Ligon several times tried to resolve this contradiction by saying that as a people the blacks were cruel and false, ‘yet no rule so general but hath his acception’. Among them, he said, are some as honest and faithful ‘as amongst those of Europe, or any other part of the world’. He could not decide which racist cliché fitted: the docile, pitiable slave or the resistant and troublesome.
One of these ‘acceptions’ was Sambo, who worked with Ligon on clearing the church paths. There seems to have developed between the two men something akin to friendship, however unequal. To find the right way through the thick jungle, Ligon employed a compass, which fascinated Sambo. Ligon explained the points of the compass, which Sambo ‘presently learnt by heart, and promis’d me never to forget’. According to Ligon, the reason why the needle pointed north (described by Ligon as being because
of ‘huge Rocks of Loadstone’ ‘in the north part of the world’) ‘was a little too hard for him’ and threw him into a ‘strange muse’. To ‘put him out of it’, Ligon told him to hold his axe near the compass and move it about to see the needle turn. This so impressed Sambo that he decided he wanted to be made a Christian, so as ‘to be endued with all those knowledges he wanted’.
Ligon promised to do his best, and brought up Sambo’s plea with his master. It is not clear if this was Modyford; if not, then it is likely to have been Drax or Middleton, whose properties bordered Kendal. The ‘master’ explained the position: ‘That the people of that Island were governed by the laws of England, and by those laws, we could not make a Christian a slave.’ Ligon had a clever response ready: ‘I told him, my request was far different from that, for I desired him to make a slave a Christian. His answer was, that it was true, there was a great difference in that: But, being once a Christian, he could no more account him a slave, and so lose the hold they had of them as slaves, by making them Christians; and by that means should open such a gap, as all the Planters in the Islands would curse him.’ Ligon ‘was struck mute, and poor Sambo kept out the Church; as ingenious, as honest, and as good a nature’d poor soul, as ever wore black, or eat green’.
Sambo may have been patronised and ridiculed for his reasons for wanting to become a Christian, but the issue of slave conversion would remain hugely important. When slavery was justified by the Church, as, most famously, in the Papal Bull of 1454, this support was clearly dependent on the conversion of those enslaved (‘the Trade must be allowed’, ran the argument, ‘the Christian Scheme of enlarging the Flock cannot well be carried on without it’). In the same way, the defence of slavery, that their condition was ‘bettered’ by being removed from Africa to the West Indies, was also underwritten by the idea that the slaves would be Christianised. The fact that this did not happen would severely undermine the planters’ defence of their practice.
Richard Ligon shied away from detailing cruelty to blacks. In his largely benign description of slavery, he refused to face the implications of his own evidence, for instance about slave suicide. In fact, he contributed to the formation of racial stereotypes. His is the first recorded use of the word ‘Pickanninney’ to describe a black infant, and his suggestions that the ‘Negroes’ were ‘a happy people, whom so little contents’ would become a stereotype of blacks in America. Ligon was more forthcoming about cruelty to the white servants, as if this somehow made up for the much grimmer position of the enslaved Africans. He even goes so far as to say
that the bonded whites had ‘worser lives’, though his own account contradicts this. In his model of plantation expenses he recommends spending £58 16s on clothes for 14 white servants, but only £35 in total for 100 black slaves. When an ox died, he wrote, the white servants feasted on the meat; the blacks ended up with the head, entrails and skin.
Both the white indentured servants and the black slaves had very poor diets. Some planters imported salted fish of the lowest quality from Europe or North America, but the staples were cassava bread, and a porridge-like mush made from Indian corn, known as loblolly. This was particularly disliked by the slaves, who preferred to roast the corn on the cob, considered animal food by the Europeans. To drink was water for the slaves, and ‘mobby’ or ‘perino’ for the servants and poor whites. As the Reverend James Parker wrote to John Winthrop, the ‘common people’ ‘are very meane in respect of provisions … though its true the rich live high’.
