The Sugar Barons (31 page)

The rector found an open street and led a group of citizens in prayer for nearly an hour – ‘the Earth working all the while with new motions, and tremblings, like the rowlings of the Sea … I could hardly keep myself on my knees’ – before being rescued by boat.

The violent tremors had the effect of liquefying much of the sand on which the town was built. The horror for anyone alive caught in this soupy mix was that it solidified rapidly: ‘some inhabitants were swallowed up to the Neck, and then the Earth shut upon them; and squeezed them to death’, wrote the rector, Emmanuel Heath. ‘And in that manner several are left buried with their heads above ground.’ One so trapped was Colonel Peter Beckford; fortunately there was someone nearby to dig him out in time.

The next day saw the harbour choked with perhaps 1,000 bodies, bobbing up and down, causing an ‘intolerable stench’. Included among the dead, noted Captain Crocket, were ‘Mr Beckford’s two daughters’, Priscilla aged 17, and 14-year-old Elizabeth. Joining those killed by the earthquake and now floating in the harbour was a large number of corpses washed from their sandy graves on the nearby Pallisades.

Many saw the dreadful hand of God’s punishment on the city, that ‘the Lord spoke terrible things in righteousness … as a Fore-runner of the Terrible Day of the Lord’. The council reported the disaster as ‘an instance of God Almighty’s severe judgment’ and vowed thereafter to better enforce laws relating to piety. Everyone could agree that the wicked city, and the most ‘ungodly people on the Face of the Earth’, had got what they deserved.

Crocket observed that in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, ‘many of the old Reprobates are become New Converts; those that use to Mock at Sin, Now Weep bitterly for it’. But he also noted that in no time, some were ‘at their old Trade of Drinking, Swearing and Whoreing; breaking up Ware-houses; pillaging and Stealing from their Neighbours’. Indeed, even before the tremors had ceased, men were at work robbing the dead, emptying their pockets or cutting off fingers to get at rings, while dogs gnawed at the heads sticking out of the ground.

The earthquake, which also ‘threw down all the churches, dwelling houses
and sugar works in the island’, was followed by widespread looting, and unsurprisingly, considering the gruesome scene, severe attacks of disease, including malaria, attributed at the time to ‘the hurtful Vapours belch’d from the many openings of the earth’. At least another 1,000 died in the aftermath from the general lawlessness and sickness. The large number rendered homeless attempted to build crude shelters on the mainland on the site of what is now Kingston, but ‘lying wet, and wanting medicines … they died miserably in heaps’.

The wrecking of Port Royal destroyed forever the playground of the buccaneers, contributing to their final eclipse by the planter interest.
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Most immediately, the destruction of the strongest defensive position on the island, as well as some 2,000 inhabitants, left the entire island in a chronically vulnerable condition. ‘Our first Fears’, wrote a Jamaican to London at the end of June, ‘are concerning our Slaves, those Irreconcilable and yet Intestine Enemies of ours, who are no otherwise our Subjects than as the Whip makes them; who seeing our strongest Houses demolisht, our Arms broken … might be stirred up to rise in Rebellion against us.’ Almost as bad was what now seemed like an inevitable ‘forcible Invasion of the Barbarous French’. For by now, Britain and France were once again at war.

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THE PLANTER AT WAR: CODRINGTON IN THE LEEWARD ISLANDS

‘[These colonies’] whole past history … presents only a succession of wars, usurpations, crimes, misery, and vice … all is one revolting scene of infamy, bloodshed, and unmitigated woe, of insecure peace and open disturbance, of the abuse of power, and of the reaction of misery against oppression.’

