This engraving titled A Tread-Mill Scene in Jamaica (also published in a variant version titled An Interior View of Jamaican House of Correction) played an important role in the abolitionist campaign against the apprenticeship system. Apprenticeship — planned as a six-year transitional system and in the end lasting only four years — was introduced in Jamaica in 1834.
It renamed enslaved people as “apprentices” and compelled them to work for those who had formerly been their owners. Although apprenticeship was initially accepted by most British antislavery campaigners as a gradual means of ending slavery, the conflicts and violence that accompanied it eventually convinced these abolitionists to campaign for its end.
Because apprentice-holders, unlike slaveholders, were not legally permitted to use direct physical violence as a means of control, apprenticeship saw an increase in the use of the prison system as a form of labor discipline. Many of the most serious and widely publicized abuses during apprenticeship took place in Jamaican prisons. This abolitionist print, which illustrated a shocking first-person account, A Narrative of Events . . . , by James Williams, a former apprentice, attempts to capture them all.
At the center of the image is a treadmill. Treadmills were introduced into most Jamaican prisons during apprenticeship as a supposedly humane form of punishment. As this abolitionist exposé emphasizes, they soon became sites of torture. Prisoners were supposed to step regularly upward, several inches at a time, turning the wheel as they did so. In practice, the wheel often turned so fast that those “working” it had no chance of maintaining their footing, and so slipped off, hanging by wrists strapped to a bar above the wheel as the wheel turned and its steps repeatedly struck their legs.
Prison drivers flogged those who came off the wheel and sometimes those who had not, in an attempt to force them to continue to step or to refind their footing if they had fallen off. The whip added to the pain inflicted by the punishment.
