The slave women in Surinam were compelled to go nude above the waist and the young girls absolutely nude, thereby arousing the sexual appetite of the white men, especially new arrivals. Beautiful, shapely black girls in their teens waited on table in the homes of the rich with not a stitch on, causing no little perturbation to newly-arrived white men. In the morning before the visitor was out of bed “a pretty black Venus wearing only a smile” would bring in his coffee.
St. Clair relates how he visited one of the finest mansions in Demerara, and how his host, his wife, and two pretty white daughters, together with a blooming young widow, were served at dinner by four Negro maids “as naked as they came into the world. I was astonished at such an exhibition before persons of their own sex.”16
Some of the black women arrived in Surinam already with child by white men. Such usually fetched a higher price. Stedman tells of a Dutch ship captain who sold the woman whom he had made pregnant on the voyage for a larger sum than he got for the other women.17 St. Clair, who saw the arrival of a slave ship, tells how lean and starved were the slaves, but how sleek and well-fed were the Negro mistresses of the white men on the ship. He says “On reaching the cabins, which belonged to the cabin and mate, I found five or six young girls, as naked as they were born, who formed the seraglios of these two sultans and were kept fat and in good condition.”18
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arredondo, A., El Negro en Cuba. 1939. This writer gives a list of distinguished Cuban Negroes.
Cabrera. R., Cuba and the Cubans. 1896. (Trans, by Laura Guiteras.)
Ortiz, F., Hampa Afro-Cubano. 1916.
Rosario. J. C., The Development of the Puerto Rican Jibaro. 1935.
___________
1 Merlin, Countess de., La Havane, Vol. 2, p. 184. 1844.
2 Philalethes. D., Yankee Travels Through the Island of Cuba. p. 244. 1856.
3 Nation. Jan. 9. 1929, p. 55
4 Beals, C. America South, p. 50. 1937.
5 Schurz, W. L., Latin America, p. 70. 1941.
6 Beals, C, America South, p. 162. 1937.
7 Thompson, V., Cosmopolitan Maga, Vol. 29, p. 19 (1900).
8 Van Middledyk, Puerto Rico, p. 92. 1903.
9 Brau, S., La Colonizacion de Puerto Rico, p. 215. 1907.
10 American Guide Series: Puerto Rico, p. 178. 1940.
11 Remarks on Hayti as a Place of Settlement for Afric-Americans, p. 33. 1860.
12 American Guide Series: Puerto Rico, p. 110. 1940.
13 Stedman, J. G., Narrative of a Five Years’ Expendition to Surinam, Vol. 2, p. 25. 1813.
14 Stedman, Vol. 2, p. 284.
15 St. Clair, T. S., A Residence in the West Indies, etc., Vol. 1, p. 112. 1834.
16 St. Clair, Vol. 2, p. 165.
17 Stedman, Vol. 1. p. 215.
18 St. Clair. Vol. 1. p. 195.
Chapter Eight
THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
IF Haiti is the Negro republic then Santo Domingo is the mulatto one. Originally called Hispaniola, together with Haiti, it is the oldest European settlement in the New World, its capital San Domingo, now called Trujillo City, having been founded by Bartholomew Columbus, brother of the navigator, in 1496.
At its discovery, the island was well populated, the number of its inhabitants having been set down at from two to three millions, which is evidently an exaggeration. What is certain, however, is that by 1542, fifty years later, the Indian population had shrunk to a few thousands. The Indians refused to toil for the Spaniards—in fact they seemed unable to grasp the idea of working for the enrichment of others—with the result that they were treated with a barbarity unparalleled in history. Las Casas, Bishop of the Indies, witnessed these cruelties and wrote an account of them.
To take the place of the vanishing Indian, the Negroes were brought in in 1502, and despite the cruelties and the hardships throve so well that Herrera, a historian of the times, said that Hispaniola was not long in becoming another Guinea in the color of its population.
In the Negroes, too, the Spaniards found an entirely different customer from the Indian. Although care had been taken to take the Negroes from the different tribes and so mix them so that they could not understand one another’s language, when subjected to ill-treatment, they fought back. In 1522, or only twenty years after their introduction, they revolted in Santo Domingo City and killed six Spaniards, and wounded several more. Diego, son of Columbus, and governor of the colony, saved his life, only by flight.1
Negroes did even more: they absorbed the Spaniards until it became almost a black colony.
In time Santo Domingo became the most liberal colony in the New World towards Negroes with the mildest slave laws. But strange to say, it was not law, but lawlessness, that helped most in bringing this about.
This liberal influence was piracy. Off the coast, and not far away was the island of Tortuga, chief buccaneer settlement of the New World. The pirates, who were chiefly English and French, with some Spaniards and Dutch, were interested not in color or race, but in one’s courage and fighting ability. Some of the Negroes as the Ashantis, Dahomevans, and Coroman tees, who were natural born warriors, possessed just the qualities the pirates were looking for, and they welcomed all the runaway slaves and others they could get until a considerable proportion of their numbers were blacks.
CITIZENS Of THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC.
XXIX. Army doctors of the Dominican Republic. (Album de Oro de la Republica Dominicana.)
Several of the best pirate captains as Roc Brasiliano and Diaguillo, protege of Sir Francis Drake, were blacks. Bartholomew Roberts, the greatest of them all, is described by Captain Charles Johnson, another pirate, as “a tall, black man, near forty years of age.”2 Roberts was born in England where Negro slavery then existed. In Tom Cringle’s Log, also, the pirate chief in charge of white men is a coal-black Negro born in Scotland and speaking with a Scotch accent.3
On Tortuga, white, black, and Indian mated freely, producing a mixed brood. The women captured by the pirates and brought to the island were of all races, but chiefly Indian and Negro, and these regardless of color, fell by lot to the common pirates after the captain had taken his pick.
Alexander Esquemelin, who lived among them, and whose book is the standard one on buccaneering, gives an idea of what went on in the pirate settlements when he says, “The Spaniards love better the Negro women in those western parts, or the tawny Indian females, when as peradventure, the Negroes and Indians have a greater inclination to white women, or those that come near them, the tawny, than their own.”4
What was true of Tortuga was also true of the other pirate colonies as Port Royal, Jamaica; Port Royal and Cape Fear in the Carolinas; and Santa Catalina and Nassau in the Bahamas.
Being so near to Hispaniola, the buccaneers practically dominated it until near the latter part of the seventeenth century when Spanish rule was reestablished again; but the racial freedom established by the influence of the pirates remained.
Moreau de St. Mery wrote, “The prejudice with respect