The Sugar Barons (63 page)

Codrington College: author photograph

Surinam Planter: engraving by William Blake from John Stedman,
Narrative of a Five Year Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
, London, 1806

Bartholomew Roberts: from Charles Johnson,
Historia der Engelsche Zee-Roovers
…
In het Engelsch beschreeven door
… Amsterdam, 1725.

The Torrid Zone: drawing attributed to Abraham James, 1806. Used with permission of the Wellcome Library, London.

Drax Hall, Jamaica: from Barry Higman,
Jamaica Surveyed
, Kingston, 1988.

Roaring River: an engraving by Thomas Vivares from a painting by George Robertson. Published by John Boydell, London, 1778.

Beckford miniature by John Smart.

Alderman Beckford: from Boyd Alexander,
England’s Wealthiest Son
, London, 1962.

Fonthill Splendens: from William Angus,
The Seats of the Nobility & Gentry in Great Britain and Wales
, London 1787.

William Beckford of Fonthill: portrait by Romney, from James Lees-Milne,
William Beckford
, Tisbury, 1976.

Ruins of Fonthill: from Boyd Alexander,
England’s Wealthiest Son
, London, 1962.

Battle of the Saints: painting by Thomas Luny, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, used with permission.

Model of Slave Ship: © Wilberforce House Museum: Hull Museums. Used with permission.

Slaves packed together: from, R. Walsh,
Notices of Brazil
, London, 1830.

African insurrection: from Carl Bernard Wadström,
An Essay on Colonization
, London, 1794.

Hanged Slave: engraving by William Blake from John Stedman,
Narrative of a Five Year Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam
, London, 1806.

Revenge taken by the black army: Library of Congress, Washington.

Haitian Revolution: From Michael Craton,
Testing the Chains
, New York, 1982.

Gillray Cartoon: © National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG D12417, used with permission.

Anti-Slavery Convention: © National Portrait Gallery, London. NPG 599, used with permission.

While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, the publisher is happy to correct any omissions in future editions.

Epilogue
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS

‘Jamaican history is characteristic of the beastliness of the true Englishman.’

Karl Marx

The first Drax Hall still stands, facing out over the gently sloping fields of St George’s parish in Barbados. The house, apart from wear and tear, has suffered only minor modifications and damage, most notably the collapse of part of the top floor in one of the island’s many hurricanes. House and estate are still owned by the Drax family, and the extent of the plantation today is almost exactly as it was put together by Sir James by the 1650s.

It remains a sugar plantation, although now its cane is ground and processed at a large factory some distance away; its giant mill, once the largest on the island, stopped operating in 1937. Cane is still planted right up to the edge of the ruined factory, and is looked after and harvested by a black workforce managed by a white overseer. The proprietor, H.W. Drax, comes out to inspect once a year. Sometimes his son and heir, Richard, accompanies him. The overseer, a white Barbadian with an accent almost indistinguishable from his black fellow-countrymen, lives in Drax Hall, but somehow does not inhabit it.

Standing now at Drax Hall, with the Jacobean house looming behind me as I survey the fields of cane, it is impossible not to feel a frisson of excitement, tinged with dread. Here is the exact place where it all began, with James Drax’s secret sugar experiment. The impact of the success of that experiment is difficult to overstate. Barbados became the richest place in America, and spread its successful plantation system all over the region. Families rose and fell; wars were fought. Taste and diet in England were revolutionised. Towns and cities as far away as Newport and Bristol thrived as a result. And, of course, for millions of black Africans, there
was ‘miserabell … perpetuall slavery they and Thayer seed’, brutal lives and early deaths.

The success of the sugar industry helped shape the modern world. After all, the landscape of Jamaica was dominated by ‘dark satanic mills’ long before that of England. The far-flung trading system that shifted the sugar and rum to their distant markets and supplied the islands with machinery, raw materials and luxury items, ushered in an era of global commerce, long supply chains, and ruthless exploitation of human and natural resources. The story of resistance to all this – from displaced Caribs, through enslaved Africans and Nonconformist Christian missionaries to sugar baron traders and businessmen seeking autonomy from regulation and control by the centre – is a parallel story that continues as well.

The legacy of the sugar barons for Britain is about more than just the resulting riches, largely invested at home rather than in the islands, or the national ‘sweet tooth’ that cheaper sugar created. The sugar empire also helped to define the country’s role in the world, and what it meant to be ‘British’. The power of inherited land faded as the British became the masters of industrial processes and the ruthlessly ambitious leaders of a newly created system of global maritime commerce.

At the same time, there remains something contradictory about the story of Britain’s dalliance with plantation slavery. Although England led the Sugar Revolution in the West Indies and became the world’s foremost slave-trader, the same country was also ahead of its rivals in the campaign for free trade and, more crucially, for an end to slavery. The celebration of the British abolition movement has been described as praising someone for putting out a fire he himself created. Nonetheless, it did turn out to be, as Richard Jobson had exclaimed in West Africa in 1618, ‘unEnglish’ to hold other people in slavery, as the ground-breaking triumph of the abolition movement in Britain testifies. In the interim, sensitive Englishmen like Richard Ligon, the third Christopher Codrington and Beckford of Somerly had found themselves painfully conflicted.

