Abstract
Mrs Rebecca Griffiths enjoyed considerable popularity among the British residents of Port of Spain. As the heroine of the Alarm affair, having sheltered the British shore party from republicans in 1796, she was undeniably the ‘doughty Welsh spinster’ that William Fullarton would later remark upon.1 At the turn of the century, she (along with her ‘three amiable daughters’) still occupied the elegant home in Queen Street that had afforded protection to her beleaguered countrymen.2 It was a desirable residence: a detached home not too far from Government House but several streets away from the clamour of the quay. By all accounts, the ladies were very fond of the home that they had occupied since well before the British invasion and were reluctant to sell. So when the offer came from the governor’s ‘housekeeper’, Rosetta Smith, they felt they could safely ignore it.3 In this they severely underestimated the power and tenacity of the young woman labelled later as the ‘aspera et horrenda virgo of government house’.4
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Notes
For the ebullience of free coloured women in more advanced colonies, see Pedro Welch, ‘Red’ and Black Over White: Free Coloured Women in Pre-Emancipation Barbados (Carib Research Publications, Bridgetown, 2000);
Pedro Welch, ‘“Crimps and Captains”: Displays of Self-Expression Among Freed Coloured Women, Barbados, 1750–1834’, Journal of Social Sciences, IV(2) (1997), pp. 89–116;
Melanie Newton, Children of Africa: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2008), pp. 23–56.
Michael Anthony, Profile Trinidad: A Historical Survey from the Discovery to 1900 (Macmillan Caribbean, London, 1975), p. 53.
Without doubt the most comprehensive survey of the free coloureds on Trinidad is Carl Campbell, Cedulants and Capitulants: The Politics of the Coloured Opposition in the Slave Society of Trinidad, 1783–1838 (Paria Publishing, Port of Spain, 1992);
see also Edward L. Cox, Free Coloureds in the Slave Societies of St Kitts and Grenada (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1984);
Arnold Sio, ‘Race, Colour Miscegenation: The Free Coloureds of Jamaica and Barbados’, Caribbean Studies, 16(1) (1976), pp. 5–21;
Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds of Jamaica 1792–1865 (Greenwood Press, Westport, 1981);
Newton, Children of Africa. See also Jesse Noel, ‘Spanish Colonial Administration and the Socio-Economic Foundations of Trinidad 1777–1797’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1966.
James Millette, The Genesis of Crown Colony Government: Trinidad 1783–1810 (Moko Enterprises, Curepe, 1970).
Frederick Myatt, Peninsular General: The Life of Sir Thomas Picton 1758–1815 (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1996).
Increasingly there are exceptions to this. See Welch. ‘Red’ and Black Over White; Welch ‘“Crimps and Captains’“; Newton, Children of Africa; David Sweet and Gary Nash (eds), Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1981);
Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey (eds), Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (James Curry, London, 1995);
David Barry Caspar and Darlene Clark Hine (eds), Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2004);
Barbara Bush, ‘“Sable Venus”, “She Devil” or “Drudge”? British Slavery and the Fabulous Fiction of Black Women’s Identities c. 1650–1838’, Women’s Historical Review, 9(4) (2000), pp. 761–89;
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Heinemann, London, 1990).
For a lack of free coloured discourse and engagement with the eighteenth century, see Angela Woollacott (ed.), Gender and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2006);
Jane Haggis, ‘Gendering Colonialism or Colonizing Gender? Recent Women’s Studies Approaches to White Women and the History of British Colonialism’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 13 (1990), pp. 8–34;
and Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester University Press, 1998).
V.S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History (Picador, London, 2001, from the original published by Andre Deutsch, 1969). See also Colonel William Fullarton, A Refutation of the Pamphlet Which Colonel Picton Lately Addressed to Lord Hobart (John Stockdale, London, 1805).
Robert Havard, Wellington’s Welsh General: A Life of Sir Thomas Picton (Aurum, London, 1996).
With so much fresh land to clear, the total number of slaves that many felt (on both sides of the debate) were needed to farm effectively all the land on the island was around a million: Hansard, Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols (Hansard, London, 1820) vol. 36, 2 May 1802, cols. 864–6, ‘Speech of George Canning’. This is not so astounding when one looks (as commentators did at the time) at the figures for Jamaica or St Domingue before the revolution. B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica 1807–1834 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 54–5 contains a map showing population and distribution.
N.A. T71–503 (1813) Trinidad Slave Register, Colony Slaves, pp. 304–5. See also Anthony de Verteuil, Seven Slaves and Slavery: Trinidad 1777–1838 (Scrip-J Printers, Port of Spain, 1992), Chapter 7, ‘Jonas’, pp. 248–78 for a more indepth study of Trinidad’s government slaves.
A. Meredith John, ‘Plantation Slave Mortality on Trinidad’, Population Studies, 42(2) (1988), pp. 161–82, where John describes the nature of illegal slavery in some detail.
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© 2012 Kit Candlin
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Candlin, K. (2012). That Business of Rosetta Smith. In: The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030818_7
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