The Sugar Barons (8 page)

After more than five years of penury in England, Ligon was now living the good life, pampered by Kendal’s house slaves, including a beautiful Indian girl,
⁵
and moving among the great and the good of the island. He was clearly a regular visitor to the next-door Drax plantation. He described how Drax’s men were busy felling trees, battling the ever-present vines, and how Drax himself lived ‘like a Prince’. Almost uniquely on the island, Drax was rich enough to kill an ox for meat – for most they were too badly needed for work – and, Ligon noted, it was at Drax’s house that he ate the ‘best Virginia Botargo’ (tuna roe) that he had ever tasted.

Indeed, Ligon wrote about food with the passion of a gourmand who has suffered years of hunger. He enjoyed the local pork, fish, fruit and spices, as well as imported beef, salt fish, spirits and beer. He chided the planters for overcooking or overseasoning some of their food, and instructed them in cooking and meat-dressing techniques, including the use of lemons, limes, mace, nutmeg and cloves. He had brought with him seeds of herbs such as rosemary, thyme, marjoram and parsley, and of vegetables including onion, cabbage, radish and turnip, all of which, he claims, he planted successfully. During the dry months he attempted to make bacon, but this did not fare so well. Like many others, he reserved his greatest praise for the ‘incomparable wine of Pines’, which he described as ‘the Nector which the Gods drunk’.

Ligon’s employer and friend Thomas Modyford was also doing very well. As he wrote in a later letter, his partner in London sent ‘all the supplies to me at the best hand, and I returning him the sugars, and we both thrived on it’.

Towards the end of his book, Ligon described how an investment of
£1,000, by clever trading between England and Barbados, could within a couple of voyages be grown to more than triple – enough for a down payment on a plantation such as Kendal worth £14,000. He estimated that 200 acres in sugar, such as grown by Modyford, could produce a profit of as much as £7,000 per crop, an astonishingly high return on the investment.

Ligon was alive to the many serious potential pitfalls, the ‘many rubs and obstacles on the way’, such as fire in the canefields or factory, the death of cattle needed to drive the mill, or losses of cargo at sea from shipwreck or piracy. For him, this made the bravery and skill of those that succeeded at sugar all the more impressive. Such was the ‘difficulty’, ‘industry and pains’ required, that those of ‘a sluggish humour … are altogether unfit for so noble an undertaking’. But those with energy, industry and determination, he wrote, ‘may make it the Ladder to climb to a high degree of Wealth and opulencie, in this sweet Negotiation of Sugar’.

Ligon, then, hugely admired the new sugar barons, whom he described as ‘Giants’. He thought Modyford as able as any man he had ever known. In addition, he praised their ‘civility’, and found their ‘dispositions’ ‘compliable in a high degree to all vertues’ – ‘Civilly intreating of Strangers’; ‘Loving, friendly and hospitable to one another’.

Some, he admitted, were too ‘fixt upon’ profits, but others had the proper aristocratic attitude to wealth: that a (small) proportion should be expended on doing good for the public and in charity to the poor. Fellow Royalist refugee Sir Humphrey Walrond came in for particular praise: ‘He being a Gentleman, that had been bred with much freedom, liberty, and plenty, in England, could not set his mind so earnestly on his profit, as to forget his accustomed lawful pleasures’, namely keeping his table well stocked and bidding ‘his friends welcom to it’.

The sugar planters, rapidly becoming rich and creditworthy, certainly aimed to impress, to establish their place in the order of things in what was still a fluid, young and unstable society. They succeeded with Richard Ligon, who was complimentary about both the new arrivals such as Mody-ford, and those emerging as the leaders of the old guard like Drax. But although on the face of it a propagandist for the island, Ligon was too intelligent and sensitive an observer to miss the darker side of the society and of life and death on the island, or the rapidly growing fallout from the Sugar Revolution.

4
THE SUGAR REVOLUTION: ‘MOST INHUMAN AND BARBAROUS PERSONS’

‘The conditions … were that the convicts should be carried beyond the sea as slaves, that they should not be emancipated for ten years, and that the place of their banishment should be some West Indian island. This last article was studiously framed for the purpose of aggravating their misery.’

Lord Macaulay,
History of England

For all the bustling trade and activity, Ligon realised very quickly that he had arrived at Bridgetown at ‘a sad time’. The inhabitants of the island were so ‘grievously visited with the plague, (or as killing a disease)’ that within a month after Ligon’s arrival, he wrote, ‘the living were hardly able to bury the dead’.

