It had been a time of constant, grinding, back-breaking labour. The Wedderburns had become rich. These two facts were connected, indirectly. The labour had been overseen by them, but actually carried out by slaves. Not that they had been idle: they had worked, first as doctors, then as planters, as hard as any other white gentlemen in Jamaica, but they had also had a large helping of luck – of the kind that really involves no luck at all, but only patience till somebody dies. In 1751, John had come into a substantial inheritance left by a great-uncle in Perthshire, and this they had used to purchase two parcels of land. The first, Bluecastle, was down near the coast, a few miles west of Savanna, an old-established cane plantation in need of new management. James had taken that on. The second was Glen Isla.
The house at Glen Isla was situated in an elevated position just over the crest of the escarpment that rose from the sugar plain. An area two hundred yards in width had been cleared of trees all around the house, so that it had unobstructed views of all the approaches – highly necessary in times of slave unrest. Where the rough parkland created by the tree-felling ended, the track to the house joined the public south – north road that twisted across the mountains into Hanover parish, eventually reaching Montego Bay twenty arduous miles away on the north coast.
A quarter mile in the other direction, there was a viewpoint on the escarpment from which one could look out over the plain as far as the sea, and take in the entire estate – the hardwood forest still thick on the hills, the cane fields, the Chocho river snaking through them to join the Cabarita, the mill and storehouses, and the slave huts laid out in rows close to the produce-growing fields.
It was Good Friday, early in April. James had come over the previous night, and after breakfast the two brothers rode out to the viewpoint to watch the last of the cane being cut and brought in for crushing. It had been an excellent crop, both at Glen Isla and at Bluecastle, where the work was all but done. Already the sun was blazing. The Wedderburns dismounted and let the horses loose to stand in the shade. Down below, the plantation looked like a toy, a model of a plantation. They could see one group of slaves harvesting the cane, another line coming behind them piling it on to ox-drawn carts. Further back, women were carrying loads of cane on their heads into the mill, from which came the faint, repetitive clank of machinery. Elsewhere a handful of children were herding cattle by the river, and a couple of men were stripping the branches off a fallen tree, preparing to clear it from the water. Since the sugar crop was almost in, other slaves had been diverted to the fields kept for growing provisions, and were making the ground ready for yams and cabbages. It was as picturesque and peaceful a scene as any planter could hope to look upon. There was something almost unreal about its perfection. Everywhere was a sense of industry, fertility, domesticity, prosperity. By the end of the week the sugar would be drying, the hogsheads waiting to be filled. Another season over.
These were the thoughts going through John Wedderburn’s mind when his brother said, ‘We have come a long way since London, have we not?’
‘I was just thinking that. Aye, we have. It’s not the road we expected to take, but …’
‘… but it’s been paved with gold, eh?’
‘Now, perhaps,’ John said. ‘Not at first. As you said, we have come a long way.’
‘Do you remember what it was like breaking in some of this land? And how little we got out of it in the first year?’
‘I do,’ John said. ‘You were angry with me. You said we’d moved too soon, should have stuck with ginger and indigo for another season or two.’
‘Aye, well, you were right. The sugar price shot up. You’re a better farmer than me, I don’t deny it. But I was always the better doctor.’
They spoke like middle-aged men, contentedly competitive with each other, looking back on decades, but John was not long turned thirty-one, James still only twenty-nine, and both still had plenty of ambitions left. Chief among these was to make enough money to go home; to see their mother and sisters again; to convert some of their wealth into Scottish land, while still leaving enough in Jamaica to go on multiplying. Their two younger brothers, Peter and Alexander, had joined them some years before, and might in due course be left to manage things on the plantations. Back in Scotland, their politics were fast becoming not only forgiven but positively romantic. Another few years would wash the slate quite clean, turn their Jacobite past into an asset. And they would still be young enough to wed, to seed their own Scots sons and daughters.
The desire to get home was what kept them going, squeezing as much out of the plantations and the slaves as possible without jeopardising the whole enterprise. It was this that differentiated them from planters like Underwood, whom they still saw from time to time, although they had long overtaken him in wealth and social prestige. All Underwood’s loud talk about knowing his Negroes and getting rich quick was a front for bumbling inefficiency and absence of resolve. He still sweated like a pig. He had never got used to Jamaica because he had never made up his mind to escape.
Some of his information, though, had been useful. He had been right, for example, about the Coromantees: they were the best slaves you could get, and the Wedderburns had made a point of buying only them. They had developed good connections with certain shipping companies and their captains, and had looked for preferential treatment at the markets, since they were prepared to pay the best prices.
What exactly a Coromantee was, however, was less certain. It had become clear to the Wedderburns very quickly that they were not dealing with a distinct tribe or race when they demanded Coromantees: they would buy a dozen and find four different languages spoken among them. John tried to discover more about the designation. The traders at Savanna were not sure, but thought it derived from an old settlement on the Gold Coast, Kromantine, the site of the first English slave station a century before. It was, in other words, little more than an export stamp.
‘What does it matter?’ James had said, when John told him what he had learned. ‘I don’t give a damn what they’re called, so long as nobody sells us a bad one.’
As for Underwood’s faith in the abilities of Scotch doctors, it was shared by many planters, which was both gratifying and useful, but largely misconceived. The brothers knew this because, with minimal training, they had both practised as Scotch doctors these last thirteen years, though only James still did much in that line. His claim that he was a better doctor was based on a bolder and more cold-blooded approach than John would ever be capable of. Davie Fyfe had given them a basic knowledge. The rest, as James had divined at sixteen, was a crude mix of guesswork, trial and error, and common sense.
Bleeding, blistering and purging: these were the basic cures most doctors relied on. Release the blood, scorch the skin, sluice out the bowels, and you might, just might, remove whatever the sickness was. The Wedderburns had learned the application of leeches and of the scalpel, the preparation of emetics, the uses of fire, steam, nitre, tartar, mercury; any number of potions, powders and pills patented in Europe or America by medical men whose names were attached to them but who could never be held accountable for their inefficacy. Mercury for the pox; opium to quell pain; ‘tapping’ to relieve dropsy; for dysentery – the bloody flux – bleeding, purging, puking, sweating, anything to cleanse the body of a condition which carried off more slaves than any other. Doctoring was a chancy business, a gamble. There was, of course, an inexhaustible supply of patients on whom to try out new methods, but this was itself part of the problem. Whenever they thought they were on top of some outbreak of illness, thousands more Africans arrived in the island after months at sea in filthy, disease-ridden holds, bringing new strains of tropical ailments with them.
The Wedderburns had often discussed slave health with other doctors and planters. There were soft fools like Underwood who thought they knew their slaves but paid more attention to the quacks who spouted medical jargon and charged exorbitant fees for the privilege of hearing it. There were hard fools who treated every African wound as self-inflicted, every sign of lethargy as malingering, every desperate fever as one more indicator of the degraded racial origins of their slaves. And then there were the calculating, thoughtful, observant ones – like the Wedderburns – who saw each dead or debilitated slave as a loss of fifty or sixty pounds sterling, each