The Sugar Barons (19 page)

Although the navy now enjoyed increasing success and relative good health, on land, the nightmare for the army continued unabated. Weakened by hunger, more than 100 men were dying each week from dysentery or fevers. Provisions grudgingly sent out from England – Cromwell complained about the expense of sending food to ‘a place which abounds in all things’ – were pilfered, purloined by corrupt officers or perished from careless storage.

When Sedgwick arrived in October 1655, he found the army ‘idle … unworthy, slothful … in as sad, as deplorable, and distracted a condition, as can be thought of’. The bodies of dead soldiers lay in the streets and the bushes.

Those men still fit were expecting and hoping to be ordered against some richer Spanish target, and therefore get the plunder they came for, and, unpaid, they considered their due; the officers, it appeared, just wanted to go home. Thus neither was inclined to undertake the long-haul task of planting, nor, indeed, wrote Sedgwick, to ‘do anything, however necessary, for their own benefit’.

A muster held the following month found that of the 7,000 who had landed in May, 3,720 were still alive, besides 173 women and children. ‘Many that are alive’, Sedgwick reported, ‘appear as ghosts … out of a strange kind of spirit, desir[ing] rather to die than live.’

At the beginning of November another 800 men arrived as reinforcements. Those already there just felt sorry for them. ‘Poore men I pitty them at the heart’, wrote a soldier of the original party, ‘all their imaginary mountains of gold are turned into dross.’ In the same letter of 5 November, he described how half the surviving men were sick and helpless and how he himself was getting thinner all the time, having had no provisions from the army for 10 weeks. He had by now suffered ‘with the bloody flux, rhume, ague, feavor’. In St Jago de la Vega, ‘There were soe many funerals, and graves … it is a very Golgotha.’ On the savannah outside the town, he reported, Spanish dogs were digging up the shallow graves of the perished English soldiers and eating the carcasses.

All the time, maroon and Spanish guerrillas in the hills and woods of the interior kept up their campaign, setting ambushes for the English
soldiers seeking game, provisions or water. Sedgwick reported to Cromwell in January 1656: ‘We now and then find one or two of our men killed, stripped, and naked.’ In March he wrote, ‘there scarce a week passeth without one or two slain’. The following month a mutiny had to be bloodily suppressed and its leaders hanged. Men started deserting to the Spanish, who rewarded most of them with instant execution.

By now, more than 5,000 men who had come from England and the other islands had died in Jamaica in 10 months. Amongst them was the renegade priest Thomas Gage, who had urged the ‘Western Design’ on Cromwell, and who had accompanied the expedition as a chaplain. In June, the hard-working Sedgwick was killed by a fever. His replacement from England lasted less than a year before dying of malaria and exhaustion.

This, then, was the less than glorious birth of what would become Britain’s richest and most important colony. The island was a giant morgue for one of the most disastrous military expeditions of British history. And it had left as the founding stock of the new colony a mutinous, disease-ravaged and demoralised rabble.

Edward Long, the grand eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica, ascribed the ‘disasters which befell the first race of settlers here’ to the want of ‘industry, unanimity, perseverance, and good order’. Although the death rate remained shocking, he wrote, ‘they were the wretched victims to their own debauchery, indolence, and perverseness’. No doubt, this is to a large degree true. One English officer called the men of the army the ‘very scum of scums, and mere dregs of corruption’. For its first adventure in aggressive, state-driven imperialism, England had put together a wretched army of the poorest-quality soldiers, moreover ill-equipped and ill-led. A large majority of the troops had paid with their lives.

