The Sugar Barons (21 page)

Later described as ‘distinguished not only by gentle birth but by many virtues’, and as ‘intelligible … and of no faction, which is rare in Barbados’, Henry had the priceless gift of quietly getting on with people. He resisted the dangerous temptation to ‘empire build’, expanding the Drax estates as established by his father by less than 100 acres to 800 by 1673; he was also noticeably astute in his choice of managers and overseers. The result was that his Barbados estates yielded income at a level only enjoyed by the most substantial landed aristocracy in England.

The success of Henry Drax’s management of the family’s Barbados estates can be seen in a comparison of his will, written in 1682, with that of his father from 20-odd years earlier. Where Sir James had lavishly handed out annuities of £100 to his extended family, for Henry the standard figure was £500, and in addition he gave sizeable one-off legacies.
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The terms of his will also demonstrate that Henry had made great efforts to create a more diversified portfolio of property, a process only just started by his father (in spite of his boasts to Ligon about aiming for an English estate worth £10,000 a year). Soon after coming into his inheritance, Henry invested his sugar money in land in Lincolnshire. Other purchases, including a town house in Bloomsbury Square, would follow over the next two decades. By the time his will was written, the scattered English estates were producing almost as much income as those in Barbados. Very few planters were wise enough to get their money out of Barbados in time in this way.

Henry was back in England from early 1664 to mid-1666 to sort out the estates of his recently deceased father and elder brother, and no doubt to see his sisters, who had all remained in England (in September 1666 his sister Elizabeth, aged 17, married Thomas Shetterden of Hertfordshire, ‘by the consent of her brother Henry Drax and her uncle William Drax esq. guardians’). While in London, he also joined up with the society known as the ‘Planters and Merchants trading to Barbados’, and met and married, in February 1665, Frances Tufton, daughter of the Earl of Thanet. He was 24, she was 20. It was a highly prestigious match, even for someone of Henry’s wealth.

Thus Henry succeeded not only in making money, but also in marrying it. All that was now lacking was what he evidently craved most – an heir to carry the Drax name forward.

Inevitably, given his wealth and his famous Barbados name, Henry was chosen for the island’s council while still a young man, in June 1667. But he seems to have had little political ambition, or perhaps more exactly, he wanted to keep his head down and get on with the business of planting.

The contrast with his cousin, Christopher Codrington the second (whose father had married old Sir James’s sister), could not have been starker. On the face of it, the cousins had much in common: both were first-generation ‘Creoles’ – that is, born in Barbados rather than elsewhere – who had both inherited substantial sugar acreage; Codrington was only one year older than Drax. But in other ways they were utterly different. While Henry made a solid success of his inheritance, Christopher Codrington would put together perhaps the most colourful, spectacular and controversial West Indian career of all.

The first Christopher Codrington died in 1656, leaving behind substantial scattered acreage, put together during his 20-odd years in Barbados. His eldest son, Christopher the second, was 16. His mother Frances brought up him and his younger brother, John and administered the estates until Christopher came to maturity, whereupon he married. Little is known of his wife, except her name, Gertrude, and the fact that she predeceased him. His brother John married the daughter of a rich planter and council member; it is likely that Christopher’s match would have been of a similar if not even better status. It seems that Christopher inherited land in St Michael parish, and John an estate on the east coast in St John.

John Codrington, like Sir James’s brother William, always played second fiddle to his more forceful and energetic brother. Although he would amass great wealth and would achieve high rank in the militia and gain a place on the council, he was always a distance behind Christopher.

There seem to have been two further brothers, Robert and Copplestone, but hardly anything is known about them. From the tenor of the scattered mentions of them in wills, it seems highly likely that they were ‘natural’, that is illegitimate (and possibly mixed-race) sons, something that would become a speciality of the Codrington men, and, indeed, of the sugar barons in general.

Christopher the second was a charismatic and easy-going young man, and undoubtedly highly intelligent. He was described as ‘being of a
debonaire liberal humour’. Unlike Henry Drax, his ambitions, even at this young age, took in leadership of the colony and, indeed, aggressive expansion in the wider region.

