eliza scarlett: leamington widow and jamaican slave owner

LeamingtonHistory Group

LEAMINGTON SPADISCOVERED

Eliza Scarlett Leamington

widow and Jamaican slave owner

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S L I D E S H O W

Monday, 4 November 2013

The story starts in a churchyard

Nearly all of the headstones and tombs in the parish churchyard of All Saints, Leamington were removed between the wars. There are now only three identifiable chest-tombs remaining. This

photograph shows two of these on the South side of the church just inside the railings on Church Walk. When I was the Verger at All Saints, I had access to the gated area of the churchyard and

as a keen local historian I thought that these particular tombs might be significant and were worth a closer look. Like most local historians, I am naturally very inquisitive.

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Basic information on the tombs

The two chest-tombs are of identical design and are very close together which seems to indicate that they were built

at the same time over over a single family vault.

Each of the panels on the two tombs had originally had incised lettering on but much of the lettering was badly eroded and it was impossible to decipher much of it. By

enlarging the photographs and enhancing the images on a computer it was however possible to read some of the

inscriptions on both of the tombs.

The inscription on the right is from the tomb nearest to the camera it reads:

IN THIS VAULT LIETHE MORTAL REMAINS OF

ELIZABETH VIRGO SCARLETTRELICT OF THE LATE

JAMES SCARLETT ESQOF TRELAWNEY IN THE ISLAND OF JAMAICA

WHO DIED AT LEAMINGTONON THE 2ND OF JANUARY 1821 AGED 53

R I P

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a few more cluesThe adjoining tomb on which the lettering is also very degraded records the death of ‘Elizabeth the widow of James Virgo Dunn born in Jamaica June

20th 1762 died in London `july 15th 1839 and James Virgo Dunn born in Jamaica died in this

parish 29th of October 1820’.James Dunn had died only two months before

Elizabeth Scarlett which strengthened the suspicion that the two tombs were erected at the same date.

This was the extent of the readable information on the tombs. There was obviously a close family

relationship between Elizabeth Virgo Scarlett and James Virgo Dunn and his wife Elizabeth for them

to be buried in the same vault but what that was we don’t know. Virgo is a common surname among the

early British settlers in the West Indies and surnames were frequently used as fore-names.

A map of Jamaica on the internet indicated that Trelawney was a large parish in the north of the

island with Falmouth its main town.

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The Jamaican connection exploredIt was fairly obvious that British people like the Scarletts and Dunns with roots in the West Indies in the eighteenth century could only have been there for one reason and that reason was their intimate connections with the sugar plantations that had been set up there by Europeans in the previous century. A search on Google led me immediately to a page on ‘The Scarlett Family in Jamaica’ on the Jamaica Family Search website. That was enough to confirm what I already suspected about Elizabeth, the question then arose -where do we go from here? Working on the basis that someone of substance would have left a will, a search on the National Archive website confirmed that they held a probate copy of the will of ‘Elizabeth otherwise Eliza Scarlett, Widow of Leamington Priors, Warwickshire’, the will was proved on 19 January 1821. For the very modest sum of £3.50 it was possible to download a PDF copy of the will, the ledger entry for which is shown below.

Elizabeth’s will was short and not very illuminating but I also downloaded copies of the will of James Virgo Dunn and of Eliza’s mother Sarah Gallimore who had died in 1810 and these were far more enlightening. Among the ‘goods and chattels’ left to beneficiaries in both of these wills were large numbers of named slaves employed on the Jamaican sugar plantations owned by the

two families.

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striking gold in the National ArchiveWorking on the assumption that the Scarlett family being minor aristocracy and seemingly long established in Jamaica, I thought it would be worthwhile to do a

search on the Access to Archive network to see whether there were any surviving documents anywhere that would help in my search to flesh out the bare bones of

Eliza’s life and that was something of a revelatory experience. I entered ‘Scarlett’ in the search box on the A2A website and the second of the 917 entries leapt out, it said that the Hull History Centre held an archive of the papers of

James and Eliza Virgo Scarlett and with a click on the mouse the contents of the archive were revealed. This is the catalogue entry.