But among them were men who, having had the courage to embark on a new and dangerous opportunity, had enjoyed the luck, and possessed the resourcefulness and the hardy constitution required to survive when so many others had not. Several of these tough, determined survivors would go on to found families of huge wealth and power. We know that Hersey Barrett, great-great-great-great-grandfather of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was amongst the men from Barbados or the Leewards. He had brought his wife and five-year-old son with him on Venables’ invasion fleet. The family would come to own vast and productive sugar estates and a number of grandiose ‘great houses’. Another pioneer was Lieutenant Francis Price, probably recruited by Venables from among the less successful Barbadian smallholders, whose family would be within two generations the second-
largest landowner on the island. The Beckfords, who became the grandest of all the sugar dynasties, may have had a family member or two on the expedition as well, and it has been suggested that Henry Morgan, who supposedly started out his spectacular West Indian career as an indentured servant on Barbados, was part of the force.
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On the death of each commissioner from England, military command in Jamaica was taken up by Edward D’Oyley. He was aloof and a harsh disciplinarian, but, as it turned out, an effective and astute leader of the colony in its hours of greatest danger.

In October 1656 he instigated a plan whereby land around Spanish Town and beyond was allocated to the soldiers regiment by regiment, in the hope that they could be ordered by their officers to start the cultivation of provisions and crops for export. At last, some cassava and tobacco was planted. It was hoped that this wider occupation would also squeeze the provision supplies of the enemy guerrilla force.

But D’Oyley’s greatest concern now was the threat of reconquest by regular Spanish forces. Jamaica, however poor and backward, had been an integral part of the Spanish empire. Its apparent loss to a rival European power was a dangerous precedent Madrid was determined to reverse. Only internal rivalries within the Caribbean empire, and the spread of sickness from the English army to the Spaniards and thence with them to Cuba, had prevented an immediate counter-attack. But crack Spanish troops were known to be on their way from Europe, and the Governor of Cuba, at last receiving reinforcement and weapons from the Viceroy of Mexico, was massing soldiers and transport for a counter-invasion.

D’Oyley’s answer to this threat was not to seek more soldiers, who could not yet be fed, but to look for a strong naval force to guard the coasts and prevent a Spanish army being conveyed from Cuba. It was hoped, furthermore, to put the enemy on the back foot with a continual campaign of harassment at sea and hit-and-run raids across the Spanish islands and Main. Goodson’s handful of frigates and couple of hundred marines could only do so much. To achieve this aim, D’Oyley needed the buccaneers.

Even more directly than the planter pioneers, the buccaneers were the spiritual descendants of those English ‘corsairs’ who, during the Anglo-Spanish war of 1585–1604, had carried back a fortune from the Spanish Main in looted sugar, hides, logwood, indigo, silver, gold and pearls, and had thereby won themselves a place in the mythology of English adventures overseas. The nucleus of the buccaneers came from the Spanish
expulsion of the English and French settlers from St Kitts back in 1629. Those who escaped capture or declined to return to their ruined tobacco plantations relocated to deserted places in the Spanish Caribbean and vowed to take revenge on Spain, while at the same time guarding their independence and paying tribute to no one. An independent and international force, though almost always directed against Spain, they operated either out of Providence Island, near modern-day Nicaragua, or Tortuga, off Hispaniola’s north coast, which was well placed for interception of Spanish ships in the Windward Passage. Over time, they attracted to their strength a large number of debtors, desperadoes and criminals, on the run from the various European settlements in the region.

Expelled from Providence Island, and periodically driven away from Tortuga, many buccaneers formed camps on the deserted northern shore of Hispaniola. There, they survived by hunting wild cattle and selling to passing ships the meat they had processed into dried strips on their ‘boucans’ or barbecues, hence their name. Sheltering under leaf-roofed sheds and sleeping in sacks to keep off the insects, they looked, said a French observer, like ‘the butcher’s vilest servants, who have been eight days in the slaughter house without washing themselves’. Soon, it was apparent that the best way to raise themselves above subsistence level was by taking over ships and selling the cargoes to the highest bidder. Even more profitable was raiding the peaceful Spanish coastal settlements. Thus developed the Caribbean’s most formidable amphibious assault force, moreover one that expected no mercy from their Spanish enemies, nor granted any in return. Atrocities on both sides escalated in ferocity and horror.

