The Sugar Barons (24 page)

Perhaps the best contemporary account, although somewhat confused on dates, comes from letters to his brother John Jr in New England written by Samuel Winthrop (who had already seen his holdings in St Kitts fall into the hands of the enemy). Having been prevented by contrary winds from attacking the main harbour and capital at St John’s, the French landed at Five Islands’ Bay, having dealt with its two forts, one being little more than an artificial mound. From there, they proceeded overland towards St John’s, burning everything they came across and capturing the island’s governor, Colonel Robert Carden. Near St John’s harbour, some 200 English soldiers faced the 600-strong French force. ‘Ye contention was verry smart for about ½ hour’, Winthrop would report, ‘& our men withstood them verry resolutedly, but, being overpowered with men, were put to flight, many slayne on both sides.’ (By this time, Winthrop had put his wife and children on a passing sloop heading for Nevis.)

Most of the English were captured or killed, but the remnants retreated to Winthrop’s house, ‘having now other place left for defence, expecting ye enemy ye next morning’. But instead, a trumpet came with a summons to surrender. The English were happy to comply, especially as a Carib force, in loose alliance with the French, had landed on the windward coast and was causing havoc. Promising to return to collect arms and ammunition due by the terms of the surrender, and releasing Governor Carden, the French departed to St Kitts, although not before urging the English Antiguans to ‘take up their armes to defend themselves against ye Indians’.

When the French returned, they found that reinforcements had been landed from Nevis and Barbados. Hearing that more English troops were on the way, they decided that they could not hold the island, but instead would ‘land, attack the enemy, and, in case of success, place the island in such a state that the enemy can draw no sort of profit from it’. However, their plans were somewhat discomforted by their being met by another surrender party carrying a white flag. Having none of this, the French formed up into battle array and advanced on the English. Only two shots were fired against them, one of which hit an English sentinel. The English commander, a Colonel Fitch (or Fitz), rushed from the battlefield to organise the evacuation of his valuable slaves.

Having once again secured the island, the French commander took over Winthrop’s house, removing all but 12 of his slaves (who had run away), but leaving his sugar works intact. Elsewhere the looting was much more
thorough. After seven days, they left for Guadeloupe. ‘In this sadd condic’on wee remained’, wrote Winthrop, ‘& yt wch added to or afflictions were ye murthers & rapes wch ye Indians com’itted upon ye inhabitants after ye French departed, having, as they said, liberty to do so for five days.’

Governor Carden did his best to treat with the Caribs, but was lured away from his guard, attacked and decapitated. According to a lurid account that circulated for many years, Carden’s head was then broiled, and carried back to his house and family, who were then taken into captivity.

Samuel Winthrop ended his account with news that an English counterattack was rumoured. His livelihood depended on it: ‘If wee prevaile’, he wrote, ‘I have yet wherewth to mainteyn my sonnes at schoole … Otherwise they will be put to trade or imploymt.’

Shortly after Antigua, Montserrat, with the aid of the majority Irish population,
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fell to the enemy. Six hundred inhabitants of Montserrat arrived shortly afterwards in Jamaica, ‘extremely plundered, even to their very shirts’. In all, according to the claims later put in, the English had lost from St Kitts, Montserrat and Antigua 15,000 slaves and materials for 150 sugar works, worth a total of £400,000. Early the following year, the valuable English colony in Surinam, weakened by disease and a shortage of arms, also fell to a comparatively modest Dutch force, who proceeded to retake other islands previously under their control. French and Dutch privateers ruled the seas, and Barbados, under effective blockade, faced starvation.

But at this point Louis XIV’s priorities changed. While in the spring of 1667 Charles II sent out considerable forces to the Caribbean, Louis concentrated on his aims in Europe – namely the Spanish Netherlands (and thereby fell out with the Dutch). Led by a new Governor of the ‘Caribbees’, Francis Lord Willoughby’s brother William, the English secured Nevis, and recovered and partially resettled Antigua and Montserrat. An attack on St Kitts in June by 3,000 men ended in defeat, but Surinam was retaken from the Dutch and Cayenne seized from the French. At the end of July, the Peace of Breda was signed. This returned all the colonies to the pre-war status quo, with the exception of Surinam, which was handed over to the Dutch in return for the New Netherland colony, renamed New York in honour of the King’s brother.