Eliza Virgo Scarlett was married to James Scarlett (d.1798). The latter is not to be confused with James Scarlett (1769-1844), 1st Baron Abinger, though the coincidence of their families both owning estates in Jamaica suggests that they may have been related.

James Scarlett died in 1798 and Eliza Virgo Scarlett returned to England from Jamaica and ran her inherited Thicketts Estate, Peru and Green Vale Estate in Jamaica from there. The papers in the collection originate from her management of these two sugar plantations. She owned and rented slaves and produced rum. When her husband died he left many debts and she sold the Jamaica Estate to cover these in 1802. Her mother's death in 1806 increased her assetts and what was left when she died in 1821 was passed to her children, Mary James Scarlett and Eliza Virgo Scarlett junior. The latter married General Phineas Riall, who owned considerable estates in Ireland and it may be that the papers passed, like other Irish papers in DDLA of the O'Kelly and Grattan families, to the Langdale family through intermarriage.

The catalogue entry went on to say that the archive at Hull comprised a total of 193 items including estate correspondence and accounts for the Scarlett estates and also

items like valuations and reports on slaves, letters and press cuttings. Talk about manna from heaven!

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To Hull to look at the documents

I got off the train at Hull Paragon station and saw Philip Larkin on the platform who I remember was also a Warwickshire lad before migrating to East Yorkshire. Three days had been set aside to look at what was a very extensive archive. There would not be time to look at or to photograph or copy all of the items but I was able to access the Hull catalogue on line in advance of the visit and identify which items would be of most interest to me and these were helpfully on the table in the search room when I arrived at the History Centre.

The Hull History Centre (right) is an interesting new building in Worship Street a short walk from the railway

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Information overloadWhen I first looked at the tombs in the churchyard, I never gave a thought to where my research might

lead and much less to the embarrassment of riches I would uncover along the way. It soon became apparent that the archive in Hull was far too extensive to look at in just three days but it occurred to me that the subject would perhaps make an interesting talk for my local history group and it was with that idea in

mind that I began to look at the material and decide which items I ought to copy. Since I knew practically nothing about the running of sugar plantations or the slave trade, it would also require a fair amount of

background reading at some future date to try and put it all into some sort of context.What follows are just some of the more interesting documents from the archive with brief notes about what they tell us.

This valuation is one of the first documents I looked at and it indicates the astronomical sums of money involved in sugar production.Greenvale and Peru were the names of the Scarlett plantations The slaves there were regarded as capital assets and together with the stock were valued at almost £42,000.

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One section of a 1794 valuation of the slaves on the Scarlett’s Greenvale Estate with their

names and monetary values in British pounds alongside. Those

with the lowest value were children.The slaves names would have been given to them by the

estate owners.

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The slaves as economic assets

This is a small section of a valuation of 223 slaves on the Peru Estate drawn up in 1816, their names, ages and value in English pounds are listed (right hand column) The values are significantly less than in the 1794

valuation and a number have no monetary value. Many of the slaves were afflicted by tropical diseases and life-threatening conditions which meant they were unable to work.

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It is fairly certain that Elizabeth Scarlett lived with her husband James on one of their Trelawney estates until he died in 1798. James Sarlett’s family had a long connection with Jamaica and had been settled there since 1670. Various members of the family held extensive estates on the island. There is a mention in the household account books of ‘a payment to D Gardner’s visit to James Scarlett during his last illness £5’

which is presumably a Doctor’s fee for attendance. James Scarlett died intestate and left large debts. At the time of his death he owned estates named Peru, Scarlett’s Thicket, Young’s Thickett and Greenvale which

amounted to 2,700 acres. He is buried in the churchyard of St Peter’s church in Falmouth seen below.

St Peters Falmouth built 1795

James Scarlett’s death in 1798

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After James Scarlett had died, Elizabeth and her daughters returned to England. Among the documents in the Hull archive is this receipt for £135 dated 19 May 1800 which was the fare for

Eliza, her two daughters and her servant’s passage to England on board the ship Elizabeth.

