The Sugar Barons (37 page)

In August 1707, Codrington left his home at Betty’s Hope, Antigua, and retreated to his estates in Barbados. It seems he intended to at last fulfil his ambition of returning home to his English garden and library, but either
a recurrence of poor health (possibly a sexually transmitted infection, as Parke alleged) or a continued engagement in local politics prevented him making the long and arduous voyage. According to his funeral oration, given by his friend the Reverend William Gordon, he spent the last three years of his life in quiet contemplation and academic study. But another account had it that ‘from [Barbados], by an uninterrupted Correspondence [with Antigua], he continu’d to refresh the Dissensions he had sown’. The Reverend Gordon himself was a scoundrel of the first order, ‘insidious, restless, meddling’, addicted to gambling, so it is likelier that Codrington continued to seethe with anger and jealousy, and to conspire to regain his Leewards fiefdom. Like his father, in the corrupting heat of the tropics, ‘beyond the line’, he had made a journey from conscientious, idealistic reformer to a man of faction, self-interest and bitterness.

Encouraged by Codrington or not, soon the Leeward Islanders had prepared extensive complaints against Governor Parke: there was his personal conduct; in addition, he had seized vessels and ‘made prizes of them contrary to Law’; he had concealed wills to buy up for himself supposedly intestate estates; while professing to counter illegal trading, he had sent vessels to Martinique; he had bought land, slaves and cattle for a low price and ‘if any other Gentleman bid higher or nearer the value they were sure to feel his resentments’. Helped by money from Codrington, these complaints were sent to London in March 1709, and every effort made to turn the home authorities against Parke.

Codrington would not live to see the grisly fate of his great enemy. On 7 April 1710, having never really recovered his health since Guadeloupe, he died aged just 42. According to the perhaps unreliable testimony of Parke, ‘he was in great perplexity before he died to alter his will and according sent 6 times for one to do it, but those about him prevented the messengers going … and a vollpony will he made takes place, so that ye most of his estate goes to those he mortally hated before he died’. Thus the extraordinary will of 1703 stood, with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Overseas getting the Barbados estates (at that time clearing a huge annual profit of £2,000), and cousin William coming into most of the rest. If Parke’s story about changing the will is to be believed, it is more likely that Codrington would have wanted to disinherit William, a slippery character who at one point sided with Parke, than the Society, though it is not impossible that he had changed his mind about that as well.

Parke was jubilant that ‘the author and contriver of all this vilany against me is now answering for it’. ‘They say he broke his heart’, Parke went on,
‘not being able to get the better of me.’ But the Governor’s own days were numbered. As indications came from London that Parke’s star was on the wane, the Leeward Islanders responded with growing violence and lawlessness. A riot in St Kitts saw the murder of the former Acting Governor John Johnson. In Antigua, Parke narrowly survived two assassination attempts. He reacted with a further escalation of violence, taking personal charge of the garrison and ordering them to attack and harass his enemies. At last he was recalled by the authorities in London, more through sheer weight of complaints than any decision against his conduct, but he ignored the order, instead becoming ever more reckless and paranoid.

The Antigua assembly was now dissolved by Parke, but it continued to meet in the island’s capital, St John’s, refusing to recognise his authority. Rumours started circulating that the Governor was preparing to surrender the island to the French. Refusing to back down, on 7 December Parke sent a detachment of troops to an assembly meeting, and dispersed the men at gunpoint. Within a short time, some 300 armed planters had poured in from surrounding area to support the assembly members. Parke retreated to his St John’s house, with about 70 loyal soldiers, and deployed five field guns to cover the main approaches.

Deputations from the council and from the assembly approached to try to persuade Parke to leave the island while he still could, but in the meantime, the house was surrounded. Parke would not hear of surrender, and as tempers flared out of control, the two sides opened fire. Parke himself fired his cannon at the throng, who then charged the house. One of the rebel leaders was personally shot down by Parke, but then the Governor was hit in the thigh. An eye-witness reports that ‘they then broke in upon him, tore off his cloathes, dragged him by his members about his house, bruised his head, and broke his back with the butt end of the pieces’. The wounded Governor was then dragged from his house and brutally treated as he lay dying; when he asked for water, they spat in his face. Of his 70 guards, 11 were killed and 35 wounded; four rioters were killed and eight wounded. Parke’s house was ransacked, the mob stealing everything they could lay their hands on, including (apparently by ‘One Turnor a farrier’) the miniature of Queen Anne that had hung around Parke’s neck.