The English took everything they could from Surinam and headed for the other islands. The colony’s governor, William Byam, ended up in Antigua, where, he wrote, ‘I am hewing a new fortune out of the wild woods.’ He reclaimed the land given him by Willoughby back in 1650 –
Cedar Hill and Willoughby Bay – and his descendants, marrying into the Warners, would become one of Antigua’s leading families.

In 1670, the Leewards were separated from Barbados and given their own governor, and two years later William Stapleton took up the position, basing himself in Nevis, the only island to escape occupation by the French and therefore by far the most prosperous and populated. The fact that Stapleton was an Irish Roman Catholic must have helped draw together the antagonistic factions on the islands. The new governor took on large amounts of land himself and forcefully pushed the Leeward Islanders towards sugar production. As a consequence, the slave population more than doubled on the islands in the six years after 1672 to some 8,500. But it was a slow process; many of the white settlers expelled by the French never returned, and for some years half the land in Antigua and Montserrat remained unpatented and the other half scarcely developed.

In St Kitts, the French took until 1671 to hand back the English part of the island, and failed to return, as had been agreed, the slaves and sugar-making equipment they had seized. St Kitts never recovered its former population and importance. A settler wrote from the island in 1677: ‘The wars here are more destructive then in any other partes of the world; for twenty yeares’ peace will hardly resettle the devastation of one yeare’s war.’ Ten years after the invasion, ‘the sad workes’ of the destruction ‘are not halfe worne out; nor is the island a quarter so well peopled as it then was’.

After the Peace of Breda, the local French and English governors tried to put together a deal whereby whatever was happening in Europe, they would remain at peace in the Caribbean. The failure of this agreement to be ratified in London meant that tensions would continue to rise between the two communities in the West Indies. William Byam, who had become Governor of Antigua, wrote to Willoughby in Barbados that ‘the French are rampant among these islands’. Indeed, the French soon re-established naval supremacy, and continued to deploy Carib allies as their ‘bloodhounds’ in what amounted to a state of cold war with the English settlers. Continuing raids by Caribs, particularly on Montserrat and Antigua, meant a permanent state of readiness was required. In Antigua ‘are kept every night 14 files of men on Guard against the Indians, and three nights before, and so many after the full moon, they are doubled, besides wch they make continual Rounds and Patrouls of Horse’. Occasional punitive raids on Dominica failed to end the Carib threat, which would only fade by the end of the century due to the ravages of yellow fever among the ‘Indian’ population.

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On his monument in the churchyard of Spanish Town, Sir Thomas Modyford, Governor of Jamaica from 1664 to 1671, is described as ‘the soule and life of all Jamaica, who first made it what it now is’. (Another contemporary called him ‘the openist atheist and most profest immoral liver in the world’.) Certainly, as an experienced planter, Modyford could see the agricultural potential of the island, whose soil, was ‘rich and fat … every where incomparable apt to produce … being always Springing’. He persuaded the King to exempt the island from the 4½ per cent duty imposed on Barbados, and now the Leewards, and to waive customs duties in England until the island was properly established. In the meantime, he handed out land with abandon: some 300,000 acres, triple the size of Barbados, during his seven years in charge.

Modyford epitomises the sheer shamelessness of the planter of this early period. He ruled as an ‘independent potentate’, and gave his family members key positions on the council, the militia and the judiciary. Although in theory land was allocated on the basis of how many family members, slaves and servants immigrants brought with them, this rule, as in Barbados 30 years before, was widely ignored. The greatest beneficiaries were Modyford’s own family; his brother and two sons found themselves owners of over 20,000 acres in total.

In March 1669, Peter Beckford was granted 1,000 acres by royal patent. Other founders of great sugar fortunes taking on land at this time were Lieutenant Francis Price (frequently in partnership with Peter Beckford), and Fulke Rose.
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But very little of this acreage was sufficiently cleared for sugar production, nor was there yet the large amount of labour that the crop required. In 1667, an influx of Portuguese Jewish families from Surinam, experienced sugar producers and traders, gave the nascent industry a boost, but there were still fewer than 60 sugar works on the island by 1670. Instead, most planters grew provisions, indigo, ginger, cotton (much of which was exported to New England) and cacao. Only when his cacao walks were wiped out by a blight in 1670 did Modyford himself turn wholeheartedly to sugar.

