Mountravers Plantation - Nevis, West Indies

Christine Eickelmann and David Small

Archival research

The population of enslaved people

• in total, more than 750 enslaved individuals lived on Mountravers between 1696 and 1834
• at any one time there were between 19 (1696) and 211 (1795) enslaved men, women and children on the plantation
• at least 200 children were born on Mountravers
• between January 1765 and July 1768 John Pretor Pinney bought over sixty African children; most were said to have come from present-day Nigeria and Ghana
• in later years Pinney preferred buying Creoles (island-born individuals) from 'good families'
• of the imported Africans between about a seventh and a quarter died during the 'seasoning' period, the first three to five years, in which the new arrivals were 'gradually introduced to the life of forced labour and ... suddenly introduced to a new and therefore deadly disease environment'. As yet, there is no comparable data for other plantations on Nevis but during the 1760s and 1770s planters on the island expected seasoning deaths to run at rather less than a fifth. This was an improvement on the 1720s when they expected losses of at least double that figure.

The biographies of some enslaved people

About six months after arriving on Nevis, John Pretor Pinney purchased a woman, Harriott, and three children, Pero, Nancy and Sheeba Jones, for £115 Sterling/£195 Nevis currency (N£). The group was described as 'three Creole, one seasoned', which suggests that Harriott was African-born. When considered solely as property, the four turned out to be a good investment: in July 1783, when Pinney valued all his slaves just before returning to England, Harriott was worth N£60, Sheeba N£100, and Nancy N£90. No value was put on Pero because Pinney noted that he was 'to go to England' (see Publications PERO The Life of a Slave in Eighteenth-Century Bristol).

Sheeba Jones mostly worked in the field and in later life as a washer woman but, like many other skilled men and women, she was also regularly hired out to other people. Fewer details are known about her and many of the other field slaves: tracing the biographies of house slaves and skilled workers is easier as they are referred to more often in the documents.

Nancy Jones was trained as a seamstress on neighbouring St Kitts. Her schooling may have included instruction in domestic duties and those of a maidservant. The Pinneys took her and Pero as servants on their honeymoon to Philadelphia in 1772. Three years later Nancy had a son, William Fisher. Almost certainly his father was the overseer on the neighbouring Woodland plantation, and, like many children of white fathers, William was taught a trade. Aged 15 he was apprenticed to 'Mr Herbert's Negro mason', Joe Moore, and later worked on building the Mountravers counting house, the windmill and the bridge at Sharloes (the site of Pinney's main sugar works).

Harriott's duties were those associated with domestic slaves; perhaps she was a cook. Pinney regularly ordered items to be sent to Bristol, and he wrote to his manager that 'Mrs Pinney desires you to give Harriott some of my best muscavado sugar to make a good deal of guava mamulet (sic) to be boiled rather high' and, for the children, '... please order Harriott to preserve a keg, or very large pot, of green sweetmeats'. Harriott, like many other enslaved people, kept fowls and pigs. We know that on Mountravers they had some gardens around their houses. Pinney wrote in 1794 that he wanted to 'afford each Negro a proper piece of land round the house', and visitors to the West Indies wrote that 'Negro houses' had gardens, with animal pens, vegetable plots and fruit trees.

It was recorded in the plantation diary that Harriott 'died suddenly', on 9 July 1801. She was about 61 years old. It is not known whether she had any children, or where she was buried.

Nancy Jones and her son were part of a group of slaves reserved by John Pinney, not to be sold with Mountravers. However, in 1807 during his negotiations with the planter Edward Huggins, Pinney and his son John Frederick gave them up for sale, with eight others. By the 1820s slaveholders sold very few individuals but Nancy was sold again. On 1 December 1824, in her late sixties, she was bought by the wife of a blacksmith, Mrs Frederick Huggins. A month later Nancy Jones' son died, aged 49, and was buried at St Paul's, Charlestown. Nancy survived William by four years, and was buried on 5 July 1829, also at St Paul's.

When the plantation was sold to Edward Huggins in 1808, Nancy's sister Sheeba Jones was sold to him, along with 182 other enslaved people. She died on Mountravers some time between 1831 and 1834, in her early to mid seventies. It is not known where she was buried but it is likely that she, like many other plantation slaves, was buried on the land she had worked all her life.

Sources for these biographies: Pinney Papers: various letterbooks and accountbooks; PRO: T 71/364-9; NCH: CR 1764-1769; NHCS: St Paul's Burials 1825-1837

The managers and overseers