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Tony Beale on 26th November 2020

Information from PhD of Eilin Friis Hordvik. Located at https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23447/1/Hordvik_whole_thesis.pdf Mauritius – Caught in the Web of Empire: the legal system, crime, punishment and labour 1825–1845 Eilin Friis Hordvik BA (Hons) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences University of Tasmania April 2016 The case of Thérésia, a 25-year-old Négress a pioche, illustrates this tension and shows how acts of defiance attracted the full force of the law. On 10 April 1830 she had attacked her master’s daughter, 10-year-old Anastasia Michel, as the young girl was playing with her dolls in the shade of a mango tree on her father’s property in the Marie Jones, From Places Now Forgotten: an index of convicts whose places of trial were outside the UK and Ireland, rev. edn., published by Marie Jones, Cardiff, New South Wales, 2005. 16 The abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807 came into effect in Mauritius from 1811 and enforced from 1813. Chapter 2: The Mauritian Courts at Work: public morality, gender perspectives and legal decisions 74 district of Pamplemousses.17 Anastasia did not pay attention to her father’s slaves working a short distance away. She only became aware of the Malagasy slave’s fury when she was struck from behind with a hoe. She fell to the ground, blood pouring from a head wound. As Thérésia was lifting the hoe to inflict a fatal blow, Anastasia’s sister, Léonide, screamed. Startled, Thérésia threw the hoe and fled.18. Léonide’s screams alerted their father, Jean Pierre Marie Michel. Running towards his children he came face to face with Thérésia. In a desperate move to escape, she pounced and grabbed her master by the testicles. She squeezed as hard as she could in an attempt to make him faint so she could make her getaway. This somewhat bizarre act perhaps hints at an underlying and unspoken (at least in terms of the court records) history of sexual abuse as she directed her attack at her master’s genitalia. The assault on Michel was certainly personal, intimate and violent. Two hired slaves belonging to Mr. Jacques Naïna working on the property came to Michel’s rescue. With escape no longer an option, she reportedly begged her master to ‘kill her by shooting her with a shotgun’.19 When later asked to offer an explanation as to Thérésia’s action, Michel hinted that it was an act of revenge, but failed to offer further details. The type of slave crime or resistance committed by Thérésia, as Barbara Bush explains of the Caribbean slave experience, meant that slaves (both men and women) ‘did not repudiate law and morality’ but created their own codes in defiance of harsh treatment, rigid control and repression. Court of First Instance, trial proceedings of Thérésia and Azémia, 24 Apr. 1830. Supreme Court, trial summary for Thérésia, 16 Oct. 1830, trial records for Thérésia, with definitive conclusion, 16 Oct. 1830. police report in the case of Thérésia, 11 Apr. 1830. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, p. 31. Chapter 2: The Mauritian Courts at Work: public morality, gender perspectives and legal decisions. The violence and cruelty inherent in a master–slave relationship, as Orlando Patterson explains, starts with the initial ‘violent act of transforming free man [woman] into slave’. Subjected to a lifetime of submission and obedience makes a slave the ‘ultimate human tool’, forcibly alienated from social and cultural heritage and open to abuse. As evidenced by Thérésia’s work among the mango trees on the Michel’s property, female slaves were involved in the production of food and Thérésia was performing an important function within the Michel household. Megan Vaughan describes the pre-plantation dynamics of slavery on small properties in Mauritius as ‘an invariable institution’, subject to complex personal, interpersonal and external dynamics. In the early 1830s there were still many small slave holdings, such as Michel’s, in Mauritius where the interplay of these dynamics saw Thérésia try to kill her master’s daughter. The examination of a police report dated 31 May–2 June 1828 investigating complaints of ill treatment provides further motive for Thérésia’s violent acts against her master and his family. Thérésia had used one of the few legal rights open to slaves, the right to complain. General mistreatment, physical abuse and working on Sundays were part of the initial complaint. Bringing attention to what was happening on the property would have made Thérésia vulnerable to further abuse and humiliation. The appointment of a protector of slaves was not in place in Mauritius until 7 February 1829, almost a year after Thérésia’s initial complaint.. Unless you were born into slavery, in which case this status was inherited. Naturally, this appointment had been very unpopular among Mauritian planters. They felt that powers vested in the general prosecutor overlapped with those of the newly appointed protector of slaves and this role was therefore superfluous. The protector of slaves’ interventions often led to a fractious relationship with the slave owners. Following the investigation, in a report dated 10–11 July 1828, it was ordered that the Michel ‘establishment be monitored by the local authority of the district’ and, because of the mutinous atmosphere on the property, Michel was ‘not to punish his blacks or negresses other than by the means of the authority of the Police of the canton’ The report further recommended that Michel himself was to treat his slaves ‘without resentment and with humility, and to pay for the hospital fees and the jail fees which could occur’. It seems that the authorities were preparing for further brutality. When Thérésia, almost two years after her initial complaint, attacked Anastasia she may not have been aware of the report’s findings. Was it possible that the authorities had been lax in monitoring the property? Had Michel’s abusive behaviour towards his human chattel continued unabated? Was it the lack of improvement in the slaves’ conditions that had prompted Thérésia to take matters into her own hands, attacking what her master held most dear, his children? Thérésia was sent to the civil jail in Port 27 Samuel de Burgh-Edwardes, The History of Mauritius, 1507-1914, East and West Ltd, London, 1921, p. 63. 