The Sugar Barons (15 page)

If, after Ligon’s description of a feast at Drax Hall, we might have been wondering how they actually did anything for the rest of the day after such a huge consumption of food and alcohol, Biet provided the answer: those rich enough to have underlings managing their business didn’t try. Instead, they subsided into a sybaritic torpor. ‘After one has dined, and the table has been cleared’, the French priest continued, ‘a trencher full of pipes and another of tobacco is put on the table along with a bowl full of brandy, into which is put plenty of sugar.’ Eggs were added, and ‘the host takes a little silver cup, fills it with this liqueur and drinks to the health of whoever is in front of him. After he has drunk, he refills the cup and gives it to the person whose health he has just drunk; this person does the same thing to another, and this procedure is continued until there is nothing left in the bowl.’ All the time, ‘well built young slaves’ refilled the pipes, which they then presented on their knees. ‘The afternoon passes thus in drinking and smoking, but quite often one is so drunk that he cannot return home’, the priest continued. ‘Our gentlemen found this life extremely pleasant.’

Another visitor a few years earlier described the typical planter as ‘A German for his drinking, and a Welshman for his welcome … if it raines he toapes [drinks] securely under his roofe … hee takes it ill, if you pass
by his doore, and do not tast of Liquor.’ Others confirm that Barbadians took it as a severe insult if ‘the trafeller dose denie to stay to drinke’. Soon, Father Biet found it too much: ‘Sometimes I went along’, he said of trips around the island, ‘but, not taking pleasure in this visiting because one has to drink in a extraordinary way, I did not always go.’

Such heavy drinking was, of course, disastrous for the health of the islanders, as well as for their society and families. Furthermore, the rum was actually poisonous. From the time that rum was first distilled on the island, visitors had noticed the prevalence of what came to be known as ‘Dry Belly-ache’. The symptoms were ‘Tortions in the Bowells’ – agonising stomach cramps. Sometimes the victim lost the use of his limbs, and for many the disease was fatal. Only in 1676 was the condition identified as lead poisoning, and it was not until 1745 that the pipes used in rum distilling were recognised as the cause.

Propagandists for the island, who could not deny the appalling attrition from disease, claimed that Barbados was healthy; it was the debauched habits of its people that explained the frightening death rate. But temperance was no guarantee of good health. A Swiss doctor who visited the island in 1661 commented that ‘Most persons who come here from Europe will have to overcome an illness which the inhabitants call Contry Disease.’ This, he wrote, made victims ‘turn quite yellow, their stomachs and legs swell, and sometimes their legs burst and remain open’. The doctor blamed unfamiliar food, too much liquid and sleeping in hammocks in the open air, but the term was probably used to refer to a variety of diseases: gastro-intestinal complaints such as dysentery or dropsy, caused by bad hygiene or the consumption of contaminated food or water – or the fevers that struck particularly hard during the wet season.

Life expectancy at birth during the seventeenth century in England was about 35. In the West Indies it was as low as 10. While in New England transplanted English folk could expect to live longer, and parent more surviving offspring than in England, in the West Indies the reverse was the case. In St Michael parish, which admittedly included Bridgetown, the unhealthiest place on the island, the register records four times as many deaths as marriages during the 1650s and three times as many deaths as baptisms. In London, the unhealthiest place in England by far, sickness was concentrated among the poor. Colonists, then, expected that rank would protect them, as it did to a large extent at home. But in Barbados, the great and the good were struck down as well.

For many, sugar was worth the risks presented by this extraordinary death rate. And sugar was now benefiting many more than just the Barbadians.
The ever-growing new trade began to swell the customs revenue back in England, while raising demand for insurance and finance services, as well as sugar refineries. Some two thirds of the Barbados sugar production was profitably re-exported to the Continent. New fleets of merchantmen were now needed to bring out equipment and supplies and return with the produce. Demand for processing equipment, packaging, building materials and vessels created new workshops, factories, saw mills and shipyards, both in England and in the North American colonies.

