elanya

So, Emancipation in the Bahamas (and the rest of the British colonies) happened in 1834. In the Bahamas there was a 4 year 'apprenticeship' program where slaves were expected to work for their old masters for wages while they adjusted to their freedom or some crap.

I was just looking at a list of registered ships built in Harbour Island between 1796 and 1843, and I noticed that beginning in 1836, ships start becoming larger on the whole. Before that most are one-masted, and after that, the ratio almost flips so that two-masted are more common and single-masted are the occasional outliers on the pattern.

Does this represent some different way in which labour was being organized? The increase in shipbuilding is certainly linked to the pineapple boom that was happening at this time (exports start going up in 1835) which relied on a truck system of blacks and poor whites growing pineapples and rich white merchants and shipowners making money off their backs... But I don't know if that's *enough* to explain things, and in any case it is all clearly tied together. An interesting side note for future research, perhaps, I'm afraid I don't have the data resources to explore it more thoroughly at this time...