The Sugar Barons (17 page)

Early the following day, having stopped two miles short of the city wall and camped without water, ‘sufficiently faint and almost choaked of thirst’, the English force approached the outlying fort. In the lead was a body of 400 men under the command of an Adjutant-General Jackson. The officer, who had acquired a reputation in Barbados for whoring and drunkenness, had taken the precaution of sending a more junior officer in the vanguard, while himself taking up a position in the safety of the rearmost ranks. This attitude seems to have informed the performance of his men. As before, the Spanish defenders counter-attacked with mounted lance-bearing ‘cow killers’. The leading ranks found their Barbados-built ‘half-pikes’ too short to be of use against the longer lances of the Spanish cavalry. The junior officer was killed straight away, and within moments the English attack had turned into a rout.

As the vanguard fled back towards the main English force, their panic became contagious. The formation behind them let off a ragged volley from their matchlocks, and then they too wheeled round and fled. The line behind them actually lowered their pikes to prevent the flight, but then they also dropped their weapons and ran. Fleeing through a narrow gap between two hills, the melee was squashed into a narrow killing field. Some 600 died, most from a lance in the back as they ran away. Two hundred more fled into the woods ‘whom the Negroes and Molattoes soon after dispatched’. Three hundred were wounded, most past recovery. A large number of officers also perished, and eight regimental colours were captured. The one-sided battle only stopped when the Spaniards, according to one English officer, ‘were weary of killing’.

Once the Spanish horsemen had returned to their lines, Venables briefly considered pressing home the attack with the heavy mortar, but changed his mind and ordered it buried and the munitions destroyed. Once again, the English force retreated to the camp on the River Jaina. By now there were only 2,000 men fit in the whole army. Frightened of venturing out of the camp to hunt for food, the men started eating dogs and what remained of the horses so expensively procured from Barbados.

Winslow and the other commissioners urged a further attempt, but on the 27
^th
, Venables made the decision to abandon the operation. By 4 May, all the surviving men were embarked, according to one soldier’s account, ‘in a most sad and lamentable condition, having never seen men soe altered in soe small a time’. The soldiers reckoned that their army of thousands had been routed by just 200 Spaniards.

Even while the shock of defeat was raw, the recriminations began. Adjutant-General Jackson, who had deserted his men in battle, was cashiered, his sword broken over his head, and was forced to serve as a swabber on board the hospital ship. One English officer commented that ‘if all of like nature had been so dealt with, there would not have been many whole swords left in the army’. A number of prostitutes, dressed in men’s clothes, were uncovered and ‘severely chastised’. Most to blame for the cowardice shown by the English in Hispaniola, Venables reckoned, were the colonials, especially the men from St Kitts, who ‘lead all the disorder and confusion’. The Barbadians, too, were ‘only bold to do mischief; not to be commanded as soldiers, not to be kept in any civil order, being the most prophane debauched persons we ever saw, scorners of religion, and indeed so loose as not to be kept under discipline and so cowardly as not to be made to fight.’ Venables’ greatest anger, though, was directed at Penn and his naval force, which had conspicuously failed to support the efforts of the army.

In all, a heavy pall of disaster, division and defeat lay over the armada as it weighed anchor from Hispaniola and drifted westwards with the wind and currents. Commissioner Winslow, his heart apparently broken by ‘the Disgrace of the army on Hispaniola’, sickened and died on 7 May. As he was ‘thrown overboard’, the expedition lost the one man in the force with experience of setting up a new colony. Surprisingly, after what had just happened, such skills were soon to be sorely needed. A short time after the abandonment of the Hispaniola campaign, word trickled down through the ranks that there was a new objective, a ‘smaller success’: Jamaica.

9
THE INVASION OF JAMAICA

‘Many that are alive, appear as ghosts … out of a strange kind of spirit, desir[ing] rather to die then live.’

General Robert Sedgwick, on the English troops in Jamaica

‘On Wednesday morning, being the 9
^th
of May’, wrote a soldier in Venables’ army, ‘wee saw Jamaica Iland, very high land afar off.’ Preparations were made for invasion the following day.

