Hakewill

1. St Thomas in the Vale, from Mount Diablo, from James Hakewill's Picturesque tour of the island of Jamaica (1825). According to James Hakewill, "In the wood beneath us are the buildings of the Ivy Sugar Estate, now thrown up, and lately purchased by George Barriffe, Esq.: beyond is Charlemont Penn, the property of Sir Alexander Grant, Bart., and more distant, the works on Treadways, the property of Henry Dawkins, Esq."

2. Hakewill ‘respectfully dedicated’ his ‘Picturesque Tour of Jamaica 1825’ to ‘the Noblemen and Gentlemen, proprietors of estates’ and UK merchants. His ‘professedly and exclusively picturesque’ portrayals erased violence, blood and death, painting sanitised fictions.

3. Admiral Sir Lawrence William Halsted, who had been in Jamaica between 1823 and 1827, described the pleasant surprise he had when he arrived on the island thus: ‘From the Papers I had read and the Speeches made at different Meetings, I fully expected to find a great Degree of Cruelty exercised towards them in the Country; and I must state that, when I arrived in the Country, I was agreeably surprised to find it was quite the contrary.’ Others, however, recognised slavery’s cruelties. Wesleyan missionary Rev John Barry, who lived in the 1820s St Thomas in the Vale, described how ‘he was surrounded by coffee plantations, and he was in the habit of hearing, almost incessantly, the sound of the whip from morning till night…The crack of the whip is so loud that it can be heard at an immense distance.'

4. William Taylor, after thirteen years managing three Jamaican estates with about seven hundred enslaved people, told a Parliamentary Select Committee in the late 1820s that coercion was ‘the spring of industry’: ‘the fact is, cruelty is the mainspring of the present system; so long as slavery exists, and the whip is the compeller of labour, it is folly to talk of humanity.'

We are grateful to Steven Carter for his assistance in compiling this entry.

1. James Hakewill's Picturesque tour of the island of Jamaica, Hurst and Robinson, 1825. Online at https://archive.org/details/picturesquetouro00hake.

2. Ibid. pp.2-3.

3. Hall, Catherine. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867, University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 111. The Anti-Slavery Reporter 105, February 1833, vol. 5 no.14, p. 536.

4. Report from Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions: With the Minutes of Evidence, & General Index, J. Haddon, 1833, p. 56.