of the people who came in, to put themselves under Spanish law, were running away from debts they had in other places under other flags. Many of the Negroes they brought in were mortgaged up to the eyes.
“So these refugee aristocrats were saying, in fact, while a big war was going on, that it was my duty as governor to prevent them from losing their Negroes. And they had powerful friends in London. So, after spending seventy-five thousand pounds on fortifying the harbour at Chaguaramas, I had to stop and think about fortifying the city and the plantations around it. That is why the Treasury is empty, and my servants and soldiers are in rags. I thought of enrolling a company of Negro Rangers, faithful and well-disposed ones, it goes without saying. The planters said they didn’t want to lose their Negroes. I said, ‘We’ll have them fairly valued. You will be recompensed if they are lost or damaged.’ They said that after Haiti they didn’t want their Negroes to handle guns. I said, ‘Very well. At least lend me some of your Negroes to work on that hill fort we are building west of the city.’ They said they couldn’t spare them. So where were we? What was the point of doing anything?”