The Sugar Barons (43 page)

This group, led by Captain Quao, was much more troublesome. As early as 1702, Lieutenant-Governor Colonel Beckford was writing to London that ‘rebellious negroes … have been so bold to come down armed and attack our out settlements to Windward’. Colonel Beckford had sent out four parties, one of which, consisting of only 20 men, had fought for six hours against 300 maroons: ‘the negroes faced our men so long as they had any ammunition left, and wounded three of our party. We killed and took several.’ Outlying maroon settlements were burned, but the threat was far from extinguished.

By the mid-1720s, the maroons numbered in their thousands rather than hundreds: travel on the north coast had become hazardous; St George and St James parishes were almost deserted. In 1730, after a raid on a plantation saw six female slaves carried off, three major militia expeditions were launched against the more troublesome windward maroons and a bounty of £10 was placed on the head of any rebel captured, who would be tortured and executed and their children sold into slavery to other islands. But the maroons had an effective network of spies as well as supplies of guns and powder. All efforts by the whites ended in disaster: one expedition was ambushed, a second driven back to the coast, and another got lost in the swamps and a quarter of the men drowned or died of fever.

The following year, two regiments of foot were relieved of guard duty in Gibraltar and sent to Jamaica to deal with the maroons once and for all. In May 1731, the Governor of Jamaica reported that the newly arrived troops were ‘pretty healthy and might be kept so were it not for rumm’. But six months later, the troops were in a ‘wofull state, some companys having lost more than half their compliment chiefly owing to drunkenness’.

Nonetheless, they were sent into action to support the militia, who had some success in November, surprising Quao’s maroons in their chief settlement of Nanny Town. The maroons were driven out and the town held for three days, before the isolated English soldiers were forced to withdraw. For the next two years, both sides had victories and setbacks in what amounted to a stalemate, exhausting for both sides. Then, in April 1734, Nanny Town was captured again after light artillery pieces had been dragged up the mountains to bombard the settlement. The town was destroyed and its inhabitants dispersed for good, although many of them slipped westwards to join up with Cudjoe’s leeward maroons.

This was now the new focus of British efforts; several deserters from Cudjoe’s community served as guides for the militia and regulars who now looked to end the maroon threat for good. Small artillery pieces were used with good effect, as well as imported dogs and Moskito Indians from the Honduran coast, accomplished trackers. But it was an unwinnable war for the British: there were endless ambushes; settlements could be destroyed, but new ones were continually established in even more remote locations. An exasperated Governor Trelawny reported that ‘The service here is not like that in Flanders or any part of Europe. Here the greatest difficulty is not to beat, but to see the enemy.’ Troops were forced to march up the currents of rivers, over steep trackless mountains and precipices, or through woods so thick that they were obliged to cut their way at almost every step. ‘In short’, said Trelawny, ‘nothing can be done in strict conformity to the usual military preparations and according to a regular manner, bushfighting as they call it being a thing peculiar to itself.’

As early as 1734 there had been efforts from the British to come to some sort of terms with the maroons. Neither side could survive a state of constant war. But only in 1738 was a negotiator appointed whom the maroons felt they could trust. Eventually, in March 1739, Cudjoe agreed a peace treaty: his band were to be declared free men and have 1,500 acres to grow provisions (though not sugar); in return, he was to build and maintain roads from his settlements to the white areas (thereby ensuring easy access for British troops) and to promise to return any further runaway slaves from the plantations and to help the British in the event of a foreign invasion. Two white men were to be stationed permanently in the maroon towns, whose leaders would have to report to the Governor once a year. A similar treaty was made later in the year with the remnants of the windward maroons.

In 1735, before the end of the Maroon War, Peter Beckford the Younger had died. Uncharacteristically for his family, it was peacefully in bed. He was 61, a great age for a planter, though not quite that achieved by his father.

The inventory of his possessions made after his death, preserved in the archive in Spanish Town, gives a vivid indication of his eye-popping wealth: plantation after plantation; pages and pages of slaves, all individually listed and named, many hundreds of lives owned by this one man. In all, he was worth in the region of £300,000.

