The two slaves identified by Rostgaard as troublemakers were of contrasting backgrounds. Both had been born in Africa, captured by Portuguese slavers, and deposited in barracoons of the big Danish fort, Fredericksborg, located near where the famed Gold Coast (to the east) met the Ivory Coast (to the west). But Cudjoe, Rostgaard’s slave, was an Ashanti, from a nearby tribe famed for its warriors who gave infinite trouble when forced into slavery, while Vavak had been captured by black slavers from a far distant tribe, the peaceful and superior Mandingos, and sold to the Portuguese. Each in his own way rotted in slavery and lusted for freedom. Cudjoe collected arms and prepared to lead a violent rebellion against the outnumbered whites—208 Danes, Frenchmen, Englishmen and Spaniards versus 1,087 Ashanti, Fante, Denkyira and one Mandingo—while Vavak moved quietly to inspirit his fellow slaves and prepare them for peaceful and in time irresistible pressure against the owners.
Since their plantations were side by side, the two slaves conspired to meet, but the rules against what the owners called ‘wandering’ were so severe that whenever Rostgaard heard that Cudjoe had strayed even a short distance, he tied him to a tree and gave him twenty lashes. And once in June when he caught Vavak talking among the slaves on his plantation, he took it upon himself to give Pembroke’s slave a thorough beating.
When John heard of this he rode over to Rostgaard’s big house, a sorry affair kept in permanent disarray, to protest, but the older man was not about to tolerate a lecture from an English intruder: ‘If you refuse to discipline your slaves, I’ll have to do it for you,’ and he vowed to repeat the lashings if Vavak ever again set foot across the borderline between the two plantations.
John, in some confusion, visited the Lemvigs to try to unravel the problems he was having with Rostgaard, but was given little consolation: ‘The reason there was a vacancy for you at Lunaberg, Pembroke, was that Rostgaard had terrified all of the young men Poggenberg sent out to run the plantation. The chaps couldn’t suffer that man’s overbearing ways and fled.’
‘What can I do?’
‘I’ll tell you one thing not to do. Don’t intercede on behalf of your slaves. If you do, Rostgaard will turn all the whites on the island against you. After all, he does have the law on his side. The new rules make that clear.’ And Elzabet reinforced this counsel: ‘Leave him alone. He’s a monster.’
The truth of what the Lemvigs had advised was demonstrated in July when Rostgaard captured one of his own slaves who had run away and remained hidden for twelve weeks and one day. Since this rendered the slave guilty under new Rule 5, Rostgaard decided to teach the other slaves in his region a lesson, so a sergeant accompanied by a soldier with a drum went to the two other plantations on the hill, summoning the slaves and their owners to an assembly in front of Rostgaard’s house, and there the bearded owner prepared his punishment.
A small platform built of logs freshly cut was flanked on one side by the sergeant, on the other by the drummer, who kept up a lively tattoo. Up an improvised stairway climbed Rostgaard, accompanied by a slave who carried in his arms for all to see a huge knife, a coil of rope and a saw. When the owner was in position, the runaway was dragged from a hut, brought before the platform, and lashed to a pole, where a white assistant produced a huge bullwhip, well knotted, with which he applied a hundred and fifty lashes. With each fall of the whip, the drummer beat a flourish on his drum while Rostgaard, from above, counted. Well before the hundredth stroke, the runaway fainted, but the punishment continued.
Finally, the drum halted, and the inert slave was dragged onto the platform, where cold water was thrown over him so that he would be awake for the next and worst portion of his discipline. When he was revived and tied by ropes in a prostrate position, Rostgaard signaled the sergeant, who produced a copy of the new rules, which he read in entirety. ‘Listen to that,’ Rostgaard bellowed from the platform. ‘That’s how things are going to be from now on.’ And he saluted the soldier, who saluted back, signifying that the Crown of Denmark approved what he was about to do.
