The Sugar Barons (18 page)

Actually, this was the opposite aim of the majority of his men, particularly those from England, who had no desire for nor experience of tropical farming. They had travelled halfway across the world to loot the riches of Spanish America and were determined not to be disappointed. At two in the afternoon on 11 May, English troops entered St Jago. To their dismay,
anything remotely resembling plunder had been carried off. All that was left was heavy furniture and a stack of hides, so common on the island that they were used to line the floors of slaves’ dwellings. The hides were collected (and later sent on a Dutch ship to New England to exchange for provisions), but in their frustrated fury, the English soldiery laid waste to the town, ransacking churches and burning buildings, while frantically digging in the ground in the vain hope of buried treasure. Many of the buildings had to be rebuilt when the English remembered that they needed shelter.

After a further delay, the Spanish Governor, Juan Ramirez, at last arrived in the city to sign the articles of surrender. Ramirez, an onlooker wrote, was ‘a uery sad creater’ ‘soe much eaten out with the pox’ that he had to be carried in a hammock; ‘the ennimie woas ashamed that wee should see him’. Apparently, Ramirez was afflicted with the ‘French-disease’.

The articles deliberately echoed those imposed on the English inhabitants of Providence Island back in 1641: the Spaniards were to be shipped off the island within 10 days and forfeit all their property. In the meantime, they were ordered to supply the huge English army with cassava bread and 200 head of cattle a day. The Governor and two of his officers remained in English hands as hostages.

News of the terms came as a severe shock to the Spaniards sheltering in the hinterland behind St Jago. Most had been born in Jamaica and had never left the island; it was their home. While they debated what to do, they sent provisions as requested to the English in the town, but at the same time preparations were started for a guerrilla war in the interior. Indeed, the Spaniards had quickly decided that ‘if they complied, they were utterly ruined, and desired rather to expose their lives to the hazzard of warr then to condescend to such termes’.

Four days passed before Venables realised he had been tricked. Suddenly the supplies of provisions ceased. Shortly afterwards, men started disappearing while out foraging for food or loot. It was soon apparent that rather than turning against their masters as the English had hoped, the island’s slaves, together with the runaway maroons, had sided against the invaders, who, they were told, would treat them harshly. Small bands were formed under the leadership of Spanish officers. These lurked just outside the small sphere of English control, and preyed on those who ventured beyond the lines. Bodies of dead English soldiers started being discovered, stripped naked and horribly mutilated.

Efforts were made to pursue the Spanish into the hills, but the enemy melted away, only reappearing to pick off stragglers. It was, wrote one of Venables’ officers, ‘an impossible thing for an army, except well acquainted
with the country, to follow or find them out … The excessive heat of the sun, the want of water in many places … did more weaken and disable them in ten miles march there, than forty in their own country.’

Even more serious for the fate of the English army was the lack of food. The island’s planted acreage had supported a population of some 2,500; now there were an extra 7,000 mouths to feed. During the first days of occupation there had been no planning for managing food supply and the English soldiery had slaughtered cattle and hogs with abandon, but now, suddenly, there were none left who had not been killed or driven away by the Spaniards. Provision grounds were likewise sabotaged, and the army found itself on starvation rations of half a biscuit per man a day.

Thus the ‘victory’ in Jamaica became, for the men of the army, even worse than the calamitous defeat in Hispaniola. Henry Whistler reckoned that within 12 days of the landing, lack of food and water had halved the strengths of the companies.

Dysentery now swept though the malnourished ranks, so that soon ‘they looked like dead men, just crept abroad from their graves’. By 14 June, there were ‘not more than five field officers in health … two thousand privates were sick; and the rest grew very unruly and mutinous’. The day before, Venables had written home that ‘our Men die daily … Fresh flesh and roots put them into Fluxes, which sweep them away by Ten and twenty per diem frequently.’ Many of the dead remained unburied, ‘others buried so shallow underground that they already scent through’, wrote a senior officer the following month. Together with the garbage of the army, carelessly strewn about, ‘the scents are here so noisome that in some parts of this town a man is not able to walk’.

