Bittersweet (8 page)

At first the number of African slaves remained small, and further south, the first shipment of black slaves to Brazil only happened in 1538, around the time that Brazilian sugar began to reach other markets in Europe. The prospect of riches in the New World was clear to all, but it would take a while for other nations to work out how best to get their share.

HYPOCRAS

Take a gallon of claret or white wine, and put therein four ounces of ginger, an ounce and a half of nutmegs, of cloves one quarter, of sugar four pound; let all this stand together in a pot at least twelve hours, then take it, and put it into a clean bag made for this purpose, so that the wine may come with good leisure from the spices.

Gervase Markham,
The English House-wife
, London, 1615

4
THE ENGLISH
AND THE SUGAR
BUSINESS

S
pain and Portugal were the first nations to begin serious exploration, and the first to start laying serious claims to new territories outside Europe. After 1493 they had the authority of the Treaty of Tordesillas to back their claims, and the Portuguese promptly claimed Africa as their own, but the other nations of Europe were unimpressed. In this treaty, Pope Alexander VI specified a line from Pole to Pole passing through a point west of the Cape Verde Islands at about 50 degrees west of Greenwich. This line assigned perpetual ownership, to either Brazil or Spain, of all new lands that were found, anywhere in the world.

In 1529 the Treaty of Zaragoza (or Saragossa) added a further dividing line at about 145 degrees east, completing the division of the globe into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres, and gave the Philippines to Spain. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, there were Protestants around who cared little for rules made by a Pope, and even Queen Mary could not get her Privy Council to endorse the treaty. Loyalty to nation and profit took precedence over any religious loyalties.

In fact, about the only time that the British, French or Dutch recognised the treaty line was when they argued that European peace treaties had no force beyond the line. In other words, when it suited them the line was there, but at other times it evaporated, and there was ‘no peace beyond the line'.

So in Queen Mary's time, the Privy Council gravely forbade African expeditions. They did their duty by saying that much, and the English ships continued to sail. The English knew that even the Catholic French took no notice of the treaty. As far back as 1523, when a French captain called Jean the Florentine had led an attack on a Spanish treasure ship, and King Charles I of Spain had protested over it, King Francis II of France had answered, ‘Show me the testament of our father Adam, where all these lands were assigned to your Majesty.'

If there was no problem playing tricks on the Dons under Catholic Queen Mary, there was firm if subtle encouragement once Protestant Queen Elizabeth was on the throne. Thus her Privy Council also told the sailors not to go, and then winked at them as they sailed off. Even if Spanish and Portuguese spies knew all this, there was little they could do, what with the French Calvinists having a colony at Fort Coligny in what is now Brazil, the Portuguese and Dutch squabbling over the Spice Islands and much else as well, not to mention the Dutch, the English, and even the Danes, all poised to join in and take a share of the Spanish–Portuguese cake—and all of those countries got their share of sugar as well.

The German lawyer Paul Hentzner visited London in 1598. He tells us of his visit that:

. . . [the English] are more polite in eating than the French, devouring less bread, but more meat, which they roast in perfection; they put a great deal of sugar in their drink; their beds are covered with tapestry, even those of farmers; they are often molested with the scurvy, said to have first crept into England with the Norman Conquest . . .

This sugar, though, had dire consequences, Hentzner thought, as he reported on the English sovereign, Elizabeth I:

. . . next came the queen in the sixty-fifth year of her age, as we were told, very majestic; her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth black; (a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar) . . .

A number among the courtiers he met would have been benefiting from the price sugar commanded, for even as its availability increased, so did the hunger for sweet tastes, and the courtiers, as was common, benefited from trade even as they pretended to despise the traders. They sent ships to the Mediterranean to trade in sugar, and to Madeira where they bought sweet wines and sugar, and they also traded in fine sugar from Amsterdam. By the time Shakespeare posed the apparent puzzle of the Clown's sugar in 1609, everybody knew about sugar, even if they had not actually tasted it. Soon, even that would change.