Indeed they did. The contrast with the diet of the poor was spectacular. Richard Ligon described in lip-smacking detail one feast he attended at the home of James Drax. There was beef, ‘the greatest rarity in the Island’ – great roasted breast, boiled rump and baked cheeks. The tongue and other delicacies had been made into pies ‘season’d with sweet Herbs finely minc’d’. In all, there were 14 dishes just of beef. The next course brought pork prepared in three different ways, chickens, turkey, duck, veal and shoulder of young goat, all cooked in a variety of fruit, spices, herbs and wines. ‘These being taken off the table’, wrote Ligon, ‘another course is set on.’ This consisted of bacon, fish roe, pickled oysters, caviar and anchovies, together with olives, fruits and pies. The puddings and fruit kept on arriving, to be rounded off with Ligon’s favourite, the magnificent pineapple, ‘worth all that went before’. All of this was washed down with gallons of perino, English beer, French, Spanish and Madeira wines, together with sherry and brandy (Madeira, unlike other wines, which deteriorate in the tropics, improves in a high temperature and retains its quality almost indefinitely). Ligon evidently relished all this, or, more exactly, was impressed by it, but it is hard to envisage enjoying such a mass of food and alcohol at the hottest time of the day in the tropics.
Of course, the Jacobean court was well known for its Lucullan feasting. The Earl of Carlisle himself, Barbados’s earlier proprietor, was famous for his culinary ostentation. Guests would arrive to ogle a vast table spread with food, at which point the whole thing was removed, thrown away and replaced with identical food just come from the kitchens. Such displays denoted status, and conspicuous hospitality was part of the code of the Stuart gentry. Nonetheless, the punishing heat aside, such extravagance in
Barbados, where so many provisions were expensively imported, and so much of the population was close to starvation, is shocking. The Drax meal, most of which must have been carried by hand up from the coast, stands as a vivid testament not only to the astonishing new wealth that the Sugar Revolution brought to Barbados, but also to the wild disparities in lifestyle and consumption.
Certainly, after a mere three or four years of growing and processing sugar, at a serendipitous time when later competitors – the French and Dutch – were yet to get off the mark, the soil was fresh and the price on a high spike, Drax was suddenly extremely wealthy. He boasted to Ligon that he had started his sugar business with only £300, but had now built up so much money that it was only a matter of time before he bought an estate in England worth £10,000 a year, ‘and all by this plant of Sugar’.
At the next-door estate, shortly before Ligon’s arrival in September 1647, a series of land deals had taken place that had seen Thomas Middleton become the sole owner of the Mount Estate in St George’s parish, while the Drax brothers took control of Drax Hope and Drax Hall to the northeast of Mount. Soon afterwards, in May of that year, James bought out his brother William’s part of the plantation for ‘five thousand pounds sterling’, and became the sole owner of an estate of 700 acres in what is still the most fertile part of the island – the high acreage that straddles the border of St John’s and St George’s parishes, where the soil is a rich, water-holding red clay, and the rainfall is abundant.
Drax’s wife Meliora had by now produced four or five sons and two daughters, although neither she nor the children are mentioned in Ligon’s account of his trips to the Drax estate, so we have to assume they were kept in the background. Instead, the field was given over to entertainments. Ligon reported several visits, in particular one on a Sunday. Drax, for all his Puritan background, was, apparently, ‘not so strict an observer’ of the Lord’s Day ‘as to deny himself lawful recreations’. This consisted, to Ligon’s delight, in more showing off on the part of Drax. He was rich enough not only, uniquely in the island, to serve beef at his table, but also to recruit and use his slaves for entertainment, in the Portuguese fashion. One visit by Ligon was brightened by the spectacle of two of Drax’s ‘Portugal Negroes’ giving an elaborate display of fencing, in which they were ‘skilful’ and ‘nimble’. At the end of the show, they ‘give their respects to their Master’, followed by a song ‘very loud and sweet’.
On another occasion, the slaves provided a different diversion for Drax and his entourage. A Muscovy duck was brought to one of his ponds and the Negroes were charged to catch it without diving under the water. This
provided excellent ‘sport’ for the onlookers, until a newcomer, unaware of the ban on diving, caught the prey. It was a ‘Negro maid’. Ligon pleaded on her behalf and she was allowed to take the duck away.
In these ways, successful planters like Drax demonstrated their wealth, their hospitality and their power. In fact, Drax himself came to personify the opportunities available on the island – the chance of riches from a small beginning; and the enormous power that a successful man could wield over his world and the people in it.