Elizabeth returns to England

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Eliza Scarlett estate owner

What is clear from the Hull documents is that at the time of James Scarlett’s death he was heavily in debt. The sums of money involved in the sugar trade and slaving are quite

extraordinary by today’s standards. By the early part of the 19th century there was already a move to get rid of the business of slavery and an increasing trend in England to give up the use of sugar because of its unsavoury associations. The sugar trade was in decline.

This advert in a Jamaican newspaper in 1802 invites offers for the Greenvale

Estate’s 900 acres and 120 slaves

A typical and greatly idealised estate scene this is Port Maria on the north coast of Jamaica circa 1800

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management from afar

The Francis Freeling one of the Post Office fleet of mail-packets that

operated weekly between Falmouth and the West Indiescarrying official dispatches, mail, passengers and Bank of England bullion.

After Eliza had moved back to England, the Scarlett estates were administered locally in Jamaica by Attorneys James Stevenson

and David Richards. Eliza kept a very close watch on their

management of her affairs. In spite of the huge logistical

problems involved she regularly exchanged letters with her

Attorneys but even though these were sent by the weekly Post

Office packet boats out of Falmouth, they took anything up to ten weeks to arrive in Jamaica and then several days before they were delivered. Replies of course took a similar amount of time to

get back to England. Eliza wrote in her own hand and

made a copy of each letter written in a leather bound Letter Book which survives in the Hull

archive and is seen top right.

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From Barret & Parkinsonat Montego Bay were purchased 17 Negroes,

16 at £75 per head, one at £50. From RainsfordBlundel & Bainsden at Kingston or Spanish

Town 20 Negroes 19 at £69 per head one at £50From Galloway at Falmouth were bought

10 Negroes 9 at £65 one at £60. These werethe last that were purchased in the year 1795.

Part of a letter to her Attorneys in Eliza’s own hand giving details of transactions for the purchase of slaves in the year 1795 when her husband was still living, with a transcription below right.

one of Eliza’s letters

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work on the plantation - planting

It goes without saying that sugar and rum production relied entirely on slave labour for the large work force it required. The latter section of this show will explain how the slave trade was organised.Here we take a look at the workings of a typical sugar plantation.

Sugar cane is sterile and can only be reproduced from cuttings. Here we see (top) slaves hoeing in preparation for planting and (below)layering root cuttings into shallow trenches There was no mechanisation in the cane fields just a few horses and oxen. The cane would take fifteen months before it would be ready for cutting and boiling.

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Harvesting the cane

When it was ready for harvesting , the cane was cut by hand with a machete and bundled. It was then taken as soon as possible to

the estate mill to be crushed to extract the juice before it deteriorated. The mills were either wind or watermills but on

some estates the cane was crushed by a simple horse-driven mill. The cane harvesting would go on for six months of the year.

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the boiling houseHere the raw sugar was boiled in a

succession of copper vessels to extract the crystalline sugar which

had to be done quickly before it began to ferment.It was then cooled

in a cistern to form coarse granulated sugar and the residual molasses.The sugar would then be put into the large wooden barrels seen below called hogsheads and

then onto carts drawn by horses or oxen for transporting to the boats.

Practically all of the metal equipment used on the estate had to be shipped out from England since there were few manufacturing industries in the West Indies.Coopering was one of the few jobs that could be done on the estate and the coopers were the most valuable slaves on the payroll. The logistics associated with setting up a mill and boiling house were very complicated.

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shipping the sugar

In the early days, there were no docks or wharves and vessels would have to be loaded out at sea. A large

hogshead of sugar weighing the best part of three quarters of a ton is being

man-handled into a small skiff to be taken out to the lighters

at anchor in the bay before being hoisted on to ships for England.

