When slavery ended in Mauritius in 1838-1899, the blow to slave owners was both economic and psychological, as the white Creole ethos was that, by definition, the honorable man owned slaves. The British statutes against the slave trade were formally applied after the island capitulated in December 1810. So far as authority in London was concerned, Mauritius was supposed to survive, like the Caribbean colonies, on the natural increase of its existing slave population, in which women were heavily outnumbered and the mortality rate was high. If the slave trade from Madagascar and Mozambique continued into the early 1820s, as it did, this was due to the prevalence of established attitudes in colonial courts after the capitulation. Governor R. T.
Mauritius.
Farquhar and his circle of British and white Creole officials thoroughly believed in slavery, expected revolt from slave owners if what they regarded as their rights were infringed upon, and feared the martial law that antislave-trade soldiers in the British garrison would willingly have imposed in order to bring the white population under firm control.
The economy depended on a steadily replenished supply of slaves. Between 1773 and 1810, 64,413 new slaves, mainly men, arrived from Mozambique ports and Zanzibar, with about a 25 per cent rate of mortality at sea, while another 12,979 embarked from Madagascar, with a 12 per cent mortality rate To set foot ashore at Port Louis was to be confronted by dockyard slaves with “their spines knotted like a pine tree, and their skins scaled and callous, with the flesh cracked into chasms, from which blood oozed out like gum” (Trelawney, p.187).
The records of slaves enfranchised for service showed how semiskilled urban roles that were once filled by whites had been taken over by slaves in the latter part of the eighteenth century; clearly they had often been hired out by their owners and allowed to keep part of their wages. Legal documents reveal slaves as owned by freed slaves, and the freed in their turn buying loved ones and relations out of slavery.
Just as this was never a self-supporting community of slaves (although there were approximately 14, 000 Creole slave children under the age of twelve in 1826), so it was not a static one either. Some 43,789 slaves changed hands between 1823 and 1830, when Sir Robert Farquhar was able to get the sugar duties changed in the island’s favor. The high proportion of new slaves before, if not after, the capitulation hardly increased the security of the minority white, or even of the colored, population. Slaves were controlled directly by their masters, backed by white opinion and power, and only lightly mitigated in practice by theoretical protection offered to slaves by the Code Noire. By the 1740s slave-owners’ rights extended so far as directing slave marriages. Compensation was paid to owners for their loss of slave capital. Roads, bridges, public buildings, and fresh-water canals were built and maintained by convicted slaves delinquent in serving their owners or considered a menace to public safety.
Theft by slaves was common. Arson and poisoning seem to have been much feared by slave-owners, but the courts generally showed an awareness of owners’ paranoia about this, for an accusation of arson or poisoning against a slave did not always necessarily lead to conviction. There were special slave courts to deal with complaints and charges against slaves. The Port Louis bazaar saw slaves regularly flogged (“corrected,” according to the official police records) and occasionally even burnt alive. A common punishment was condemnation to perpetual labor in chains, on public works.
British soldiers and seamen, in particular, found it intolerable that this system was regarded as so essential to the survival of colonial society by white slave-owners in Mauritius, that any relaxation of slave-owners’ authority, under existing law or successive Orders in Council promulgated in London, was opposed and considered likely to bring on large-scale slave revolt. The fact was that Rassitatane’s “revolt” in 1822 was the only outbreak to rise above the marauding of small bands for mere survival, and whatever may have been in the mind of this exiled, imprisoned, and escaping Madagascar noble, he had only about thirty men with him before his recapture and execution. This may be taken to show how effective the system was. Actually, rebellion was primarily carried out by white Creoles. To show that they were still Frenchmen, they took up arms against the abolition movement, forming an underground local government in the early 1830s. It planned attacks on the garrison but never achieved its goal of an independent island to fruition. Its members were duly acquitted of treason when tried before sympathetic local judges. Britain regarded this affair as a mere show of bravado and refused to implement an elected legislature as demanded by the group.
Deryck Scarr
Further Reading
Bissoondoyal, U., and S. B. C. Servansing, eds. Slavery in the South West Indian Ocean. Moka-Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute, 1989.
Jeremie, J. Recent Events in Mauritius. London, 1836.
Scarr, D. Slaving and Slavery in the Indian Ocean. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Telfair, C. Some Account of the State of Slavery at Mauritius. Port Louis, 1830.
Trelawney, E. J. Adventures of a Younger Son. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
World History
