The Sugar Barons (5 page)

Colt also reports that his ship, anchored in the bay opposite ‘the Bridge’, was constantly having to expel ‘servants’ who had sneaked on board hoping to escape the island. From the first days of the colony, and for its first 20 years, the majority of the labour force was indentured workers from the British islands. Henry Powell, when leaving for Guiana to collect seeds and plants, wrote that the 40 or so men he left behind were ‘servants’; as early as August 1627, Henry Winthrop wrote home asking for two or three servants to be sent out, bound to him for three to five years.

The backers of new colonies, wherever they were situated, needed able and willing hands – to clear land, build forts, plant crops. Under the system of indenture, developed by the Virginia Company in the 1620s, young men and women contracted themselves to work for a master for a period ranging from three to nine years. In return, they were given passage to the colonies and subsistence during their tenure. Some were paid annual wages, but most were promised a one-off payment – usually around £10 – or some land (in Barbados it was 10 acres) at the end of their contract.

Some 30,000 indentured servants went to the Caribbean during the reign of Charles I (1625–49), with a similar number going to the North American colonies (making up more than half the total emigrants). Among them there were dissenters and the politically disaffected, but most were from the rural poor, suffering from the severe economic and social troubles in England during the 1620s and 1630s, which included persistent inflation, recurring depressions and bad harvests.

Some of the servants – the majority of whom were from the West Country,
East Anglia or Ireland – were tricked by merchants or middlemen into selling their labour, or even kidnapped. Others sold themselves out of desperation. But a large number, with energy and ambition, genuinely saw emigration as a route to a new freedom, be it religious, political, economic or social.

Few, however, can have known just what they were letting themselves in for. Indenture might have evolved from the traditional institution of apprenticeship, but it was much harsher. Indentured workers served for longer, could be sold on by their masters, were unable to renegotiate their contracts, and seldom emerged with a trade at the end of it all.

On crowded ships from England or Ireland many died from sickness, and the survivors would arrive weakened, shaken, and utterly unfit to start the hard physical labour expected of them. Few were equipped with suitable clothes or hats for the scorching tropical climate, and strict rules governed every aspect of their lives. A visitor to Barbados in 1632 commented that the indentured workers were kept more like slaves than servants, and two years later an attempted rebellion was only foiled at the last minute by an informer. Two brothers considered ringleaders, the Westons, were seized and one of them was executed as an example.

Unlike those stowing away on Sir Henry Colt’s ship, some indentured servants did succeed in escaping their bondage, and many others left the island once their period of indenture was complete. Some settled in the English Leeward colonies – St Kitts, Nevis, Montserratt, Antigua – where land was more available. Others took up privateering or contraband trade with the Spanish Main – an English colony founded in 1629 by Puritan grandees on the island of Providence, close to modern-day Nicaragua, provided a useful base, as did Tortuga, just off the northern coast of Hispaniola.

Meanwhile, the French, from 1635, started the slow and painful process of driving the Caribs out of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and in 1638 English settlers made another failed attempt at colonising St Lucia. Other expeditions soon after also came to grief. A small party started a settlement in Hispaniola, but were never heard of again. Their bones were found in 1645 at Cape Tiburon. New colonies were also attempted in Trinidad, Tobago and Surinam, but all were wiped out by a combination of disease, starvation and Carib attacks.

In Barbados, the 1630s were hard times, particularly in comparison with what would come towards the end of the next decade. Even substantial landowners lived entirely without luxuries. The owner of hundreds of acres who died in 1635 left behind nothing much more than a battered chest, a
broken kettle, three books and a handful of pewter plates. Nonetheless, immigration continued to rise, and with it the island’s population, from under 2,000 in 1630 to 6,000 by 1636, and some 10,000 at least by the end of the decade, on a par with Virginia or Massachusetts. One study has shown that a fifth of all those who left London in the mid-1630s headed for Barbados, which soon had a population density unrivalled anywhere in the Americas. The island did little to advertise itself to settlers (unlike the northern mainland colonies), but clearly back in Bristol, London or Cork, Barbados still seemed exotic and full of outrageous possibilities, as indeed it would prove to be.