From the platform Rostgaard shouted so that all of Lemvig’s and Pembroke’s slaves could hear: ‘This one runaway, stayed away twelve weeks, law says he loses a leg.’ And with that, he grabbed the big knife, felt its keenness, and began sawing away on the slave’s right leg above the knee. When that cut was made, with blood gushing forth, the slave was turned face up so that the front cut could be made. Almost without stopping, Rostgaard reached for the saw and began screeching through the bone. When the leg was detached, Rostgaard held it aloft for the other slaves to see: ‘This is what happens if you ever run away.’ And then, to Pembroke’s horror, the big Dane launched into a sermonlike speech about how wrong it was for a slave to run away and deprive his master, who really cared for him like a father, of his property: ‘When you run away, you steal from your owner what is rightfully his, your work in helping him to make sugar so that he can clothe and feed you.’
The dismembered slave was dragged away and the platform torn down. The sergeant saluted, and the soldier kept beating his drum as they left the field. In the heavy silence Lemvig whispered to Pembroke: ‘What in the name of God can the slaves think who were made to watch that hideousness?’
The two black leaders, each so different from the other, had asked the same question even before the cutting of the leg had begun. While the lashes were still falling, Cudjoe, the wild Ashanti, and Vavak, the patient Mandingo, moved slowly and almost imperceptibly not into contact with each other but close enough to flash eye signals. With extreme self-control, Vavak nodded his head ever so slightly; and Pembroke, who had turned away, unable to watch the grisly sawing, chanced to see the look of horror on his slave’s face and the fleeting nod of acquiescence to a signal from elsewhere. Looking quickly in the direction of Vavak’s eyes, he saw a dark visage of someone he assumed to be Rostgaard’s troublesome slave Cudjoe.
It was then that the Englishman Pembroke, surrounded by Danish planters, deduced that a slave insurrection of some kind must soon erupt. The scene he had just witnessed was so far from what might have happened at Trevelyan had a runaway been captured that he knew there would have to be some response, and given the hatred he saw on the faces of his own well-treated slaves who had been marched some distance to witness the punishment, he supposed that Rostgaard’s brutalized ones must be even more tormented and vengeful.
It was then, in late July, that he launched upon a program of doing everything possible to ameliorate the lot of his Lunaberg slaves. He instituted more sensible work routines, fed them a little better, and took special pains to conciliate Vavak, who betrayed no sign that he knew what the master was doing. Not a single reflex indicated that a kind of bond had been established between the two, and when John tried to talk with the slave, Vavak feigned inability to understand the Englishman when he spoke Danish. Nevertheless, John continued trying to communicate, and from time to time caught a fugitive spark of understanding. In this way the critical months of August and September passed.
But in October 1733, Rostgaard caught another runaway and preparations were made for one more public dismemberment, with the sergeant and drummer passing from one plantation to another, assembling the slaves to watch the gruesome exhibition. But when the runaway was being hauled to the ugly platform from which he would soon leave a beaten cripple, he suddenly broke away from his captors, ran with fierce speed to the edge of the promontory on which the three plantations rested, and pitched himself in screaming defiance down the great height onto the rocks below, where his corpse, crushed and bleeding, was seen by those crowding the edge.
Rostgaard, deprived of both a mature slave and his revenge, grabbed the bullwhip from the man who was to have administered the hundred and fifty lashings and roared through the crowd of slaves, Lemvig’s and Pembroke’s as well as his own, flailing at them with the knotted lash and screaming: ‘Away, you beasts! Don’t look at him! He’s dead, and you’ll be too if you don’t mind!’
He had struck some dozen of
Pembroke’s men when he saw Vavak, whom he despised, and although the black man stood perfectly still, simply watching this obscene display, Rostgaard lunged at him with special fury, preparing to lash him about the head. John quickly interceded, saying in his broken Danish: ‘Not that one, he’s mine.’
This obvious interruption by a white man of what Rostgaard considered his justified chastisement of a slave, an intrusion seen by all, so infuriated the Dane that he turned his fury on the Englishman, and would have thrashed him with his whip had not John anticipated the assault and grasped the bullwhip near the handle. For a moment the two men were immobilized, each by the other’s force, and then slowly Pembroke forced the whip down. Snarling and cursing, Rostgaard moved off to thrash indiscriminately at the other slaves, seeking Cudjoe in particular but not finding him.
