Only a few minutes’ walk from the seaside community of Cromarty in the Scottish Highlands, a 17-year-old mixed-race student was stabbed during a brawl outside the local school. A recent immigrant from the Caribbean, he had been shunned by others and often carried a knife to protect himself.
His white opponent, who was a year younger, and claimed to have been attacked first, retaliated, drew his own blade and cut the foreigner in the thigh. Both from troubled backgrounds, the black student was probably an illegitimate son sent to Scotland for a paid education, with no close family around him in a strange country, the Scottish historian, Dr David Alston writes.
Dr Alston uses this true story, not from 2018, but from 1818, at the start of his new book, “Slaves and Highlanders” seeking to help correct “a catalogue of silence” in detailing the links between his homeland and slavery in the Caribbean, with emphasis on British Guiana and Jamaica.
The school turned a blind eye to the incident but the white student, Hugh Miller was expelled shortly afterwards for an assault on a member of staff. Mr Miller started work as an apprentice stonemason and went on to become a leading figure in Scottish public life, as a journalist, geologist, writer and churchman.
“But who was the unnamed black student? Why was he in the Highlands in 1818? Were there others like him? And what had been the connections between the West Indies and Cromarty, then a small, thriving Highland town of two thousand people? These questions of local history, which I began to ask in the late 1990s, led me to challenge the story that Scotland was confidently telling itself about its involvement − or lack of involvement − in the sordid business of slavery and the brutal regimes of slave-worked plantations in the Caribbean.”
Sadly, “I have never been able to name with certainty that young black man who steps from the shadows of anonymity only through the prejudicial words of the victorious Hugh Miller” who cites “a wild, savage disposition.”
In the cemetery, Dr Alston discovered two of the gravestones, Mr Miller carved with elegant inscriptions which referred to the West Indies. One in Cromarty was erected by ‘John Munro Esq. late of Demerara’ to the memory of his father, who died in 1825; the second was a memorial to ‘Daniel Ross of Berbice’, who passed away in 1827. Mr Ross, it turned out, was a relative of Mr Miller, an older, distant cousin by marriage who had entranced the teenager with accounts of life in this colony.
Yet, Scotland had so successfully effaced its comprehensive role in all aspects of the transatlantic African slave trade and national and British Empire building, that “I had heard of Demerara, on the north coast of South America, but not of neighbouring Berbice, both now part of Guyana,” Dr Alston admitted in his book. He would eventually learn that the two colonies and Essequibo seized by Britain in 1796, would become some of the most Scottish of the Caribbean holdings with Berbice, “the most Highland,” presenting the challenge of control by a tiny white population greater than anywhere else in the Caribbean.
His extensive research led him to closely examine a map of Berbice, and there looking back at him were Cromarty, and dozens of names mirrored from the coast of the Highlands, ranging from Alness, Culcairn, Kildonan and Lemlair to Tarlogie and Tain. Back then, “there was little or no acknowledgement from professional historians that Scotland, let alone the Highlands, had had any significant involvement with slavery.”
For instance, when the new Museum of Scotland opened in 1998, to “tell the country’s history from earliest times to the present,” there was not a single mention of slavery, he remembers. While “things are a little better” now, this was “achieved by piecemeal change and some of the displays still jar,” he commented in a separate piece published in June 2020. He rebuffed an article in “The Herald” headlined “No society is free from racism but Scotland’s record isn’t bad,” that fed into “the myths which still circulate about Scottish slave-ownership – that Scots did not engage in the slave trade, that Scots were enslaved in the colonies, that Scots are ‘innately’ more egalitarian.”
A recent study revealed the historical connection between land ownership and plantation slavery in the Caribbean and Africa, showing that between 1726 and 1929, more than 60 estates, amounting to almost 1.2 million acres and covering 33.5% of the west Highlands and Islands, were acquired using the equivalent of over £120 million by beneficiaries of “slavery derived wealth.” The number of estate sales doubled in the 1830s, with a high number after 1834 when generous compensation was paid by Britain to slave holders, allowing them to reinvest the capital, they had accumulated in the Caribbean, Dr Alston said.
Media reports state most of the £20 million record sum, £15 million was borrowed from famous bankers Nathan Mayer Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore by the British Government and only fully repaid in 2015. The compensation equivalent of about £17 billion went to about 47 000 beneficiaries. Not a penny went to the victims. Over 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and transported in the British-led Trans-Atlantic slave trade. There is an online Atlantic Slave Trade Database comprising 36,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866. See https://www.slavevoyages.org/
However, on a 2019 visit to the Museum, the presentation Scotland and the World still made no mention of slavery. “Nor did the ‘S’-word appear in a whole section called The Spirit of the Age, which emphasised the positive role of Enlightenment ideas, influential at home and spread by Scots who travelled abroad,” the historian pointed out.
“The example is given of Sheriff Donald Macleod of Geanies, portrayed along with some of his silver and described as ‘a highly respected local figure, typical of those whose adoption of Enlightenment ideas influenced life all over Scotland’. No mention of his slave plantation in Guyana.” On display were “a sugar box, sugar tongs, and snuff boxes” but no link to slavery,” Dr Alston noted, “With the initial narrative of the museum so fundamentally flawed, it is almost impossible to correct it by small changes here and there.”
“I came to feel that Cromarty was haunted, not just by a black teenager, but by many ghosts of the Caribbean and beyond, half-glimpsed figures who flitted on the edges of the conventional view of the town’s past. In many parts of the Caribbean they call these ghosts jumbies.” Now, it is clear that Cromarty and Scotland as a whole, had immersed itself in the exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
As for John Munro’s gravestone, Dr Alston discovered that John had gone to Demerara with his brother Alexander, and when the latter died there in 1823, he left five children − Eliza, Jane, Sophy, Mary and Jessey − all daughters of Eve, an enslaved African woman. Since Alexander had not freed Eve, their daughters were also born slaves and all five were advertised for sale, along with their mother, by the executors of his estate. Someone, possibly John, stepped in to buy them and then paid the hefty fee for their manumission, the formal process of granting freedom. When John died in 1833, he left his property to be divided among his mother Jessy, his sister Sophia, both in Cromarty, and his five, finally free black nieces in Demerara.
ID ponders the words of David Alston: “It is important to recover the truth and over the past 20 years or so much has been done. It has been hard work, often against the grain of the stories Scots want to tell themselves.”
