THE STORY OF JOHN BLACK
NEWSDAY HISTORICAL DIGEST
September 30, 2001
Pages 5 and 6
"Black was middle-aged, impish, renowned for his meanness and admiringly feared for his crooked dealing," wrote Vidia Naipaul of John Black.
In his day, Black was larger than life, a wheeler-dealer, smartman, possessed of personal bravery and who was one of five, together with Governor Thomas Picton, who actually ran this island towards the end of the 18th century, the 1790s. He was directly responsible for the destinies of hundreds of thousands of people who walk the streets today by virtue of being the importer of their ancestors. Naipaul said of him and his associate Edward Barry, "Two, Irishmen, Barry and Black, set up as Negro shippers. They didn't deal in new Negroes. Their Negroes were from other Caribbean islands and not always legitimately obtained. Some were at the end of their useful life."
They knew how to disguise old age or illness and imported in one instance, some 40 Negroes and sold them for approximately $300 each. Within three day's thirty-four were dead. No refunds were offered.
Governor Picton, writing to the Secretary of State on the 4th November, 1800, to justify the qualifications of the five men he had appointed to his Council of Advice, stated concerning the three British members that "John Nihell, John Black and John Nugent, Esquires, are the most respectable and opulent proprietors of the colony."
When he was 26, and a lieutenant commanding the St. George's regiment of militia in Grenada, the French squadron under Admiral Comte d'Estaing, on a flawless morning in July 1779, bombarded St. George's. The French men-of-war turned in the light air, guns blazing, to win back a prize taken by the English, but owned by them for more than one hundred years. With boy drummers beating "The Advance", the French troops landed and swarmed up the Carenage. Already, the town was burning, the British falling back in an orderly retreat except for one band of men.
Black, the regimental colours flying smartly, with sabre in hand, rallied to him eighty grenadiers and a body of light infantry in defense of Hospital Hill. They were eventually overrun, but they had seized the day.
John Black was a Protestant. Born in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1753, he was an adventurer who set out for Grenada in 1771, where Lord McCartney, an Irish peer, was governor. The island had recently been taken by England from France, who had settled there well over a century before. John Black was a bright lad and came from the sort of background that allowed Lord McCartney to appoint him to the council at the young age of 24. Black set himself up as a merchant in St. George's. He was the owner of several vessels and busied himself with inter-island trade goods, some dry, some alive.
Michael Pocock wrote about Black in his book 'Out of the shadows of the past' that Black was not successful with his boats, having had one impounded, another wrecked, and a third stolen. Undeterred, he was caught up with the idea of settling in the Spanish island of Trinidad, a plan put forward by a fellow Grenadian, Philippe Rose Roume de St. Laurent. But first, Black would marry a girl called Bonne.
The prevailing easterly wind sent strong puffs into the corps of trees under which they had picnicked for the day. The sun signaled that a spectacular setting was in the offering. He took her face between his huge hands. A mass of black curls framed it, tiny mouth, level, quiet brown eyes, she looked up at him and would always do so right up to the day they put him in a grave in San Juan cemetery in Trinidad, years from now, in a different kind of world.
That night, he rode his pony at full gallop into St. George's. Bonne was his and with gold in his pockets,he would set up in business with a countryman, Edward Barry, in a most lucrative venture, the slave trade.
Trinidad, in the minds of the more knowledgeable, educated adventures, was an almost mystical place, dangerous, untouched, with vast forests, unknown interiors and resources - just imagine!
Black stood on the foredeck of his sloop, the "Swallow", gazing at the dawn in which lingered a handful of stars. The island, strange, loomed, unrecognised shapes, distant mountains, reaching sharply to the sea, dark folds bearing caverns into which the waves rushed to swell and well and leave with a sigh to become the sea again.
This strange island to which the Dons had flocked in search of gold, pearls, and some antique trace of a lost civilisation, lost in the interior of the of the nearby main.
The running swells and steady wind took them towards a great gap, a chasm in the cliff's face, the Dragon's Mouth, now shaded pink, with the dawn lighting the rising sea mists. The Dragon's Mouth that had swallowed so many, where the Grand Admiral had seen the fresh water of the Orinoco system fighting with the Caribbean sea, "pushing so that the other shall not enter and the salt water so that the other shall not escape."
He very nearly didn't. Huge whales played in the bay. St. Isidoro of Seville catalogued it as an earthly paradise, peopled by monsters, a place known as the Gulf of Pearls in the Land of Grace that had been described elaborately in the book of the prophet Isaiah.
The wind changed as they entered the Gulf; no longer coming from the northeast, it now flowed steadily from the east, causing the skipper to alter his course. Black realised that they had been joined by several dozen dolphins, leaping in tandem to the motion of the "Swallow". He felt her warmth before he saw her. The morning light bright on her sweet face, they shared her shawl. The town known as Port of Spain was a collection of thatched huts in a mangrove swamp that exuded a stench that they would never learn to recognise, always thinking that something was burning. Naked Caribs painted red walked about with huge, iridescent parrots, toucans, iguanas and pre-historic armadillos for sale or trade or rent - who knows? Already, there were French dandies with gold in search of "domains" and rows of wretched Negroes for sale. The Spaniards, to which the island belonged, seemed out of place. Disdain, as haughty as can be managed, was their only refuge.
