Anthony Gambrill | Jamaica in Britain: Edward Long, planter and historian

A disturbing legacy of the history of slavery and sugar was the publication in Britain in 1774 of a three-volume History of Jamaica by Edward Long, the great-grandson of a man who had once taken on the Crown.

Samuel Long was a lieutenant in General Venables’ invading army, and for his role, received land in Clarendon which, by 1754, his descendants had increased to 606,755 acres. It was said that the Spanish had found gold on the Rio Minho adjacent to his sugar cane plantation, but a neighbour observed that “we have so profitable a mine above ground (pointing to the cane piece); we will not trouble ourselves hunting for any underground”.

Long was the speaker of the Jamaica Assembly and became chief justice at the time when a new governor, the Earl of Carlisle, arrived and announced that henceforth on the instruction of King Charles II, he and his general council would pass all laws, sidestepping the Assembly. Resentment mounted when the Assembly refused to sign up to this as a pledge.

In addition, Chief Justice Long refused to act on the earl’s belief that those opposing him should be charged with treachery. Long and the assembly’s speaker, Sir William Beeston, were taken prisoner and carried to England by the governor to face charges of sedition.

Long not only pleaded Jamaica’s case, dismissing the charges as trifling, but also accused the governor of encouraging well-known pirates and sharing in their booty. The king proposed a more acceptable form of administration and the men returned to the island in triumph.

His son, Charles, became the proprietor of Sevens Two plantation, later called Longville, on the death of his father in 1683, and, coincidentally, took a second wife, who was Sir William Beeston’s daughter, Jane, in 1702. His first son, named Samuel, eventually employed 443 slaves on the Long properties.

PUBLIC LIFE

His fourth son, Edward, later to become the controversial historian, was born in England and pursued a career in law at Gray’s Inn in London. In 1757, he accompanied Sir Henry Moore, who had been appointed governor to the island as his private secretary. He quickly entered public life, being elected to the Jamaican Assembly for the parish of St Ann and was later elected speaker of the House, later still becoming chief justice.

A year after he arrived, he married heiress Mary Ballard Beckford, who presented him with six children, four of whom were born on the island.

After only 11 years in Jamaica, he returned to Britain. Now an absentee plantation owner and no longer burdened by the demands of Jamaican public life, Edward Long devoted much of his time to writing articles and pamphlets and overseeing the family’s British estates.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes his three-volume History of Jamaica as “his most influential work, which cemented his reputation as the leading contemporary commentator on the 18th-century British Caribbean”. Edward Long simply announced it as an “unpolished survey of Jamaica”.

Drawn from his own experiences, public records, and private papers, it is encyclopaedic in its detail, some of which were said to have been copied from other writers. On the other hand, Bryan Edwards’ History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, published 20 years later, reproduced Long’s section on the origin of the Maroons.

The first volume weighs in heavily on the island’s government and captures its administration during the British early years. It describes the country’s Caribbean dependencies, trade, and currency. This latter required considerable explanation as at the time, English, Spanish, Mexican, Portuguese, and even Peruvian money was in circulation.

The History of Jamaica, in volume two, covers the geography of the island, the composition of the population, as well as a variety of insights into maintaining good health. For instance, he praised a fruit and vegetable diet but warned against eating too much meat, particularly the salted kind. Wine in moderation was recommended as well as weak rum punch (but distilled with rum matured for at least a year). He made a case for early rising as contributing to good health and commented on the benefits of bathing, sleeping, and a limited amount of dancing.

The final volume focused on climate, earthquakes, hurricanes, weather, as well as 352 entries itemising everything from nature’s bounty to rats and reptiles.

It was in the second volume that he analysed the country’s population, producing a racist description of slaves that even for its era, was extreme, to say the least. He did not classify Africans with the rest of mankind, and he considered slave trading as a profitable business and Jamaican slavery a benevolent institution.

In his book, Britain’s Black Debt, Hilary Beckles describes Edward Long as the “pro-slavery ideologue of late 18th-century Jamaica”. Long never returned to Jamaica, dying in Sussex, England, aged 69.

- Anthony Gambrill is a playwright and historian. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.