WEBVTT
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... lives or their experiences.
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It was as if they were there but they did not exist.
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They were the proverbial invisible people of the 17th century.
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"This island is the dunghill
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whereon England does cast forth its rubbish.
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Rogues and whores and suchlike people
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are those which are generally brought here.
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In the most unsupportible captivity,
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grinding at the mills,
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attending the furnaces,
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or digging in the scorching island,
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having nothing to feed on but potato roots.
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Bought and sold from one planter to another,
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or attached as horses and beasts for the debts of their masters,
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being whipped at the whipping post as rogues
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for their master's pleasure."
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The Africans are accustomed to the climate,
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these people were not.
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That is why in bond servants didn't really last in Barbados,
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because they died off too quickly.
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Furthermore, if you only, you only have use of the bonds for 5 or 6 years,
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you've got everything you can out of him.
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If you have a slave, you have him for life,
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so you're likely to pay more attention to him.
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That doesn't mean the blacks didn't suffer,
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they suffered a lot.
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[narrator] St Nicholas Abbey is in the Scotland district,
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the oldest plantation house on the island,
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dating back to 1658.
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Until the 1940's it produced sugar and rum for export,
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and will do again.
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Larry Warren, an architect of poor white descent himself,
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bought St Nicholas to make it a going concern once more,
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but also as a living tribute to generations of both black and white Barbadians. [/narrator]
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That mill is an embodiment of St Nicholas,
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because at one stage in Barbados there were 110 or more of those mills on the island,
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and that's the last remaining one.
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Just by fate, it was preserved.
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And I always reflect on St Nicholas too, because, um,
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if you think about it,only 350 years of its history,
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and all the cane fires, and potenial fires and problems and so on,
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it survived,
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and I believe it's actually, you know, kind of meant to happen.
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But that mill, ehm, was really destined to be scrapped,
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and then Colonel Lay, who was the owner here,
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and someone with the Canadian government,
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got together and they preserved it and brought it here.
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In many respects, a lot of the people that do go to Barbados
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feel so comfortable there,
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they just don't go beyond to know the history of Barbados.
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Of course, since owning St Nicholas,
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I've read books on it,
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and quite amazed at you know, the period around the 1650's,
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and Oliver Cromwell and how he in fact transported all of these people here
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to become slaves,
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and in fact were treated as bad or even worse, yknow?
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[narrator] Winston Gill, of Scottish descent,
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has worked as ranger at St Nicholas Abbey for 30 years.[/narrator]
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To most black people, they think they were the only ones that were in slavery,
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but to some person who understand and know history
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is that all _ were in slavery, the white and the black.
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And the white was the first slave in Barbados.
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By the end of the 17th century,
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a lot of the white people that were doing manual labour on the estates,
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were driven off in preference of the black,
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because their production was not as great as the black,
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so then they went on some to another market,
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some went on to other Caribbean islands.
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Well, the ones that stayed still continued to weather the storm on the island,
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the white people were mainly centred around Bath and St John,
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Churchill and
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The Scottish that're left behind think that haggis and puddin' and souse.
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People tell you that slaves invented puddin' and souse, but it never true.
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Puddin' and souse Scottish _.
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... and what they call haggis,
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we call it _ here.
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[narrator] Apart from the local haggis,
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the connections with Scotland can be seen in surprising places.
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In the very brickwork, in fact,
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of a plantation house like St Nicholas.
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The poor seldom leave behind much evidence of their lives,
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it's blown away in hurricanes
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and writen out by the rich and powerful.
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Fred Smith and his students are searching for clues
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to the daily lives of those resilient forgotten people.
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It's clear that poor whites lived very similar lives to black slaves in the early days.
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The difference was class, not race.
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You have to dig deep in this beautiful place to find evidence of suffering. [/narrator]
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The archeological work that we've been doing here
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has been focused on trying to get a general sense of plantation life here at St Nicholas Abbey.
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There seems to be a preponderance of bowl forms,
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um, and greater emphasis on bowls than on flatware plates,
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and this probably reflects the emphasis on stewed foods,
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whereas the planter's house has a great deal more flatware,
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associated probably with roasts and other types of foods.
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Rum today is the 2nd most widely consumed alcoholic beverage in the world,
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but in the 17th century and the 18th century,
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it was really a drink of enslaved peoples,
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of poor whites, indentured servants, of sea men.
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Life was very challenging,
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especially the disease environment in early Barbados
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in which many people were dying from a variety of tropical diseases,
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uh, hurricanes, earthquakes, difficult place to live,
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especially if you were poor, uh, or enslaved.
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And so rum really kind of helped meet the challenges of daily life in Barbados,
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and provided a temporary escape.