During the rest of October and the first two weeks of November, Jorgen Rostgaard circulated among the other Danish plantation owners, warning them that ‘this damned Englishman won’t be trustworthy when the trouble comes.’ He did not carry this message to the Lemvigs because he suspected that they had been contaminated by Pembroke’s views on handling slaves, but he did not need to try to frighten Magnus and Elzabet, because, like Pembroke, they were already horrified by what might happen in the weeks ahead. They saw the looks of hatred in the eyes of their slaves; they heard the mutterings; and they knew that Rostgaard’s lead slave, Cudjoe, had disappeared, and if that intractable man was plotting something, they expected Pembroke’s man Vavak to join him before long.
But October waned and Vavak still labored in Lunaberg’s cane fields. Pembroke went out of his way to speak reassuringly to the obviously troubled man, but Vavak did not respond. Nevertheless, John felt certain that his gestures of conciliation were noticed and appreciated, for when a special law came down from the governor’s headquarters on St. Thomas, only a few miles distant across placid water, Vavak volunteered to help Pembroke in its enforcement. The new instructions were simple:
Every plantation manager, on pain of fine and imprisonment, is to padlock to some tree near the shore any small ship or boat or canoe belonging to his plantation when such vessel is not in use by him. Such action will prevent runaway slaves, when reaching the shore, from stealing a vessel and fleeing over the sea to Spanish Puerto Rico or French St.-Domingue.
Pembroke faced a difficult situation. He had two rowboats and two pad-locks, but he did not have enough chains long enough to go around trees, so he instructed Vavak to mind the locks while he rode off to see if Lemvig, who had no boats, might be able to lend him some chain. He found Magnus gone, but Elzabet was there, pretty as ever in her flaxen braids, and they discussed the new law.
‘It’s prudent,’ John said. ‘Boats are an invitation to the runaways.’
‘Do you think there’ll be trouble? The way the others talk?’
‘Cudjoe’s gone to the woods. One of my men is missing.’
‘Magnus said …’ But now the young Dane appeared to speak for himself, and when he heard that Pembroke had left his locks with Vavak, he showed real fright: ‘John! Two of my slaves have gone to the woods. Your man could run off with the locks.’ But when the two men galloped their horses down to the seafront, there stood Vavak guarding the boats and holding the precious locks at his side. He watched with interest as the two men prepared the boats for their chains and helped them drag the craft ashore, where Pembroke attached the chains in such a way that slaves might tear the boats from their moorings, but if they did, the shell would be broken and the boat would sink. Vavak understood what was being done and why.
At the end of the second week in November, Jorgen Rostgaard, accompanied by two planters like him, toured the island to satisfy themselves that the boat law had been complied with, and they were almost surprised to find that the Englishman had lashed his securely. ‘Good job,’ Rostgaard said in Danish. ‘Keep an eye on things. That Cudjoe is still somewhere in the woods. And Schilderop here has lost two of his slaves.’
One of the other men vowed: ‘We’ll catch them,’ and Rostgaard said: ‘When we do, that’s it for Cudjoe.’ And with his forefinger extended, he made a twirling gesture upward, imitating rising smoke and indicating that this time the slave would be burned alive.
On the night of 23 November 1733, John Pembroke was awakened at a quarter past midnight by distraught horsemen shouting: ‘Slaves in rebellion! Plantations burning! Men and women slain!’ And before he could question them, they had galloped eastward to alert Rostgaard and others in that direction, but as they left Lunaberg, one shouted back: ‘Better look in at Lemvig’s. We had no response there.’
After John had armed himself with all the firepower he had sequestered plus a long knife, he ran first to inspect the little shacks occupied by his slaves, and found that every one was empty and that all the knives used for slashing cane were missing too.
With increasing anxiety he ran to the Lemvig plantation, but its slave quarters were also vacant, and he was about to assume that the two Lemvigs had taken flight when he heard a moan coming from the house. Dashing in, he found only darkness, then a weak whisper from a corner: ‘Is that you, John?’
