William Moore

1. William Moore was proprietor of St Clair's plantation in St John, Jamaica, in the early 1820s when Moore hired a group of jobbing enslaved people from Adam Steel. Steel's overseer, Benjamin McMahon described enslaved people on Moore's estate as "not black like negroes, but yellow, from constant confinement and monstrous persecution. They looked more like phantoms than human beings; the rags with which they were covered could not be distinguished from their skin, nor from the ground on which they were working. They were wretchedly meagre, and ghastly enough to make any Christian run away at the sight of them... Every one of them was covered from head to foot with cuts and scars - even their faces had not been spared from the lash. While, working under the rays of a broiling sun, the iron collars on their necks got so hot as to burn their skin, which caused them intolerable pain, and kept them constantly wailing and moaning."

1. Benjamin McMahon, Jamaica Plantership: Eighteen Years Employed in the Planting Line in that Island (1839) p. 55.

We are grateful to Siddharth Singh Ahlawat for his assistance with compiling this entry.