'Slavery be dead, we be free' – The amazing true story of ...

As Cayman celebrates Emancipation Day for the first time in over half a century, the Cayman Compass takes a detailed look at how a century of slavery came to a dramatic end on these islands.

‘Absolutely and unconditionally free’

On the morning of 3 May 1835, clad in the scarlet livery of the British West India Regiment, Captain Anthony Pack stood on a low wall overlooking Hog Sty Bay and read the proclamation that would change Cayman forever.

Lest the message of the legal document be unclear, the Governor of Jamaica, Lord Sligo, was there in person to spell it out.

“You who have been slaves and lately acting as apprentices, are by this decision made absolutely and unconditionally free,” he told the assembled crowd.

And with those words, Cayman’s formerly enslaved population became one of the first truly liberated black communities in the Caribbean.

The rest of the region was still suffering under an apprenticeship scheme which historians have described as ‘slavery by another name’ and would not be truly free for another three years.

Addressing himself first to the former slave owners, Sligo acknowledged their “hardship” in losing the “service as apprentices of your former slaves”.

As he spoke, the Union Jack, flying high on the main mast of the 44-gun warship HMS Forte, stationed off shore in Hog Sty Bay, fluttered in the breeze. The HMS Serpent, with its 16 cannons, had also dropped anchor in the pretty harbour.

There had been months of unrest in the ‘lawless’ colony and the British were ready for trouble.

Sligo turned his attention to a small group of former slaves gathered in the shade.

“I trust you will show gratitude to that nation which has made such personal and pecuniary sacrifices to ensure your freedom.”

Adopting a paternalistic (some would say patronising) tone, he instructed them to show they were deserving of the “great benefit” they had received.

The governor’s address spelled out some of the challenges that lay ahead. While the white slave owners were to be well compensated for the loss of their so-called ‘property’, the newly free black Caymanians were left homeless and penniless.

“You have now no person to feed you, no person to clothe you, no person to give you medical assistance if you are ill.”

The governor’s letters about the day – extracted in Brian Kieran’s book ‘The Lawless Caymanas’ – indicate a subdued response from the gathered apprentices.

“They did not appear to appreciate the extent of the blessing they had received,” he wrote.

It wasn’t until several days later when Capt. Pack made the 14-mile journey by horseback to Bodden Town that the celebrations truly began.

“Wild demonstrations of joy. Shooting, fiddling, dancing to excess,” were recorded in the disapproving dispatches of Dr. Robert Thompson, the stipendiary magistrate.

An eyewitness account from the Reverend Tom Sharpe, also quoted in Kieran’s book, details some of the more exuberant celebrations.

A large banner with the words ‘Slavery be dead, we be free’ was draped across the road at the western entrance to the town. At the eastern end a similar poster declared, ‘De king hab set we free, rejoice”.

Sharpe records a jubilant procession of men, women and children waving flags, streamers and bunting, and firing muskets into the air.

“The men began beating their drums, playing their fiddles, banjoes and other instruments and scraping their graters until the sounds of rejoicing kills the sound of the roaring sea nearby.”

‘A century of slavery’

Those scenes heralded the abrupt end of a ‘century of slavery’, according to the definitive history of the islands, ‘Founded upon the Seas’.

The first slaves were likely brought to Cayman from Jamaica around 1730, author Michael Craton wrote.

They initially worked in logging crews clearing land to fuel a growing global demand for mahogany. The trade increased with the emergence of cotton plantations in the latter part of the 18th century.

In 1802, when Edward Corbett conducted his census of Cayman, there were 545 slaves, the majority of them working on fewer than a dozen plantations.

At the time of emancipation, the slave population had increased to 985 – just fewer than half of the total population.

By then, Craton notes that the local cotton industry was collapsing and Cayman slaves “were more like unpaid domestic servants”.

It has been claimed that slavery in Cayman was somehow more benign than in other areas, characterised by less brutality and oppression than in other parts of the Caribbean and the southern United States.

A copy of the Abolition of Slavery Act published by the UK Parliament in 1833 and acquired by the Cayman Islands National Museum.

Christopher Williams, author and associate professor of history at the University College of the Cayman Islands, takes issue with this interpretation, arguing that it minimises the fortitude and tenacity Caymanians showed in the face of oppression.

“Slavery is slavery is slavery,” he said.

‘A beggar with nowhere to turn’

The jubilation in Bodden Town in the wake of the proclamation was in contrast to the despondency of the 121 former slave owners.

It was to the most prominent of these landowners that Lord Sligo addressed himself in the great cabin of the HMS Forte on the eve of the announcement.

An image by Chris Mann, featured in the Lawless Caymanas book and reproduced here with the artist’s permission, recreates the scene inside Sligo’s cabin.

A sketch by Cayman Islands artist Chris Mann, who was commissioned in the early 1990s to produce a collection of paintings and sketches of epochal moments in Cayman’s history, gives a glimpse of how the scene may have unfolded.

Light filters through the diamond panes of the cabin window as the men, heads bowed, hats in hand, sombrely receive the news. The governor is rendered in silhouette – straight-backed, broad shoulders adorned with epaulets, square jaw locked in a grimace – as he resolutely reads from prepared remarks.

The Cayman landowners  were “thunderstruck” and immediately pleaded for time to raise a petition against the “threatened evil”, according to Lord Sligo’s accounts of the encounter:

“One man, Mr Bodden, a very principal proprietor here, said ‘I came on board a wealthy man possessing all I desired and I am at this moment a beggar without knowing where to turn for a bit of bread’.”

