The Sugar Barons (49 page)

Thus the role of black mistresses, particularly those like Phibbah who were resourceful and accomplished, blurred the rigid distinctions of race and slavery. Most remarkably perhaps, Phibbah retained the affection and respect of the rest of Thistlewood’s slave community, despite her ‘halfway’ position.

In addition, almost all the slave women had direct experience of how it was impossible to reject the attentions of Thistlewood. Most would also have accepted the reality that using their bodies was pretty much the only way they would achieve any sort of agency, and in some circumstances even freedom. A white visitor to Barbados during the late eighteenth century noted at length the availability of young black prostitutes in the bars and hotels of Bridgetown. He added, ‘this offers the only hope they have of procuring a sum of money, wherewith to purchase their freedom; and the resource among them is so common, that neither shame nor disgrace attaches to it; but, on the contrary, she who is most sought, becomes an object of envy, and is proud of the distinction shewn her’.

Other slaves found that having Phibbah in a ‘halfway’ position, between them and the master, was to their interest. Phibbah no doubt kept Thistle-wood informed of the ins and outs of the slave dwellings. But she also interceded with him on the side of the slaves.
⁴⁹
On at least three occasions, Thistlewood actually reprimanded her for pushing too far on behalf of the field slaves, which he considered outside her jurisdiction. Nonetheless, the regime notably softened. Writers on Thistlewood all agree that Phibbah ‘civilised’ him.
A major incentive for slave women to become ‘wives’ of whites was to do with their children. The child of a slave was automatically a slave him- or herself, and thus could be sold to other distant plantations or even off the island entirely. Hans Sloane, who was in Jamaica 70 years earlier, advised against this, as it often led to the suicide of the parents – but the practice was nonetheless widespread. This outcome was much less likely for mulatto children, who often enjoyed other substantial benefits.

After a difficult pregnancy, Thistlewood and Phibbah had a child, John, in 1760. When born, Thistlewood’s child belonged to another white – Phibbah’s mistress, Molly Cope. After a struggle, Thistlewood bought his son’s freedom when the boy was two years old. From the age of five he was educated at the local school. Thistlewood added children’s books such as ‘History of Jack the Giant Killer in 2 parts’ to his regular orders from London. As a teen, John was apprenticed to a carpenter. Thistlewood reported regular battles with his son: he was caught lying; he was indolent. But Phibbah adored him, and according to Thistlewood, spoilt him rotten.

Had John survived, he would have inherited his father’s estate, as well as the not insubstantial property amassed by his mother. He would then have gone on to ‘become a member of Jamaica’s brown elite’. But it was not to be.

In August 1780, John was spending a lot of time at a neighbouring plantation where he had become friendly with a slave girl, Mimber. On 1 September, Thistlewood received word that his son was ‘very ill’. He was too sick to return home, so Phibbah, on foot, went to nurse him. While she was away, Thistlewood had Sally in his bed.

Phibbah got her son as far as Egypt, whence Thistlewood rode from Breadnut Island Pen to see him. The next day John was brought home, ‘very weak indeed & not in his right senses’. A doctor summoned from a nearby estate pronounced him in very great danger, recommending doses of bark and rhubarb to curb his fever. Another doctor arrived ‘much in liquor’ and ‘laid blisters inside each thigh; but he continued light headed’. Two days later, ‘burning with the fever’, he died. Phibbah was devastated, ‘almost out of her senses’. Thistlewood, in his grief, made wild accusations that his son had been poisoned, but the doctors confirmed the cause of death as ‘putrid fever’.

John was buried on the day of his death, Thursday 7 September 1780, ‘in the old garden, between the pimento tree and the bee houses’. Gathered at his graveside was an extraordinary cross-section of Jamaican
society: planter friends of Thistlewood, free fellow-apprentice friends of John, enslaved friends of his mother – the entire radical diversity through which, had he survived, John Thistlewood would have had to negotiate.

24
JAMAICA: RICH AND POOR

‘Franklin gripped the bridge-stanchions with a hand
Trembling from fever. Each spring, memories
Of his own country where he could not die
Assaulted him. He watched the malarial light
Shiver the canes.’

