A very good copy of this rare manual for managing a Caribbean sugar plantation at the height of the slave trade.
Turnbull states in the advertisement that opens the work: “The author’s design is, to convey some observations which, he flatters himself, may be useful to the young planters; to inculcate in their minds, a mild and humane treatment of the slaves; and, as far as lies in his power, to supply the want of a more complete practical treatise of West-Indian husbandry.”
Written in a series of eight letters, in the first two Turnbull tackles everything from describing different soils found on different Caribbean islands and the various techniques required for each, including whether to plant early or late in the season. The third letter is devoted to managing diseases, the fourth to controlling insect damage.
The letters are supplemented by the calendar which provides valuable month-by-month instructions for planters. These instructions not only give a breakdown of cultivating sugar cane but also include notes on how best to manage cattle and the enslaved workforce. For example, the notes for February advise planters to “trash the cattle-pens, and repair the negro-houses, watch-huts etc.” Furthermore the exhortation “neither the slaves nor the stock, should be overworked” is qualified in practical rather than humane terms: “for this would infallibly be attended with considerable loss and inconvenience …”
Turnbull’s advice to ameliorate conditions for the enslaved workers - “should not expose the slaves to be often wet, nor oblige them to remain long in the field under heavy rains” - is contradicted somewhat by his instructions to use the deep holing technique of planting whereby jobbing gangs marked out a grid of squares “each measuring approximately three feet by three feet, using twine and wooden pegs before digging a series of six-inch-deep holes with banks around them. Larger quantities of manure could be placed in the holes to combat the depletion of the soil’s fertility, and the banks prevented water and soil from running into the sea” (Radburn & Roberts, 228). Furthermore, Turnbull suggests this “should be done in rainy weather, that the salts in the dung may sooner be carried down into the soil.”
OCLC locates copies at New York Historical Society, Harvard, William Clements, Western Reserve Historical Society, Louisiana State, London, BL, Birminghand, Aberdeen, and BnF.
Sabin, 97462; Radburn, N. & Roberts, J., “Gold versus Life: Jobbing Gangs and British Caribbean Slavery” in The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 2 (April 2019), pp.223-256; Roberts, J., Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807 (Cambridge, 2013) … p. 194.