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How the slave trade worked

The trans-Atlantic slave trade owes its existence to the pursuit of riches. European plantation owners needed huge numbers of workers on their estates in areas like the West Indies whose small populations were

insufficient to meet the demand for labour. The easy solution was to charter ships in England and to sail down the coast of West Africa and to forcibly enslave huge numbers of Africans. Thus developed what came to be known as the Triangular Trade. Merchants filled outbound ships with things like metal goods and textiles

which could be exchanged in West Africa for slaves who were then shipped across the Atlantic and off-loaded in the West Indies. The ships would then return to Britain with sugar and rum from the plantations to be sold

here.The ships never sailed empty.

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Slavery had been practised in Africa for centuries and many of the African Chiefs were complicit in providing slaves for European merchants. Slaves were frequently gathered from areas far inland and imprisoned in forts along the coast to wait until a large enough group had been assembled to fill a slave ship which might be several weeks or even months.. Men, women and children were taken and many native African families were separated for all time.

Filling the ships

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A slave could be purchased for the equivalent of a few pence. One of the most favoured items to be bartered for slaves was a brass or copper item shaped like

a bracelet and known as a Manilla shown bottom right.. These could be melted down but were used as currency in some parts of West Africa. The

bronze plaque (right) from Benin shows an African trader holding his staff of office and one of these Manillas the local currency. These were turned out

in their millions by Birmingham brass foundries.

buying an African slave

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a journey into the unknownThis is the ‘Watt’ a typical eighteenth century slave ship. Most slave ships were normal merchant ships of 250 to 300 tons adapted to carry a human cargo and would have a crew of 35 or 40 sailors. Each ship would be packed with up to 300 slaves who were shackled below decks in the ships hold for most of the time. The slaves on board had no idea where they were going or what the future held in store for them. Some thought they would be killed and eaten by the crew.

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Conditions on board shipThe passage across the Atlantic would take several weeks and the conditions on board were unspeakable. Small groups of slaves

would be unshackled and taken up on deck for exercise. A former slave surgeon Alexander Falconbridge had this to say:

‘They lie on bare planks and are frequently stowed too close, as to admit of no other posture than lying on their sides. Neither will the height between decks,

unless directly under the gratings, permit them the indulgence of an erect posture. The surgeon upon going between the decks in the morning, to examine the situation, frequently finds several dead. These dead slaves are thrown to the

sharks’.

Unsurprisingly there was a very high mortality rate among both the slaves and crew on passage and 12% died before the ship

reached landfall and were thrown overboard. On some voyages the mortality rate was an astonishing 40%.

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Landfall and further indignities

The regime on board the slave ship was

brutal and the conditions for the

slaves were indescribable after a long period at sea. Having survived the

rigours of the Atlantic, disease, rough treatment, poor food, lack of sanitation and the

threat of piracy, they might have expected that their situation could only improve

once the ship neared its destination but further indignities

were in store.

As the ship approached its destination, it was a case of ‘all hands on deck’ to smarten up the slaves and to make them as saleable as possible when they were taken ashore. They would be washed and shaved and a sailor would apply a mixture of gunpowder, lemon juice and palm oil to the skin of the slaves which he rubbed in with a cloth. A second sailor would then vigorously brush the slave with a dandy brush so that the skin glistened. The better the shine the better the price.

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welcome to Jamaica

Having finally disembarked, the assembled slaves were offered for sale in

a number of different ways. Some had been pre-ordered by estate owners and

merchants. Others would be sent to a public

auction where they could be bid for like cattle in a market and prodded and

poked and intimately examined like an animal.

The worst-case scenario was something called the ’scrambles’ where at a given

signal potential buyers would rush among the slaves and grab hold of

anyone they wished to buy. An observer at one of these spectacles reported how

a large number of terrified Africans had jumped into the sea fearing what was

about to happen to them. Thus was their fate sealed for the rest of their short

lives. A man sent by their new employers stood ready with a red-hot

branding iron and each slave was branded on the left shoulder with an iron bearing the new owner’s logo or

initials.