In the island’s capital, known at the time to the English as St Jago de la Vega (and later as Spanish Town), alarming news arrived early the next morning from lookouts on high ground over what is now Kingston harbour, 10 miles from the capital. A fleet had been spotted to the east, approaching out of the rising sun. Soon afterwards, two fishermen, who had been out catching turtles off the coast the previous day, reported in a terrified state that they had blundered into a huge armada and had themselves only narrowly escaped, paddling hard, to the safety of the port. They overestimated by a factor of two the strength of the fleet, at more than 70 vessels, but had not failed to spot the red and white cross of St George flying from the ships’ masts: it was an English force of a scale previously unseen off Jamaica’s shores. In St Jago de la Vega church bells were rung and through the streets drums were beaten, as the governor massed what paltry forces he had and ordered them to the harbour to repel the hostile invasion.

Jamaica was, indeed, a ‘smaller’ target than Hispaniola, only a fraction of its size and importance. Venables, having lost confidence in his troops, urgently needed an easily won consolation prize for Cromwell after the disaster outside the walls of Santo Domingo. Jamaica, thinly populated and virtually undefended, hove into view at the right time.

Nonetheless, it was very different from any of the islands already settled by the English. The combined land area of Barbados, St Kitts, Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat is less than a tenth of Jamaica’s 4,441 square miles. Furthermore, Barbados (by some distance the most important colony thus far) is small, relatively flat, and cooled to an extent by the trade winds. In spite of early struggles, it had shown itself to be a landscape that could be overcome and dominated by the English. Jamaica was radically different. It was a wild topography – mountains in the east rising to more than 7,000 feet, thickly clad in vegetation, with their summits cloaked in blue-tinged clouds. Below the ‘cloud forests’ lay thick woodland. Elsewhere there were barren savannahs in some places, lush rainforest in others. The interior also contained harsh, waterless uplands, and deep hidden valleys. Near the coast stretched rich alluvial plains, but they were isolated from each other by rivers and deep swamps. In stark contrast to Barbados, the English would find this a landscape impossible to master and subdue.

Colombus had ‘discovered’ the island on his second voyage in 1494, sailing into what is now called St Ann’s Bay on the north coast. He called the bay ‘Santa Gloria’, ‘on account of the extreme beauty of its country’. According to his reports, Columbus found Jamaica ‘the fairest island that eyes have beheld; mountainous and the land seems to touch the sky’.

Jamaica was at that time the most heavily populated of the Greater Antilles, the coastline thickly dotted with villages. The Tainos, sometimes called Arawaks, had been in Jamaica for some 2,500 years. Arriving as colonisers from South America, they may have displaced earlier settlers who had migrated southwards from Florida. Although they had spread over the whole of the island, most Taino settlements were near the coast. There may have been as many as 50,000 at the time of European contact.

The Tainos, most evidence suggests, were a peaceful and gentle people. But Columbus met with a hostile reception, with 70 or so canoes launched into the bay towards his vessels, each full of shouting and gesticulating warriors. They soon dispersed when fired upon from the Spanish ships, but Columbus then weighed anchor and headed down the coast to what is now called Discovery Bay. Needing water, provisions and wood for repairs to his ships, he put a party on shore, guarded by crossbowmen and accompanied by a large dog. The former killed a number of Tainos, who also found the unfamiliar dog terrifying. Shortly afterwards, gifts of fruit and provisions arrived from local chiefs as symbols of submission.

Columbus returned to Jamaica in June 1503, and spent a year stranded there. Nonetheless, the island retained its charm for the explorer. Although
he established that there was little or no gold in Jamaica, the island, for him, was ‘otherwise a paradise and worth more than gold’.