Derek Walcott, ‘Tales of the Islands’

Thistlewood never had the capital or manpower to go into sugar on his own account. Nonetheless, he did much better in Jamaica than he ever would have done at home, achieving in the West Indies his dream of landed independence. He was even financially secure enough to have time for reading, gardening and socialising. In spite of severe setbacks late in his life, he was worth nearly £3,000 at the time of his death. By comparison, the average holder of wealth in England was worth only a little more than £200. In the northern colonies it was about £300. By far the most valuable asset Thistlewood owned when he died was his slave force – some 35, worth more than £1,500.

But Thistlewood, judging from his diaries, was something of an exception among the more ‘middling’ whites of Jamaica. During a five-year period at Egypt, he had 18 different white men working for him. Only one stayed more than a year, some lasted only days. Those not dismissed for indolence, drunkenness or excessive violence against the slaves sickened and died.

On most sugar plantations, below a head overseer like Thistlewood would be found two or three white ‘bookkeepers’. By the mid-eighteenth century, many were young Scots (Robert Burns was appointed a bookkeeper in Jamaica, and was ready to depart for the island when halted by the news
of the success of his first volume of poetry). The work included driving the slaves, as well as managing the planting, harvesting and processing of the cane.

This undertaking remained as hectic as in the seventeenth century. The technology had barely changed since the days of Sir James Drax. The cut canes still had to be ground and the juice boiled on a fiercely rapid and potentially problem-strewn schedule: mills still broke down, particularly in undercapitalised estates where a new set of rollers or machinery was unaffordable. The boiling went wrong (expert boilers, the vast majority now the most valued slaves, were in great demand, and were lent out to other plantations at considerable expense). Bookkeeper J. B. Moreton complained that during the harvest, he only got three or four hours’ sleep out of 24.

As well as hard work, it was isolated, poorly paid, ‘a dull, cheerless, drudging life’, as one bookkeeper later complained. Unless armed with an introduction, the young men were shunned by ‘smart’ white society. It was, the bookkeeper wrote, ‘A line of life where, to his first conception, everything wears the appearance of barbarity and slavish oppression.’ The consolations of plentiful alcohol and sex often contributed to the young men’s downfall.

A string of casualties from this cadre of rootless, dispirited young men process across the pages of Thistlewood’s diary. John Hartnole, only 19 years old, who took over at Egypt plantation, was called ‘Crakka Juba’, ‘Crazy Somebody’, by the slaves. Thistlewood reported him as overindulging in food and alcohol to the extent that he soiled himself. Another underling of Thistlewood, Patrick May, was said to be ‘in his house all day, drunk’. He was quickly dismissed after violently assaulting his slave lover.

In 1761, a bookkeeper called John Groves was taken on at Egypt. He had come from nearby Roaring River plantation, owned by the estate of Richard Beckford, having been fired for excessive brutality. Soon after his start, Thistlewood noted, ‘Yesterday afternoon John Groves like a madman amongst the Negroes, flogging Dago, Primus, &c. without much occasion.’ Thistlewood reprimanded him, and Groves left the estate. His replacement, Thistlewood complained, did nothing but eat. He died four months later. In November 1761, another bookkeeper was fired for attacking the slaves in the fields when he was drunk.

The chance was still there for a first-generation immigrant, who worked hard and avoided an early death from disease or drinking, to put together enough property to pass on at least the germ of a great Jamaican sugar
estate to the next generation. By the end of the eighteenth century, a high proportion of Jamaican wealth was held by Scots – in the main the sons or grandsons of young bookkeepers who had come out at the beginning of the century, survived and prospered. Nonetheless, from the lower-ranking whites there must have been more than a few envious glances at the vigorously displayed riches of the Jamaica sugar barons.

By mid-century, inequality of wealth was extraordinary in Jamaica; Barbados looked almost egalitarian in comparison. Ten per cent of those who held wealth owned two thirds of the island’s total. At the other end of the scale from the slaves and their young white drivers, the owners of large Jamaican sugar plantations were thriving spectacularly.