As the strength of the English force steadily diminished, guerrilla attacks by the Spanish and their maroon allies grew ever more daring and destructive. ‘The enemie lye still on the mountains, expecting our deserting this country’, wrote an English soldier on 15 June in a letter home. At one point, maroon guerillas entered Spanish Town itself, burning several buildings. In all, it is estimated that as many as 1,000 men were killed by ambushes, usually when hunting for food. Within a short time, Venables was forced to ban his troops from venturing beyond the narrow confines of the city and the harbour. The men were forced to eat snakes, lizards and rats, and ‘Neither’, we are told by a Spanish source, ‘did the English spare any of the dogs, cats, colts or donkeys which their bullets reached, so exceedingly hungry were they’.

The leaders of the ill-fated expeditionary force responded by scuttling back to England. Venables, to be fair, was seriously ill, with what he called
a combination of ‘flux’ and ‘fever’, although the naval commander, William Penn, was the first to leave, setting sail from Jamaica on 25 June, with about three quarters of the fleet (leaving Vice-Admiral Goodson in charge of a force of 12 frigates). Penn, it appears, was keen to have his version of events in Hispaniola heard before that of Venables. At this time, it was rumoured in the army that the General had died, but instead, he was ‘Convey’d on board in a distracted Condition’, and arrived back in Portsmouth, still alive, on 31 August. Major-General Richard Fortescue was left in command of the army.

Cromwell was devastated by the Hispaniola disaster, which he saw as the Lord’s punishment for his own iniquity. On hearing of the shock defeat there, he had shut himself in his room and become ill. When Penn and Venables showed up back in England, he was furious, and both were imprisoned in the Tower of London as punishment for deserting their men. A precariously held Jamaica was seen as totally inadequate return for the grandiose ambitions of the Western Design.

According to soldiers’ accounts, the men of the army were, indeed, ‘full sore’ about the departure of their leaders. Furthermore, no one had been paid. Fortescue, Venables’ replacement, wrote to Cromwell that the men of the army, who had come for plunder, now ‘fret, fume, grow impatient’. The island had huge potential, he went on, but there was a desperate need for some more upstanding, ‘Godlike’ immigrants and servants who, unlike the vast majority of the army, might be willing to get down to the hard work of planting. Tools were also required, he wrote, along with well-equipped, experienced and disciplined reinforcements for the army to deal with the continued threat of reconquest by the Spanish and their maroon allies.

Fortescue was soon dead from sickness, leaving Lieutenant-General Edward D’Oyley in command, but Cromwell, wishing to make the most of the meagre prize of Jamaica, responded vigorously. Every male immigrant, he announced, would receive 20 acres, with 10 allocated per woman and child. A thousand each of Irish boys and girls under 14 were to be sent out and sold as indentured servants, and he ordered the sheriffs of the counties of Scotland to round up ‘all known, idle, masterless robbers and vagabonds, male and female, and transport them to that island’. At the same time, appeals went out to other English colonies in America to provide the means to people the newly conquered territory. A number of Quakers from Barbados, who had made themselves unpopular by refusing to bear arms in the militia, were welcomed to Jamaica, along with Bermudans, as well as Jews expelled from Brazil by the Portuguese after the final defeat there of the Dutch.

Cromwell’s great hope, however, was that the doughty Puritan North Americans, scratching a meagre living out of the stony New England fields – ‘driven from the land of their nativity into that desert and barren wilderness, for conscience’ sake’ – would welcome a move to the warm and wildly fertile climes of the West Indies. In September 1655, an envoy was sent to New England to try to persuade them to move on to Jamaica. In his instructions Cromwell outlined his vision: ‘Our desire is that this place [Jamaica], if the Lord so please, be inhabited by people who know the Lord and walk in his fear, and by their light they may enlighten the parts about them (a chief end of our undertaking and design).’ In the meantime, 2,000 Bibles were sent to Jamaica for the edification of the troops there.