Sugar did not bring sickness to Barbados. The New World had been a spectacular melting pot of diseases since the time of Columbus: the Europeans brought smallpox and influenza, with catastrophic results for the region’s original inhabitants; and from the earliest days of contact, any European voyaging to the tropics took his life in his hands. Countless thousands of Spaniards and others were laid low by tropical fevers. The carriage of West Africans to the region as slaves brought a whole new array of diseases to add to the mix, as well as providing existing illnesses with new vulnerable victims.

Sugar did, however, cause a rapid increase in the traffic coming in and out of Bridgetown harbour. Ligon estimated that it was as many as 100 ships a year by the late 1640s. These mostly cramped, unhygienic vessels, with poorly fed crews, were ideal nurseries for illnesses, which were then transferred to the ports.

Bridgetown, described by Ligon as having the ‘bigness of Hounslo’,
was by this time home to some 1,500 merchants, artisans, servants and slaves. Its situation had been chosen due to the fine, easily defended harbour of Carlisle Bay, and because it was on low ground and therefore relatively protected from hurricanes. But as a consequence, it was also the unhealthiest place on the island. Ligon wrote that behind the town was ‘a kind of Bog or Morass, which vents out so loathsome a favour, as cannot but breed ill blood, and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there’. Indeed, the diseases from the ships found a happy new home in the bustling town, where rubbish and excrement were everywhere, picked over by dogs, vultures and rats. According to Ligon, at the height of the ‘sad time’, bodies were thrown into the bog behind the town, ‘which so infected the water, as divers that drunk of it were absolutely poysoned, and dyed in few hours after’.

Heat, humidity, insects and atrocious hygiene had from the time of first settlement taken a grievous toll on Barbadians. Ligon was shocked to discover that hardly any of the first pioneers had survived. But this new outbreak was on a different scale. Ligon did not identify the disease, and was unsure whether it had been carried to the island by shipping, or was caused by ‘ill dyet’, and ‘drinking strong waters’. It is most likely, however, that this was Barbados’s first encounter with the horrors of yellow fever, carried from Africa in the slave ships by infected mosquitoes.

At the time it was called the ‘Bleeding Fever’ or the ‘Barbados Distemper’, and nothing was known about the transmission of yellow fever. It would be 250 years before it was discovered that the disease was spread by a particular species of mosquito. The yellow fever virus causes headaches, loss of appetite and muscle pain, followed by high temperatures, a raging thirst and agonising back pain. To catch the disease in Ligon’s time meant a less than even chance of survival. The end usually came with the sufferer spewing up mouthfuls of dark blood – ‘
vomito negro
’ – as the virus caused liver and kidney failure and multi-organ haemorrhage.

The epidemic was long-lasting and violently destructive. Dr Vines wrote to John Winthrop that ‘the sickness’ was ‘an absolute plague’. In his parish they were burying 20 a week, and the fever took no account of its victims’ strength or habits. ‘It first seased on the ablest men both for account and ability of body’, wrote Vines. ‘Men who had begun and almost finished greate sugar workes, who dandled themselves in their hopes, were suddenly laid in the dust.’ As late as the end of the following year, ‘the plague’ was ‘still hott at Barbados’.

The chaos caused by the epidemic, together with a severe drought in
late 1647, caused ‘a general scarcity of Victuals through the whole Island’. Only the timely arrival of provisions from New England saved the colony from starvation, but by the end of 1648, as many as 6,000 may have died out of a population of less than 25,000.

Such startlingly high mortality rates would remain one of the most remarkable – and influential – features of the sugar societies. For the next 150 years, something like a third of all whites died within three years of arriving in the Caribbean. Those born there fared little better; few families survived for more than a couple of generations. Those who did were exceptionally tough, or lucky. Only just over a third of marriages left surviving children; the risk of early death dominated everything, contributing to the settlers’ fatalism, fast living and callousness.

The destruction wrought by the yellow fever epidemic of 1647–8 also provided an impetus for a process already under way once sugar had been planted. As the deceased owners’ lands came on to the market, they were snapped up by the likes of Christopher Codrington, the Walronds, and other richer planters, who were steadily increasing their acreage. At the same time, surviving small-scale freeholders with 30 or 40 acres found that they could not afford the switch to sugar. Establishing the complicated
ingenio
, or factory, was prohibitively expensive for any without considerable cash or credit, and to be viable, the works needed substantial acreage of cane to keep it supplied. All this also required the assembling of a large workforce for the labour-intensive new crop. With no improvement in the profitability of tobacco, cotton, ginger or any other of the now minor staples, a great number of smallholders were forced to sell out to the new sugar barons, ‘wormed out of their small settlements by their more subtle and greedy neighbours’. Over a thousand Barbadians (later described as coming from ‘the Soberest’ part of the population) migrated to New England during the 1640s. Thus through the late years of the decade, the average size of an estate on the island steadily grew, as land was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few.