In this, he was in agreement with the returned governor Francis Lord Willoughby, whose earlier Surinam settlement was thriving. Willoughby envisaged English colonies spreading around the Caribbean following the Greek model of one colony giving birth to another. His first target was St Lucia, home to occasional Barbadian wood-cutters, a tribe of Caribs and a tiny, struggling French settlement. In 1663, he organised the ‘purchase’ of the island from the Indians. The price paid was ‘divers goods, wares, and merchandizes … being of great value’. Organising all this as a trustee for the sale was the 23-year-old Christopher Codrington. (The following year Willoughby sent a party of 1,000 Barbadians to settle. Like previous attempts on St Lucia, the colony was a failure, with starvation, disease and Carib attacks ending the venture within three years.)

Codrington’s evident support for Willoughby’s vigorous expansionist policy greatly endeared him to the Governor. Three years later, at the age of just 26, Willoughby elevated him to the island’s council. ‘He is well beloved’, wrote the Governor at the time, ‘and free from faction, an ingenious young gentleman.’ The same year Codrington was made a lieutenant-colonel of the militia. By 1668 he was a full colonel, the owner of at least one vessel trading amongst the islands and with England, and a father for the first time, to a son, another Christopher.

The young Christopher (the third) would grow up on an island being rapidly transformed by the riches from the 15,000 tons of sugar exported to England each year. In 1666 the Governor, Willoughby, described Barbados to Charles II as ‘that fair jewell of your Majesty’s Crown’. In 1668, two Bridgetown merchants declared that Barbados, then producing more than 85 per cent of the sugar imported to England, was ‘worth all the rest’ of the colonies ‘which are made by the English’. A visitor eight years later called it the ‘finest and worthiest Island in the World’ and ‘the most flourishing Colony the English have’. Per capita income was probably between a third and two thirds higher than in England and far ahead of the North American colonies. ‘A mean planter’, wrote a Barbadian in 1668, ‘thinks himself better than a good gentleman fellow in England.’

This wealth was becoming ever more visible. John Scott, geographer to Charles II, who was on the island in 1667–8, noted that he had found ‘by a rational estimate’ that the ‘plates, jewels, and extraordinary household stuffs’ on the island were worth about £500,000. A visitor eight years later described the ‘splendid Planters, who for Sumptuous Houses,
Cloaths and Liberal Entertainment cannot be exceeded by their Mother Kingdom itself’.

The establishment of the sugar industry had taken an enormous amount of hard work and energy on the part of the first sugar barons. According to an earlier visitor to Barbados, the enslaved blacks had a saying: ‘The Devel was in the English-man, that he makes every thing work; he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass work, the Wood work, the Water work, and the Winde work.’ Owners of smaller or undeveloped properties, or at least the successful ones, continued to graft, spending the day on long rides over their estates to check on the state of their crops, in constant battle against insects, weeds, drought or other setbacks, while closely supervising the welfare of their workforce, the processing, packaging and shipping of sugar, and the acquisition of provisions and other plantation supplies. But already a number of the richest planters had taken their feet off the pedal, delegating the hard work to employees, whilst themselves enjoying the luxury their new wealth now afforded. ‘The Masters’, wrote another traveller in the 1670s, ‘for the most part, live at the height of Pleasure.’ Indeed, an earlier account described how only ‘the most inconsiderable of the Inhabitants’ now actually did the work. The rest hired overseers and managers, and ‘lead pleasant lives’, making frequent visits to one another, ‘endeavour[ing] to outvye one the other in their entertainments’.

In the countryside, a spate of building saw the old low-roofed wooden homes replaced by far more grandiose constructions in stone or brick, with tiled roofs, ‘built after the English fashion for commodiousness and decency, as well as strength’. By 1681, they were ‘now general all over the island’.