The development of sugar production in Jamaica was slow because about half of the male white population was involved not in planting but in buccaneering. Modyford himself encouraged this, and personally benefited to the tune of several thousand pounds. After the end of the war in 1667, during which the buccaneers had proved themselves a more than useful auxiliary force, Modyford argued that these ‘freebooters’ of Port Royal
were essential for the defence of the island against French and Dutch privateers, and the continued threat of the Spanish, who, he wrote, ‘look on us as intruders and trespassers wheresoever they find us in the Indies and use us accordingly’.

Led by Henry Morgan, the 1,400-strong Port Royal buccaneering force attacked Porto Bello in 1668 (reportedly using monks and nuns as human shields), and, most spectacularly of all, fought their way across the thickly jungled isthmus to plunder and burn the city of Panama in 1671.

This last feat, accompanied by ‘divers barbarous acts’, proved to be a step too far, and a severe embarrassment in Europe, where England the year before had signed a treaty with Spain recognising English occupation of Jamaica and the right of English vessels to be in the Caribbean (though not to trade with Spanish colonies) in return for an ending of the destructive buccaneering raids. A new governor, Sir Thomas Lynch, was sent to Jamaica with orders to arrest Modyford and suppress the buccaneers. Lynch lured Modyford on to his ship, and then sent him home under heavy guard. Morgan was also arrested and returned to England, as Lynch then attempted to convert the buccaneers to planting. A few took him up on his offer, but attacks on Spanish towns and shipping continued, and a number of the buccaneers removed to Bermuda and became out-and-out pirates, preying on ships of all nationalities. It was the beginning of what has become known as ‘the Golden Age of Piracy’.

Lynch continued the policy of handing out large grants of land, and encouraged the nascent sugar industry. But there remained two Jamaicas: one of planters, and one of buccaneers and (largely contraband) traders. Five years later, Morgan’s faction was back in favour, and he returned, having been knighted for his services to his country’s interest, to be deputy governor. Although he sanctimoniously betrayed and sentenced to death a number of his former shipmates, his drinking and carousing reached new epic levels.

Meanwhile, however, a pattern emerged of planters building themselves up to sugar production in stages. Land would be cleared, then planted with pea crops while the tree stumps rotted, then potatoes and yams, and perhaps indigo and ginger, with the land ready for canes by the third year, and, all being well, profits from these minor crops sufficient to invest in capital- and labour-intensive sugar production.

Among the first to start making serious money from sugar was Peter Beckford, who in 1676 took over the 1,000 acres in St Elizabeth granted to his kinsman Richard three years earlier. At the age of 33, Peter Beckford had 2,238 acres in sugar and cattle, while at the same time continuing to
work as a merchant. He had also married well, to Bridget, the daughter of one of Jamaica’s richest planters – she was probably the daughter of Sir William Beeston, or possibly a Lynch. Their first son, another Peter, was born around 1674, and was one of the first Jamaicans to be sent to school in England. Peter was followed a year later by a daughter, Priscilla. Another son, Charles, was born in 1677, but died in infancy. The following year a further daughter, Elizabeth, was born, then, in 1682, another son, Thomas. At the same time, although reportedly unpopular – described as ‘a great incendiary’ and as ‘ruthless, unscrupulous and violent’ – Peter Beckford became renowned for his ‘great opulance’, which ‘gained him a superiority over most of the other Planters’ and made him a leading light in the politics of the island. He was the first Custos of Kingston, a member of the assembly for St Catherine’s, and from 1675, Secretary of the Island, the last a lucrative sinecure he purchased for £6,000. By then, it was reported, a personality trait had set in that would become an inherited characteristic of the Beckfords – violent megalomania. Apparently he thought ‘himself the greatest man in the world’, and took to ‘carrying and using, too, a large stick on very trivial provocations’. Political opponents would find themselves physically assaulted and knocked to the ground.