In the 1650s, the New England–Barbados trade really took off, helped by the partial removal from the scene of the Dutch, as well as other factors. The experience gained by North American mariners since the first trading voyages made the long journey, if not hazard-free, then certainly less dangerous. Barbados consumed more and more of New England’s surplus foodstuffs and livestock. In return, the New Englanders not only brought back specie – vital for discharging their debts to England for manufactured goods – but also, increasingly, tropical products, particularly sugar, molasses and rum, were now finding a market in New England.

Much of the new trade was oiled by family and new religious connections. In 1655, Barbados was visited by the Quakers Mary Fisher and Anne Austin. Henry Fell followed the next year. Together, they found a small but influential constituency of spiritually starved Puritans ripe for conversion, including the important planter Thomas Rous. In 1656, Rous, with the unshakeable conviction of the rescued sinner, penned a diatribe entitled: ‘A warning to the Inhabitants of Barbodoes who live in Pride, Drunkennesse, Covetousnesse, Oppression and deceitful dealings’. Castigating his fellow Barbadians, who ‘Excel[led] in wickedness … cheating and cozening’, he railed against the local propensity for violent greed, whore-mongering, ‘vanity, and folly, and madness’, predicting that ‘the wrath of God shall be revealed in flames of fire against you, ye Earth-worms’.

At the same time, Quakers were making a determined appearance in Rhode Island. In 1656 a party arrived from Boston, hoping that Rhode Island would provide them with the religious freedom they had been denied in Massachusetts. In the summer of the following year, more appeared, having been turned away from New Amsterdam. Two senior Dutch clerics living there wrote to Holland that in all probability the Friends had sailed to Rhode Island, ‘for that is the receptacle for all sorts of riff-raff people, and is nothing else than the sewer of New England. All the cranks of New England retire thither.’ An Anglican noticed that the Rhode Island settlement was ‘a chaos of all Religions’. It was now uncharitably called ‘Rogue Island’ by the Bostoners. The island’s 1663
charter from Charles II would end up giving unprecedented religious freedom to the colony.

The sanctuary given to the Quakers created strong links with Barbados that were crucial in driving the trading growth of Newport and of Rhode Island in general. More widely, by the late 1650s, the enterprising New Englanders were becoming known as the ‘Dutch’ of England’s empire, trading whatever they could with whomsoever they wanted. Not even war would stop them – during the conflict between England and Holland in 1652–4, merchants from Newport, as well as commissioning the town’s first three privateering vessels, brazenly traded with the enemy, setting a precedent that would later lead to major ructions in the empire. By the 1670s, English merchants were complaining that New Englanders were importing European goods and then selling them on in the West Indies at prices that severely undercut their own efforts, then selling the tropical products they got in return directly to Europe. ‘New England is become the great mart and staple’, the English merchants protested, ‘by which means the navigation of the kingdom is greatly prejudiced, the king’s revenue lessened, trade decreased, and the king’s subjects most impoverished.’ It wasn’t the fault of the New Englanders that their economy was simply not complementary to England’s (then self-sufficient in foodstuffs and timber), but if the likes of Boston and Newport were to emerge as rival metropoles to the mother country, there could only be conflict ahead.

While offering the hope of trading wealth to New Englanders, Barbados was also providing investment for the English economy at home, as well as newer settlements in the West Indies and, indeed, the Northern American colonies. Perhaps even more important was the flow of settlers from the island, many of them experienced sugar planters or merchants, with bodies seasoned to the dangers of local diseases. Barbados remained a favourite destination for poor white emigrants from England, but losses to sickness, and, increasingly, onward migration, meant that the white population fell from a high of some 30,000 in 1650 to just over 25,000 a decade later.

So Barbados now became the ‘mother’ colony or ‘hearth’ of the English American empire. Some islanders moved on to the promising colony in Surinam. As in the 1640s, repeated efforts were made by Barbadians to settle other parts of northern South America, as well as Trinidad and Tobago. Between 1650 and 1662, nearly 2,000 spread themselves over Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie Galante, Grenada and Curaçao. Others headed for the established, but comparatively undeveloped English settlements in Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat. Some 2,000 ended up in Virginia,
bringing with them experience of the plantation system and of extensive black slavery.