Few of these earliest ‘sugar boom’ mansions have survived the following centuries of hurricanes, humidity, termites and neglect. But St Nicholas Abbey
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still stands in the northern part of Barbados, straddling the parishes of St Peter and St Andrew. Like Drax Hall, it was constructed in the 1650s out of coral blocks covered with plaster. Although also three-storeyed, it is smaller than the Drax residence, but its loving restoration makes it appear smarter. Like many contemporary Jacobean mansions in England, it looks very Dutch, with three curvilinear gables, each crowned with a tall finial.
There are some concessions to the West Indian climate: the front of the house faces the vitally cooling north-eastern breezes, and there are no overhanging gables, prone to be lifted up by tropical winds or hurricanes, but in each of the house’s four corners rises a chimney, and the rooms are lavishly equipped with fireplaces, obviously totally redundant in the year-round heat of Barbados. A walled medieval-style herb garden is also part of the faithful copying of what must have been an off-the-peg design for a building back home in England.

On the east coast, right next to what is now the grandiose Codrington College, stands Consetts, probably built sometime in the early 1660s, and certainly before the end of the century. A big, square lump of coral stone, with Palladian details probably added later, it is quietly impressive, as it gazes out over the Atlantic. But it is also a great example of how the English built disease and discomfort into their early West Indian habitations – thick walls, no overhangs for shade, and small windows. Inside, the house is primitively divided in the medieval manner into three ‘chambers’, the parlour, dining hall and servants’ hall.

Nonetheless, visitors to Barbados in the 1660s and 1670s were impressed. John Scott wrote that the new plantation houses were ‘very fair and beautiful’. ‘At a small distance’, he added, they ‘ordinarily present themselves like castles’. Together with all the sugar works and slave quarters, the plantations appeared from afar ‘like so many small towns’. ‘Delightfully situated’, reported another visitor, most of the ‘pleasant Habitations’ ‘have pleasant Prospects to the Sea and Land’.

Bridgetown, situated on marshy ground below the reach of the cooling breezes, was noticeably less ‘pleasant’. A visitor in the 1670s commented that the heat ‘to Strangers at their first coming [was] there scarce tolerable’. But the town also attracted admiration for its ‘abundance of well-built houses’, ‘Costly and Stately’ and its ‘many fair, long, and spacious Streets’.

Bridgetown was periodically visited by devastating fires. In 1659, a major conflagration destroyed more than 200 of the town’s wood-built houses. Further ‘Great Fires’ were recorded in 1668 and 1673. Each time, though, the town was constructed anew, increasingly with ‘well built’ stone dwellings and other ‘noble structures’, warehouses and shops, ‘well furnish’d with all sorts of Commodities’.

By the 1690s, if a contemporary illustration of the harbour is to be believed, Bridgetown was a prosperous and thriving mart, with numerous wharfs crowded with warehouses, residences and counting-houses, all looking distinctly gabled and Dutch, serving a bustling and numerous
merchant fleet. Furthermore, it was now the hub of the Western Empire, the most crucial node in the emerging imperial system. A letter sent from London to Boston or Newport would almost inevitably travel via Bridgetown.

Outside the town, agricultural land now cost more than in England, and by the early 1660s, except for deep gullies, all the original forest had been cleared, and up to 80 per cent of the island was planted in cane. A governor in the 1670s noted that there was ‘not a foot of land in Barbados that is not employed even to the very seaside’. His successor wrote that there was not even space ‘to draw a regiment of foot on without great damage’.

Cotton was still produced by the island, mainly in St Philip, and tobacco grown by ‘poor Catholics’ in the inferior soils of the north of the island; elsewhere were small operations producing indigo, ginger and fustic woods. But sugar was king, accounting for up to 90 per cent in value of the island’s exports.

It was not all plain sailing in the ‘sweet negotiation of sugar’. The Navigation Acts, by removing international competition, raised shipping costs for the planters, and the 4½ per cent export duty bit into profits. Sugar growing itself remained, a planter lamented in 1687, ‘a design full of accident’. In 1663, there was a plague of ‘strange and unusual caterpillars and worms’, which wreaked havoc. In 1667, there were numerous cane fires, as well as a hurricane. The following year saw a severe drought, followed by excessive rain, then another drought. An epidemic in 1669–70 carried off great swathes of the workforce.