On the 16th December, 1784, Black and Edward Barry bought a parcel of land to the north of the town. They called it Belmont and built several houses for their use on the hillside above the flat, exactly where an international hotel would stand 200 years later. Belmont estate was planted in provision, root crops, moko fig and the newly introduced breadfruit. Barry and Black were not farmers, but businessmen. The crops they grew were for the slaves which they bought, mostly from the other islands, from distraught and impoverished plantation owners who had been ruined by war or revolution or whose dreams had been drowned in cheap rum, or whose hopes had been dashed between the thighs of the most beautiful women of a breed just being freshly created in these isles of grace. Laws would be passed to prevent this loss of property to slave-women, gorgeous "mulatresses" and indescribably beautiful "quadroons".
John Black had no such distractions. He bought and sold. Sometimes, his cargoes were insane from misery, malnourished, overworked, dying on their feet. Perhaps grateful to escape their crumbling, rotting barrack rooms on islands burning with white men's wars which they could not even dream to comprehend. Packed tightly in John's ships, they stumbled ashore in the mangrove mud of this more quiet island, to be rested and fattened up on the Belmont estate, to be resold to the French colons who were "opening up" the island.
They died like flies with no record of their burials; their ghosts to float and haunt the twisting, narrow lanes of the suburb called Belmont for centuries, sometimes appearing in J'Ouvert to frighten people, or to be seen in very old trees by children innocent of such things.
John Black was "the" slave master. In a list of persons found guilty of conspiracy in the contemplated outbreak of the slaves on Christmas Eve 1805, "Jean Rose of the St. George's regiment, belonging to John Black, Esq., was sentenced to 25 lashes". He bought plantations that were going under for their slaves and acquired an unsavoury reputation. Before the capitulation to the British in 1797, he was a member of the Illustrious Cabildo, the Spanish administrative body. Governor Picton, the first military governor of the British in Trinidad, put him on his council. Black and Picton saw eye to eye; they were cut from the same cloth. When Picton began to run into trouble, Black supported him. Summoned back to England to face a trial for the torture of one Louisa Caldeon, Black provided evidence for Picton to present in his defense. Black felt obliged to offer his resignation from the Council and thought of leaving the island. Picton wrote from London in August 1804:
"I am sorry to learn that Black has resigned. I think he is wrong. I know they have a most favourable opinion of him at the Secretary of State's office and they express much regret."
Black didn't leave the island. Picton, his reputation at first tarnished, later refurbished, died a hero at Waterloo. By 1808, Britain abolished the importation of new Negroes. "The trade" had come to an end. On the 11th January, 1808, the Colonial Department in London proposed the immigration of Chinese. The first 192 of these arrived in Trinidad in October. John Black was appointed to supervise these. He did not consider the experiment a success and recommended that at the conclusion of their one-year contract, they be shipped to Bengal, because they were not an economically viable proposition.
In 1808, the town of Port of Spain was burnt flat because of a fire started in a latrine by an inebriated apothecary, a Scotsman named Shaw. The Imperial Parliament voted £50,000 towards compensation and rebuilding. Picton returned the £4,000 collected by his friends in Trinidad towards the expenses of his trial. John was appointed chairman of the rebuilding committee. Money poured in. The term "bobol" might have been coined in this period, "where the money gone"?
The town remained un-rebuilt, tall razor grass grew in vacant lots where once elegant mansions, built in the French style, had stood. Huge flocks of corbeaux took over. Men took to carrying pistols instead of wearing rapiers. Knee-breeches and stockings disappeared, giving way to trousers. Only the elderly wore white, powdered wigs. Women rode in sedan chairs to church, carried through the muddy streets by tall, strapping house-slaves. The Caribs were all but gone. German merchants wee arriving.
The last of the three military governors was taking his leave. Emancipation was in the air. Great Britain had been victorious in all her continental wars. Soon, a great Queen Empress would reign over the greatest empire the world had ever seen. That was still to come.
In 1829, Sir Ralph Woodford, baronet, took office. Fresh-faced, clean-cut, he took one look at the grizzled old pirates in the Council of advice and fired them all. Fr. Anthony de Verteuil wrote in his "History of the Irish in Trinidad":
"Barry died in 1800 but Black, like many a rascal since, who had acquired wealth in dubious ways by living long, acquired respectability. He never learnt to respect the slave laws and in 1831, when he was nearly 80, he was fined £150 for having spat on a Negress and for having administered corporal punishment to another female slave. The French creoles who didn't love him commented, 'next time he'll use a spittoon'. He survived Woodford by 8 years, dying on 6th October, 1836, aged 84. He was buried at San Juan next to his son-in-law John Shine. Bonne passed away in July 1837, aged 74. She lies at his side.