Chapter One - Drums in the Heat of the Night
Chapter One - Drums in the Heat of the Night
An Estate burns in Matanzas - June 1825
The first most plantation owners around Guamacaro knew of the slave uprising that had broken out was when drums began to sound it the darkness of the forests. It was a call to arms, although few startled whites realised it, for the slave populations. Many sugar plantations had at least fifty slaves. Larger ones had close to two hundred. And so it was that the mobs of men and women who emerged from the forest's edge under cover of the dark knew where they were going. They had worked these fields and workshops, sweated along the narrow paths and water ways, and now they followed their feet back to the big houses of their slave masters.
The violence was terrible and indiscriminate. Panicked stories of survivors who rode through the terrifying night spoke of burning houses and storerooms. Of slave masters and enforcers hacked apart with sugar cane machetes and knives. Few were spared the terror of the assault - women, children, eldery, sick - all were put to the blade by insurrectionists in the dark of the night. It took a full night of hard riding, and most of the following morning, for news to reach the shocked authorities in Havana. They were not to know it yet, but by that point over four hundred whites were dead and an approximate 7,000 former slaves under arms in a major rebellion in the west of the island of Cuba.
Most were from the Yoruba people of West Africa, brought over in horrifyingly cramped slave ships, or born into slavery on the island. They had toiled and suffered and died on the sugar plantations of the island for decades and now they took to the hills and forests, armed with the tools of their labour and the weapons of their former overseers. One piece of information that the authorities in Havana did manage to learn was the watchword of the rebels. It was a Yoruba word, used to tell friend from foe, and whilst the panicked colonial officers who assembled their militia were not to know it yet, it was a word that would symbolise a change in Cuba and the World forever.
The word was Ominira - Freedom.
Hi all - the POD of this new timeline is that the slave revolt of 1825, a real revolt that turned into a running low-level resistance in western Cuba until the 1840s, is a lot...bigger. That's all I want to cue up at the moment, but I hope it gives people an idea of how we've diverged from history.
An Estate burns in Matanzas - June 1825
The first most plantation owners around Guamacaro knew of the slave uprising that had broken out was when drums began to sound it the darkness of the forests. It was a call to arms, although few startled whites realised it, for the slave populations. Many sugar plantations had at least fifty slaves. Larger ones had close to two hundred. And so it was that the mobs of men and women who emerged from the forest's edge under cover of the dark knew where they were going. They had worked these fields and workshops, sweated along the narrow paths and water ways, and now they followed their feet back to the big houses of their slave masters.
The violence was terrible and indiscriminate. Panicked stories of survivors who rode through the terrifying night spoke of burning houses and storerooms. Of slave masters and enforcers hacked apart with sugar cane machetes and knives. Few were spared the terror of the assault - women, children, eldery, sick - all were put to the blade by insurrectionists in the dark of the night. It took a full night of hard riding, and most of the following morning, for news to reach the shocked authorities in Havana. They were not to know it yet, but by that point over four hundred whites were dead and an approximate 7,000 former slaves under arms in a major rebellion in the west of the island of Cuba.
Most were from the Yoruba people of West Africa, brought over in horrifyingly cramped slave ships, or born into slavery on the island. They had toiled and suffered and died on the sugar plantations of the island for decades and now they took to the hills and forests, armed with the tools of their labour and the weapons of their former overseers. One piece of information that the authorities in Havana did manage to learn was the watchword of the rebels. It was a Yoruba word, used to tell friend from foe, and whilst the panicked colonial officers who assembled their militia were not to know it yet, it was a word that would symbolise a change in Cuba and the World forever.
The word was Ominira - Freedom.
Hi all - the POD of this new timeline is that the slave revolt of 1825, a real revolt that turned into a running low-level resistance in western Cuba until the 1840s, is a lot...bigger. That's all I want to cue up at the moment, but I hope it gives people an idea of how we've diverged from history.