The New Englanders may have been supportive of Cromwell’s aims, but with a few exceptions, they resolutely refused to migrate to this supposed ‘land of plenty’. They were actually doing rather well, a large part through the ever-growing trade with Barbados and the other islands; and they had had enough contact with Jamaica to have heard of the ‘prophaneness of the soldiery, the great mortality in the island; and the continual hazard to the lives of any peaceable settlers there, from the skulking Negroes and Spaniards’. In New England, in contrast, there might not have been such a hope of instant riches, but ‘they lived more comfortably like Englishmen than any of the rest of the Plantations’.

Cromwell had more success with his appeal to the English settlers of the Leeward Islands. Governor Luke Stokes of Nevis responded enthusiastically, raising at least 1,000 men, together with women and slaves, to make the leap to the new colony. They were fetched by Goodson in three frigates and sent to the long-deserted eastern tip of the island near what is now known as Port Morant. This was an important part to occupy, for the good harbour there could easily have been taken over by the Spanish. It was also one of the most fertile parts of the country. However, it was long deserted for a reason: it was bordered by mangrove swamps that provided a home to countless malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Within two months, Stokes and his wife were dead, along with two thirds of the other immigrants. Soldiers sent to guard them from the ever-present threat of Spanish attack also died in droves.

But Cromwell’s vision for his ‘Western Design’ had not been just about planting and settlement. Any foothold gained in the central Caribbean was to be exploited to harass, weaken and plunder the local interests of the Spanish (or of any other rival European powers). So at the same time as appealing for new settlers, the Protector sent orders to Jamaica for the creation of Courts of Admiralty (which dealt with the disbursement of
‘prize’ enemy cargoes and vessels, the proceeds being shared between the crew, the officers and the state) and for the commissioning of ‘private Men of War to annoy and infest the Enemies of our Nation’. Admiral Blake’s fleet was doing a good job of besting the Spanish navy in European waters, and this gave the energetic Goodson free rein to exploit Jamaica’s strategic position, and to carry out his instructions to capture any foreign vessels he could at the same time as taking the fight to the Spanish Main. During the latter half of 1655, he brought in a number of prizes, as well as attacking Santa Marta near Cartagena, demolishing forts and burning the town. The big hope, though, remained the capture of the annual Spanish treasure fleet.

Cromwell also dispatched to Jamaica a new commissioner and military chief, Major General Robert Sedgwick, who arrived with some 700 reinforcements in October 1655. Sedgwick was a pious Puritan soldier with an honourable military record in the Massachusetts colony. He had mixed feelings about the operations now being undertaken by Goodson: ‘This kind of marooning cruising West India trade of plundering and burning of towns’, he wrote home, ‘is not honorable for a princely navy … though perhaps it may be tolerated at present.’ He was concerned that unless towns like Santa Marta were taken and held, there would be little hope of carrying out their ‘intentions in dispensing anything of the true knowledge of God to the inhabitants’. Such ‘naked plundering missions’ also ran the risk, he warned, of making the English appear ‘to the Indians and blacks’ ‘a cruel, bloody, and ruinating people … worse than the Spanish’.

Such delicate sentiments, of course, had no place in the West Indies of the seventeenth century, and to do him justice, Sedgwick did have a more pragmatic side. Realising the importance of naval superiority, he started work on what would become the British navy’s key West Indian base for the next 200 years and more.

Kingston harbour was protected by a sand spit, in places as narrow as 100 yards, just beyond the end of which lay a small island of just under 60 acres. This had been used by the Spaniards for careening ships but, a few shacks aside, it was empty. On the landward side was deep, well-sheltered water, a perfect harbour and anchorage. Sedgwick ordered the construction of a fort on the island, which would command the harbour. Heavy guns were mounted, 21 by March 1656. A small stone tower was then built, mainly by men from the navy, the army being too debilitated. Traders came to sell to the garrison and labourers to work on the fort. The following year there was the ‘fair beginnings of a town’. It was the start of what would very shortly become the dazzling and infamous city of Port Royal. As events
would dramatically demonstrate, it was a wildly unsuitable place for a new city, only a few feet above sea level, consisting of unstable sands and in the midst of a zone battered by natural disasters. In addition, the island was small, lacking any fresh water, and only reachable by boat. Nevertheless, its advantages as a harbour seemed to outweigh everything, and soon the army’s stores and headquarters were moved to the island.