Chapter 4

Chapter four of Hochschild's Bury the Chains tells the tale of the West Indies' Sugar trade principally. To give the reader a comparison to this day and age the author compares the sugar industry to today's oil industry. 60 percent of all slaves brought anywhere in the Americas were brought to the small islands of the Caribbean. This was due to the immense profits and demand for the sugar from European nations. Sugar was considered the principle source of national opulence in the Carribean. The chapter then moves to future abolitionist in James Steven. James Steven at the time before his reinvention is involved in a love triangle with a woman he knew from childhood, Nancy, and her friend, Maria. His best friend Tom, Nancy's brother, was also courting Maria, but he was away in the Navy as this went on. He eventually impregnated Maria but still tried to court Nancy. During this time he was able to once again resume law school and he attained his law degree. The problem was eventually "solved" when Maria found someone else to marry and James and Nancy eventually moved to the Caribbean and adopted the child after James Steven had caused a massive amount of heartache. While he was in the West Indies he saw the first horrific image that would drive him from his life of debauchery towards abolition years later when he attended a trial of four slaves charged with murdering a white doctor. They were most likely innocent, but sentenced to death anyway, but death alone was not what haunted Steven. Steven heard a tale of their execution which involved them being burned alive, a common execution for blacks at the time. This especially horrified Steven as he himself had benefitted from slavery due to his uncle's inheritance enabling him to return to law school that was gained through slavery. Two decades later he would, behind the scenes, strike a major blow against slavery, but this was just the beginning of his retribution.
The rest of the chapter comes from accounts of the Codrington plantation in Barbados. They first described the sugar making process in the sugar mills. It was a brutal crop to harvest for farmhands and millworkers. The farmhands were forced to carry heavy burdens of cane, followed by putting the cane through dangerous vertical rollers. The millworkers then took over and had to work tirelessly with massive deadly vats of scalding sugar that burned many a worker brutally. Both fields resulted in startlingly young deaths for the workers. Codrington's records not only show the horrors of slave labor, but also show who received benefits, including the Church of England. One cleric once said "I have long wondered and lamented that the negroes in our plantations decrease, and new supplies become necessary continually. Surely this proceeds from some defect of humanity and even good policy." But even the clergy themselves weren't going to find out. This further shows the horribly apathetic nature of everyone at the time with regards to slavery. Most saw it as just a fact of life...