The immigrant population, inevitably homesick, went some way to trying to mimic the England they had left behind, re-creating customs and habits, organising parishes, building churches. It was a notable failure, particularly when it came to religion. As late as 1641, there were only 10 clergymen on the island for a population in excess of 10,000. Furthermore, many of the priests were themselves fortune hunters, or those who had for various reasons failed to make it up the ecclesiastical ladder at home. Most had no qualifications.

The general failure to create a ‘home from home’ stemmed from the heat and strangeness of the Caribbean, its position ‘beyond the line’, the raw tensions between servants and masters, and the profile of those who emigrated to Barbados. Studies of ships’ rosters from the 1630s have shown that emigrants were overwhelmingly male – more than 90 per cent – and almost all very young. Seventy per cent were aged between 15 and 24. (It was similar for the tobacco plantation colony of Virginia; women, children and families tended to head for the markedly more God-fearing settlements of New England.)

With such a population, with 16 men to every woman, the establishment of family life, which underpinned moral stability at home (and in New England), was an impossibility. Even 10 years later, a visitor to Barbados would complain of the incest, sodomy and bestiality prevalent on the island.

The leadership of the island set the tone for the rest. The Earl of Carlisle had instructed that leases on land be granted (sometimes for life, sometimes for seven years) on the basis of 10 acres per white servant in each household. The purpose was to ensure for the colony a large white population, and therefore a strong local militia. But Governor Hawley formed an illegal syndicate with his brother, with William Hilliard and with one William Smart, in order to dispose of land claimed under the Earl’s policy by themselves and their friends. Thus in 1635 Hawley claimed 40 acres
for four servants, but then sold the land to William Smart, who sold it on to James Drax for £12. Over the following two years the Hawley brothers claimed 2,600 acres for 260 servants, even though they had never owned more than 60. Much of the land was then sold on to William Hilliard. At the same time, Governor Hawley was making a fortune through a poll tax and arbitrary fines and confiscations. Those who resisted were arrested and imprisoned or pilloried in the hot sun, with a favourite twist being to nail the victim’s ears to the stocks.

Eventually though, Hawley overreached himself and heard that he would be replaced. To garner support, he invited influential Barbadians to form the island’s first ever Assembly, with 22 delegates elected by wealthy freeholders in each parish (with Drax amongst those chosen). Nonetheless, in 1640 Hawley was arrested by the new governor, Henry Huncks, and returned to England as a prisoner.
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Huncks had served for six months as governor of Antigua, where he had gained a reputation as a drunken, vindictive tyrant and an unabashed seducer of his friends’ wives. Arriving in Barbados, he declared that he did not care threepence for what people said about him, and set about installing his cronies in all the public positions in the island. Captain James Futter, a planter who had impressed Sir Henry Colt as a rare example of a skilful local farmer, asked in open court, ‘If all the whore-masters were taken off the Bench, what would the Governor do for a Council?’ He then pointed out that Carlisle himself was ‘too much given to drink’. He received an hour in pillory in the burning midday sun for his outspokenness, but he was certainly right about the island’s proprietor.

All the while, as the population grew, the island was being transformed. While the hard work of forest clearance proceeded slowly, many indigenous birds and other creatures were rapidly destroyed. By 1634, the hog population had been wastefully exterminated. There was fish still aplenty off the coasts, but in the heat it went bad so rapidly that the islanders started importing dried cod. A visitor in 1634 arrived under the impression that Barbados was the ‘granarie of all the Charybbies Iles’. Instead he found that food was scarce and ‘bore so high price, that nothing could be had, but it Cost us our eies’.

In other ways, little had changed between Colt’s visit in 1631 and the end of the decade. Most striking was the continuation of the islanders’ extraordinary and lethal alcohol intake.

