The Sugar Barons (45 page)

Above all, there were dances. At every social gathering, even lectures, the evening would always end with dancing. Every assembly meeting in Bridgetown was accompanied by a succession of balls. ‘Though a Creole was languishing on his death bed’, wrote an islander later in the century, ‘I believe the sound of the gumbay or violin would induce him to get up and dance till he killed himself.’ Indeed, William Hillary, a respected doctor who wrote about the illnesses of Barbados, even warned: ‘Dancing is too violent an Exercise in this hot Climate, and many do greatly injure their Health by it, and I have known it fatal to some … But most of the Ladies are so excessive fond of it, that say what I will they will dance on.’

By the 1730s, a number of the leading proprietors had followed the example of Henry Drax and become resident in England. In their place at the top of Barbados society came a new breed: merchants with juicy government contracts; moneylenders; beneficiaries of official positions. Never entirely honest, civic life now became further mired in corruption. The first half of the eighteenth century saw a procession of crooked governors; assembly elections were frequently fixed; judges were appointed who were illiterate or corrupt (in 1716, a man got himself appointed a judge for one of the districts of Barbados where a case against him was to be tried). Lucrative official positions were bought and sold regardless of honesty or competence: in 1728, one man held eight civil and military posts.

In around 1715, the founder of one of the greatest Barbados fortunes, Henry Lascelles, was appointed Collector of Customs for the port of Bridgetown, amongst the most valuable revenue posts in the British customs service. Henry’s father Daniel had married the daughter of Edward Lascelles, from another branch of the family. This Edward had been in Barbados in 1648, when he had bought a small sugar estate called Frames. The following year he had purchased a further 100 acres in an adjoining parish, and in partnership with his brothers had built a valuable sugar and trading business, before returning to England in 1701 having lost three young children to the Barbados climate. Two further sons were produced, but both died childless, the elder drinking himself to death, so most of his property descended through his daughter to Daniel’s branch of the Lascelles family.

Daniel Lascelles’ eldest sons, George and Henry, were trading in Barbados by the 1710s, shipping as well as planting. Soon afterwards their half-brother Edward (credited with introducing the mango to Barbados) joined them on the island; in 1730 he would succeed Henry in the post of Collector of Customs (George died in 1729).

Henry became a force to be reckoned with in Barbados politics and, partly thanks to his official position, immensely wealthy. According to accusations made against him, he submitted fraudulent accounts concerning the 4½ per cent duty on sugars shipped from the island. In 1720 he was summoned to London to answer the charges, but was cleared. Soon afterwards he was accused of importing cheaper French sugar from Martinique and sending it to London to benefit from the higher price arising from the monopoly. Again he held on to his job. His brother faced similar charges in 1744, which led to his suspension and a surcharge against Henry of just under £40,000. But Henry and his second son Daniel became MPs the following year, and also gave financial support to the Hanoverian regime. The nasty fine went away.

In 1730, Henry returned to London, leaving Edward in charge in Barbados. From London Henry became victualler to the armed forces and a substantial slave-trader, taking over forts on the West African coast. With a partner, George Maxwell, he established a banking house and started lending large amounts of money to planters – £85,154 by 1753 – while selling his own land in the West Indies.

By the time of his death in 1753, Henry Lascelles had installed his eldest son Edwin as Lord of the Manor of Gawthorpe and Harewood, estates that Henry purchased in 1739 for just under £64,000. (His second son, Daniel, was by now established as a partner in Lascelles and Maxwell.) In
spite of this outlay, Henry was still worth around half a million pounds; without doubt, he died one of the richest men in Britain.

Independently of Henry, his half-brother Edward had prospered. His son would purchase an estate at Darrington, commissioning John Carr to build Stapleton Park. The manner of Henry’s death is a mystery. He is reported ‘to have cut his throat and arms and across his belly’. The reason for his suicide remains unknown.

