DR RITA PEMBERTON

The distress faced by planters in Tobago plunged to new depths during the second half of the 19th century. The need to maintain plantation operations caused planters to seek recourse in another system of labour, the metayage system - a system of share cropping in which the planters provided equipment, carts, mills and machinery and curing house.The workers, called metayers, were responsible for all activities, from planting to the manufacture of the sugar using the equipment on the plantation. The final product was shared between planters and metayers in variable proportions.

These agreements were made by unwritten contracts which varied from estate to estate, and when estates changed hands, from one owner to another. The system was first introduced in Prospect and Mary's Hill estates in 1842, and was not initially popular with the workers. Due to concerns about the unwritten contracts which left them vulnerable to exploitation, they avoided metayage arrangements opting instead to rent land and establish their own independent cultivation.

The twin crises of the 1846 Sugar Duties Act and the competition from the emergence of new sugar producers were crippling blows to Tobago planters. The hurricane of 1847, the collapse of a number of merchant houses which serviced the trade in the region, and the collapse of the West Indian Bank, the only bank Tobago in 1847, didn't help the situation much. This caused absentee owners to sell or abandon their estates and new resident owners took over the island's sugar industry. The number of estates in operation was reduced, while for those that were barely functional, the threat of abandonment loomed. The end result was an increased dependence on metayage and a weakening of planter control over Tobago's land resources.

As the century wore on planters' problems multiplied. Finding themselves short of capital to repair buildings, maintain their operations and pay wages to their workers, the favoured solution was to reduce the already paltry wages and terminate free medical attention and other incentives to their workers. The workers went on strike across the island and planter/metayer tensions became more inflamed.

The termination of the garrison in 1854, which was the main source of cash injections on the island, was another serious blow to planters who simply could not pay wages. Rather than accept the low wages, workers moved off the estates to live in independent villages. They registered to work as metayers on several estates and in the Windward areas, and there was migration to Scarborough where the opportunity to buy land was greatest.

In desperation, planters became more dependent on the despised metayage system and metayers were able to obtain additional rights. Among these were the rights to pasture stock, to gather wood and grass on estate property, and increased access to provision grounds. The shortage of credit to planters increased the bargaining power of the workers for access to land.

The metairie system was fraught with confl