Property in England was left to the eldest son, but he died unmarried two years later, and his inheritance went to the second son, William, who
was also left the greatest part of the Jamaica property. The third son, Richard, who was in England training as a lawyer, received two plantations, and the other brothers, Nathaniel, Julines and Francis, seem to have inherited one plantation each.

William, later known as ‘Alderman Beckford’, was born in Jamaica in 1709, the year before Abraham Redwood, and had been sent to England for schooling at the age of 14. At Westminster, he was reportedly one of the best scholars the school had ever had, although he was criticised and ridiculed for his poor grammar and Jamaican accent. It is said he ‘possessed few of the external graces as far as expression and manner were concerned’. In short, he did not really fit in. Like other Creole (that is, born in the West Indies) whites, he would have thought of himself as European. It was only on visiting England that people like him were confronted with the realisation that they thought, spoke and reacted differently from Europeans. Eating habits, mannerisms and emotional reactions marked them as aliens.

After Balliol College, Oxford, William Beckford studied medicine in Leyden, where, the story goes, he fell in love with an unsuitable girl, the daughter of a shopkeeper. They had a child, Richard (the first of a huge number of illegitimate children Beckford would sire), who was kept secret from his irascible father. Beckford moved the mother and child to London, and put them up in a flat, with a mulatto servant, presumably shipped over from Jamaica. To Beckford’s horror, this page boy, only 16 years old, then fathered a child with the woman. William was reportedly heartbroken; the woman was shipped off with an annuity back to Holland.

On the death of his father, then his elder brother, William returned to Jamaica, where he remained for the next seven years, before returning to England in 1744. It is fascinating to speculate whether, after his time in England and Europe, he saw Jamaica as home. Many years later he would request that his heart be sent to the island after his death to be buried there; yet very soon after coming into his inheritance he started putting down roots in England, purchasing a grand manor with 5,000 acres at Fonthill in Wiltshire. To his contemporaries he seemed a ‘strange and contradictory character’. It is likely that he, like others born in the West Indies but educated elsewhere, did not feel that he really belonged anywhere.

According to his later account, while in Jamaica William Beckford served as ‘a common soldier’ in the island’s militia. When war was declared in 1739, he volunteered to join an expedition from the island.

The enemy was Spain. In spite of the partnership implied by the granting
of the
asiento
after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, tensions had remained high, with Spanish
guarda costas
– freelance customs inspectors, effectively privateers – seizing a large number of English vessels, including legitimate traders. The government in London was besieged by complaints. One petition, demanding protection from the ‘insults on persons and properties’ being carried out by the Spanish, was signed by William Beckford’s brother Richard, as well as his cousin Thomas Beckford, who acted as a sugar factor for the family in London. Among the other signatories were almost all the ‘sugar names’ – Frye, Tomlinson, Warner and others.

It was effectively a state of undeclared war, and to be fair, the English gave as good as they got. South Sea Company directors in Jamaica as well as naval commanders were active in the illegal trade, in defiance of all regulations. As Rear Admiral Charles Stewart wrote to London from Jamaica in 1731, ‘you only hear one side of the question; and I can assure you the sloops that sail from this island, manned and armed on that illicit trade, have more than once bragged to me of their having murdered seven or eight Spaniards’. ‘Villainy is inherent to this climate,’ he concluded.

In the same year, Captain Robert Jenkins’s vessel, the
Rebecca
, was boarded by
guarda costas
while off Havana. Jenkins had his ear cut off and was told to present it to the King of England. (Although he wasn’t then forced to eat it, this was the sort of mutilation afforded to a slave, not a Briton.) When the case came to light, it provided a rallying point for a ‘Patriot Party’ – driven by William Pitt, and gathered around the Prince of Wales – that demanded war. Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole did what he could to preserve the peace, but the country was full of bellicose talk of British naval supremacy and the weakness and effeminacy of Spain. On 13 October 1739, Abraham Redwood’s London agent wrote to him: ‘At present we have nothing but Rumours of War & daily advices of ye Spaniards taking our Ships hope we may soon have an oppo. of banging ’em heartily for without it they will not be brought to reason.’ The same month, war was declared.

