Caribbean (60 page)

And down in the lowlands they could see aflame in the night the various plantations in which the white owners lay dead.

The history of the great slave rebellion on St. John in the winter of 1733–1734 was one of constantly increasing terror. On the first dreadful night, slaves killed all the plantation families they could reach. They made an assault on Rostgaard’s place but were driven off, and for some reason they neither tried to kill Pembroke nor burn his plantation.

Intensive questioning of those slaves who remained loyal to their masters, and there were more than a few, proved what Rostgaard had surmised: “Cudjoe’s in command. Vavak and that other from the east are his lieutenants. It will be hell routing them out of those forests.”

He was more than right, because the slaves, with an adroitness and skill their white masters had always predicted they did not have and could not have, mounted an offensive-defensive war of remarkable subtlety. At the end of five days of hit-and-run they had burned some two dozen plantations and ridiculed attempts by their white masters to subdue them or even locate them.

On 29 November, the sixth day of the fighting, an English man-of-war which happened to be in the islands to take on water landed a large contingent of trained soldiers to subdue the rebels, and after marching here and there in fine order, they finally stumbled into a contingent of blacks led by Cudjoe. There was a brief skirmish. The Englishmen were routed after twenty minutes of firing at an enemy they never saw, and they retreated, leaving their wounded to trail along after them.

Rostgaard and his planters were not so easily subdued, though in their rampage they found few of Cudjoe’s and Vavak’s men. Instead they slaughtered thirty-two noncombatants “to teach the others a lesson.”

As word flashed throughout the other islands that a rebellion had occurred on St. John, planters and their families were terrified: “Is this the beginning of the end? Will there be general uprisings on all the islands?” To prevent that, a major expedition was mounted from St. Kitts under an officer named Maddox, who led his men ashore
on St. John with drums and fife, but after a gallant chase clear across the island during heavy rainstorms, these volunteers had encountered not a single slave they could see but had ended up with three Englishmen dead and eight wounded. The St. Kitts men had had more than enough, and when they retreated to their ship, no drums sounded and the fife was silent.

In the weeks that followed, Pembroke lost any understanding of how the battle against the slaves was going, because his attention was focused on trying to comfort and protect the Widow Lemvig. With her slaves vanished and no white hands to help her maintain her home, she was left terribly alone, and John could not decide how best to assist her. He visited her daily, took her food which he had prepared himself, for his slaves were gone too, and after much negotiation, arranged for a black woman who had remained faithful to her master on a plantation to the west to stay on the hill with Elzabet, the two of them rattling around in the big house.

The sensible thing would have been for Elzabet to flee by small boat to St. Thomas, where the revolt had not spread, but she refused to quit the only property her husband had left her, their plantation. It would also have been reasonable for her and her black helper to move over to the relative safety of Lunaberg, but her sense of propriety would not permit this. Despite the great crisis, her upbringing as the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman asserted itself, and she asked Pembroke when he suggested the move: “What would the islanders say?”

He replied harshly: “What’ll they say when they find you one morning with your throat cut?” but this did not relax her attitude, and he had to content himself with aiding her from a distance.

But now the terror in which St. John was gripped spread to the other islands. The French in Martinique, who owned the important island of St. Croix a few leagues to the south of St. John, decided that the black revolt had run rampant too long, so on 23 April 1734 they dispatched a competent, well-armed contingent of more than two hundred local creoles, four trained officers from France and seventy-four colored and black West Indians. The Frenchmen marched with great vigor here and there, but it was many days before they located Cudjoe’s men, who had, in the meantime, continued to burn and ravish the Danish plantations. Finally, on 29 April the French pinned the blacks into a defile from which they could not retreat, and a real
battle was enjoined. Since the French had every advantage, plus determined leadership, they prevailed, and after chasing the remnants of the slaves for an additional two weeks, they finally captured the black general Cudjoe of the Rostgaard plantation.