A visitor to Barbados at the end of the decade wrote home that the
islanders were ‘such great drunkards’ that they would find the money ‘to buy drink all though they goe naked’. When they could not import wines, ales and spirits they made their own, initially ‘mobby’, made from sweet potatoes mashed then fermented, which reportedly tasted like ‘Rhenish wine’, and ‘perino’ from fermented cassava. Walking to church on a Sunday, the same visitor wrote in another letter that he came across people sprawled by the side of the road who had had their toes bitten off by landcrabs as they lay passed out. In 1641, a Reverend Mr John Wilson charged that the ‘Inhabitants had pissed out 15000 [pounds sterling] … against the wall … by their excessive drinking’.

Henry Colt had declared in 1631 that the great hope for the island was in cotton. Although tobacco prices recovered after the slump of 1630–1, and many farmers continued to concentrate on producing it, a few of the more enterprising men moved into other crops. Fustic wood, a useful dye, was harvested, and indigo and ginger planted. Most important, though, was cotton.

Cotton was a more difficult crop to grow, and more capital-intensive than tobacco. Cotton gins and outbuildings were needed for its processing, and expensive canvas bags for its shipping. But with help from the Dutch in Brazil, those willing to work hard mastered the art impressively quickly, and what was more, the end product was highly regarded, unlike Barbados tobacco. By 1634 there were a number of cotton gins and warehouses in operation, and the value of the crop had surpassed tobacco by the late 1630s, finding a ready market in the mills of Lancashire, all too pleased to be released from their reliance on imports from Cyprus and the Levant.

The success of the switch to cotton kept the island afloat during the mid-1630s, and perhaps most significantly, demonstrated to investors among the merchants of London that there were planters in Barbados with competence and professionalism enough to be entrusted with the huge loans that sugar plantation establishment would require. As would be the case with sugar, the leading cotton producers were Hilliard, Holdip and James Drax.

By the mid-1630s, Drax, a Commissioner for Roads and a captain in the militia, had become a leading light in the infant colony, and the success story of his family. From the paltry evidence that survives, we know he was physically tough, solidly built and a stickler for debts being paid on time, which was something of a rarity in the free-wheeling colonies. Some time early in the decade, possibly after the death of his father in 1632, Drax’s elder brother William and spinster sister Frances both emigrated to join their enterprising brother in Barbados. William and James went into partnership with a Thomas Middleton, started
acquiring land in St George’s parish, and commenced the arduous process of clearing away the thick forest.

In the mid to late 1630s, the young James Drax married Meliora Horton from a Somerset family who may have been his distant cousins. She was the sister, or possibly niece, of Ursula, who had married Drax’s brother William. We can only speculate whether the marriages were love matches or planned by the families; whether James Drax met Meliora on a visit to England during this period, or instead William came out to Barbados with his new bride and Meliora in tow. It is known, however, that James and Meliora’s first child, also named James, was born around 1639. He seems to have been a sickly child. A second son, Henry, was born two years later.

All the time, Drax was buying and selling land, steadily increasing his acreage, paying with cotton, which was fast supplanting tobacco as the currency of the island. By 1641 he had over 400 acres, making him almost, but not quite, the greatest landowner on the island. He was the first to have a significant number of enslaved black Africans working his plantations. He had 22 on one of his estates in 1641, at a time when no one else had more than a handful alongside their white servants.

But the end of the decade saw a disastrous fall in the prices of all of Barbados’s staples. The value of its tobacco plummeted in 1638, and in 1640 the prices for cotton and indigo also fell, at the same time as the cotton growers recorded their most disappointing crop. A pamphleteer would write 10 years later that in the first years of the 1640s, the island was ‘in a very low condition’. Merchants stopped calling there and supplies ran low. ‘The inhabitants’, we are told, ‘being so wearied out with the small profits they reaped in their toylsome labours, daily run from the Island in Boats, being very much indebted both to the Merchants and also to one another.’