The biggest single exodus was in 1655. On 29 January of that year, a powerful English fleet arrived at Barbados. Soon, Carlisle Bay was crowded with as many as 60 new vessels. On board were some 3,000 English troops. Their aim was grandiose: the ending of Spanish power in the Caribbean, and recruits were called for from Barbados to join the great design. More than 3,000 came forward, making this the most powerful expeditionary force the Caribbean had ever seen. They sailed at the end of March. Only a handful would ever see Barbados again.

8
CROMWELL’S ‘WESTERN DESIGN’: DISASTER IN HISPANIOLA

‘Why did I go with such a rascally rabble of raw and unexperienced men?’

General Venables, 2 November 1655, Tower of London, on the men under his command in the West Indies

The fleet had left England on 26 December 1654. A naval officer on the expedition, Henry Whistler, described the doleful scene on the wharf: ‘This wose a sad day with our maryed men’, he wrote. Husbands were ‘hanging doune thaier heads, loath to depart’. Couples were embracing, ‘sume of them profesing more love the one to the other in one halfe our then they had performed in all the time of thayer being together’. At two o’clock the fleet sailed, the wind blowing freshly at ENE. Whistler’s ship briefly ran aground, but then got under way again. In the evening, light rain began to fall, and at midnight the wind veered SSE, ‘a faier galle’.

This expedition represented an important new departure. It was no corsair raid, it was ‘take-and-hold’. For the first time, England was to attempt to conquer colonial territory of one of its European rivals. For the first time, imperialism was to be directed by the centre; colonies were to be acquired by order of London, rather than by the actions of merchant syndicates, entrepreneurs or adventurers on the ground.

The fate of the men leaving Portsmouth set an unhappy precedent for further imperial wars in the West Indies. A year and a half later, both the expedition’s commanders were prisoners in the Tower of London, and almost all of the men were dead.

Flushed with the success of conquering the Scots and Irish, and from the recent victory over the Dutch (who had agreed, however falsely, to observe the Navigation Act), Oliver Cromwell was looking for a new war
to bolster his domestic position. The French seemed to fit the bill; indeed, an undeclared naval war had been continuing for some months. But in the end Cromwell decided that the Spanish provided the best target for his desire to fulfil what he saw as England’s destiny of leading the opposition to the Church of Rome, of chastising the Antichrist. Since June 1654, a plan had been germinating for an attack on Spain’s American empire, the source of its wealth, and therefore of the financial means to make mischief in Europe. At the same time, fighting Spain had a happy resonance with the exploits of the Elizabethan corsairs such as Raleigh and Drake, whose stories were being busily reprinted in the 1650s – safe patriotic fare after years of divisive civil war. Furthermore, while leading the Protestant cause, Cromwell also claimed to be revenging the cruelties of the Spanish in the Americas, and releasing the region’s indigenous peoples from the ‘Miserable Thraldome and bondage both Spirituall and Civill’ of the King of Spain.

Oliver Cromwell undoubtedly saw the launching of this, his ‘Western Design’, in religious terms. But the mission also represents a moment when religious zeal as the basis of political action was beginning to fade away. In its place was emerging a steely pragmatism allied to a more modern commercial spirit. Cromwell saw England’s destiny as the head of a navigation and mercantile system and looked to dominate trade in the West Indies. In the shorter term, he hoped for an instant profit from the overrunning of Spain’s rich American cities. At the very least, the mission should be self-financing – the navy was by now over a million and a half pounds in debt.

There was no detailed plan of attack. Cromwell had consulted Thomas Gage, the country’s leading expert on Spanish America and on all things anti-Papist. Gage had been born into a fiercely Roman Catholic family in Surrey in around 1600. First a Jesuit, then a Dominican, he lived and worked in Central America for some 15 years before returning to England in the early 1640s and renouncing his Catholicism in favour of a Puritan Anglicanism. (He confirmed his new loyalty by denouncing a number of former friends, including his brother’s ex-chaplain, who was executed.) In 1648 he had published a book about the Americas full of tales of the corruption, decadence and strategic weakness of the Spanish American empire, as well as useful information for any invading army about fortifications, topography and infrastructure. The Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Thomas Fairfax, then the leading power in the land, urged him to ‘employ the soldiery of this kingdom upon such just and honourable designs in those parts of America’. ‘To your Excellency, therefore’, he concluded, ‘I offer a New World.’