Few of the Spanish colonists who followed in Columbus’s wake felt the same way. The Tainos were forcibly set to work digging for gold, but when none was found, a majority of the more enterprising Spaniards left the island for the greater lure of the mainland. On the orders of Columbus’s son Diego, a city was founded on the north coast, but this was soon abandoned as the small population gravitated to the south, establishing the colony’s headquarters at St Jago de la Vega, six miles from the sea. By the time of the English invasion, the city consisted of a number of churches, a monastery and several hundred houses, some of brick and roofed with tiles, others only of rough mortar and reeds.

While the north and west remained undeveloped, on the southern plains farms were established growing sugar cane, cacao, pimento and cassava, mainly for domestic consumption, although a little was traded with passing Spanish galleons. The main activity, though, was hunting the cattle and pigs that were allowed to roam free. Pork fat and cow hides were exported to Spain, but on the whole the colony was a failure, more of a burden than a benefit to the imperial authorities in Madrid. The small number of ruling families quickly became inbred and suffered the bitter feuds attendant on most very small and isolated communities.

The island had been raided several times by English corsairs, but it was so poor and undeveloped that it was hardly worth the trouble, except for its richness in portable provisions. Part of the weakness of the colony was due to the elimination of the native population, and therefore workforce. Smallpox was perhaps the biggest killer, but many also died of other introduced diseases and of hunger as the imported livestock wrecked their unfenced provision grounds. Enslaved by the Spaniards, tens of thousands also died of overwork or wanton cruelty at the hands of their masters. Rather than live as slaves, many killed themselves, and women aborted their children. In 1598, an alarmed governor suggested an ‘Indian reservation’ to preserve the fast-shrinking population, but nothing was done, and by the time the English arrived just under 60 years later, they were almost all gone.

So in 1655, the population, including women, children and slaves, was only 2,500, outnumbered nearly three to one by the invading force under Admiral Penn and General Venables. There were perhaps only 500 Spaniards who could bear arms.

Nonetheless, after the humiliating disaster at Hispaniola, Venables was taking no chances. Before launching his troops, the general ordered that
from then on, if anyone tried to run away, the person next to him should shoot him dead, or forfeit his own life. He seems also to have learnt another lesson from Hispaniola: the importance in amphibious warfare of close cooperation between the army and navy. This time, with helpful winds, the attack was vigorously led by the navy, which sailed a gunboat right up to Passage Fort, on the west side of Kingston harbour, and gave covering fire as a swarm of smaller vessels, packed with soldiers, was launched against the beach below. Before the keels of the boats had touched the sand, the men were leaping out into the waist-deep warm waters of the bay. Musket and cannon fire from the fort whistled around them, but no one was hit, and then the men were ashore, their ‘determination’, according to one account, causing the Spaniards to abandon their positions and flee. Venables had a different take, later thanking the wind for the fact that the men ‘could not possibly row back, but must vanquish or die’, but whether made bold by courage, threat or necessity, by three in the afternoon the English troops held the harbour as the Spanish soldiers retreated back to St Jago.

But Venables’ trust in his men was not to be restored that easily. Having taken over a fortified but abandoned position on the road to the capital, the general called a halt to the advance. His men, ‘wanting guides’, were ‘very weak … with bad diet’, he later wrote. Indeed, the troops were sickly from their adventure in Hispaniola, and hungry, having been on half-rations since Barbados, but while they rested, the delay allowed the Spanish to evacuate the city, taking everything they could with them.

The next day, assured of overwhelming strength, the army marched towards the town. Shortly, a Spaniard appeared with a flag of truce. He was followed, an eye-witness wrote, by ‘divers Spaniards, which seemed to be of quality, to treat’. With them they brought presents for the general of wine, poultry and fruit, and promises of cattle ‘sufficient for the maintenance of the army, with other large overtures, and high compliments’. Clearly, the Spaniards hoped that this was another hit-and-run raid, for treasure or, more likely, provisions, and that the English would take what they needed and depart, as their countrymen had done before. Venables readily accepted the offer of food for his hungry army, but he also signalled that this time the English had arrived to stay. We have not come to plunder, he told them, but to plant.