Joseph Knight. James Robertson

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       Kingston, January – March 1747

      John Wedderburn slowly came awake again, and found himself, as his eighteenth birthday approached, no longer a boy. He had been in Jamaica for half a year, acclimatising, or being ‘seasoned’, as the term was. Europeans, it was said, needed this period of adjustment, preferably twice as long, even more than Africans, though it was the latter who would eventually be toiling all day under the Caribbean sun. But while the Africans were not allowed to be idle in their first months in the island, but were given light tasks such as weeding or cattle-minding, or indoor work, John Wedderburn was expected to do almost nothing. He was kept at his relative Mr Paterson’s expense, and grew increasingly bored.

      Company was not hard to find, but, to begin with, he avoided it. He felt like an exile, not yet a West Indian but a Scot, on the run from England. He kept himself to himself. Riding from one part of the island to another on a borrowed horse, he inspected some plantations, their great white houses and simple slave villages, watched the slaves at work in the cane fields, saw the sugar being processed in the mills, learned the difference between creoles and Africa-born blacks and the obsessive gradations of blood-mix that lay between black and white: sambo, mulatto, quadroon, octaroon, musteefino. These designations also taught him an important lesson: there were no gradations of whiteness. In the purity of your race, if you were white, lay your salvation.

      As his own skin became burnt by the sun, he thought of this, and determined to keep himself pure. He wanted to save himself. He thought of home and its whiteness, something to which he had never before given any consideration. Now, surrounded by black people, he saw in his mind the overwhelming whiteness of Scotland.

      In Kingston, he spent these lone months wandering the grim, gaudy streets, taking in their odd mixture of dust and humidity, of squalor and sweat, of crudeness and finery. He got caught time and again in astonishing downpours. A baking hot sky would be transformed in mid-afternoon, in a matter of minutes, into something dark and menacing. Then the rain would come, vertical sheets of warm, sweet-smelling water, quite unlike the insidious, creeping drizzle of Scotland. Half an hour later the sky would be clear again and the ground bone-dry.

      Compared with London, Kingston was a village but it lacked the quaintness of a village. The streets were lined with wooden shacks and larger wood- and brick-built houses, the latter often with shaded porches along their entire front where white men and women sat and observed the world. The few really substantial buildings were used by the island’s administration or by the wealthiest merchants and planters. King Street, the wide main thoroughfare, was always busy with carts and carriages. There were stores with the latest fashions, furnishings and domestic supplies imported from Europe. Inns and boarding houses, rough-looking drinking shops and slightly more genteel coffee rooms filled the gaps. It was a male town faced in some quarters with a chipped female veneer.

      At first sight, it was a place where blacks and whites seemed to mingle on equal terms. But this was a false picture. Most of the apparently free blacks were slaves employed in various trades – coopers, carriers, carpenters, blacksmiths, seamstresses, laundresses. If they were not working for their own master they were working for someone else’s, charging a fee, some of which they were permitted to keep. These men and women existed in a halfway state between slavery and freedom, and their whole manner, their better clothes, their sprightliness and the speed at which they worked, all seemed to suggest to John Wedderburn that they had somehow been ‘improved’ beyond the condition of those labouring on the plantations. This he found interesting.

      Ships arrived daily from Britain, Guinea and the American colonies. Down at the waterfront John watched vast quantities of goods being offloaded and tried to calculate what they must be worth. A miserable, foul-smelling guardhouse was there too, and a gibbet, on which were suspended cages containing the remnants of slaves who had committed some crime or other.

      A man passing by, seeing him standing there, asked him what he was staring at. Embarrassed, John Wedderburn waved an arm widely. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘It’s all so busy.’

      ‘No,’ the man said, ‘you were looking at something, not everything. You were looking at that.’ He was smoking a pipe, and pointed at the gibbet with it.

      John began to speak, but the man interrupted him.

      ‘And you’re as well to look at it, lad. Because without that, everything is nothing.’ He spat on the ground. ‘We’re at war.’

      John looked again at the carcasses in the cages. ‘The French?’ he asked. ‘Were they in league with the French?’

      ‘Bugger the French. We’re at war with them.’ He sucked on his pipe again. ‘You’ll see if I’m not right,’ he said.

      Months after his arrival, a letter reached John via Mr Paterson’s business. The letter had been weeks on board a ship crossing the Atlantic. It was written in his father’s hand. He opened it eagerly, forgetting how much time must have passed since its composition. It was very brief, a few lines only:

      27 November 1746

      Dear John,

      Today I got notice that I am to be executed tomorrow.

      The paper swam before his vision, his heart doubled its pace. With an effort he focused on the writing again.

      I was proved reviewed by the Prince at Edinburgh with a small sword and pair of pistols when you know I was not in arms there, the injustice and untruth of which with a great many other things I designed to have expatiated more fully upon if I had time. I hear that while you stayed here you parted too easily from your money which will not do, I need not tell you to take care and please Mr Paterson.

      Damn Mr Paterson! Mr Paterson was in London! He, John Wedderburn, was stuck in the Indies, and all his father could do – had been able to do – was complain about untruths and tell him to curb his spending. Take care. Take care of what, his empty purse? His browning skin? O God, Papa was dead! What had they done to him? They had wiped him clean away. As if to emphasise that awful fact, the letter was not even signed.

      He tried to persuade himself that there might have been a reprieve, but he knew it could not be. A week, a month passed: no joyous, God-praising letter in the same hand arrived. Instead, in January, came his brother James to confirm the news.

      The boys spent a week getting drunk together, СКАЧАТЬ