[The following is in regards to 17th century indentured servitude on Jamaican plantations.]
Various cash crops had been tried in the island, but West Indian tobacco could never compete with the rich Virginia variety. Sugar was a difficult crop and required backbreaking work from an army of indentured servants and slaves to produce. The lad had to be cleared, hoed, weeded, dewormed, degrubbed, planted, tended with care. Small planters desperate not to sink back down into servitude drove their servants pitilessly, beating them with cudgels or whacking them with sticks when they did not keep up, until the white men’s backs blistered and ran with pus.
The men slept in tiny shacks “rather like stoves than houses.” They needed permits to travel around the island to meet a friend or a sweetheart, and for every two hours they were off the plantation, they had to donate an extra month of servitude. When they rebelled against the treatment, even minor offenders received harsh sentences from planters whose dreams and gossip were filled with scenes of uprising: When one John Wiborne published a book that spoke out against a member of the Barbadian elite, he was sentenced to have his ears nailed to the pillory; after they took him down from this minor crucifixion, he was whipped and branded. Disease killed between a third and a half of the bondsmen before they finished their term, and if they died, their bodies were tossed into unmarked holes.
When these men finally earned their freedom, they found that there was little demand for unskilled laborers like themselves; often they had to sell themselves back into servitude just to eat.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “Rich and Wicked.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 135-36. Print.
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