Threatened by Spanish reconquest of Jamaica, Edward D’Oyley decided to make what later turned out to be a pact with the devil: he invited the buccaneers to come to the new Port Royal to dispose of their prize cargoes and loot, and to refit and spend the proceeds of their raids. In return they would act as ‘freelance’ auxiliaries to the official English naval force, who, of course, shared their goals: to snatch loot and generally cause chaos among the Spanish in the Caribbean. The chance to base themselves in a good, well-defended harbour at the strategic centre of the Caribbean Sea was welcomed. Within a short time, more than 1,000 buccaneers were operating out of Port Royal, with their loot and prize cargoes often reloaded on to New England or Bermudan ships as payment for provisions.

So the buccaneers now operated under commissions, or letters of marque or reprisal – official sanction from the English authorities. While still primarily motivated by the hope of Spanish pieces-of-eight and by the charisma and dash of their particular leaders, their efforts were led by
the handful of English naval vessels left behind after the departure of Admiral Penn.

The deputy of this force was Captain Christopher Mygns, an aggressive and popular commander. Sent by D’Oyley on a wrecking mission against the Spanish Main, he was advised to attack settlements in secret and under cover of darkness. Instead, he arrived at midday with drums thundering and trumpets blasting, much to the terror of the Spaniards. After one raid with 300 men he returned to Port Royal with an estimated £200,000-300,000 sterling of booty, mainly in silver snatched during a descent on the Spanish town of Coro. Much of the treasure stuck to the fingers of Mygns and his men, causing the temporary disgrace and recall of the Captain, but his aggression and confidence were infectious.

In October 1658, the English came within a whisper of catching the elusive treasure fleet. Lying in wait at anchor between Cartagena and Porto Bello in Panama, they sighted the galleons on 20 October, but only two frigates were on hand to intercept them, the rest being away collecting water. The two vessels engaged the rear of the fleet, hoping to scatter the merchantmen, but the Spanish ships kept their formation and the silver proceeded unmolested to Europe.

Yet there were enough successes for the proceeds of prizes and raids to go a long way towards underwriting the young colony, in a way that planting could not yet achieve. They were Jamaica’s only true income, and the demand from the buccaneers and privateers for naval supplies, provisions and entertainment drove the development of Port Royal and its hinterland.

In early 1657, the first crops planted by the regiments were ready for harvest. Helped by early rains, the yield was good, particularly for those Leeward islanders who had struggled on around Port Morant. In addition, fustic and other dye woods were now being gathered and sent back to England. In terms of simple survival, a corner had been turned. But in the same year warning came, through captured letters, that the plans of the Viceroy of Mexico to retake the island were now ready for launch.

D’Oyley took 500 men, and sailed in search of the enemy, whom he found on the north side of the island near Ocho Rios. About 500 Spaniards had landed and fortified themselves with trenches and a stockade of tree trunks. Undaunted, D’Oyley’s men advanced, hacked their way into the stockade and drove the Spanish out. More than 100 Spaniards were killed and many more wounded. Some escaped back to Cuba, but most fled into the woods. English losses, though, were light.

The Spanish continued to land small parties of men from Cuba, and in May the following year, a larger party of nearly 1,000 established a new
fort on the north coast at Rio Nuevo. This provided a sterner test for attackers: on high ground and protected by a deep river, it was equipped with six cannon, each firing four-pound shot.

D’Oyley didn’t hear about the new Spanish base on the island until 12 days later; as before, rather than brave the hostile interior, he took a force of 750 by sea, landing a short distance from the Spanish position. Then, by circling round through thick woods behind the fort, he managed to find a weak spot. As his vanguard threw crude grenades into the palisade, scaling ladders were rushed up, and the fort breached. Three hundred Spanish soldiers were killed, against some 50 English.

The Spanish would not land again in such numbers, but the guerrilla war continued, with news of the death of Cromwell in September 1658 adding to the uncertainty of the English. Then, in 1660, a renewed effort against the guerrillas led to the discovery of a hidden, richly fertile valley where 200 acres had been planted in provisions to sustain the Spanish and their local allies. Soon afterwards came a decisive breakthrough when a key maroon leader, Juan Lubolo, was contacted and successfully persuaded to change sides. His men now hunted down the Spaniards and their allies, and by the end of the year, after one final unsuccessful landing of some 150 men, the Spanish at last abandoned their attempt at reconquest. Many hostile maroons, however, remained at large in the interior.