An image from a work printed in 1824 by Joshua Bryant about the Demerara uprising. Image: John Carter Brown Library.
Many readers may know about Demerara sugar – a type of raw cane sugar with large, golden-brown crystals and a rich, caramelly flavour from its molasses content.
But there is nothing at all sweet about its connection with Illawarra’s Lieutenant Colonel John Thomas Leahy.
Leahy, of the 21st Fusiliers, came to Australia in 1833 and after having sold his military commission in 1835, purchased a massive 4000 acres (1618 ha) in the Illawarra from the estates (which included the grounds of today’s University of Wollongong) of James Stares Spearing and his wife Harriet in the same year.
The purchases included the Mount Keira Estate and the Bellambi Estate.
And while today it is now slightly better known that many famous individuals among the early invaders of Australia had parents who provided them with wealth derived from the slave trade in the Caribbean and India, it is still the case that too little has been revealed about the horrible connections of someone such as Lt Colonel Leahy with one of the worst forms of cruelty human beings can inflict on others.
Even Governor Lachlan Macquarie when he arrived at Sydney Cove in 1809 was accompanied by an Indian man named George Jarvis. The Governor had purchased Jarvis as a slave when he was six years old along with another boy aged seven.
Macquarie described them as “very fine, well-looking healthy Black Boys” and paid 170 rupees. The older boy escaped but the younger one, George, went on to serve Macquarie for the rest of his life.
And even Macquarie’s first wife, Jane, a West Indian heiress and daughter of a wealthy Antiguan slave owner and former Chief Justice of Antigua, was thus also implicated in the slave trade.
Moreover, Reverend Robert Allwood who became the first vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, was born in Jamaica as the son of a Caribbean slave owner. He came to Australia with part of his father’s inheritance – more than 10,000 pounds compensation for the release of 202 of his slaves in British Guiana.
Furthermore, the artist George French Angas – who produced the earliest image of the Cleveland Farm near Dapto in 1845 – was the son of George Fife Angas, a businessman who played a significant part in the formation and establishment of South Australia. He had been financially compensated to the tune of just over six pounds for giving up 121 slaves in Honduras in 1835.
Even the first Governor of Western Australia, James Stirling (1791-1865), was connected in that he descended from the Buchanan family of Scottish merchants who had grown wealthy on the tobacco produced by slaves. Various generations of the Buchanans were involved to differing degrees in the sale and export of tobacco and hence also in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Andrew Buchanan 1st of Drumpellier (1691-1759) had taken full advantage of purchasing plantations in Virginia, USA and became known as one of the “Virginia Dons”.
And there is even one known slave ship that was given the name “Buchanan”. Yet, although James Stirling was somewhat less connected directly with slavery than Macquarie, Allwood and Angas, his family had for generations profited from the tobacco produced by slaves that was later sold in Glasgow.
But it was one Illawarra landholder – Lieutenant Colonel John Thomas Leahy – who had an even more direct and far more horrific involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
And, as I was alerted by my fellow researcher Vivienne Caldwell who is the local expert on the land holdings and families living in Illawarra between Fairy Meadow and Corrimal, Leahy was directly behind the killing of at least 150 slaves.
Vivienne fortuitously came across a work printed in 1824 titled An Account of an Insurrection of the Negro Slaves in the Colony of Demerara, which broke out on the 18th of August, 1823 written by Joshua Bryant at Demerara and printed by A Stevenson at the Guiana Chronicle Office, Georgetown.
John Thomas Leahy’s obituary explains that he had “joined the 21st Fusiliers at Barbados as a Major in 1820″ and was appointed Lieutenant Colonel of “that fine regiment in 1822 … He was a native of the county of Cork, in which he had also some valuable estates, and enjoyed a pension from government in consequence of his wounds”.
But it was the deadly wounds that Leahy inflicted on the Negro population of Demerara which Vivienne Caldwell uncovered that today makes for disturbing reflection and can be read in the three extracted scans seen below.
Reading about these horrors and the allocation to Leahy of a reward of “two hundred guineas for the purchase of a sword” sounds even worse to me than the 30 pieces of silver which was said to be the price for which Judas Iscariot supposedly betrayed that bloke named Jesus said to be living in Palestine some 2000 or so years ago.
Extracts from An Account of an Insurrection of the Negro Slaves in the Colony of Demerara, which
broke out on the 18th of August, 1823 written by Joshua Bryant. Image: Supplied.
