MORTALITY DURING SLAVERY AND APPRENTICESHIP

As we have already seen in Chapter 2, the cessation of the slave trade was probably followed by a reduction in the rate of natural decrease in the slave population, and this suggests that there was in fact some reduction in mortality after 1807. But in the absence of any satisfactory data, nothing definite can be said about the level of mortality in the early slave period.

Two sources of data made available early in the nineteenth century make it possible to assess very roughly the prevailing levels of mortality and the main diseases to which the population was exposed during the last years of slavery and the apprenticeship. These two sources, the study of Tulloch and Marshall and the slave registers, provide the starting-point for the mortality analysis. Despite the many limitations of these sources, they still give insights into the processes of severe wastage of human life that were such prominent features of slave society in Jamaica and in the West Indies at large at this time.

The investigations of Tulloch and Marshall, which cover the years 1817–36, constitute the most comprehensive attempt ever made to present an overall picture of health and mortality in the British West Indies. However, in view of the quality of the white troops sent to the West Indies and the limitations of the military records this mortality experience cannot be taken as wholly representative of conditions prevailing throughout the region. It appears that the troops sent to the West Indies were among the worst available. And they faced conditions probably more hazardous than most of the inhabitants as the garrisons were usually located near swamps and similar notoriously unhealthy areas. Moreover, there was constant movement of troops, representing replacements as well as interchanges with other commands, so that the mortality records were not the experience of a settled body of men. Again, the records yield data only on adult males. Indeed, the fact that records are confined to the experience of white soldiers born outside the region gives rise to the suspicion that they reveal merely the ravages of disease among Europeans who suffered so severely mainly because of their poor physique and lack of acclimatization to the region.