Martinique - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 45

gagés or employees whom the early colonists brought with them from France. They served them for a
number of years, and then settled on their own account on concessions that were granted them in payment
for their service. Next came the Freedmen, the manumitted Mulatto slaves who had acquired their free-
dom owing to their white blood. Intermarriage between white men and black women—the reverse seems
to have been virtually non-existent—became so common that the privilege of automatic manumission
was withdrawn. Mixed marriages were forbidden by law round 1700, but unions between slaveowners
and Negro women still continued on a wide scale. They were based on a kind of willingly conceded droit
de jambage et cuissage (as the correct old French term describes the jus primae noctis ) of a temporary
or occasionally of a permanent nature. As the extraordinary range of colour and characteristics in Marti-
nique testifies, this was a custom that legislation was unable either to suppress or mitigate.
The last, and by far the largest group, were the slaves themselves, either those born in the country,
nègres créoles , or Negroes from Africa brought to the islands in the slave-ships at the rate of tens of
thousands yearly. Slave-owners who were proved to be the fathers of Mulatto children were compelled to
pay a fine to the Crown of 2,000 pounds of sugar, and their concubines and the children in question were
confiscated and presented to the monks of the Charité, of which institution they became slaves for life.
Their former owners were forbidden ever to buy them back.
Naturally the monks, eagerly helped by the white wives of the delinquent planters, became expert at
searching out these windfalls. Each case was tried in front of a judge in the presence of the woman, her
child, the supposed father, and a monk, usually the same one, representing the interests of the Hospital.
The usual excuse of the women was that they had fallen victims to unknown, drunken sailors who had
inflicted the last outrages on them in the cane-fields and then sailed away. Occasionally, however, more
original defences were discovered. One of these, set on record by Labat, I find impossible to omit. I trans-
late him word for word: 'I have often witnessed these debates, and, on one occasion, a woman belonging
to a settler from one of our parishes' (i.e., administered by the Order of Preachers of which Labat was a
member) 'maintained to Brother —— that he himself was the father of the Mulatto baby of which she
had been brought to bed. Unluckily for this cleric, he had visited the master of the Negress between nine
and ten months previously, and had spent the night in his house. The master, remembering this, had in-
structed the Negress so well in what she was to say that it was the drollest conceivable scene (a priest or
a monk ought to find such a sight deplorable) to hear the evidence that she brought forward to prove that
she had never known any other man but the monk. The judge did everything in his power to trip her up,
but without success; she stuck to her story, and, as she was carrying her infant in her arms, she presented
it to Brother ——, with the words, “ toi papa li ”—the Créole for “you're his father”—and then held it
up to the whole assembly pretending it was as like Brother —— as two peas. The latter, accustomed as
he was to these sessions, was so discountenanced that the gathering was almost expiring with laughter. It
was difficult to say which was more comic—the effrontery of the Negress under the guise of extreme na-
iveté , the embarrassment of the monk (who was a very good man whom everybody knew to be incapable
of such a backsliding), or the wavering gravity of the judge, who, despite all his efforts, would also have
succumbed had he not put a stop to this scene by sending the Negress back to her master, and reserving
his decision until more satisfactory evidence could be produced.'
Like Guadeloupe, the island was attacked and occupied several times by the English, who each time
set up their ephemeral head-quarters in St. Pierre. Their last sojourn covered the period of the Hundred
Days, and since then Martinique has remained unmolested. The Revolution brought the usual series of
upheavals, the donning of the Tricolor cockade at the fall of the Bastille, emancipation, repressive meas-