Deryck Scarr

Fiji : a short history

Illustrations..Introduction..Orthography..Glossary..Foreword..1 In the Islands of Degei..2 A search for stability 1865-1875..3 The multi-racial community 1875-1914..4 The makings of a nation 1914-1982..References..Bibliography..Index

The history of the Pacific Islands : kingdoms of the reefs

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Random Thoughts of an Occasional Practitioner

Like many other contributors to this volume, I came to life writing quite by chance and I hesitate to add reflections that touch upon theory in any shape or form, unless in argument against paying overmuch attention to psychological analysis even of the living let alone of the dead. The authorities who deal in psychology were once likened to ‘Romans consulting Sibylline books’, but admittedly by a novelist in wartime.1 And while I have always greatly admired works like Carola Oman’s Life of Nelson, I had never particularly seen myself as setting up as a biographer in any major way, and had not much more idea of it than that the subject should be central and have left a sufficient direct record to be able to speak up for him or herself to a considerable degree.

Mauritius Slavers — Courts — Free Colour Questions 1811–18

WHAT NUMBER of slaves were in the Mascareignes at any one time was a recurring question second only to debate over what percentage of the slaves entered in successive registers under the same description were actually the same human beings, as they were purported to be and sometimes were. Registration of existing slaves was intended as a bar to importing new slaves but the registers with their vague descriptions were an evident and in private frankly avowed means of disguising illegally imported new slaves by putting them against old entries for slaves now dead.

Madagascar Treaty and Military Eruptions 1817–20

THE SLAVE-TRADE ABOLITION COMPACT between Mauritius and Madagascar, humbug to soldiers in Mauritius but a very real stroke of British policy to the Bourbon French, was made from Le Reduit, in defiance of the established principal Malagasy slave-agent Jean Rene at the port of Tamatave on the east coast of Madagascar, by his overlord, major slave-source, and under British urging his reluctant blood-brother, the Merina king Radama I inland at Tananarive.

Anatomy of Pre-Abolition Slave Colonies

THE LUGGER COUREUR of Dorval, L’Hoste and St Colomb was sometimes reckoned the last slaver to run a cargo of slaves into Mauritius — about 140 of them, all spirited away to plantations inland by St Colomb in 1821; but Captain Moresby was probably being slightly deceived here by his faith in spies, signals and offshore patrols. Certainly chains and the master’s or overseer’s whip or the guardian’s gun still went on ruling all the Mascareignes more than a hundred years after the Letters Patent of 1723 completed the Code Noire, and up to a generation after Mauritius unwillingly changed its metropole for one whose first Governor almost doubled the island’s population in his nightmares and trimmed his own sails accordingly. On the eternal Mascareignean assumption that slave revolt began in the household or on the plantation, domestic discipline backed by armed detachments and police ran Seychelles, Mauritius, Bourbon.

Isles of France Pre-1810

SOME 1800 actual or potential slave-owners were censussed at 28 November 1776 on Ile de France, from Laurent Masson Abraham to Jean Zamudia1 — many perhaps willing to believe with Saint-Mery’s Martinique and Saint Domingue kinsmen that in a sense they were ennobled by residence there; and more of them convinced that to be surrounded by available black, coloured, even white women was to be delivered from any great pretence at sexual restraint. When white women broke the marriage vow it was because their husbands neglected them, if not due to manners introduced from Paris, the judicious earlier eighteenth century opinion ran in the Mascareignes. Among settlers of the 1740s there were actual noblesse like Grant d’Annelle de Vaux from Normandy who had ruined his family by investing in John Law’s companies and was followed by a consequently penurious soldier nephew rejoicing in a new country remote from law suits four-and-a-half-months’ sail from France; and like that other Norman M. de Grenville who had left France after fighting a duel in the gardens under Louis XV’s windows at Versailles.2

Rebellions in the 1830s

POSSESSION of slaves always had significance beyond the merely material for white landed proprietors in the Mascareignes anyway; and given the leadership that Creoles of Mauritius accorded the D’Epinay brothers with their long robes, long pens, covert involvement in Adrien’s case in slaving, ungenerous ideas in Prosper’s about what constituted a livelihood for a slave he emancipated, and their notably short but inventive combined memories for the recent history of their island, perhaps a particularly intense significance existed for white Creoles.

Slaves and Slave-Owners 1760–1810

MASCAREIGNEAN-BORN or born in France, identified familiarly in their transactions at law by nicknames like La Rejouissance, La Taille, Bellerose, La Tulippe, La Guerre which perhaps render slave-names like Zephyr Nord-East and Dame Telmire Chemise less alienating, the enduring white habitants kept notaries at work with transactions at several levels of business and of personal intimacy. Perhaps the record for marital haste was held by the widow of the 1760s Port Louis merchant Francois Gaiby who remarried two days after his ten page inventory was made up;1 and for a kind of propriety, by the Bourbon-descended habitant of Mahe more than two generations later who got a dispensation to marry his own aunt.

Illicit Slaving and Colonel Keating 1811–15

IF it was to be a triumph, and a sign of times grown dangerous to slave owners, for any surviving member of Sir Robert Farquhar’s old Mascareignean circle like Charles Telfair to admit even half-openly in the late 1820s that the slave trade had much continued during Farquhar’s governorship from 1810 to 1823, Telfair, as Civil Commissary of St Paul in 1812, as yet without estates of his own though he was already receiving concessions of land in Reunion and Seychelles too from Farquhar, had admitted the fact more quietly that year by warning Reunionais that slaving while the island was in British hands would bring them to ruin. There was a cash bounty for men of Keating’s garrison in capturing illegal slaves, just as there was for Farquhar himself. In November 1815 he was directing Telfair in one of his several government capacities to pay Waugh bounty due to Farquhar as governor in respect of slaves condemned by the Mauritius courts.1 The possibility exists a silent Farquhar share in Belombre was financed through the channel of Waugh in this way.