Misery for millions, prosperity for the few

County View
John Healy

This Friday, December 2, marks International Day for the Abolition of People Trafficking, as distinct from the UNESCO-nominated day each August to memorialise the ending of the heinous transatlantic slave trade in 1807.
It is timely that the event coincides with the paperback edition of ‘From Rake to Radical’, by Anne Chambers, a detailed account of the life of Howe Peter Browne of Westport House, who was often lauded as a champion of the enslaved of the West Indies.
Browne, the 2nd Marquess of Sligo, had reset his life from that of a dissolute hedonist to that of a compassionate reformer against slavery. At age 21, in 1809, he had inherited 200,000 acres of an estate in Ireland, together with the two sugar plantations in Jamaica that would provide him with untold wealth and the means to develop Westport House as a lavish home.
Two years before that, the British had abolished the abhorrent slave trade, whereby roughly 3.1 million Africans had been forcibly transported across the ocean to be bought and sold, whipped and tortured, between 1662 and 1807, by British slave owners and traders. (In total, an estimated 12.5 million people were transported as slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean.) However, they had not abolished the actual practice of slavery; it was not until 1833 that slavery was finally legislated against, and even then only gradually.
A sum of £20 million was set aside to compensate the British planters and slave owners for their losses, half of which went to slave owners resident in the Caribbean and half to absentee owners living in Britain and Ireland and who had never resided in Jamaica.
When Howe Peter Browne was appointed governor of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands in 1834, his primary aim was to reform the Jamaican legal system and, in particular, to implement the government intent to bring an end to slavery.
It was a task he set about with zeal, to the grave disappointment of the plantocracy who assumed that Browne, himself a slave owner, would be sympathetic to the ruling class. In the end, a campaign of vilification against him led to his removal from office after two years.
The Brownes, however, were not the only Mayo family to have prospered handsomely from the Jamaican sugar trade.
The slave registers of the time – a legal requirement for those seeking subsequent compensation – are replete with the names of Mayo families whose assets included ownership of the enslaved.
Dr Michael O’Connor, in his authoritative study ‘Caribbean Slave Owners of County Mayo’ is meticulous in his research of those middle- and upper-class families who not only owned the plantations, but also owned the people. They were of both Catholic and Protestant persuasion, and followed in the footsteps of the English colonists who imposed a reign of brutal horror on their victims.
There were the Burkes of Ballynew, outside Castlebar, who inherited land and slaves from a colony they never visited; the Garveys of Murrisk; the Cuffs of Ballinrobe and Belcarra; the Gibbons of Ardagh, outside Newport. The Jordan family of Old Head, the Clarkes of Lrisburgh, the Palmers of Palmerstown and the Lindseys of Hollymount were all beneficiaries of the odious trade. Rev Richard Wynne, grandfather of Dr Kathleen Lynn, nationalist and Sinn Féin politician, was a plantation owner. The Blakes of Towerhill, after 20 years in Jamaica, were able to sell their estate, settle their debts, and return to Ireland to purchase 600 acres at Lehinch, Hollymount.
And meanwhile, John Mitchel, in whose name the Castlebar GAA club is known, an Irish nationalist and activist, was proclaiming black people to be ‘innately inferior’, ‘born and bred to be slaves’, it being ‘no sin to whip and flog them into submission’.