It was Elzabet, and when he made a light he found her crouched behind a table, holding in her bloodied arms the body of her young husband, whose throat had been slashed to the neckbone. ‘Oh, Elzabet!’ he cried, and when he dragged her away from the corpse she whimpered: ‘Our own slaves did it. They’d have killed me too, but your Vavak saved me.’
And down in the lowlands they could see aflame in the night the various plantations in which the white owners lay dead.
The history of the great slave rebellion on St. John in the winter of 1733–1734 was one of constantly increasing terror. On the first dreadful night, slaves killed all the plantation families they could reach. They made an assault on Rostgaard’s place but were driven off, and for some reason they neither tried to kill Pembroke nor burn his plantation.
Intensive questioning of those slaves who remained loyal to their masters, and there were more than a few, proved what Rostgaard had surmised: ‘Cudjoe’s in command. Vavak and that other from the east are his lieutenants. It will be hell routing them out of those forests.’
He was more than right, because the slaves, with an adroitness and skill their white masters had always predicted they did not have and could not have, mounted an offensive-defensive war of remarkable subtlety. At the end of five days of hit-and-run they had burned some two dozen plantations and ridiculed attempts by their white masters to subdue them or even locate them.
On 29 November, the sixth day of the fighting, an English man-of-war which happened to be in the islands to take on water landed a large contingent of trained soldiers to subdue the rebels, and after marching here and there in fine order, they finally stumbled into a contingent of blacks led by Cudjoe. There was a brief skirmish. The Englishmen were routed after twenty minutes of firing at an enemy they never saw, and they retreated, leaving their wounded to trail along after them.
Rostgaard and his planters were not so easily subdued, though in their rampage they found few of Cudjoe’s and Vavak’s men. Instead they slaughtered thirty-two noncombatants ‘to teach the others a lesson.’
As word flashed throughout the other islands that a rebellion had occurred on St. John, planters and their families were terrified: ‘Is this the beginning of the end? Will there be general uprisings on all the islands?’ To prevent that, a major expedition was mounted from St. Kitts under an officer named Maddox, who led his men ashore on St. John with drums and fife, but after a gallant chase clear across the island during heavy rainstorms, these volunteers had encountered not a single slave they could see but had ended up with three Englishmen dead and eight wounded. The St. Kitts men had had more than enough, and when they retreated to their ship, no drums sounded and the fife was silent.
In the weeks that followed, Pembroke lost any understanding of how the battle against the slaves was going, because his attention was f
ocused on trying to comfort and protect the Widow Lemvig. With her slaves vanished and no white hands to help her maintain her home, she was left terribly alone, and John could not decide how best to assist her. He visited her daily, took her food which he had prepared himself, for his slaves were gone too, and after much negotiation, arranged for a black woman who had remained faithful to her master on a plantation to the west to stay on the hill with Elzabet, the two of them rattling around in the big house.
The sensible thing would have been for Elzabet to flee by small boat to St. Thomas, where the revolt had not spread, but she refused to quit the only property her husband had left her, their plantation. It would also have been reasonable for her and her black helper to move over to the relative safety of Lunaberg, but her sense of propriety would not permit this. Despite the great crisis, her upbringing as the daughter of a Lutheran clergyman asserted itself, and she asked Pembroke when he suggested the move: ‘What would the islanders say?’
He replied harshly: ‘What’ll they say when they find you one morning with your throat cut?’ but this did not relax her attitude, and he had to content himself with aiding her from a distance.
But now the terror in which St. John was gripped spread to the other islands. The French in Martinique, who owned the important island of St. Croix a few leagues to the south of St. John, decided that the black revolt had run rampant too long, so on 23 April 1734 they dispatched a competent, well-armed contingent of more than two hundred local creoles, four trained officers from France and seventy-four colored and black West Indians. The Frenchmen marched with great vigor here and there, but it was many days before they located Cudjoe’s men, who had, in the meantime, continued to burn and ravish the Danish plantations. Finally, on 29 April the French pinned the blacks into a defile from which they could not retreat, and a real battle was enjoined. Since the French had every advantage, plus determined leadership, they prevailed, and after chasing the remnants of the slaves for an additional two weeks, they finally captured the black general Cudjoe of the Rostgaard plantation.