Much of the money Henry lent went to New Englander Gedney Clarke, a close trading partner based in Barbados. Back in 1637, John Gedney, a Norwich weaver, had sailed from Yarmouth to New England on the
Mary Ann
with his wife and three children. After his wife’s death he had married a wealthy widow, Callie Clarke, and had taken over a tavern and small farm on the border of the townships of Salem and Lynn. The family grew rich through trading, shipbuilding and marriage, and during the eighteenth century the Gedney Clarkes dispersed along the eastern seaboard and overseas to the Caribbean. John Gedney’s great-grandson Gedney Clarke migrated to Barbados in 1733, aged 22. Having forged links with international trading networks that took in London, New England, Virginia, Barbados, Lisbon and Bilbao, a decade later the New Englander was one of Bridgetown’s leading merchants. In the 1740s he moved into land, acquiring huge tracts of Virginia as well as estates in Barbados and new investments in Dutch Guiana and Demerara (one such investment is said to have recouped the £12,000 outlay in just one year). By now he was in close partnership with Henry Lascelles’ operation.

Lascelles and Maxwell were Gedney Clarke’s London bankers, and they had many shared interests in slave-trading vessels. Clarke illicitly sold slaves in the Dutch colonies and even smuggled slaves into New York itself, making use of the coves and inlets of Long Island, where happily the Gedney family owned 200 acres astride a fine natural harbour. He also supplied slaves to Henry Laurens in Charleston, who on one occasion was requested to send back in return a number of deer to grace the Gedney Clarke lawns in Barbados.

As his family had done in New England, Gedney Clarke combined commercial interests with military and public service. In 1748, he succeeded Edward Lascelles as customs collector for Bridgetown. The position would stay in the Clarke family for the next 30 years, despite allegations of bribery and other misconduct. When, on one occasion, he was suspended from his post, such was his influence in England that orders came by return packet for him to be restored.

Naval power was crucial to the security of the plantations and the defence
of colonial trade. The Clarkes’ influence in this area was, therefore, of paramount importance to the family’s commercial interests, and Clarke’s house was famously welcoming of military and colonial officials. As well as wining and dining at his lavish Belle plantation those who might prove useful, Clarke also went into partnership with a number of naval officers in order to prosecute the slave trade and to profit from victualling and privateering. The delivery of slaves to Charleston, for instance, was a venture he conducted jointly with Admiral Thomas Frankland. In the wars of the early 1740s, Clarke took prize cargoes in partnership with Edward Lascelles and, again, Admiral Frankland.

Such arrangements between traders and the military were not exceptional, nor were they illegal, although they could frequently involve participants in conflicts of interest. The influence wielded by the Clarkes, however, exceeded the norm and, on occasion, obliterated the distinction between private and public interest.

In 1755, Clarke’s son, Gedney Clarke Jr, was sent, aged 20, to Amsterdam to learn Dutch and become naturalised, so that restrictions on the Clarkes’ property ownership in the Dutch South American colonies could be avoided. In 1762, Gedney Clarke Jr married Frances Lascelles, daughter of Henry’s half-brother Edward, cementing the close business relationship between the two families.

As the Seven Years War got underway in 1756, a naval lieutenant, Edward Thompson, wrote a series of intriguing letters from various outposts around the far-flung empire. By the time he got to the West Indies, he had seen it all, from Europe to the Far East. From Antigua he reported, ‘I am sorry I cannot say any thing pleasant about this place.’ Barbados was the next stop, and he was optimistic that from there he could ‘entertain’ his correspondent ‘with more pleasing accounts’. Arriving in Barbados in early December 1756, he found that ‘This island looks more like a Christian country, than any of the Caribbees.’

Barbados was indeed different from the other islands in important ways that in the eyes of European visitors and white Barbadians alike made it, in comparison, ‘the civilised island’. For one thing, the ratio of blacks to whites was in the region of four to one, rather than the 10 to one in Jamaica, and 18 to one in Antigua. This proportionally larger white population, unlike the tiny garrison communities in the other islands, was substantial enough to exhibit rigid class distinctions reassuringly similar to England. The early arrival of the Sugar Revolution in Barbados might have wrecked the island’s soil, but it also meant that a number of families had now been
there for four or even five generations: a small number even began to think of themselves as Barbadian or Bajan rather than English. There were, indeed, high-profile absentee owners, but because of the falling yields, only those with the best and most substantial estates could actually afford to retire to England. This kept many of the planters physically on the island and emotionally connected to its future.