One curiosity, though: the usual editions of Hentzner's account of his travels feature a drawing of Queen Elizabeth, the work of one Signor Zuccaro. Given his name, it is hard to avoid mentioning that, sweetly and wisely, Signor Zuccaro did not show the Queen's teeth.

PIRATES AND TRADERS

Sir John Hawkyns (to use his own spelling) was a Devon man like his kinsman, Francis Drake, and he is often called the first English slave trader. While he did indeed sell a few slaves that he took from Portuguese ships, his justification would have been that he did not trade regularly in slaves, that he did not take slaves, but that he needed slaves to force a trade with the Spaniards. Much of this was true. A more valid (and more honest) justification might have been that if priests and prelates, rulers and great lords could see no harm in taking and trading slaves, why should he object to making a fortune?

Whatever the case, it was the age of the seadog, and there was just one law at sea: if you saw a foreign ship and thought you could capture it, you did—and if you thought it could capture you, you fled. It was a seadog-eat-seadog world—that was something Hawkyns knew well, and so did all the Devon men.

Thomas Wyndham was very much the genuine seadog. He had sailed with Hawkyns' father and later mounted his own expeditions. In 1552 Wyndham was master of the
Lion
, when he was forced to land in the Canaries, on a small island between Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, to mend a leak below the waterline. His crew took 70 chests of sugar ashore to lighten the ship, but these chests were seen by islanders who claimed they came from a ship that had just left port, which led to Wyndham being accused of piracy.

The matter was sorted out easily enough when Wyndham's men captured the governor, a man he described as ‘a very aged gentleman of seventy'; being thus well placed to negotiate, they made good their departure. A year later Wyndham died on the way home after he had sailed to the African coast with another ship, seeking trade in gold and pepper, but he had shown the way to work. You can negotiate with the Dons, said the Devon men, but you need to get them over a barrel first, if you want the best of the bargain. That was the norm for trade in those times, and if Wyndham had in truth taken the chests of sugar, well, that would not have been unusual either.

In 1562 John Hawkyns was 30 years old, and he was ready to go trading. He sailed for Africa, planning to go after things like gold dust and ivory, materials which had a ready home market. He sailed for Africa in three ships, with the financial backing of the treasurer of the navy (it helped some that this official was also his father-in-law), two city magistrates, the Lord Mayor of London, a future Lord Mayor and, most importantly, Queen Elizabeth herself. They captured 300 slaves, mainly by taking them from Portuguese ships headed for the Cape Verde Islands and, having annoyed the Portuguese, set out to tweak a few Spanish beards.

Arriving at Hispaniola, Hawkyns claimed he needed to careen his ships and that he could only pay for this by selling some of the slaves. Then, having opened up the trade to raise careening money, he opened it up a little more and so managed to return to England with a clear profit. That, at least, was the story the two sides told—it is likely that the Spanish colonists, chafing under trading restrictions imposed by the home government, were happy to play along with a neat cover story.

On his third voyage, Hawkyns sailed with six ships, two of them belonging to the Queen herself. At the Spanish colonial port of Rio de la Hacha, the English fleet fired off a few cannon and took the town. Once they were ashore and safely in charge, two slaves, one a mulatto, the other a Negro, revealed where some Spanish treasure was hidden in exchange for help in gaining their freedom.

Hawkyns claimed afterwards that because he was an honest trader he took only 4000 pesos from the treasure for each of the slaves he left in the town, and returned the rest. Then, because the loyalties of race and class counted for more than the loyalties of nationality or religion, he handed over the slaves who had so treacherously revealed where the treasure was hidden. The Spaniards, equally keen to respect this assistance from a gallant and honourable adversary, and sensitive to distinctions of either race or guilt, promptly quartered the Negro, and hanged the mulatto, both for treason.

Once again, the story may be open to some doubt, since the Spaniards claimed the slaves they were forced to buy were old and feeble, sickly and dying. Perhaps the execution of the traitorous slaves was a fiction added to the tale to make it sound better, or perhaps they really were done to death so that the guilty parties would not meet a similar fate.

