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187 11 the struggle for survival Slave Infant Mortality in the British Caribbean in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries kenneth morgan The enslaved population of the British Caribbean failed to reproduce. This abnormality of human demographic behavior resulted from the low fertility and reproductive difficulties suffered by female slaves subjected to the tough working regime of cultivating sugar, poor nutritional and living conditions, the physical punishments characteristic of slavery, and inadequate treatment of many contagious or fatal diseases.1 Mortality was also an obstacle to the growth of the British Caribbean infant slave population. Not enough children born to slaves survived into adulthood to reproduce. In 1790 the attorney general for Grenada and its dependencies noted that nearly half the slave children born in the West Indies died before the age of two, most within the first nine days.2 In 1818 a doctor claimed that 38 out of 141 slave deaths (27 percent) in Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, were infants.3 In 1817–18 in Grenada 24 percent of slave deaths occurred before the age of five.4 Details from some slave estates reflect these findings. On the Codrington plantations, Barbados, at least one in every two slave youngsters died before reaching the age of five.5 Half the slave children born in Trinidad between 1813 and 1816 failed to survive to their fifth birthday.6 And between 1817 and 1834 approximately 56 percent of slave children born on the Lascelles estates in Barbados and Jamaica died before the age of five.7 The burden of these estimates is that between a quarter and a half of slave children in the British Caribbean died before they were five. This demographic fact was important for slave work in the Caribbean because 188 kenneth morgan children aged six years or above were usually employed in the sugarcane fields alongside adults. They assisted female slaves in the third gang, which carried out less demanding physical work than that allocated to the fittest adult slaves of both sexes. Slave children gained knowledge and experience of the seasonal rhythms and routines of sugar cultivation that they carried into adulthood. High infant mortality was therefore a blow to a productive human resource for planters. Newborn slave children were the most vulnerable to mortality. During the eighteenth century roughly 80 percent of infant mortality occurred within the first fortnight after birth. By the early nineteenth century, the figure was 50 percent.8 Evidence from individual islands supports the case for heavy slave infant mortality. Dr. John Castles, who practiced medicine in Grenada in the twenty years after 1766, asserted that fully one-third of slave children died within a month after birth.9 From 1817 to 1820, birthdeaths (before the seventh day of life) accounted for 40 percent of slave children born on three plantations in St. Vincent and for 41 percent on two estates in St. Kitts. The same records generate mortality of 50 percent in the first month of life for Saint Kitts and 61 percent for St. Vincent.10 Calculating infant mortality rates is difficult because the data used for such an exercise are distorted by the underregistration of births. Estate accounts usually recorded only live births, so it is not easy to estimate the number of babies aborted or stillborn. In order to estimate slave infant mortality (children under five), Barry Higman has adopted a methodology widely used by historical demographers to compile model life tables for 1817 through 1832, the period of comprehensive slave registration in the British West Indies. Such tables have the advantage of being specific to each British colony in the islands. For male infants, death rates in individual colonies ranged between 240 and 580 per thousand births, and for females from 200 to 480 per thousand. Four out of every ten children in most of the eastern Caribbean colonies did not live to the age of five.11 Because model life tables are least accurate for the youngest age group (0–5) owing to the underrecording of infant deaths, these estimates indicate the minimum level of slave infant mortality.12 These mortality rates were much higher than for infants in Britain during the same period. Despite secular swings, the infant mortality rate in England never rose above two hundred per thousand births in any quarter century between 1580 and 1837. Overall infant mortality in England between 1790 and 1837—covering the slave registration period in the British Caribbean—averaged 141 per thousand births.13 Although the subject...

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