‘Another form of slavery’

The irony of the slave-owning class considering themselves as disenfranchised victims of emancipation will be hard for a modern reader to absorb. But the abolition of slavery by the UK Parliament didn’t signal a universally enlightened attitude to race relations.

The proclamation itself even makes reference to the “inconvenience” and “injustice” inflicted on the “proprietors of negroes”.

The Cayman landowners felt shortchanged in comparison to counterparts in Jamaica and elsewhere in the British West Indies who had been guaranteed the continued labour of their former slaves through a transitional system of apprenticeship

Williams of UCCI explains, “The UK didn’t think outright freedom was the right thing and they wanted the former slaves to go through an apprenticeship period where they continued to work for their former masters.”

“As many historians have maintained, it was just another form of slavery.”

UCCI professor Christopher Williams

It wasn’t until 1838 that this system was dismantled across the Caribbean.

Unrest between apprentices and their former masters and official concern that the slaveholdings in Cayman had never been formally registered (at least not until compensation claims were being processed) prompted the decision to grant full freedom to Cayman apprentices three years earlier.

There was increasing concern also from British authorities about law and order in Cayman and its vague status as a neglected outpost of Jamaica.

A peacekeeping force of the West India regiment had been sent to the islands following the official end of slavery and the advent of apprenticeship in August 1834.

But the presence of the black soldiers of the regiment only inflamed tensions further among the white landowners.

“Their lawless behaviour both towards soldiers and towards their own former slaves constituted a major challenge to public order,” Craton wrote.

It was against this backdrop that Sligo made his decision to abandon apprenticeship in Cayman and free the former slaves with immediate effect.

Compensation claims paid out to slaveholders

Perversely, in the aftermath of emancipation, compensation was not paid to the freed slaves who had worked the land for generations without pay.

The British government paid out claims of more than £20 million to former slaveholders across its colonies.

The Bank of England administered the compensation package.

Details of those claims appear in the Accounts of Slave Compensation Claims across 20 Caribbean colonies – acquired by former journalist Simon Boxall, who has collected historic documents about Cayman from auctions and sales by antiquarian book dealers over the years.

Boxall leafs through the pages of the accounts ledger. – Photo: James Whittaker

The slim blue book was among a number of documents acquired by the Cayman Islands National Museum from Boxall in the run-up to Emancipation Day.

Collectively, Cayman’s slaveholders attempted to claim 44,000 pounds 764 shillings and were paid around £19,700 – still more than £1 million in today’s money.

After emancipation

The idea of compensation for slaves themselves was never discussed.

Many continued to work for their former masters or hired themselves out as day labourers while settling their own small holdings in the eastern districts.

Bodden Town, which had the densest concentration of former slaves, was the chief focus of social tension, according to Craton.

“The proprietors wanted to obtain as much labour for as few wages as possible in return for their former apprentices continued use of house and grounds,” he wrote. 

“The ex-slaves wanted to keep their houses and grounds without obligation if possible and to work when and as they wished for the highest possible pay.”

Race relations continued to be a challenge throughout the following decade, which Craton describes as a period of “unprecedented upheaval and change”. 

A briefly successful school, with teachers funded by the Mico Charity, was shut down after its beloved teacher Malcolm left the island.

Craton wrote, “Malcolm suffered social isolation, heat and mosquitoes but chiefly from opposition by former slaveowners. The issue was Malcolm’s determination not to separate the non whites and whites in his class.”

The brotherhood of the sea

Despite these struggles, a path to a more equal future was seen on the seas, where black and white fishermen would work side by side for the same pay.

“Fishermen and turtlers seem to have forged a more equal relationship,” said Williams.

This is supported by testimony from Custos John Drayton who wrote at the time, “The crew gets one half of the profits and the owner the other. All the hands have share and share alike whether Black or White.”

Craton highlights the change in Cayman’s economy – necessitated by the abolition of slavery and apprenticeship – as ultimately heralding a more equal future, where everyone was relatively poor.

“In a post slavery economy conditions were determined by economic realities and by the will of former slaves as much as by the wishes of their former owners,” he wrote.

“Restoring anything like a plantation economy in the Cayman Islands was clearly impossible. All parties alike relied on subsistence economy and the extension of the turtling industry – along with shipbuilding and what might come in from the chancier business of combing wrecks.”

Legacy: ‘The first to be truly free’

Historically, most of the Caribbean celebrates Emancipation Day on 1 Aug. –  commemorating the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in the British Parliament in 1833.

Records from the Cayman Islands National Archive indicate that Cayman observed the same holiday up to 1960, when it disappeared from the calendar.

Premier Juliana O’Connor-Connolly announced in her budget policy address last year that it would be restored at a new date in early May, “in recognition of Cayman’s unique emancipation story, one which sets it apart within the Caribbean”.

Highlighting how the Cayman Islands received full emancipation on 5 May 1835, bypassing the multi-year apprenticeship which took place across other colonies, she said,“the slaves in the Cayman Islands were the first to be truly free”.

Williams sees the restoration of the holiday as an important step forward.

And he hopes Cayman will embrace the true meaning of the date and why it matters, instead of seeing it as purely a day of national pride.

“Other Caribbean nations don’t shy away from saying we are celebrating emancipation. We are not celebrating slavery, we are celebrating the tenacity of people who were once enslaved.”