The negro blacksmith upon the parade near the coopers—him who kept three slaves himself—he was all shut up with ‘gone to visit me sister’ chalked upon his door. That expensive preserve shop, the dry goods store, and every single laundry hut in town were deserted. No food was steaming upon fires along the wharf; no groups of raucous negroes chatting and chewing over those victuals there.
The courthouse saw no restless crowds jostling, anxious, around its doors, nor heard the sharp calls from the buying and selling of the luckless human harvest that was usually being exchanged. There were no ragged children tormenting dogs and chickens about the square. No white people, in their straw hats and bonnets, walked along the road, stepping their fine shoes carefully out of the harm of a puddle of water or dung, while holding their noses away from niggers. Their house slaves were not to be found haggling for them, or being scolded for the dear price as they tripped at their owners’ heels.
Even those three coloured girls who worked in the boarding house along King Street, were not at their open window laughing at the ugly hats that went by them.
All this absence muffled this usually bustling town with a disquieting gloom that the overseer—and perhaps even John Howarth—thought draped around those elegant streets heavy as a black velvet cloak.
They gathered in from all about the district, from plantations, estates, pens, churches and town, the regulars of the Trelawny Interior Militia under the practised command of Captain Shearer. These white men’s pistols were cocked, and their powder was plentiful and dry. Rebel slaves were firing the trash houses up upon Castle Estate. Be warned, they were told, there are a lot of them—forty, fifty, reports were unclear. One or two hundred, someone said, armed with stolen muskets, fowling pieces, carbines, pistols, and shouting, ‘War! War! War!’ Some say these nigger rebels had come from Montego Bay, where they had taken a whole barracks—seized the arms. Nonsense, what piffle, Captain Shearer said, for negroes were never so shrewd.
The militia’s orders were to punish the guilty—all principals and chiefs in these burnings—without mercy. For those who surrender—if they yield themselves up and beg, beg, beg, then, perhaps, they will receive a gracious pardon from his majesty for their crimes. But certain death to all those blacks who foolishly hold out.
The forty white men of the Trelawny Interior Militia rode on to the level land of the Castle Estate in one phalanx. Among them were planters whose families hailed from Canterbury, Bloomsbury and Camden Town; attorneys who talked of home in Bristol, Whitstable and Fife; overseers from Galway, Great Yarmouth, Cardiff and Bow; ministers and curates whose families fretted for them in Exeter and Norwich, St Austell and Sheffield; bookkeepers who had just run from the mills of Lancashire, the mines of Glamorgan and an asylum in Glasgow. All advanced to the vicinity of the plantation works with their jaws jutting with resolve.
Soon they came upon intense flames—a trash house was being devoured with the swiftness of a dragon licking tinder. The bitter smoke from the crackling dry cane leaves blew dense about them, choking at their throats and smarting their eyes blind. Suddenly, from their left and from behind, came bursts of discharging musket fire. Ping, ping. This was not forty negroes, ping, not fifty. Ping, ping, ping. This was a thousand. Maybe ten thousand!
The Trelawny Interior Militia were surrounded—caught stumbling and trapped. These white men, charged to protect property, women, children and loved ones, were men of the land—oh, how the truth of this rumbled through the guts of every man there—they were not soldiers, they were not redcoats. Hold your nerve, Captain Shearer had to order of them. Hold your nerve!
But then the light from that fire spread a golden daylight across that black night, as if the sun had just risen. And there, revealed in their pitiful hiding places, were the few old negroes who had set the fire. Those slaves were suddenly exposed, clear as players in limelight, as they crouched to aim their old cutlasses and fowling pieces.
The noise of the thousand muskets firing was the bamboo burning—the air inside the grass all around them popping with the heat. By gad, it sounded to them like gunfire. But now those revolting niggers were shown to be clutching rusting, squeaking, wood-rotten, useless weapons—last-century stuff that needed an hour to re-arm—that those sneak-thieves had hidden in their roofs