James Phillippo, a Baptist minister who worked in Jamaica, 1843

News of William of Orange’s invasion of England and dethroning of James II, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’, reached England’s American colonies in January 1689. The Jacobite Governor of the Leewards, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, told the new King, William III, in May that he could not accept the revolution. The uncertainty allowed the long-bubbling tensions on St Kitts to explode into war and destruction. The following month, 130 armed Irish servants rose up in the name of the deposed King James and sacked the English plantations on the windward side of St Kitts, carrying their loot over the border to the French parts of the island, where they were given sanctuary in the name of their shared Roman Catholic religion. Although disowned by their governor, a number of French inhabitants joined in the ‘burning and ravaging’. Unwilling to provoke the numerically superior French into open war, the English evacuated their women and children to nearby Nevis and, some 450-strong, sheltered behind the walls of their redoubt, Fort Charles, having sent a small boat to Barbados to plead for reinforcements.

But open war was not long in coming. To help check the ambitions of Louis XIV, which included returning James II to the throne, England joined the ‘Grand Alliance’, declaring war on France in May 1689.
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On
18 July, before news of the declaration had reached the English American colonists, an 18-ship French fleet was spotted heading for St Kitts. Soon a 3,000-strong, well-armed force was marching on Fort Charles. Shortly afterwards, Sir Nathaniel Johnson voluntarily resigned and boarded a vessel for South Carolina,
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but not before nominating a new commander, Christopher Codrington, a man, he wrote to London from Antigua (now the seat of government of the English Leewards), ‘of great estate here and in Barbados’.

The appointment, quickly confirmed by London, would last nine years and show Codrington at his very best, and his very worst. Then nearly 50, his extraordinary energy and skilful leadership would save the English Leewards and gain him a reputation as the most effective English military commander of the seventeenth century in the West Indies; his tactlessness and shameless greed would see him disgraced and his most progressive aims come to nothing.

Whatever his private opinions, Codrington radiated confidence, writing to London on 31 July that the defences of Fort Charles were ‘so strongly built and backed by so vast a thickness of earth that there is no danger of a breach from their guns’. There was no way in for the French, he said, ‘so good is the spirit of the garrison’. Straight away he moved to disarm the Irish in Antigua, some 300 of them, lest they repeat the depredations of their countrymen in St Kitts; and in Nevis and Montserrat, too, potential troublemakers were imprisoned or deported. Then Codrington, using mainly his own vessels, rushed with all the men he could muster to Nevis in an attempt to draw the French away from the besieged fort on St Kitts. At the same time he sent off pleading letters to London for help: ‘We are not unprofitable appendages to the Crown’, he wrote. ‘We contribute as much and as heartily to enrich the royal coffers as any English subjects … these things entitle us to protection …’

The spirit of the English defenders of Fort Charles was, in fact, far from good. The men were in dire need of food, clothing and arms, and the soldiers had not been properly paid for six years, while the planters were distracted by internal treachery and dissension. After holding out for three weeks, they surrendered on 5 August.

The survivors were allowed to leave for Nevis, which was now becoming crowded, hungry and fractious with so many extra mouths to feed. Soon an epidemic broke out – likely to have been smallpox – which killed 500 whites and 200 enslaved Africans. The English in the Leewards started to
panic. Attempted raids on Antigua by Caribs added to the sense of crisis. There was still no sign of an English fleet, even though Codrington assured everyone that it was expected daily, to ‘turn our mourning into joy’.

Faced by a desperate situation, Codrington opted for bluff, carrying out a series of raids against the smaller French islands, largely financed out of his own pocket, while waiting for a force to arrive from England. St Martin, St Barts and Marie Galante were attacked, and Barbuda successfully defended after another joint attempt at takeover by its Irish inhabitants and a French force. To Codrington’s fury, Barbados – comparatively safe in its windward, isolated location – was proving very slow in providing help; but he knew enough about the self-interest of planters to surmise that many on the populous island would welcome the ruin of the Leewards and the consequent hike in the value of their own sugar crop.

When at last a troop of soldiers came from Barbados, Codrington was compelled to use them to keep order in Nevis, whose people, he complained, were ‘most turbulent and ungovernable’, although he seems to have talked the Irish contingent into professing loyalty.
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Codrington was also losing patience with London. ‘We are greatly discouraged by the long neglect of us at home’, he complained, ‘it being seven months since one of these Islands was lost.’ ‘Had we a fleet to make us masters of the sea’, he went on, ‘two thousand soldiers from England would amply suffice to make us so on land in all the French Islands.’