28 NAM, RA 371, Thérésia, general police report 10 to 11 Jul. 1828. 29 NAM, RA 371, Thérésia, general police report 10 to 11 Jul. 1828. Chapter 2: The Mauritian Courts at Work: public morality, gender perspectives and legal decisions 77 Louis to await trial.30 On 24 April, 1830, Thérésia and Azémia, a female slave working alongside her on that fateful day, both stood accused of attempted murder. In her statement Azémia said she had refused to participate in the planned killing. The court eventually dropped the charges against her. Little Anastasia, although receiving a severe head wound, survived the attack. In 1830 Mauritius still adhered to the Capitulation Proclamation of 1810, signed between Britain and France. As a slave, Thérésia was tried according to Article 26 of the Letters Patent of 1723, a separate criminal code based on a version of the French Code Noir of 1685.33. Part of the philosophy of the Code Noir was to bring directives on slavery into the public arena with regard to punishment. Within the French legal system it was important to bring slaves ‘under the hegemony of the law’, reflecting the anxieties about the ability to control a servile population. It was the explicit assertion that in the area of criminal responsibility, the slave lost his or her status as a minor or chattel and was considered a free person in a court of law. Thérésia, general police report 10 to 11 Jul. 1828. Attached to the report in July 1828 was also a report on the prison population. Of 174 prisoners,12 blacks in chains were out digging in the streets, 50 convicts had been assigned to work in the streets and Dr. Shaw visited the jail at 11 am—two free and three slaves were dead. There were 11 guards in service with three couriers. The jail was in some ways as harsh as the plantation. However, slaves sometimes preferred the jail to plantations, which gives an indication of the treatment many slaves endured at the hand of their masters or overseers. Court of First Instance, trial proceedings of Thérésia and Azémia, 24 Apr. 1830. Article 26 of Code Noir stated that slaves who ‘hit their master, mistress, the husband of their mistress or their children, causing bleeding, should be punished by death. Anastasia, Thérésia’s master’s child, had been bleeding profusely from the head wound inflicted by the slave. Overwhelming evidence led the court in this instance to establish that she had acted with malicious intent. Code Noir had served as a critical element in social control, securing obedience and deference to social and political hierarchies. The court was able to apply an exact code fitting the crime and impose an exact punishment. The court, based on judicial reasoning in search of the ‘truth’ had arrived at a pre-set sentence and, predictably, condemned Thérésia to death. In response to the death sentence, the protector of slaves lodged a petition on Thérésia’s behalf. Mr. Michel, as Governor Charles Colville sarcastically put it, ‘activated by a laudable sentiment of humanity … also affixed his signature’ to the petition. Perhaps he felt a pang of guilt over his slave’s predicament? In a dispatch from Colville to the Secretary for War and the Colonies Viscount Robert Goderich, he included a letter from the chief judge of the colony, putting forward some mitigating circumstances as to why Thérésia’s death sentence should be overturned. Having read Thérésia’s medical report, Colville must have been aware of the conditions on the Michel property. Colville wrote, ‘from circumstances within my knowledge I could not consistently with ideas of duty and obligation to unite mercy with law and justice sign the death warrant of Thérésia’. Letters Patent of 1723, Article 26, p. 15., verdict in the trial of Thérésia with definitive conclusion, 16 Oct. 1830., letter from G. Barry to Governor Charles Colville, proclamation regarding the commutation of the death penalty of the slave Thérésia, 9 Dec. 1830, dispatch no. 41, relative to the case of the slave Thérésia, from Charles Colville to Viscount Goderich, in response to dispatch, 8 May 1831. In his dispatch to Goderich regarding Michel’s claim for compensation he noted that he would ‘recommend caution in the assessment of the price to be paid by gvt [sic] according to existing law of the owner of the transported slave.’40 However, Michel was rewarded handsomely to dispose of what Cassandra Pybus calls ‘troublesome property’. Colville wrote to Goderich, ‘for want of what could constitute legal proof, he received £100 instead of perhaps a shilling! Due to the circumstance surrounding Thérésia’s case her death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Diego Garcia, a location for convicts and slaves suffering from leprosy, and the notorious prison on Robben Island in the Cape Colony were possible penal destinations for the slave Thérésia, but after some consideration these destinations were deemed unsuitable. Instead, she was transported to New South Wales, considered the most humane option. Thérésia arrived on the Celia on 11 March 1831. Stepping ashore, Francis Rossi immediately assigned her as an inside-outside servant. As Clare Anderson points out, the assignment of Mauritian criminally convicted slaves to Rossi, a former general superintendent of the convict department in Mauritius, became a ‘neat joining up of the pan-imperial circle of convict transportation’. New South Wales, Australia, Registers of Convicts’ Applications to Marry, Granted 20/4/1846 Saint John Ross 44 Free(7yrs) per ship Mary Ann to Marry Theresa (Thereza) 33 ToL (life) per ship Celia . Rev H H Boberts Parramatta Theresa arrived in 1831 on board the ship “Celia” as a 17 year old having been convicted on the Isle of France (muritius) for cutting and maiming. She was from Madagascar Received a conditional pardon