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a life of unremitting toilAlone, separated from family and friends and unable to communicate with those around him, what did life hold in store for the enslaved African? His life expectancy was at best nine years of unremitting toil. Stripped of his identity and in a

process designed to make him subservient, he would be put through a process of ‘seasoning’ which might last for two or three years. During this period he would get accustomed to the mental and physical torture that were part and parcel of

daily life on a plantation. He would work for up to eighteen hours a day and sometimes longer at harvest time. There were no free weekends or rest days. The only people exempt from working were children under the age of six, some elderly people and those with serious physical disabilities.Beatings and whippings were common as was the use of

implements like the neck collar and leg irons. Any serious offences would be punishable with the death penalty. Slaves were never more than chattels that could be traded at will by the people who owned them.

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The slaves lived in encampments of simple huts and always at a respectable distance from the large and imposing houses occupied by the estate owners and their families. We know little about many aspects of

the lives lived in these small settlements. Whilst looking through Eliza Scarlett’s archive in the Hull History Centre I came across a number of revealing entries in the estate accounts for the shipment from

Glasgow of large quantities of salted herrings which I can only assume was perhaps the staple diet of the slaves. One such shipment, of which there were many, was for 100 barrels of herrings.

During the time of Eliza Scarlett’s stewardship of the Jamaican estates, big changes were afoot for both the sugar trade and for the slave trade which underpinned it and the word on everyone’s lips was

ABOLITION

but the times they are a changing

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The slave trade reached its zenith in the middle of the 18th century but within a few decades a movement for abolition began to gather momentum. The defeat of the British in the war with America led to many people returning to Britain sometimes bringing with them their former slaves who wasted no time in actively lobbying against slavery.

In 1783 an incident involving the Liverpool registered slave ship Zong caused widespread outrage and raised public concern. The Zong lost her way on passage to the West Indies and as water grew short an epidemic started on board and crew and slaves began to die. At this point the Captain, Luke Colingwood, called the crew together and pointed out to them that if the slaves died naturally then the financial loss would be borne by the ship’s owners but if on some pretext of the safety of the crew they had to be thrown into the sea, then it would be the loss of the underwriters. Ever keen to satisfy the ships owners and despite the objections of his first mate Colingwood ordered that 133 slaves be thrown overboard.

a beginning and an ending

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The abolitionistsTwo of the most influential members of the abolition movement were

William Wilberforce (left)the Member of Parliament for Hull and the potter and industrialist Josiah Wedgewood (below) together with many other

Quakers. Wilberforce failed on eleven occasions to get an Abolition Bill through Parliament and had a model of the slave ship Brookes made

showing the manner in which the slaves were packed like sardines in a can which he produced at length in a House of Commons debate to great effect. Wedgewood produced a cameo showing a kneeling, manacled slave asking

‘Am I not a man & a brother?’ These were probably two of the most effective political images ever used in a British political campaign.

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the cartoonist joins the debateThe leading caricaturist of the time Isaac Cruikshank reflected the mood of the period in this 1792 cartoon titled The leaving of sugar by degrees. The title is a play on the words ‘of’ and ‘off’. Seated round the breakfast table are

George III, the Queen and two of their daughters. The Queen’s Keeper of the Robes’ Juliana Elizabeth Schwellenbergen holds a bottle of brandy and discusses with them the use of sugar in moderation.

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The Abolition Bill is passed

It was the testimony of men like former ships captains and surgeons who had served on slave ships that

would prove to be the deciding factor in focussing public opinion in Britain

firmly against the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. That said,

economic factors also played a part and women were at the forefront of

the abolition campaign and set up the Anti-Saccarite Movement to promote

the boycott of slave-grown sugar. Britain became involved in a costly

war with France, one of the consequences of which was a halving

of the value of English currency between 1790 and 1800.

The Abolition of the Slave Trade bill was eventually carried in the House of

Commons and became law on 25th March 1807.

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see how the girls danceIsaac Cruikshank’s satirical view of the Abolition titled The Abolition of the Slave Trade published in 1792

depicts the notorious Captain Kimber whipping a teen-age African girl on board the slave ship Recovery which had sailed from Bristol en route for Grenada in 1791. "Dancing the slaves" was a regular part of the

routine of a slave ship on the Middle Passage and aimed to ensure that slaves who were confined to the extremely cramped and unhygienic conditions below decks received at least a degree of regular exercise.