Many of the last-ditch rebels were shot during the battle, but some eleven were set aside for what the local officials called “special attention.” The details of their prolonged deaths at public exhibitions were not recorded, but when Jorgen Rostgaard stormed French headquarters to demand the right to take care of his rebellious slave Cudjoe, the invaders, out of respect for the remorseless fury with which Rostgaard had helped them track the rebels, acceded to his request.

Cudjoe’s execution took place on the platform which Rostgaard had used before. The same sergeant stood at one side to read the death warrant, the same drummer marked the hundred and fifty lashes, but now there would be a difference, for the warrant had said “Racked and Burned,” and Rostgaard was eager to supervise both.

On the platform, enlarged to accommodate the machinery, wheels and levers had been installed, with lengths of thick rope attached, their free ends awaiting their victim. After the lashings, Cudjoe was revived, hauled onto the platform, and stretched out while ropes were attached to his ankles, his wrists and his shoulders and, at a signal from Rostgaard, these ropes were tightened by slow and painful degrees until the joints began to tear apart.

Pembroke, watching the execution with most of the other two hundred surviving whites who were required by rules governing the emergency to be present with such of their slaves as could be assembled in that area, was outraged by the prolonged cruelty of the rack, but that was only a preamble to the horror that was about to occur, for as the ropes were pulled almost to the breaking point, with the black man insensate from the pain, Rostgaard signaled that slaves should set afire the timbers and shavings assembled below the platform. Pembroke looked away, unable to watch as the inert body was carried to the fire, but as he gazed at the placid Atlantic, he heard a gasp, and when he looked back he saw the most sickening sight of all. A triumphant Jorgen Rostgaard had taken up a long knife and was approaching the taut body of his slave. With swift cuts through the distended joints he severed arms and legs, throwing them onto the growing fire. “Now take him down!” he shouted, pouring water as he
did so in an attempt to revive the still-living torso, which was thrown into the swirling flames. Cudjoe, the resolute Ashanti, had been taught not to rebel.

When John Pembroke walked with staggering steps back toward the big house he no longer cared to occupy, he realized that Elzabet Lemvig had not been made to attend the execution, so he walked right past his temporary home and kept going till he reached the Lemvig plantation. Eager for the solace of another human being like himself, and not some vengeful monster like Rostgaard who had brought this terror to his community, he shouted: “Elzabet, where are you?” and when she appeared, wan and thin, he rushed to her, took her in his arms, and cried out: “Elzabet, for God’s sake, let us quit this hideous place. Start a new life with hope, not despair.”

She tried to respond to what was in effect a marriage proposal, but it came so unexpectedly and on such a wretched day that sensible words were beyond her. Instead, she fell limp in his arms, which was itself a signal that she would now rely only on him.

When he revived her, he led her outside the lonely house and perched her beside him on the porch overlooking the cluster of islands to the west. When she was calm enough to ask in a whisper: “What did you say in there?” he repeated: “You and I must leave this blood-soaked place and start a better life elsewhere.”

“I think you are right,” she said, and for the first time since that day sixteen months ago when they became neighbors, he kissed her.

But because life on the islands always seemed urgent, he proceeded immediately to give her strange news: “Did you ever wonder why those French volunteers from Martinique were so eager to rush their troops over here to help us put down our slave rebellion?” When she said no, he continued: “They’ve been wanting for years to sell the island of St. Croix to the Danes. Thanks to their gesture of good will, helping us against our slaves … well, the sale’s gone through.”

“What would that mean to us?”

“The Danish government wants me to move down and establish a big sugar plantation on English principles.”

Very firmly but quietly she said: “I would not want to live on any plantation where our new rules were in effect. I’ll not go with you, John.”

Her words caused him not disappointment but joy: “Oh, Elzabet!
I explained in the minute they made the offer that I’d be returning to Jamaica. I’m taking you to Trevelyan. You’ll love it there.”

This time she kissed him, and as the sun sank lower, he said gravely: “I’ve one thing more to do on this terrible day.”