Drax may have been the stand-out success story of the 1640s, but other more middling sugar farmers and processors clearly shared in the new bounty. Inventories of estates made before 1647 rarely included beds. Farmers slept in cotton hammocks in low-slung shacks. But thereafter, even the smaller-scale planters moved to four-poster beds, and for the first time other furniture such as stools, chests and leather chairs start appearing in inventories, together with pictures, candlesticks, books, mirrors and lamps. Brass kettles and other kitchen implements replaced iron versions, and in 1648 silver objects made their first appearance, alongside other obvious tokens of wealth and success such as gold watches, silk stockings and lace handkerchiefs.
The torrent of cash that the Sugar Revolution poured down on the heads of those farmers fortunate enough to be well placed for the change and hardy or lucky enough to survive the ever-present threat of disease now made Barbados a serious market for English manufactured goods. By 1650, the tiny island of Barbados, less than 170 square miles, had a white population of more than 30,000. This was about equivalent to Virginia and Massachusetts combined, and on average far richer. A visitor to Barbados that year wrote that the island ‘flourisheth so much, that it hath more people and Commerce then all the Ilands of the Indies’. Traders found that they could double their money bringing goods from Europe and then make a further 50 per cent on the sugar they carried on the return journey. By the end of the 1640s, 100 ships a year called at Bridgetown, the majority of them Dutch; four years later, that number had doubled.
Richard Ligon noticed a transformation of the island in just the three years he was there, from 1647 to 1650. When he arrived, the land was largely uncleared, provisions were short, and the houses of the planters low-roofed and unbearably hot and squalid. He himself designed a wooden frame house on a new style and scale for Thomas Middleton, and noted the vast improvements in lifestyle for the planters. It was all down to sugar. In just the few years Ligon was there, sugar-processing technology – and therefore output and profits – had improved enormously. By 1648, sugar
had become the means of payment in 60 per cent of transactions on the island, and, as Ligon wrote, the ‘soul of Trade in this Island’. If the process of the consolidation of the acreage into large estates, ‘fit for plantations of sugar’, continued, Ligon reckoned that Barbados would shortly become ‘one of the richest spots of earth under the sun’. In fact, it had already become, quite suddenly, the wealthiest English colony in the world. In the 20 months before the end of the decade, the total value of Barbados exports had reached the amazing sum of £3,097,800.
It had helped enormously that during the short but transformatory period of the Sugar Revolution, Barbados had enjoyed minimal interference from home, and had basked in the advantages of free trade. Alongside this laissez-faire attitude to commerce had flourished a friendly, hospitable attitude between the rich white planters, and religious toleration found in few places in the world at this time. Jews and Roman Catholics were left unmolested, and Dutch, French and other foreign settlers made welcome. While the colonists in the mainland North American colonies fell out, often disastrously, over what seem now obscure differences of religious doctrine, in cosmopolitan Barbados most rubbed along fine and concentrated on the main deal: making money as fast as possible.
Not that the island was in any way complacent or laid-back. Every sugar planter faced severe risks: livestock, crucial for driving the mills, could be laid low by a mysterious illness; a crucial piece of machinery could break; fire could break out. Any of these could ruin an entire crop and see the descent of the planter into bankruptcy.
Perhaps even more worrying was the threat to the ‘masters’ inherent in the unequal and coercive new system from its victims – the servants and slaves. A letter from 1648 mentioned ‘many hundreds Rebell Negro Slaves in the woods’. Ligon, whose book’s accompanying map included an illustration of runaway slaves being rounded up, commented how the planters built their houses ‘in the manner of fortifications, and have Lines, Bulwarks, and Bastions to defend themselves, in case there should be any uproar of commotion in the Island, either by the Christian servants, or Negro slaves’. The planters, he reported, collected supplies of water to see them through a siege or ‘to throw down upon the naked bodies of the Negroes, scalding hot’. Nonetheless, Ligon considered it ‘a strange thing … [the Negroes] accounted a bloody people’, that they didn’t ‘commit some horrid massacre upon the Christians, thereby to enfranchise themselves, and become Masters of the Island’.