A man of small means could ‘make it’ in Barbados, however, provided he survived the diseases and the lifestyle. Ligon commented on how some who had arrived with virtually nothing ‘are now risen to very great and vast estates’. Henry Morgan, who would become one of the richest and most powerful Englishmen in the Caribbean, was probably a servant in Barbados by 1650, having sold himself into indenture to avoid the life of a poor Welsh farmer. We know of a servant, Garrett Sisters, who served his term of indenture and returned to England, then came back to Barbados in 1639, aged 26. He acquired land, married well, and by the time of his
death in 1679 owned 19 slaves. Sometimes, prosperity waited for the second generation. The saying was that a man went out poor to the West Indies, and his son came back rich. John Harwood was a Royalist soldier, sentenced to servitude in Barbados following capture at the battle of Newbury in 1643. In 1679, his son Richard secured the job of overseer for Henry Drax, James’s heir, and the following year is recorded as owning a few acres on his own behalf. Two years later, he became agent to a London merchant and absentee planter. In 1686 he was elevated to the lofty heights of the island’s council. Another who started out working as an overseer for Henry Drax was Samuel Osborne. Both his parents were dead by the time he was 13 and he inherited just seven slaves, a few gold rings and £150. By the time of his death in 1736, he owned 10 plantations totalling 2,700 acres, possibly the greatest ever landholding in Barbados.

Nonetheless, for servants arriving in Barbados hoping to establish themselves on a small piece of land, the prospects were now grim. For one thing, the planters and merchants, who controlled the council, appointed by the Governor, and the assembly, elected by a handful of rich whites, did not want to see large numbers of subsistence farmers on the island. This would reduce trade and the labour force available to work the sugar fields. Furthermore, by the late 1640s, there was simply no land left on the tiny island to give to servants who had completed their indenture period. In 1647, the proprietor was forced to concede that ‘the land is now so taken up as there is not any to be had but at great rates, too high for the purchase of poor servants’.

There were other changes to Barbados society and the type of immigrant at this time. In the 1630s, supplies of willing immigrants had been plentiful, but the next decade saw the birth rate in England fall, wages rise, and, of course, the wholesale slaughter of the Civil War, which killed a larger proportion of the population than any other conflict except World War One. At the same time, the switch to sugar increased the demand for labour, with the unhappy result that a growing share of those arriving in Barbados were now unwilling immigrants.

The earliest theorists of colonialism had seen overseas settlements as outlets for surplus population, which otherwise might provide ‘fewell of daungerous insurrections’, in particular those who were ‘lewed and lasy felowes’. And from the outset, Barbados had received a number of forcibly deported prisoners of war, vagrants and criminals. On Ligon’s ship were a group of servant women, ‘the Major part of them, being taken from Bridewel [prison], … and such like places of education’. In addition, a
number were tricked or physically coerced on to ships sailing for the West Indies. But these sources of supply suddenly became much more important in the late 1640s and 1650s. At this time, to be ‘Barbadosed’ took on the meaning of the more modern term ‘Shanghaied’. Children were even stolen from their parents and sent to the colony.
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One incident came to the attention of the authorities when a ship ‘lately fallen down to Graves End’, was found to contain ‘children and Servants of severall Parents and Masters so deceived and enticed away, cryinge and mourninge for Redemption from their Slavery’. The greatest numbers, however, came as a result of the fighting of the Civil War, which saw at least 8,000 Englishmen joining the sugar estates of Barbados between 1645 and 1650. Cromwell found that he could sell his Royalist prisoners of war as servants in Barbados, and thus rid himself of potential enemies while clearing a profit at the same time. Some took their families with them, only to find themselves separated at their destination. ‘They were sold’, one account tells us, ‘the husband in one place, the wife in another, and the children in another place so as not to receive any solace from each other.’ And after Cromwell’s victories at Drogheda, Worcester and Dunbar in 1649–51, there was a large influx of Irish and Scots to the colony (and also to the Leeward Island settlements). After Drogheda, Cromwell wrote that ‘When they submitted, these officers were knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for Barbados.’ These Irish servants, in particular, were found to be ‘fiery spirits’, and came to be feared by the planters to the extent that the Governor of Barbados was soon pleading with Cromwell to send no more, even though the new sugar plantations remained hungry for labour.