Parke’s brutal murder was outrageous and shocking even by the standards of the ‘beyond the line’ West Indies. But no one was ever punished. A new governor, Walter Douglas, was sent out, but found no one willing to testify against the ringleaders; after all, you could hardly prosecute the entire Antigua white population. Douglas decided instead that it was safer to accept bribes to clear those implicated in the crime. For this, and other
misdemeanours, which included stealing the communion plate from St John’s church, he was recalled, tried and imprisoned.

Thus the colonists had proved themselves almost ungovernable. (In this light, the efforts of the Codringtons, however severely tainted by self-interest and personal psychological issues, look all the more commendable.) But while some Antiguans celebrated their deliverance from the interfering Parke, others never recovered their belief in the happy future of the colony.

Abraham Redwood was one of those horrified and sickened by what had occurred. Originally from Bristol, Redwood had worked as a slave trader and mariner on the West India route, before marrying the daughter of the wealthy Antiguan planter and Quaker pioneer Jonas Langford and settling on the island. Redwood himself was by now a Quaker, and as well as looking after land in his own name worked as a partner in Langford’s extensive sugar business. In 1709, shortly before Parke’s murder, his third son, another Abraham, was born. Following the early deaths of his elder brothers, this Abraham would turn out to be the inheritor of a great sugar estate in Antigua, and subsequently, based in Newport, Rhode Island, one of the richest men in North America.

Abraham senior’s thoughts seem to have turned for a while towards the northern American colonies. For him, Antigua was just a stepping stone to a future for his family in the distinctly more God-fearing, calm and law-abiding mainland. We know that he and his wife had travelled to Newport, probably on business for his father-in-law (his eldest daughter, Mary, was born in Newport in 1698). He had sent his eldest children to school in Quaker-friendly Philadelphia, and was in correspondence with Jonathan Dickinson, an old West India hand fast establishing himself in that city.

On 11 February 1711, only six weeks after Parke’s murder, Redwood wrote to Dickinson that he would himself have been in Philadelphia by now, had not the sloop due to carry him there been ‘Taken’. He had received, he reported, ‘the 3 barrels of bread and 3 barrels of beer’ sent to him to pass on to Langford, and urgently requested news of his children, of whom he had heard nothing for too long. The gloomy letter also reported the ‘miserly Dry Dry Times’ and expressed a hope for a ‘speedy peace’ with France, after so much destruction: ‘We are now daily expecting the French by good Intelligence if not for this Islands for another of the Leeward Islands.’ All this worry caused Abraham great ‘discomposure of mind’.

On the morning of his death, Parke had written a codicil to his will,
appointing a new executor after the death of a previous nominee. That new man was Abraham Redwood. His take on the murder that day is therefore informed by this loyalty, as well as by his growing distaste for life in Antigua. I have ‘much fear’, he wrote to Dickinson, that ‘it will be very hard with this Island for we have stain’d the Land with so much Blood that wee Can expect nothing but Banness [destruction] on this Island and I fear a scurge is over our heads’. ‘I desire to settle in Philadelphia’, he went on, ‘for I see nothing good here for I much fear our Distruction by Drawing god’s Judgemt On Us that So wee are a miserable people … Pride goes before Distruction which is our Miserable Case.’

Abraham Redwood would remove his family from seemingly tainted Antigua within a couple of years, with fairly tragic results; the predicted retribution came sooner than that, with further misery heaped on the heads of the English Leeward Islanders. In July 1712, a French force, having attacked Antigua unsuccessfully, descended on Montserrat and laid waste the island for several days, carrying away 1,200 slaves and a booty worth an estimated £180,000.

By then, unknown to the distant West Indies, negotiations were already under way in Europe to end the war. What would eventually become known as the Treaty of Utrecht, signed the following year, for once did not entirely reconstitute the pre-war situation in the West Indies. The French parts of St Kitts were at last permanently ceded to Britain (as it now was called, after the union with Scotland). Although concerning only a tiny amount of land (and of minor international signficance compared to the gaining by Britain of Gibraltar, Novia Scotia and other territories), this was hugely helpful in ending the awkward sharing arrangement – made in the face of Carib and Spanish threats many years before – that had caused so much friction and conflict between France and England in the Leewards.

Long before the end of the war, the conflict in the West Indies had deteriorated into simple vandalism and looting. Neither side really wanted to flood their home markets by actually conquering more sugar acreage – the English had all they could use in Jamaica, and the French in Hispaniola. With the land everywhere in the hands of a tiny elite, the chance to plunder presented by the conflict had provided perhaps the best hope for the poor whites of either side to gain a quick fortune, but in the medium and long term they were losers in the war, and not just because they made up the cannon fodder. Lands left empty were snapped up by the big sugar barons, and many of the smallholders who left their home islands during the periodic expulsions never returned, giving up on cultivation in favour of
privateering or emigration elsewhere. This left the islands more socially divided among the whites, and ever more polarised, with a tiny planter elite precariously perched on the top of a growing slave population.

A census carried out by Governor Parke in 1708 shows that the white population of all the English Leeward islands, bar one, had shrunk since the previous census 30 years earlier, most markedly in Nevis, where it was less than a third of its 3,500 earlier population. The exception was Antigua, almost totally undeveloped in 1678, whose white population had grown by 500 to 2,892. Having, uniquely in the Leewards, escaped French invasion, Antigua was now the most important sugar island in the group, and had a slave population just short of 13,000. No one at the beginning of the eighteenth century could call the Leewards settler communities. As in Barbados 20 years before, the gradual transformation to slave society was complete.

Amazingly, in spite of the destruction, sugar production had doubled in the Leewards during the war, from around 5,000 tons in 1689 to 10,000 in 1713. Worse wars against the French were still to come, but after the Treaty of Utrecht, the Leewards enjoyed a generation of peace. For the islands’ surviving sugar baron families – the Byams, Martins, Gunthorpes, Fryes and, of course, Codringtons – the chance was there to become a colonial sugar aristocracy on the Barbados model.

19
THE BECKFORDS: THE NEXT GENERATION

‘The Passions of the Mind have a very great power on Mankind here.’

Sir Hans Sloane on Jamaica, 1707

In Jamaica, the creation of the most powerful and spectacular sugar dynasty of all was already well under way. By the end of the seventeenth century, Colonel Peter Beckford had upwards of 4,000 acres, he was the factor for the Royal African Company, had widespread shipping and trading interests and, like the Codringtons, looked to combine wealth with political power to the benefit of both. By the late 1690s, Colonel Beckford was President of the Council; furthermore, Governor Beeston, some five years before he left Jamaica in 1702, had obtained for his friend Beckford a commission ‘to succeed to the Government of Jamaica’ should the post become vacant.

But in the intervening period an incident had occurred that severely damaged the family’s reputation. Beckford’s eldest son Peter, having been educated at Oxford, returned to Jamaica in around 1692, when he was about 19 years old. Nothing is known of his time in England – he made no great impression, as the younger Codrington had done – and he arrived back in Jamaica an unvarnished chip off the old block – headstrong, violent and, as would subsequently be shown, a shrewd and skilful businessman.

By virtue of his father’s wealth and political power, Peter the Younger quickly assumed a civil position, sworn in as Receiver General in October 1696 ‘on giving the usual security’. But at the end of the following year, on 9 December 1697, Governor Beeston was forced to add an unusual footnote to his customary report to London: ‘This Eve Mr Lewis [the Deputy Judge Advocate] was unfortunately killed by Mr Beckford the Reciever Generall, by which both these offices are at present void but I will endeavour to fill them with the most capable men I can find for them.’