Piracy as State Policy.
Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, oversaw a British expedition in 1655. It was a part of his “Western Design”, a euphemism for an ambitious plan to weaken Spanish power in the Americas. The expedition failed to capture the larger and richer island of Hispaniola (modern Haiti/Dominican Republic). However, Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables seized the weakly defended Spanish colony of Jamaica. Spain formally ceded the island to England in the Treaty of Madrid (1670).
Jamaica was an island at a strategic location in the Caribbean Sea. The island became a major haven for English privateers and buccaneers.
Take note that the foreign policy of Cromwell, the commoner, was no different than the royal Kings. Jamaica demonstrated it.
Former Miss India and now Priyanka Chopra Jonas starred in a movie called The Bluff. It was a disappointment but had a stray moment of truth about pirates. But that too was vague.
License to Piracy
James Bond is a fictional Hero who has a fictional license to kill from Her Majesty the Queen of England. But do we know that the British Crown actually issued such licenses?
It was called a ‘letter of marque’. It was an official legal document, essentially a government commission or license. It authorized a privately owned ship and its captain/crew to attack, capture, and seize the ships and property of a specific enemy nation during wartime or in a period of hostility. It required a share of the profits (the “prize”) to be paid to the government or the issuing authority. The holders of this license were called privateers or buccaneers.
Henry Morgan was one such famous privateer. He received commissions from the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford, to attack Spanish targets. Morgan was born in Wales, perhaps near Llanrhymny. He arrived in the Caribbean in the 1650s, probably as part of the English expedition that captured Jamaica in 1655. He settled in Jamaica and rose quickly among the privateers based in Port Royal. He raided Spanish treasure fleets and ports. In England he was a national hero who weakened Spanish power and enriched Jamaica. In Spain he was a pirate and outlaw.
In 1671, he attacked Panama City after England and Spain had made peace. Morgan was arrested and sent to London. However, he was never really punished. In 1674, King Charles II knighted him and sent him back to Jamaica as Lieutenant Governor.
Sugarcane Plantation and Slave Labour
The British discovered that Jamaica had one more use apart from being a springboard for raids on Spanish assets. It was the soil of Jamaica.
The British introduced large-scale sugar plantations, replicating the already working model in Barbados. Jamaica’s size, fertile soil, and climate proved ideal for sugar cane. By the 18th century, Jamaica became Britain’s leading sugar producer and one of the richest colonies in the entire British Empire.
Sugar (and its by-products, especially rum) generated enormous wealth for British planters and merchants. But cruelty is never behind any British operation. The plantation system depended on the massive importation of enslaved Africans. Jamaica also became one of the busiest slave markets in the Americas.
The Illusion of Freedom: Post-Emancipation Jamaica
Britain abolished slavery across its empire in 1834, paying £20 million in compensation not to the enslaved human beings, but to the white slave owners. Former slaves in Jamaica were thrust into a system of nominal freedom that was economic servitude in disguise.
By 1865, thirty years after emancipation, the Black population of Jamaica faced catastrophic conditions:
- Landlessness and Poverty: White plantation owners controlled the vast majority of fertile land, charging exorbitant rents or refusing to let Black peasants farm unused plots.
- Economic Exploitation: A severe drought in 1864–1865 collapsed crop yields, while wartime trade disruptions sent the price of imported food and clothing skyrocketing.
- Political Disenfranchisement: Out of a Black population of over 430,000, strict property and tax requirements meant that fewer than 2,000 Black Jamaicans were legally permitted to vote.
- Biased Courts: Local magistrates were white plantation owners who consistently ruled against Black workers in wage, land, and labor disputes.
A group of Black peasants sent a humble petition to Queen Victoria appealing for access to crown land to feed their starving families. The Colonial Office replied in a cold refusal known as the “Queen’s Letter.” It informed the peasants that their poverty was their own fault and that they must work harder for the white plantation owners.
The Morant Bay Protest (October 1865)
On October 11, 1865, Paul Bogle, a Black Baptist deacon, led a peaceful march of hundreds of landless peasants to the Morant Bay courthouse in St. Thomas parish. They sought a meeting with local magistrates to demand land reform, fair wages, and relief from oppressive taxation.
Instead of listening, the local volunteer militia was called out. As the crowd surged, the militia fired into the unarmed assembly, killing seven protesters. Enraged by the shooting, the crowd retaliated. They stormed the courthouse, set it on fire, and killed 18 people, including local magistrates and militia members.