In some respects ‘the War of Jenkins’s Ear’, which merged into the War of Austrian Succession, otherwise known as King George’s War, was different from a lot of what had gone before. This was not about European balance of power or dynastic squabbles, but about imperial trade, empire. It was also started in the West Indies. But in other respects, for the Caribbean theatre it followed the depressing course of previous conflicts. Initially the British had a great success. In November 1739, Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, with only six ships, launched a skilfully planned and well-executed attack on Porto Bello in Panama. The city surrendered in 24
hours, and Vernon stayed three weeks, destroying fortifications and the port facilities that had been used to fit out the
guarda costas
.

Vernon became a national hero overnight (it helped that he was identified with the opposition to the unpopular Walpole), and streets and villages in England were renamed Portobello in honour of his feat. Victory celebrations the following year in London saw the first performance of ‘Rule Britannia’.

But now the government found it could not resist the popular clamour for further military adventures in the West Indies. So in January 1741, a force of 8,000 regular troops, with a substantial squadron under Rear Admiral Sir Challenor Ogle (Atkins’s former captain on the
Swallow
), was dispatched to the Caribbean. Reinforced with colonial troops (including 200 men from Rhode Island and a Virginia contingent that included George Washington’s brother Lawrence), new recruits, and a host of troop transports, merchant and naval ships, this force was then launched against the important Spanish city of Cartagena.

Here, the unhappy precedent of Hispaniola asserted itself once again: disagreements between land and sea commanders and crippling disease, mainly yellow fever, hampered the British as much as did the strong Spanish defences, and the attack was abandoned. Next the force was sent against Santiago de Cuba, with a similar result. By the time the armada returned to Jamaica at the end of November, three quarters of the men had been lost, mainly to yellow fever. Of the original 28,000 soldiers and seamen, 22,000 were dead within a year, and only 1,000 of those through combat. Mosquitoes claimed the rest. ‘Universal dejection prevailed’, wrote novelist Tobias Smollett, who served as a surgeon’s mate on one of Ogle’s vessels. ‘The distemper which then raged among the English was the bilious fever’, he explained, ‘attended with such a putrefaction of the juices that the colour of the skin, which at first is yellow, adopts a sooty hue in the progress of the disease, and the patient generally dies about the third day, with violent atrabilious discharges upwards and downwards.’ By comparison, during the fighting in Europe at the same time, the British army lost just 8 percent of its strength to fighting and disease.

William Beckford would later write to Pitt that in the West Indies, ‘whatever is attempted in that climate must be done
uno impetu
; a general must fight his men off directly, and not give them time to die by drink and disease; which has been the case in all our southern expeditions, as I can testify by my own experience’. Vernon’s attack on Porto Bello had met these criteria for success; the later disasters, which presumably included Beckford as a volunteer, did not.

The ‘damage and disgrace’ led to the fall of Prime Minister Walpole in 1742, and little more was attempted against the Spanish in the Caribbean. In March 1744, the French joined the war against the British, but neither side was keen on conquering each other’s sugar acreage. Instead, the war was fought on the seas, largely by privateers from all sides.

The English islands benefited: a report from St Kitts told of 10 privateers already at sea, with four more being fitted out – ‘We flow in Money’. A recent split of a couple of prize cargoes had seen the lowliest crew member receiving £200. In Jamaica, a contemporary account reported, ‘the People of this Island were intent on nothing so much as encouraging Privateers; and tho’ sometimes they suffered considerable Losses, yet … many rich Prizes … were daily brought in’. But for the maritime economy of Rhode Island, the war was a godsend. On Tuesday 22 April 1740, His Majesty’s Declaration of War against Spain was publicly read at Newport before an assemblage of civil and military officers. A number of gentlemen with drawn swords attended the solemnities and at the conclusion gave three rousing huzzas. Already the Rhode Island assembly had authorised the Governor to grant commissions to privateers to act against Spain. Immediately upon the receipt of the ‘so long wish’d for news’, armed vessels started pouring out of Newport harbour.