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[narrator] One early settler wrote to his father:
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"To send out 50 cases of good spirit,
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and make no question than that you will have great gains from them,
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they are generally such drunkards on this island,
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that they will find coppers to buy their drinks,
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although they go without themselves.
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I have seen, upon the Sabbath day as I have been walking to church,
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first one, presently another,
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laying in the highway so drunk
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that there be land crabs that have bit off some of their fingers,
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some of their toes,
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and have killed some before they have wakened."
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They drank heavily,
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in fact that was a common feature among these whites,
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you know, they consume vast quantities of alcohol,
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obviously that would have had some effect on overall health,
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you know, many many years later.
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[narrator] Our expectation of the West Indies,
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that being white means being rich,
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simply isn't true.
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The descendants of those first servants who were cheated out of their inheritance,
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entered a century and a half of social and economic paralysis,
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subsistence farming, menial labour, and domestic service were the best they could hope for. [/narrator]
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It was logical for the people of the time to conclude
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that over-consumption of rum
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led to this laziness, and this inability to work hard,
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and the whole pejorative stereotype that developed associated with poor whites.
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But actually there are medical reasons
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that explain some of the dibilities.
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A large percentage of the poor whites in Barbados who were too poor to have shoes,
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and so who worked bare feet in the fields etc,
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picked up parasitic infections,
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particularly hookworm infections.
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Somebody with masses of hookworms in their body
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wouldn't be able to respond well to situations,
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would stumble, slouch, would move very slowly,
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and be seen sort of, like, the village idiot stereotype.
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Enslaved Africans who didn't drink as much as the poor whites,
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they had family networks,
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they had large communities of people that could work together,
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and sort of community networks that would help ease the challenges of everyday life.
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Whereas poor whites tended to live sort of on the outskirts of communities,
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very little opportunities for upward mobility,
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and as a result, sort of lost themselves in drinking.
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Part of the issue was that the whites remained by themselves,
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and so you had a situation where there was quite a bit of inter-marrying.
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Where you would have had quite a lot of families marrying each other.
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First or second cousins marrying each other,
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just _ for a white female to marry a black guy.
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So, they married predominantly white men.
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And of course, the whole issue of incest.
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I mean, it's not a nice thing to speak about,
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but that obviously happened in those type of communities.
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If one looks very quickly at the demographic patterns and racial patterns in Barbados over time,
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Barbados started as a white majority colony,
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but by the 1660's it had become a black majority
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where about 60% of the population was black, and 40% was white.
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And what they did with this large poor white population on the island
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was they used it as a buffer group between themselves and the black slave population.
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And during the period of slavery
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the poor white population was critical to the status and success
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and if you like peace of mind of the planter class.
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1640's you might have had maybe, ehm, 4 or 5 thousand black slaves,
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but by 1660 you had about 60,000 slaves,
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and the population moved down to about 10,000 whites and 60,000 blacks,
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so they need to have some form of militia,
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or military for internal security,
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and the laws were made that for every 30 acres of land,
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you had to have one able-bodied white man serving in the militia.
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Once you were in that that rut of a poor white,
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you had no education,
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you may become an overseer,
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ehm, you were not ever a land owner.
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The women of the militia tenants also earned some money because of course
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each plantation had the contractual or economic responsibility to supply clothes, etc
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for the slave population,
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and so many of these white women were employed as seamstresses etc.
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[narrator] The poor make use of everything,
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as Fred Smith finds out in the militia families croft. [/narrator]
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Perhaps the most interesting finds were these tiny pieces pf ceramic,
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that have been whittled down into, uh, what are gaming pieces.
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These were probably used for chess or for backgammon.
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We've also found a large number of buttons,
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which suggest that perhaps somebody at some time at this house
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may have been a seamstress or a tailor.
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Here you can see even better the coral rubble construction techniques that were used,
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uh, building these houses.
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These were just coral rubble that were picked up from the ground and surrounding bedrock,
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uh, pieced together using a lime plaster mortar
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that would sort of bake the limestone
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and get it into a powder form, add water,
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and that would be the basis for sort of concrete in those days.
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And it's very strong construction technique, as you can see.
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[narrator] So it's weathered well. [/narrator]
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Yeah it has certainly lasted.
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[narrator] Ironically, things got worse for the poor whites after emancipation in 1834.
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Apprenticed and experienced black slaves were able to transfer their skills to the free market.
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Redlegs didn't have those skills,
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and anyway, they didn't want to do work thay associated with black slavery,
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identifying instead with the rich planters who wanted nothing to do with them. [/narrator]
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During slavery, the slaves were not supposed to do anything that's skilled.
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But of course, eh, there were skilled carpenters, who did all sorts of skilled work.
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But they weren't supposed to.