Both Henry Drax’s heir, Thomas Shetterden-Drax, and Thomas’s son Henry married extremely well, with the result that Henry’s son, another Thomas, inherited three fortunes on the death of his father in 1755 – Drax, Ernle and Erle, part of which included the huge Charborough estate in Dorset. Twice in the next three generations there was no male heir, but each time the man marrying into the fortune took the name Drax, so it has survived to this day. With each successor, the plantation and Hall in Barbados has passed to a new Drax, though none have lived on the island
for any length of time. One of these men, John Drax, previously Sawbridge, became an MP in 1841, as most of his Drax forebears had done. He was known as ‘the silent member’; his only speech in the House was to ask if a window could be shut. In the 2010 general election in Britain, Richard Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, who prefers to be known simply as Richard Drax, became MP for South Dorset.
⁵⁴

Outside academic and local circles, the crucial role of Sir James Drax, the first sugar baron, is little known. His only likeness, the bust commissioned by his adoring son Henry, sits unremarked on a high, dusty shelf in the small, unexceptional City of London church of St Anne and St Agnes, almost opposite the Goldsmiths’ livery hall, where Sir James’s eldest son was apprenticed.

Christoper Codrington, although dying without legitimate heir, ensured the longevity of his name, as intended, through the bequests in his ‘soldier’s will’ to create a library at All Souls, Oxford, and to build Codrington College.

The college has endured numerous vicissitudes. Codrington’s heirs, along with most local planters, fiercely opposed the founding mission to educate and convert Barbadian black slaves. Clergy sent out from Britain to lead the project died at a furious rate. One who lasted longer than most was Thomas Wilkie, who reported in 1727 that he had taught five or six Negro youngsters to ‘spel very prettily and repeat the Creed and Lords prayer’. He had three adults under regular instruction, and two of these he had persuaded to attend the Sunday church services. The three slaves had agreed to take ‘one wife apiece, forbare working on Sundays … and live conformably to the laws of the Gospel to the best of their knowledge’. But Wilkie died insane six years later, and when the main building was finally opened in 1745, the priority was the education of white boys, and instruction of the blacks fell away for a time. For one thing, even the slave children were too busy working what was still an extensive functioning plantation.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Overseas lost a fortune through business dealings with the spectacular bankrupt Gedney Clarke, and in 1780 the college buildings were wrecked by the hurricane. Nonetheless, by the turn of the century, the Society’s slaves were the best treated on the island, and about a third were converts, helping to establish the enslaved blacks’ rights to participation
in Church society. In 1812, apart from one religious institution in Trinidad, Codrington College was the solitary school for blacks in the entire British West Indies.

The descendants of the strange and troubled Christophers, who were absentee landlords based at Dodington in Gloucestershire and MPs for the area, prospered for a while, as the family continued to expand its sugar and slave business through the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a grand Palladian mansion was completed at Dodington, designed by James Wyatt. The Codringtons still owned substantial Caribbean acreage in the mid-nineteenth century, but the business suffered alongside all other British West Indian sugar establishments. The last Codrington plantations were sold off in 1944.

By the 1970s, upkeep of the huge grey-stone pile of Dodington Hall required it to be opened to the public, with a children’s adventure playground, a narrow-gauge railway and a carriage museum to draw in paying visitors. In 1978, a huge sale of family treasures raised a substantial and much-needed sum. Shortly afterwards, the archive of family papers, held in trust for a long time by the local county records office, was sold for over £100,000. Nonetheless, by 1982, Sir Simon Codrington reported that he and his wife were living in a kitchen and one bedroom with only an electric fire for heating. Planning permission to build a ‘pleasure park’ in the grounds was refused, and the following year Dodington was put on the market, ending more than 400 years of family occupancy. It was eventually purchased in 2003 for a reputed £20 million by British vacuum cleaner tycoon Sir James Dyson.

In contrast, of the British Beckfords there seems at first to be little modern trace, either in people or in buildings. Although his daughters married well, the main Beckford male line ended with William of Fonthill. There are a number of towns and streets in Jamaica named after the family, but travel to Somerly’s old plantations in Westmoreland and all that is left is a scattering of ruins, and stones lying half buried by the vibrant vegetation. One has carved on it the Beckford family symbol of a heron; nearby lies a large iron wheel stamped with ‘Sheffield’. Although sugar is still grown down on the Westmoreland plain, at Hertford Pen, as at the nearby site of Thistlewood’s enterprise, the jungle and bush have largely reclaimed the land.

The National Portrait Gallery holds a number of paintings of Beckfords, but only one is on display. The subject is Henry Beckford, who appears in the foreground of a depiction of the London anti-slavery convention of 1840; at the centre of the picture, Thomas Clarkson is in full oratorical flow. But this Beckford is black, a freed slave and Jamaican delegate to the conference.
In Westmoreland, on the land that once belonged to William of Somerly, there are, indeed, a host of Beckfords. One elderly black gentleman of the name claims, gesticulating vividly, to have had 27 children. In fact the Beck-ford name is alive and well – among clergy, academics, sports and media stars. It is now indisputably a black Jamaican name.
⁵⁵

The West Indian islands have never recovered their pre-eminent global importance, achieved in an astonishingly counter-intuitive moment of world history. As early as the 1830s, their value as markets for British manufactures had started to decline. In 1846, the same year as the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws, the prohibitive duties on imports to Britain of cheaper foreign sugars started to be lifted. Protection for the West India interest was an outdated priority. Less clear was how the massively over-populated islands were to survive.

On the majority of the British islands, sugar production slumped. From a high in 1805 of 100,000 tons, for most of the rest of the nineteenth century Jamaica only exported 20,000 tons of sugar annually, falling to a nadir of 5,000 tons in 1913. In the 60 years after 1850, the number of sugar plantations on the island shrank from over 500 to just 77. Sugar consumption in England continued to grow, allowing refiners like Sir Henry Tate to make fortunes, but little of the money was returned to Jamaica, and even less to the black workforce. Frantic belated attempts were made after 1900 to diversify the island’s economy away from sugar monoculture.