At last on Saturday 31 May 1690, the long-awaited fleet, with 13 warships as well as transports, dropped anchor at Antigua with military stores and a British regiment on board. Without delay Codrington prepared to take the offensive on a large scale, determined to drive the French out of the Caribbean for ever. Only the wretched state of the stores and personnel dampened his enthusiasm. ‘I have inspected the muskets and think them as bad as ever came to these parts’, he commented. He also preferred local, seasoned men, ‘fittest for marching and accustomed to rugged paths’, to the sickly soldiers from England, and used all of his charisma and energy to raise a force from Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat that soon numbered 2,300. Willoughby Byam, son of William, the former governor of Surinam and then Antigua, commanded 200 men from Antigua to be Codrington’s personal guard.

On 19 June, the fleet set out for the recapture of St Kitts. They anchored
in Frigate Bay. The French were ready, with more than 1,000 men in well-prepared trenches, but Codrington deployed his ships as a decoy while sending a force of 500 or so of his best men, ‘mostly natives’, to land at between two and three in the morning at an unguarded part of the coast below ‘an almost inaccessible hill’.

There was, however, a path, according to one of the soldiers on the spot, ‘frequented by none but wild Goats’, and the men clambered forward in the darkness, ‘forced to use our Hands as well as our Feet in climbing up’, ‘pulling themselves forward by the bushes’. At the top they were met with a ‘Volly of about seven or eight Shot, from some Scouts there placed, (who immediately upon their firing retreated) which wounded our two brisk Commanders [including Byam, who was hit in the neck], one of which died of his Wounds soon after’. But the approach allowed the attackers to charge the French trenches from the rear, and as the defenders retreated, Codrington landed 600 men to attack from the front. After two hours’ fighting, the French were in full retreat as the English marched in a pincer movement on the French capital of Basseterre. A mile outside the town, there was another engagement, but soon the French ‘made all the heels they could’, some into the mountains, others to a fort in what had been the English part of the island. Having first ordered that all ‘Liquors’ be ‘secured in a convenient storehouse’, Codrington released his men to plunder the French town, while artillery was landed to reduce the fort into which the enemy had retreated.

The fort was overlooked by high ground known as Brimstone Hill. On 4 July, Codrington reported to London that morale in his force was excellent and that he had managed to drag two guns of 2,400 lb up Brimstone Hill, and was now pouring fire into the fort, ‘riddling the houses like sieves’, while his fleet pounded the French from the sea, and sappers dug trenches to within pistol shot of the fort. ‘I have fully resolved’, he went on, ‘to find a grave in this Island or make it an entirely English Colony, which will be some reparation for lives lost and families ruined in the several wars.’

On 14 July, the French surrendered. ‘The King and Queen’s healths were drank’, wrote an eye-witness, ‘and the great guns three times fired, three vollies being also made by the whole army.’ Codrington, in reporting the victory, urged London to press on with driving the French out of the West Indies, and started preparations for an attack on Martinique or Guadeloupe. He also warned against returning the formerly French part of St Kitts to its previous inhabitants. ‘No Englishmen will ever settle there again’, he wrote, ‘having been twice ruined by the French neighbours
within twenty-two years’ and settlement on nearby Nevis would also be deterred. He also pointed out that he had ‘disbursed large sums for the public service and am ready still to do so cheerfully, not doubting of repayment from the King’.

Codrington’s actions after the victory at St Kitts in part recall the best of his period of governorship of Barbados 20 years earlier. He was careful to control his troops, who were at one point set on pillaging everything, including the property of the dispossessed English settlers. Although many in the other islands would happily have seen St Kitts laid waste to raise the price of their own sugar, Codrington set about resettling the entire island. He urged the creation of a stable fiscal structure to pay for government, and the establishment of schools, churches and hospitals; furthermore, he reserved 15,000 acres for small farmers with 10 acres apiece so as to guarantee an adequate white militia and ‘middle class’. Invitations were sent to New York and New England for settlers to come.