Those who refused to take part were flogged and Kimber was subsequently charged with the murder of a slave girl who had refused to dance with him. Although he was acquitted at an Old Bailey trial in 1792 due to a lack of evidence, it established the principle that those who killed slaves could be tried for murder. When the slaves were thrown overboard from the Zong ten years earlier none of the crew was ever tried for murder, and the

subsequent court cases established the legality of their act.

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1833 and the pay-off

Although the 1807 Act had effectively put an end to the business of trading slaves, it

would be another twenty-six years before slavery throughout the British Empire was

ended with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. One of the provisions of

the Act provided for the payment of compensation to slave owners for the loss of their

slaves as business assets. In 1833 the British Government set aside 40% of its annual

budget for such payments which is an indication of the huge sums of money involved

in the trade over the preceding two centuries. Many of those who received payments

were people of high social standing who it has to be said had risen from modest

beginnings to establish family fortunes and trading dynasties by putting money into

slave ships and plantations in the West Indies. The Lascelles family rose from modest

Yorkshire farming stock and reached the top of the aristocratic slippery pole being

ennobled as Earls of Harewood. When the compensation was paid out Henry Lascelles

was in receipt of £26,309 for his 2,554 slaves in the West Indies.

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To round off this presentation I want to return to Elizabeth Scarlett whose tomb in All Saints churchyard first set me off on this voyage of discovery into the unknown.

Eliza was a young woman of just thirty years of age with two small children when her husband James died on their Jamaican plantation in 1798 leaving behind huge debts. It says much about the capable woman she was that for the next twenty-three years she successfully managed the estates in what were very difficult times for all those involved in producing sugar. What is even

more remarkable is that for much of that time she ran the estates from here in England. We know that she came back to England with the children in the Spring of 1800 and from her letter book we also know that she was back on the family's Greenfield Estate in Jamaica by 1810 and

again between 1815 and 1817. During the periods she spent in England, she occupied a number of addresses in the more desirable parts of London in Portland Place and Bedford Square. On

returning to England she lived for a period in Cheltenham between 1817 and 1819 but there is no indication as to when she came to Leamington or where she was living at the time of her

death. To the best of my knowledge no image of Eliza is known to exist. She would have had to address the problems associated with the Abolition Act in 1807 but had

died by the time the compensation was paid in 1833.At the time of her death she held government stocks worth half-a-million pounds at today's

values.

She sat down at her desk in Leamington to write out her will on Boxing Day 1820 and had died before the week was out. It was a great privilege to see and to handle the letters and documents

in the Hull Record Centre and in spite of much that I read and saw I developed a huge amount of empathy for

Elizabeth Scarlett a truly remarkable Regency woman.

Postscript

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This slide show in the Leamington Discovered series was compiled by Alan Griffin for the Leamington History Group website

Resources

Hull History Centre, Worship Street, Hull houses the Scarlett archive for which the reference is UDDLA/41. This archive is of national importance for anyone researching early sugar production and the slave trade. I found the

staff to be unfailingly helpful and good -humoured.

Wilberforce House, 23 High Street, Hull is the birthplace of William Wilberforce the abolitionist campaigner. The museum tells the story of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its abolition, as well as dealing with contemporary slavery. The permanent displays include journals and items that belonged to William

Wilberforce, Admission is free

Acknowledgements

All contemporary photographs were taken by the compiler of this presentation and the majority of early engravings are also from his collection. He also acknowledges the following:

National Maritime Museum National Archives John Trevelyan - Blake Aexpress

John Carter Brown Library Providence R I Wilberforce Museum

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End of slide show 3

Please visit us again for new presentations on aspects of the history of

Royal Leamington Spa


eliza scarlett: leamington widow and jamaican slave owner

Education

james virgo dunn

hull history centre

eliza virgo scarlett

james scarletts death

atlantic slave trade

james scarlett

scarlett family

slave trade