The outbreak was localized to a single parish. But to Governor Edward Eyre, who was a staunch believer in white supremacy, it was viewed as the beginning of a colony-wide “Black rebellion.”
Governor Eyre’s Campaign of Terror
Governor Eyre declared martial law across the entire eastern county of Surry for 30 days. What followed was not a law-enforcement operation, but a systematic campaign of state-sanctioned murder and destruction:
- Mass Extrajudicial Murder: British soldiers, sailors, and Maroons rampaged through Black villages. Over 439 Black Jamaicans were shot or hanged without trial or after summary court-martials lasting only a few minutes. Paul Bogle was captured and hanged from the yardarm of a British warship.
- Brutal Floggings: More than 600 men and women were brutally flogged, many with cat-o’-nine-tails whose cords were deliberately interwoven with wire to tear human flesh. Pregnant women were not spared.
- Systemic Arson: British troops burned over 1,000 homes, cottages, and farms, leaving thousands of innocent civilians homeless and destitute.
The Judicial Murder of George William Gordon
The most glaring proof of Eyre’s calculated malice was the murder of George William Gordon.
Gordon was a wealthy, mixed-race member of the Jamaican House of Assembly, a political rival of Eyre, and an outspoken advocate for the rights of Black workers. He had no role in the Morant Bay outbreak and was in Kingston, far outside the declared martial law zone, at the time of the riots.
Knowing he could not legally convict Gordon under civilian law, Governor Eyre personally arrested Gordon in Kingston. Eyre had him placed on a British warship, transported into the martial law zone at Morant Bay, and handed over to a military tribunal.
Within 24 hours, after a sham trial with zero credible evidence, Gordon was convicted of high treason and hanged on October 23, 1865. It was a cold, premeditated judicial murder executed by a British governor to eliminate an effective political opponent.
Meet Defenders of Genocide
When news of the Morant Bay massacres reached England, it created a massive public scandal. Abolitionists, religious leaders, and liberal politicians formed the Jamaica Committee, led by philosopher John Stuart Mill and scientist Charles Darwin, to prosecute Governor Eyre for murder.
A Royal Commission investigated the event in 1866. It concluded that while Eyre had acted promptly at first, the state response was characterized by “unnecessary rigor” and “a reckless disregard for human life.” Eyre was recalled to London in disgrace.
However, the response of the British intellectual and political establishment exposed the deep-seated white supremacy of British culture.
An elite counter-organization, the Eyre Defence Committee, was formed to defend Eyre from legal prosecution. Who joined it? The leading literary and cultural icons of 19th-century Britain:
- Thomas Carlyle (who declared Eyre a heroic defender of white civilization against “savages”).
- Charles Kingsley (author of The Water-Babies).
- Alfred Lord Tennyson (Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom).
- John Ruskin (leading art critic and social thinker).
- Charles Dickens (the author who privately supported the committee).
These cultural giants raised enormous sums of money to defend Eyre. They argued that a white governor who saved a colony from Black subjects should never be held accountable to the law.
The legal prosecutions brought by Mill and the Jamaica Committee were repeatedly thrown out by grand juries of wealthy British men. Eyre was never convicted of a single crime. Parliament eventually voted to cover all of Eyre’s legal defense expenses, and he retired comfortably on a full state pension.
Civil Society
Once again, the elite of British civil society were found to be actively complicit in racial, violent crimes. Their conscience did not flinch. Dickens, who wrote Pickwick Papers, did not once reflect upon his own conduct in such a case. Race and power were all that mattered.
British justice was a racial boundary: protection for the ruler, terror for the ruled.
In the next chapter, we shall examine how identical methods of dispossession and racial eradication were deployed in Tasmania.
References:
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Semmel, Bernard. The Governor Eyre Controversy (published in the UK as Imperialism and Social Reform). MacGibbon & Kee, 1962. (The definitive historical study detailing the legal fight between John Stuart Mill’s Jamaica Committee and the British elite who defended Eyre).
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Heuman, Gad. ‘The Killing Time’: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. University of Tennessee Press, 1994. ISBN: 978-0870498527. (Comprehensive historical analysis of the 1865 Morant Bay protest, Eyre’s state terror, and the court-martial executions).
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Parliamentary Papers (UK). Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission. HMSO, London, 1866. (Official British parliamentary investigation documenting the 439 executions, 600 floggings, and 1,000 burned homes).
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Kostal, R.W. A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN: 978-0198260769. (Legal historical analysis showing how the British legal establishment destroyed martial law accountability to protect Eyre).