In the same way, because widespread African slavery had started so much earlier in Barbados, there were, in spite of the ferocious infant mortality, a large number of Creole slaves, those born on the island: as many as 50 per cent of the black population. Together with other factors, this contributed to the lack of a major slave revolt in Barbados for the duration of the eighteenth century.

Barbados was less ‘Africanised’ than the other islands: for instance, Bajan Creole is much closer to English than, for example, Jamaican patois. People even called Barbados ‘Little England’, not a term that was ever applied to Jamaica. Edward Thompson commented on Antigua that most of the estates were run by newly arrived Scotsmen. In Barbados, everything was more settled, and less transient: the vast majority of the plantation managers were island-born, rather than fortune-hunters from Europe.

A spur to the creation of a Creole Barbadian identity came with the launch of the island’s first newspaper, the
Barbados Gazette
, in 1731. This gave a forum for the white population to talk to each other as fellow islanders. Theatre productions seem to have started about this time. Although Codrington’s bequest to establish a college on the island still languished under repeated attacks from his heir and others, the 1730s saw the establishment of a number of good-quality schools. Those few who could afford it still sent their children to England to be educated, but an increasing number of white children were not only born on the island, but schooled there. They even started talking in a recognisably Bajan accent, ‘the languid syllables … drawled out as if it were a great fatigue to utter them’, as an English visitor complained.

The visiting Royal Navy lieutenant Edward Thompson found Barbadians ‘more easy, hospitable and kind, than those on the other islands’. He also admired Bridgetown: ‘extensive and well built, and the merchants’ houses elegant’. The port remained an important entrepôt, rivalled in the British Americas only by Boston.

Links between the West Indian islands and the northern colonies continued to grow, in spite of suspicions on the part of the Americans of the decadence of the sugar islands: ‘We do not live so flash and fast’, wrote one New Englander, ‘yett wee live well and enjoy life with a better gust.’
As well as commercial and educational links, there were itinerant artists, entertainers and theatrical companies who toured the mainland colonies and the islands.

Visits were exchanged, often by those seeking the better health conditions of the north. Barbados sent Philadelphia her hard drinkers, with their ‘carbuncled faces, slender legs and thighs, and large, prominent bellies’, as a later account relates. It was jokily suggested that a house be set up in the city called the ‘Barbados Hotel, putting up for a sign, the worn-out West Indian, dying of a dropsy from intemperate living’.

The traffic also went in reverse. Barbados, in particular, had a reputation as a place good for easing respiratory diseases. Thus in September 1751, future first president of the United States George Washington set sail for the island with his elder half-brother, Lawrence, who was suffering from tuberculosis. His doctor had recommended a stint in the tropics to relieve the disease.

They left the Potomac river on 28 September 1751. Their vessel was probably the
Success
, a square-sterned sloop of 40 tons. As well as the passengers, the ship carried nearly 5,000 barrel staves, just under 1,000 bushels of corn and 31 barrels of herring. Having spent six weeks on what George Washington called the ‘fickle & Merciliss Ocean’, they landed at Bridgetown on 2 November.

The 19-year-old George Washington kept a diary during the seven weeks he spent on the island, the only time in his life that he left North America. Unfortunately the pages that might have recorded his first impressions of Barbados are missing or damaged, but we can assume that Bridgetown, a cosmopolitan port city totally unlike anything he had experienced at home in rural Virginia, must have made a considerable impact. For the first couple of nights the brothers lodged in a tavern in the city, but were soon invited to the house of Gedney Clarke. The Washingtons had family links with the Clarkes through Lawrence’s wife Anne, and Clarke himself owned 3,000 acres in Virginia at Goose Creek. This connection must have influenced the decision to go to Barbados, and presumably the brothers expected to stay at the Clarkes’ house.