With her holding on to his arm, he led the way to where his two boats were padlocked to trees, and when she asked what this was about, he said: “I’ve seen signs that Vavak is somewhere in our forest. They’ve never caught him, you know.”

“He saved my life that night.”

“And mine too, I think. No other reason why they didn’t kill me.”

When they reached the boats, John took from his trouser pocket the large key that worked the locks, and while Elzabet watched he carefully unlocked the boats, setting them free for the use of any slaves still hiding in the woods who might want to try the long sail to Spanish Puerto Rico or French St.-Domingue.

As he and Elzabet started back up the path to the house, they heard a rustling in the trees, and from the shadows emerged Vavak and a woman, and it was a fearful moment, because the slave was armed and the master was not. The path was narrow, so narrow that only one person could occupy it, and as the two men walking in front met, each stepped aside to let the other pass, and the Englishman thought ruefully of another of the new rules: A slave meeting a white person shall step aside and wait until he passes; if not, he may be flogged.

They passed, and no one spoke, but all knew why Pembroke had released his boats.

John and Elzabet remained hidden by trees as they watched Vavak and his woman test the two boats, choose the better, and set forth on the long and dangerous voyage to the land to be known as Haiti, where their descendants would continue their quiet fight for freedom.

When John Pembroke surprised Trevelyan Plantation by bringing home a Danish wife, reactions were varied. Sir Hugh, at ease now that all his sons were safely married, welcomed Elzabet heartily and assigned the couple a suite of three rooms on the second floor of Golden Hall. John’s brothers, Roger and Greville, were relieved that he had escaped the entrapments of Hester Croome, but that young woman, when she learned of the marriage, came running to
Trevelyan, rushed up to Elzabet, enclosed her in wide-sweeping arms, and said: “We welcome you to Jamaica!” after which she broke into uncontrolled sobbing.

John would give his wife no explanation for Hester’s amazing behavior, but Roger confided: “She’s a dear girl, Hester. Worth a triple fortune, and she set her lure for landing one of us Pembroke boys. Although heaven knows she didn’t need us.” Embarrassed by the unintended frankness of his revelation about a good neighbor, he added: “She’s a grand girl and she’ll have no trouble finding herself a husband.” Then, as if compelled to describe Hester accurately, he said: “When Greville and I married, she adopted our wives. Warmly and honestly. And she’ll do the same with you. Not a mean streak in her body.”

And that’s what happened. At the big dinners given on the various plantations, the three Pembroke boys, as they were called despite their years, sat with their pretty wives while Hester Croome, big and awkward and ebullient, cried: “Aren’t they the pride of Jamaica, that trio?” And she was especially kind to Elzabet the Dane: “John brought back a beauty, didn’t he?”

The family decided that John and Elzabet should remain at Trevelyan, at least for the first years of their marriage, helping Greville and getting to know the whole of Jamaica and the other British islands. It was a happy time, for it seemed that Jamaica and the Caribbean then stood at the apex of their joint history. Governments were stable. Sugar prices were never higher. And although war seemed always to be raging somewhere, it did not often manifest itself in the islands. John and Elzabet shared in the general euphoria when she became pregnant.

There was, however, one persistent problem across the Caribbean: the proper management of slaves. In later centuries scholars and writers would frequently ask: “Why were the slaves so passive? If they outnumbered the whites six and eight to one, why didn’t they rebel?” The truth is they did rebel, constantly, violently, on all the islands, as the chronicle of those years shows: Jamaica, 15 rebellions in all; Barbados, 5; Virgin Islands, 6; Hispaniola, 8; Cuba, 16; every island experienced at least one major rebellion.

In 1737 a shocking affair occurred in a remote corner of Jamaica and it projected the Pembrokes into the middle of the slavery problem. A clergyman of the Church of England sent by foot messenger
two reports, one to the capital now at the new town of Kingston, the other to the king in London: