The Sugar Barons (41 page)

Roberts’s third ship was soon afterwards captured, and the prizes and prisoners taken to the English castle at Cape Coast. According to Atkins, ‘the pyrates in this Passage were very troublesome to us, from a Project or two they had formed for their Deliverance’, but they were delivered safely to justice. The captured crews, totalling 272 men, turned out to consist of 75 blacks, who were quickly sold to slaving ships, a large number of West Country Englishman, and a mix of Londoners, Irish and Scots, together with Dutch and Greeks. More than 50 were hanged; 20 were allowed to take on indentures with the Royal African Company, by reputation ‘a lingering death’, 20 were sent to London for trial, and about a third were released.

The captain of the
Swallow
, Challenor Ogle, was rewarded with fast promotion and a knighthood, the only British naval officer to be honoured specifically for his actions against pirates. He also became instantly a very rich man. According to Atkins, on board the ships was ‘great plenty of trading Goods, and, what more attracted the Eye, a large quantity of Gold Dust, by computation, 8 or 10,000
l
.’ The gold disappeared into Challenor’s pockets. In the division of the spoils, Atkins got only £26.

The
Swallow,
with its prize the
Royal Fortune
in attendance, now left Africa for Brazil, Barbados and Jamaica, accompanying English slave-traders, who would then return to England with sugar and other tropical products, completing the famous trade triangle.

Atkins was impressed with a lot of what he found in Jamaica: the wide streets of Kingston, open to the sea breeze; the ‘Magnificence of Living’ of the ‘Gentlemen’, whom he described as ‘true Republicans in Disposition’. But the slavery he saw – men, women and children treated as ‘beasts of burthen’ – confirmed him in his view that the Africans were not, as had been suggested, better off in the West Indies. He was also concerned about the ratio of blacks to whites, now in the region of eight to one: ‘a Disproportion, that together with the Severity of their Patrons, renders the whole Colony unsafe’. Maroons, he wrote, ‘daily increase’.

There was to be a more immediate danger, however. A week after his arrival in Jamaica, Atkins had first-hand experience of a hurricane. The island had been hit 10 years before, but this one was worse. For 48 hours the storm gave warnings of its imminent arrival: waves crashed noisily against the wharfs and the nights saw ‘prodigious lightnings and thunder’.

When the hurricane started on 28 August 1722, Atkins found himself
‘left alone proprietor of a shaking old house, the streets full of water and drift, with shingles flying about like arrows’. Most of the population of Kingston took shelter in the church, as the two blocks nearest the sea ‘were undermined and leveled with the Torrent’. But the flimsy church then collapsed too, killing 300–400 people in the ruins.

Only six of the 50 vessels in the harbour survived, (including the
Swallow
, though not her prize), but all had their masts and booms blown away. Wrecks and drowned men were everywhere to be seen along the shore, ‘a melancholy scene’. Left behind were pools of stagnating water, which ‘brought on a contagious distemper, fatal for some months through the island’.

Along with epidemics of disease, natural disasters remained a fact of life in the West Indies, contributing to the colonies’ pervading sense of crisis and impermanence. Jamaica would be hit once more by a hurricane four years later, then again in 1734. The French settlements, where sugar production was now rising sharply, were just as vulnerable. Guadeloupe, for one, was visited by hurricanes in 1713, 1714 and 1738. Antigua was now, in terms of production, the fastest-growing British Leeward sugar island, but this was in spite of losing a sixth of its inhabitants to a fever epidemic in 1725, followed by a severe drought and then a hurricane in 1728.

Bristol-born Quaker Abraham Redwood, who had written to a friend in Philadelphia after Parke’s murder in 1710 that Antigua had called down God’s judgement on itself, inherited, together with his sons, substantial estates on the island on the death in 1712 of his father-in-law, the ancient Quaker Jonas Langford (all of whose sons had predeceased him). Almost immediately, Redwood removed his family – now consisting of four or five children – north to Newport, Rhode Island, safe, he must have hoped, from the threats of war and disease in Antigua.

But by the spring of 1714, Redwood was preparing to return to Antigua. His family, it seems, had not taken to the New England winter. It is ‘too Cold in this place’, he wrote to John Dickinson from Newport in January 1714. The whole family had been ill, and his eldest son, 16-year-old William, had died in October 1712. William’s three-year-old brother John died the following year.

However, the return was not a success. Abraham’s wife Mehitable died in 1715, and, leaving his estates in the hands of an attorney, Redwood relocated north again, to Salem, Massachusetts, where he remarried. Although by now 51, he went on to have a further five surviving children with his
new wife, Patience, including one son, William. Nonetheless, there would be further tragedy: in October 1724, Redwood’s eldest son, Jonas, aged 18, died after a fall from a horse. This meant that his third son, another Abraham, was now set to inherit the Antigua plantations.

Abraham junior rose to the challenge. From 1726, although only 17, he based himself in Newport and, using his family’s Quaker business contacts, started selling the Antigua produce there – sugar, rum, molasses and cotton – shipping out to the West Indies in return peas, beans, candles and horses, as well as occasional gifts of fruits and cheese, and corresponding with his family’s agent in Antigua, at that time Edward Byam.

The young Redwood was part of a Rhode Island colony that had found its role in the imperial system. The overriding purpose of the commercial economy of colonial New England was to obtain the means with which to purchase English manufactures (an objective the Virginia planter accomplished by the simple expedient of exporting tobacco). Rhode Island had turned out to be too barren to compete on agricultural production and had no access to fisheries. What it did have was excellent ports and an enterprising population. The answer was to build ships and to trade. Hundreds of vessels of all sizes were constructed in the colony during the early decades of the eighteenth century, during which time New England came to dominate the supply of provisions, horses and lumber to its key market – the West Indian sugar colonies.

Self-assured, decisive, and independent-minded, Redwood was an able but headstrong young man, a great contrast to his gloomy and God-fearing father. Certainly Abraham junior felt no compulsion to follow in his parents’ devout Quaker tradition, as evidenced by his marriage, aged just short of 18, to Martha Coggeshall, from an old but far from wealthy Rhode Island family. To the shock of the Newport Quaker community, the youngsters married outside the Society of Friends. A marker had been laid down: Abraham would pay scant regard to the Friends’ distaste for luxury and, in time, slavery.

By the time of his father’s death in January 1729, Abraham Redwood junior, although remaining in Newport, had acquired solid experience of managing the family’s interests in Antigua, centred on the Cassada Gardens plantation, now bringing in £2,000–3,000 a year profit on the back of the work of more than 200 slaves. By this time, he had laid down firm roots in North America, having acquired an elegant house with a large garden on the Newport wharf at Thames Street, as well as warehouses and loading facilities on the docks, and another house in Spring Street. To compete with the showiness of his neighbours, the pre-eminent Newport merchants,
the Malbones, he had imported gates and bricks from England for the entrance to his mansion, as well as specially commissioned carved stone pineapples to top the gates (the English West Indian symbol of welcome that is today everywhere to be seen in the older parts of Newport).

From as early as 1727, Redwood was also importing enslaved Africans from Antigua to Newport. This was in part, like the mansion gates, a question of status – it was suddenly the thing to have in attendance a black child as a page or maid. There is voluminous correspondence about ‘negro’ boys and girls requested by Redwood (‘I have bought you a negro Girle of about nine or ten years of age …’) and sent to him by his Antigua agents. Sometimes this was tricky: on 20 July 1728, Byam wrote: ‘I would have sent ye girle you desired but … those on your plantation who are in family are very unwilling to part with their children.’ In the same letter, Byam congratulated Redwood on the birth of his first child.

But slaves in Newport were not just ornaments. By the 1730s, they were doing a lot of the hard physical work of a trading and shipbuilding colony, and made up 10 per cent of the population of Newport. Most were imported from Barbados, some 30 a year, and it seems that unlike in the West Indies, the slave owners were ‘supplied by the offspring of those they have already, which increase daily’. (In contrast, the Carolinas at this time were importing about 1,000 slaves a year; by 1732, the population of South Carolina was 14,000 whites and 32,000 blacks.)

More significantly, a number of North Americans were now involving themselves directly in the slave trade from Africa. As early as 1700, Rhode Island and Boston ships were to be found on the West African coast, picking up slaves who were then sold in Barbados or the other West Indian islands, with perhaps one or two brought back to North America. But in the 1720s, this trade surged.

The key to this was rum. Places like Newport and Boston had been distilling since the 1690s, but most of the resulting spirit had been for local consumption, or for sale to the ‘Indians’ in return for furs, and, according to later complaints, to ‘debauch them’. But from the 1720s onward, about a third of Rhode Island’s rum production was loaded on to ships for Africa, where it was traded for slaves. Rum was perfect: cheap to produce; easy to transport; it did not deteriorate with age; and it lent itself to adulteration by clever North American traders. Most importantly, the super-proof ‘Guinea’ rum produced by the New England distilleries was massively popular in West Africa, much preferred to its rivals, West Indian rum, English spirits or French brandy. Soon the New England rum was a de facto currency of the Slave Coast. Adult male slaves could be
bought for as little as 80 gallons, which cost only five pence per gallon to produce. Within a short time, there were as many as 20 vessels from Newport alone making the voyage every year, carrying about 1,800 hogsheads of rum. Slaves were sold on in the Caribbean or in New England for between £30 and £80.

The highly profitable trade was not without its risks. The journey from Newport to Africa took 40 to 50 days – plenty of time for shipwreck, pirate attack
⁴⁵
or other disasters – and the diseases of the West African coast remained deadly to outsider whites.

The demand for the raw material of rum – molasses – also threatened to cause severe long-term problems. In the late 1720s and early 1730s, a gallon of molasses from Barbados cost 9–10d; in French Martinique the same quantity could be had for as little as 4d. Inevitably, the French islands secured the new market and benefited from the increased demand from New England. Furthermore, the French, by trading with the New Englanders, pushed up the prices of the goods supplied by the northern colonies to their sister settlements on the British islands.

The British sugar planters were not prepared to put up with this for long. Starting in 1730, they complained of penury, and lobbied Whitehall to impose a heavy duty on all foreign sugar, molasses and rum imported into the northern colonies. New Englanders mocked the claims to poverty, pointing out that the sugar barons still ‘live like Lords, and ride in a Coach and Six’. But it was the sugar interest that prevailed in London, where trading with a rival power was seen as against the national interest and the prevailing mercantilist economic orthodoxy. In 1733 the Molasses Act was passed, imposing a duty of sixpence per gallon on molasses imported from non-British territories. This was not a revenue bill, it was effective prohibition, doubling the cost of French molasses for the New England distiller.

The Act represents a turning point in the history of Britain’s first western empire. As John Adams would later write: ‘Molasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence.’ Crucially, the legislation clearly favoured the interests of one set of colonies over another. North Americans complained vociferously that the duty was contrary to their rights as ‘ye King’s natural born subjects and English men in levying subsidies upon them against their consent when they … have no Representatives in Parliament’.

Such dangerous words should, with hindsight, have caused alarm in London, but just as worrying was the subsequent carrying-out of the
Molasses Act. In short, it was a dead letter. Rhode Island traders such as James Brown, the founder of the dynasty that would establish Brown University in Providence, quickly sent messages to their captains to bring their molasses, picked up in Martinique, into one of the many quiet bays around the island, out of sight of British patrols.
⁴⁶
Some made even less effort, simply paying off officials who realised that a port without commerce benefited nobody but the distant planter interest in the islands. Thus the flagrant violation of the Molasses Act indicated that North American colonial merchants would not observe, nor would local British officials enforce, a law that would seriously disrupt trade.

So New England’s transatlantic activities continued, with Barbadians complaining in 1736 that the New Englanders sold their slaves in the English islands for cash, which they then spent in the Dutch enclave of St Eustatius on imported goods or on molasses from the French islands. In the same year, the first slaver set sail from Providence, Rhode Island – the
Mary
, owned by the Brown family and with Obadiah Brown, James’s younger brother, in charge of the cargo. (A ledger of James’s accounts shows a bill from a blacksmith for ‘35 pare of handcoofs’, which indicates they were aiming to take on 70 male slaves.) In Newport, the slave population continued to grow.