Excerpt
From Chapter Five: Slavery in the Rainforest
Compared to other places where slaves, enmeshed in the tangled web of the Atlantic slave trade might end up – as plantation fodder on a sugar island, up to their knees in the rice paddies or tar pits of the Carolinas, or in a sweltering tobacco field in the Chesapeake – the mahogany forests might have been one of the more tolerable outcomes. For although mahogany cutting entailed hardship and danger, it offered some opportunities as well, thanks to the frontier setting along the Central American coast that necessitated a relatively flexible form of bondage. Given how mahogany grew – with individual trees dispersed across vast stretches of rain forest – logging it required small groups of slaves to range widely in remote settings, often with minimal supervision. Slaves played vital (if involuntary) roles in finding and felling the coveted trees, inscribing them with their master's marks, and transporting them out of the forest. In the process, they gained valuable knowledge of their surroundings which they deployed to their advantage whenever possible. Unlike the West Indies where logging usually preceded agriculture, it was the primary economic activity in the Bay of Honduras and the specific challenges of its extraction dictated the labor regimen and materially shaped the lives of everyone in the Bay, free and enslaved. Furthermore, since Baymen could not officially own land on Spanish territory, their slaves were by far their most valuable form of property to the extent that the number of slaves that they owned determined their access to mahogany works as well as their social status and political participation.
Given their proximity of Spanish territory where English runaway slaves were promised freedom, the Baymen sought to retain their slaves through an odd mixture of positive inducements, such as rewards, incentives, and concessions, and various forms of coercion and discipline, including threats, harsh punishments, and negative propaganda about the Spanish. The contingent world of the Bay was thus characterized by permissiveness, ambiguity, volatility, and violence. But on the whole, slave masters were so dependent on their slaves to extract any value from the forest that they more often than not were forced to grudgingly offer accommodations rather than risk mass desertions, especially since their efforts at control often backfired. As Newport’s autonomy and resourcefulness suggest, enslaved woodcutters pushed the boundaries of their bondage, sometimes to surprising degrees and, in some cases, even secured their freedom.
An adequate labor force was essential because mahogany cutting could not be easily standardized. Extracting each individual tree from the forest presented a new set of challenges, depending upon its size, shape, growth pattern, location, distance from a river, and the terrain across which it had to be hauled. Unlike logwood, which grew in accessible coastal lagoons and could be shipped in easy-to-handle pieces, the massive mahogany trunks were usually taken in one piece, making proximity to a waterway essential to move them any distance. The Baymen had trouble, however, securing enough strong, rigorous workers. Most slaves were acquired, often at great expense, via the closest chattel markets on Jamaica, where Baymen competed with sugar planters to buy up young, fit men. Some were imported directly to Jamaica from Africa and sold after seasoning period; others were born in the West Indies or transported from elsewhere within the broader Atlantic region. New England ships, like that of Captain James Card, also brought individual or small lots of slaves who found a ready market in the Bay. In its early years, the settlement also eagerly accepted individuals deemed undesirable elsewhere, such as those condemned to transportation for crimes or insurrection.