Qualla: Trinity Plantation

Trinity Plantation: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1837, four years after slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, the executors of a merchant banker named Job Mathew Raikes received a government payment of 4,026 pounds. It was compensation not for lost property or damaged goods, but for 212 human beings who could no longer be held in bondage at Trinity plantation in Jamaica's Saint Mary Parish. The sum amounted to roughly nineteen pounds per person. Trinity's story, spanning more than a century of colonial sugar production, is inseparable from the lives of the enslaved people whose labor built its wealth, whose rebellion challenged its authority, and whose freedom its owners were eventually paid to accept.

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Trinity Plantation: The Empire of Bayly's Vale

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Trinity sat south of Port Maria in the lush interior of Saint Mary Parish, one of several plantations owned by Zachary Bayly that together formed an estate known as Bayly's Vale. Bayly, who died in 1769, also controlled the Tryall, Brimmer Hall, and Roslyn plantations, a contiguo...

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Trinity Plantation: Sugar, Water, and the Mile-Long Aqueduct

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sugar refining demanded enormous quantities of water, and Trinity's location at the confluence of the Port Maria Western River (now called the Otram River) and the Negro River gave it a natural advantage. But natural advantage was not enough. In 1797, Nathaniel Bayly completed a ...

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Trinity Plantation: The Rebellion of 1760

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The article's brief mention of what happened in 1760 belies its significance. Enslaved people from Trinity launched a rebellion that swelled to over 400 participants before troops dispatched by the Governor suppressed it. Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century was a tinderbox. Ens...

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Trinity Plantation: Abolition and Auction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, Trinity held 212 enslaved people. The compensation paid to Raikes's executors in 1837 tells a story the legislation itself tried to obscure: the British government spent twenty million pounds compensating enslavers, not the enslaved....

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