Against a climbing sugar price – from 17 shillings per hundredweight in 1733 to 43 shillings in 1747 – Jamaica had dramatically increased output as new plantations were established and consolidated. By 1750, nearly half of the sugar imported into the UK came from Jamaica, which also had the most productive mills.

The total wealth of the island had risen fivefold between 1700 and 1750 and would triple again up to 1774 as Jamaica experienced extraordinary economic growth. This was based partly on trade with Spanish America, but mainly on rum and sugar. Between 1740 and 1790, the plantations marched along the north coast, through Llandovery, Rose Hall and Tryall, and southward on to the Westmoreland plain by way of Friendship and the Roaring River and Williamsfield estates. There had been about 400 sugar mills on the island in 1740; by 1786 there would be more than 1,000.

This sugar production made the colony ‘not only the richest but the most considerable colony at this time under the government of Great Britain’, and its inhabitants the wealthiest. In spite of the radical inequalities, the average Jamaican white was worth between 20 and 30 times as much as the same man in Britain or North America. In 1774, per capita wealth in England was around £42; in Jamaica for a white man it was more than £1,000. While in Chesapeake only the richest planters had more than 30 slaves, in Jamaica the average sugar plantation in 1750 had some 200. Over the following 25 years, some 177,600 further slaves would be imported.

Major beneficiaries of this sugar bounty were the Beckford family. On one occasion, it was suggested to Alderman William Beckford that he invest in a putative silver mine in Jamaica. Pointing to his fields of cane he said, ‘While we have so profitable a mine above ground we will not trouble for hunting for one underground.’ All the Beckfords had been using sugar profits to add to their inheritances: Richard had acquired three more plantations, Julines two, Francis one. Most aggressive was William, who had
22,000 acres in Jamaica by 1754, with his brothers and cousin Ballard (son of Peter’s brother, Thomas Beckford, killed in a duel) together owning about the same again, spread across 12 of Jamaica’s parishes. All had increased their slave holdings at the same time, William to some 2,000.

The Price dynasty, founded by Francis, a soldier in Cromwell’s invasion force who had acquired more than 1,000 acres in his own lifetime, also prospered. Francis’s son Charles developed the huge, rich sugar estate at Worthy Park, which by the time of his death in 1730 was the most envied on the island. Of his nine children, only three outlived him, and only one for any length of time. This was another Charles, who had been sent back to England to attend Eton and Oxford. Sir Charles, as he soon became, owned in his prime about 26,000 acres and some 1,300 slaves, located in 11 of Jamaica’s parishes. This bloated portfolio came partly from canny dynastic marriages and successful speculations during Jamaica’s most expansive era, but mainly through Charles’s unashamed manipulation of his political power as close friend of the Governor, Edward Trelawny, and perennial Speaker of the assembly, a position he held almost continuously for 18 years, despite the accusations of his enemies that he was a man ‘of no abilities or experience’ who ‘frequently Lyes with Black women’. This political power enabled him to bypass rules about the size of patents that could be granted, and gave him first refusal when Crown lands came up for sale.

In 1760, Price built the most grandiose surviving Jamaican Great House, Rose Hall, on the north coast of the island, at the staggering cost of £30,000, even though he was already being described as ‘rich a man as William Beckford, for possessions but in debt’. Eight years later he became Sir Charles, Baronet of Rose Hall. But this was only part of his empire: his house in Spanish Town occupied a whole block, and the mansion at Worthy Park had a staff of at least 20 individuals: a butler, two footmen, a coachman, a postillion, an assistant, first and second cooks, a storekeeper, a waiting maid, three house cleaners, three washerwomen and four seamstresses. Each of the children in the family was provided with a nurse and a boy or girl helper. When Price left his broad acres, he was accompanied by a handyman who made the trip on foot, holding on to the tail of his master’s horse.

Sir Charles was a leading light in the Jamaica Association, formed at his Spanish Town mansion in 1751 by the island’s most powerful planters to check the power of the London-appointed governor and advance their own interests. With him in a triumvirate at the top of Jamaican politics was Richard Beckford, brother of Alderman William, and another man, Sussex-born Rose Fuller.