When quoting from letters, newspapers and other sources I’ve kept original capitalizations and spellings, except where they obscure the meaning. In addition to pruning some long-winded passages, I’ve taken a few liberties with punctuation; to Bridget Atkinson’s letters, in particular, I have added a sprinkling of full stops.
Slavery was a condition imposed upon millions of Africans against their will, and its terminology was devised to strip them of their dignity. Much of this language is today considered derogatory or offensive. Where possible, I have referred to ‘enslaved’ men and women, rather than ‘slaves’, to highlight their humanity and not simply the cruel status that was forced upon them.
Under the old, pre-decimal system of pounds, shillings and pence, £1 consisted of 240 pence (denoted by the letter ‘d’ for the Latin denarius), with 12 pence making a shilling, and 20 shillings (‘s’ for solidus) making a pound. A guinea was worth 21 shillings, or £1 1s. During the period covered by this book, Jamaican currency was worth less than its counterpart in Britain – £1 8s currency equalled £1 sterling. Monetary figures in the text are in pounds sterling, except where I have specified ‘currency’.
It is impossible to estimate the modern value of historic sums with even the slightest accuracy, for the relative values of what money might buy – commodities, food, labour, manufactured goods, property – have fluctuated too greatly in the interim. Moreover, it depends on which yardstick you use – retail prices, say, or average earnings. MeasuringWorth.com, a useful resource on this subject, estimates the 2018 value of £1 from the years given below:
| using retail price index | using average earnings | |
| 1750 | £155 | £1,925 |
| 1775 | £125 | £1,650 |
| 1800 | £79 | £1,147 |
| 1825 | £81 | £841 |
| 1850 | £105 | £796 |
The gulf between these figures rather suggests the limitations of the exercise. When George Atkinson died in 1814, his fortune was valued at £140,000; according to these criteria, it would today either be worth £9.6 million, or £107 million.
Some container sizes, mostly taken from Johnson’s Dictionary:
Barrel: 36 gallons
Bushel: 8 gallons
Cask: a barrel of any size, smaller than a hogshead
Chaldron: a measure of coals, 2000 lb in weight
Firkin: ¼ barrel, 9 gallons
Hogshead (Hhd): 60 gallons
Pipe: 2 hogsheads
Puncheon: 102 gallons
Quarter: 8 bushels