Hawkyns' modern English apologists argue that the slaves he sold were used to extort money from the Spanish and to stimulate trading—so he was not so much trading in slaves as using them so that he could trade. The end result, though, was that his third voyage brought the first West Indies sugar into England, and Francis Drake had gained valuable experience in dealing harshly with the Spanish. You needed a fierce resolve, cold steel, iron cannonballs and plenty of lead musketballs to trade on an even footing with the Dons.

Curiously, lead is a recurring theme in the story of sugar. Alexander VI, the Pope who approved the Treaty of Tordesillas, father of Cesar and Lucrezia Borgia (among others), bribed and poisoned his way to the papal throne. He probably died of a fever, though at the time there were plenty willing to believe that he had accidentally drunk poisoned wine set aside for Cardinal Corneto, and so suffered a just fate. That, at least, is the story that Alexandre Dumas told in one of his novels.

The poison the Borgias used was probably lead acetate, a soluble lead salt, known from its sweet taste as ‘sugar of lead'. It is likely that Corneto's wine, if it was his, was laced with this. But whether or not Pope Alexander VI died in this ironic (leadic?) way, we will probably never know.

There was another link between lead and sugar, apart from the use of lead pipes to carry cane juice from the mill to the boiler-house. Around AD 1000, lead acetate was used in Egypt as a defecant, an agent to clean the heated cane juice, but using lead like this was soon banned. After that time, suspect syrups were exposed near a latrine where the action of hydrogen sulfide coming from the cesspit would produce a tell-tale black precipitate of lead sulfide in the syrup.

In 1847 a British patent proposed the use of lead salts in the preparation of sugar, an idea which alarmed so many people that Earl Grey felt the need to send a circular to all British colonial governors, warning them against allowing it.

THE INDENTURED SERVANTS

Given the piratical habits of all sides, it is hardly surprising that when
William and John
, the first British ship to reach Barbados, arrived there in 1627, it carried 80 English settlers, and also half a dozen Negroes plundered from a Portuguese vessel ‘met' on the way. On the return voyage, the crew captured a Portuguese ship with a cargo of sugar. This cargo was sold for £9600, which went to benefit the colonists. While the colony might thus seem to have begun on a combination of black slaves and sugar, it really began with indentured white labour, and with crops other than sugar.

A year after the British had first settled on Barbados, Henry Winthrop reported a mere ‘50 slaves of Indeynes and Blacks'— and that included the blacks collected on the way to the island. Between 1628 and 1803 the island imported 350 000 slaves, of whom 100 000 were women, but when the last of the slaves were freed in 1834 they were just 66 000 in number. Many of those would have been born after imported slaves stopped arriving, for when slaves could no longer be shipped in, breeding was encouraged. For a comparison, in the United States, between 1803 when the importing of slaves was officially banned, and 1865, the slave population increased tenfold due to internal population increase.

The white indentured servants of the seventeenth-century colonies were seen as people excess to the needs of the home nations. As early as 1610, Governor Dale of Virginia pointed out that the Spanish had greatly added to the (white) populations of their American colonies by sending out their poor, their rogues, their vagrants and their convicts. In 1629 Henry Winthrop realised that he needed ‘every yere sume twenty three servants' to work his tobacco plantation in Barbados. While these were not always available, the English Civil War began to provide shipments of prisoners in 1642. Soon a group of kidnappers known as the Spirits became active, ‘crimping' or kidnapping people who found themselves carried to Barbados, where the ships' captains would, in effect, sell them into slavery.

Many of these servants were seen as troublemakers in their new homes. The Scots servants were rated more highly than the English; the Irish servants were rated so poorly that the Barbados Assembly enacted a law in 1644 against any increase in their numbers. Because Barbados had to take what it could get, however, some 20 per cent of servants were still Irish in 1660.

In the meantime, yellow fever had come to the New World with the African slave ships. Spread by the mosquito
Aedes
aegypti
, it had to wait until a fast trip carried a single generation of mosquitoes across the Atlantic from Africa in the open barrels of foul drinking water. Once they reached the islands and South America, the insects dispersed and passed the disease on. To European populations, this tropical disease was a serious threat. Those who survived never got it again, so an immune population of survivors eventually developed, but new arrivals were always at risk.