Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

Miranda said, “Is there going to be an investigation?”

“Who can tell? There may well be. The news from London has been very strange.”

“Is there a lot to be investigated? Was it very bad?”

“Three hanged. The heads spiked, the bodies hung in chains in the square.”

“The bodies of pirates hang from gibbets on both banks of the Thames, half-way up to London.”

“A lot of people mutilated. It’s what they do in the islands.”

“How do you mutilate them?”

“You cut off the ears. I’ve seen it in other places. In some of the very small islands they slit the nose, but here they just do the ears.”

“I never saw that in Venezuela. But I can’t trust my memory now. But if a punishment is customary, it’s customary. You’re too nervous, General. A rebellion is a rebellion.”

“It’s what I tell myself in my better moments. And Lord Castlereagh, the colonial secretary, sent his approval. He said he knew that that class of the community had to be watched. But if there’s an investigation, what’s that approval worth? If I am asked to state what law I was following when those men were given a hundred lashes and had their ears cut off, I wouldn’t be able to say. All I would be able to say is that I followed the Council and the planters, and the jail staff seemed to know what to do. I never looked for the laws. I don’t even know what laws we are operating here. The territory was Spanish until nine years ago. It might go back to Spain at the end of the war, or it might be given to the French in exchange for something somewhere else. No one knows. If you say that the laws should be Spanish, there is no one here to tell me what those laws are. The lawbooks and the lawyers are all on the other side of the Gulf. A military governor can only follow the advice of responsible citizens. That’s what Tom Picton did, and that’s what I did after him. And you know the full bill against Picton. Thirty-seven charges. Execution without trial, false imprisonment, torture, burning alive. Bail set at forty thousand pounds. The man ruined, his life darkened these last three years.”

“You’ve been here too long, General. You’re too jumpy. You can’t compare yourself to Picton. He was notorious. And most of those charges related to the regiment. The others were thrown out. There was a charge of using torture against a young mulatto girl in a case of petty theft. But that’s going to be thrown out too.”

“General, didn’t they tell you in Barbados? The trial came up at the end of February, before Lord Ellenborough. General Picton was found guilty.”

“At one time I would have liked to hear that. I thought that Picton had done me much harm and I thought I had a score to settle with him. But I don’t think like that now. You can waste too much time settling scores. You can forget what you really have to do. He’ll appeal, of course.”

“He’ll appeal. But he’s ruined. And the planters who sat in the jail and had the people tortured, and devised ways of burning people alive — they’re free men. Picton didn’t build the jail. It was there when he came, with the jailer and the torture chambers, the special hot rooms. The planters had set it up. They paid the jailer fees for torturing or flogging Negroes. For the torture of the mulatto girl the planter who was the chief magistrate at the time paid the jailer sixty reales, about six dollars and sixty cents. Nobody’s been investigating that planter, or the others. They’ve not been on forty thousand pounds bail. They’re loyal to no one except themselves, those French aristocrats. If you stay here long enough your mind begins to go. You lose faith. You lose your way.

“I’ll tell you. We had an invasion scare here last year. First it was the French. Then it was the Spaniards. The Spanish admiral Gravina appeared in these waters with quite an armament. I don’t have to tell you how small our military establishment is, and how vulnerable we are to any sustained assault. We clearly can’t defend the whole island — two or three hundred miles of coastline, some of it very difficult, and so much of the island is uninhabited anyway — so I thought we should decide in the Council what we were going to try to defend. I thought it made more strategic sense to defend the naval harbour at Chaguaramas. It’s a small area and it’s very defensible. If you defend the ships, they live again to fight another day. The planters said no, the duty of our military establishment was to defend property.

“Now, General, you have been following the debates about slavery and the slave trade in England. And I don’t have to tell you that when planters talk about ‘property’ and ‘the free transfer of property’ and ‘a free supply,’ they are simply finding a way of not saying ‘Negroes’ or ‘slaves.’ They are not even talking about land. Most of them got the land free when they came. The Spaniards, to develop the island, offered a settler sixteen acres for every Negro he brought in. A white settler got thirty-two acres for himself, a free man of colour sixteen acres. Many of the people who came in, to put themselves under Spanish law, were running away from debts they had in other places under other flags. Many of the Negroes they brought in were mortgaged up to the eyes.

“So these refugee aristocrats were saying, in fact, while a big war was going on, that it was my duty as governor to prevent them from losing their Negroes. And they had powerful friends in London. So, after spending seventy-five thousand pounds on fortifying the harbour at Chaguaramas, I had to stop and think about fortifying the city and the plantations around it. That is why the Treasury is empty, and my servants and soldiers are in rags. I thought of enrolling a company of Negro Rangers, faithful and well-disposed ones, it goes without saying. The planters said they didn’t want to lose their Negroes. I said, ‘We’ll have them fairly valued. You will be recompensed if they are lost or damaged.’ They said that after Haiti they didn’t want their Negroes to handle guns. I said, ‘Very well. At least lend me some of your Negroes to work on that hill fort we are building west of the city.’ They said they couldn’t spare them. So where were we? What was the point of doing anything?”

“But you built your fort?”

“I had to. That was my duty as governor. I used Negroes owned by people of colour. The people of colour didn’t like that at all, and the whites crowed over them. And now, of course, since the news about Picton’s conviction, some of those people of colour are after me. One man of colour is already suing Picton for forty thousand pounds for wrongful arrest. I wait for something like that to be done to me. Night and day I cast my mind back over things that have been done in my time. I accuse myself, I defend myself. It’s like a sickness. Those Negroes whose ears were cut off last December and January — they were also given a hundred lashes. In the Spanish time the limit was twenty-five. Picton raised that to thirty-nine — and that was under the influence of the French. Why did I let those planters tell me that those men should be given a hundred? After fifty lashes a man is half dead.”

“General, General. A domestic misdemeanour is quite distinct from rebellion against the state. You are tormenting yourself needlessly.”

“You think so? One man whose ears they cut off was a free man of colour. They were very down on that man. They said that a free man of colour associating with the Negroes was the most dangerous kind of man. They decided he was to be returned to slavery. They cut his ears off and sold him out of the island. It’s what they do in the islands. As a punishment it is one step down from hanging, because that man’s life isn’t worth living afterwards. How could they do that to a free man? I should have asked them to show me the laws. Now the investigator will ask me that question. The laws of England wouldn’t like that, making a free man a slave and cutting off his ears and selling him cheap to somebody outside who is going to work him to death. That is all you can do with a Negro whose ears have been cut off. You can’t sell him.