THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Stuart
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published, in somewhat different form, in hardcover in Great Britain by Portobello Books, London, in 2012.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stuart, Andrea.
Sugar in the blood : a family’s story of slavery and empire / Andrea Stuart.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: London: Portobello Books, 2012.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96115-0
1. Sugar trade—Barbados—History. 2. Sugarcane industry—Barbados—History. 3. Slavery—Barbados—History. 4. Stuart family. 5. Barbados—History. I. Title.
HD9114.B32S78 2013 338.1′7361092272981—dc2 2012034259
Front-of-jacket photograph courtesy of the author
Jacket design by Emily Mahon
Map by Leslie Robinson and Vera Brice
v3.1
For my uncle, Trevor Ashby,
whose stories started it all
The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Map
Family Tree
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE: The Pioneer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
PART TWO: The Plantocrat
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
PART THREE: The Legacy
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
A Note About the Author
Illustration Insert
Other Books by This Author
Illustrations
1.1 “A Corvette, a Brigantine and a Barque,” from West India Vessels of the Close of the Seventeenth Century, English School, 20th century (Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library).
1.2 A Prospect of Bridge Town in Barbados, Samuel Copen, engraving by Johannes Kip, 1695 (Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library).
1.3 Richard Ligon’s map of Barbados, 1657 (courtesy of The Barbados Museum and Historical Society).
1.4 Barbadoes Mulatto Girl, Agostino Brunias, 1765 (courtesy of The Barbados Museum and Historical Society).
1.5 Sugar cane (courtesy of The Barbados Museum and Historical Society).
1.6 “Sir Henry Morgan at Porto Bello,” lithograph by Howard Pyle, 1887 (Private Collection/Peter Newark Pictures/The Bridgeman Art Library).
1.7 “A Representation of the Sugar-Cane and the Art of Making Sugar,” from Universal Magazine, 1749 (Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library).
1.8 Photograph of Drax Hall, 1980 (courtesy of The Barbados Museum and Historical Society).
1.9 Portrait assumed to be of Robert Cooper Ashby (courtesy of John Knox).
1.10 Title page of a pamphlet calling for the emancipation of African slaves, 1776 (Private Collection/Peter Newark American Pictures/The Bridgeman Art Library).
1.11 Robert Cooper Ashby’s will (courtesy of Andrea Ramsey).
1.12 Sukey Ann’s certificate of manumission, 1832 (courtesy of Andrea Ramsey).
1.13 Photograph of Edith Ashby (from the author’s family album).
1.14 Photograph of “Skipper,” Henrietta, and Wilfred Ashby (from the author’s family album).
1.15 Photograph of Edward Everton Barnes Ashby (from the author’s family album).
1.16 Photograph of Muriel Haynes Skinner (from the author’s family album).
1.17 Photograph of Barbara Cecille Ashby (from the author’s family album).
1.18 Photograph of Kenneth Lamonte Stuart (from the author’s family album).
Preface
My family is just one of millions across the globe that were forged by sugar and slavery. And so my chronicle has echoes across the Americas as far away as Australia and the Indian Ocean. Virtually all our stories began the same way: some English or European migrant abandoned the Old World for the New, eventually to become enriched by the production of sugar, which became known as “white gold.” During this process, their bloodlines inevitably became intermingled with that of the slaves imported to farm and service this new economy. Yet, despite the ubiquity of this tale, I could not recollect a non-fiction book that tried to tell it; one which explored how the epic forces of sugar, slavery and settlement made and shaped the life experiences of our ancestors, and our world today. So I have written that book myself.
The narrative of the book is organized around the particular genealogy of the Ashby family, my maternal ancestors. It begins with my first identifiable ancestor and continues to the present day. This approach caused me some heartache, since it has meant focusing the initial section of the story largely around its white progenitors, whose experience is definitively documented. That doesn’t feel comfortable, but it allows a more representative story to be told, since the Caribbean was a European world in the early years of settlement, with blacks in the minority for several decades. And this methodology also demonstrates a fundamental truth about the region’s families, which overwhelmingly started as ethnically white and over time became predominantly black.
So, historical veracity triumphed. But that has meant that my African ancestors do not enter the picture until they are confirmed on the family tree. The unknowability of their past is one of the many terrible by-products of slavery, when people, reduced to chattels, are written out of history and deprived of a personal past. Ghosts haunt this tale, small men whose lives leave only very faint footprints and slaves whose sufferings leave no mark at all. My debt of honour has been to try to reconstruct their stories, black and white, and bring them to vivid life, using the scraps and fragments of information available to me. In doing so, I have been very aware of the tensions between helping stories to be told without abusing the limitations of historical record, and allowing myself to interpret and comment while acknowledging the silences of the undocumented past.
The completion of Sugar in the Blood would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of a great number of people. My first debt is to my editor, Laura Barber, whose passion for the book, unfailing encouragement and editorial prowess have made this the book it is; and then to everyone else at Portobello for producing and publicizing it with such enthusiasm and energy. In America I am grateful to Sonny Mehta’s team at Knopf, with a special mention to Diana Coglianese, for taking this project to their hearts and backing it so unequivocally. My wonderful agent, Clare Alexander, “got” this project immediately and went in to bat for it with panache and passion. My profound gratitude also goes to the Wingate Foundation, without whose financial support this book could not have been written.
My research has taken me on interesting journeys. In Barbados, where much of my prima
ry research was undertaken, I was met with great kindness. My dear friend Alissandra Cummins, director of the Barbados Museum, has been invaluable: introducing me to the right people, tracking down useful sources, recommending useful texts. Huge thanks are due to Robert Morris and my newly discovered cousin John Knox, who have guided me through the maze of Ashby-related sources, and whose unstinting generosity with their research, time and superior local knowledge have been invaluable. Thanks are also due to Sir Hilary Beckles, Dr. Pedro Welch, Dr. Karl Watson and Dr. Tara Iniss, who in different ways have contributed to this project. Cynthia Cummerbatch and Patricia Stafford both shared their precious work with me. The library staff at the Barbados Museum and the Barbados Archives were always patient and helpful. In England I particularly wish to thank Bill Schwarz at Queen Mary, University of London, for his vital input in thinking through the research process. Staff at the London Library were always willing to help me source material, and I would like to thank the Athenaeum for granting access to their collection of pamphlets on the slave trade.
My special gratitude goes to Tara Kaufmann, who has walked the entire way with me, helping with research and reading and editing sections; and to my daughters Ava and Georgie, whose cries of “Is it finished yet?” have spurred me to the finishing line. My siblings, Lynda and Steven, have been unstinting in their support, while my parents, Kenneth and Barbara Stuart, have been wonderful in every way: finding material, reading samples and providing feedback. My wider family—especially my uncle John and aunts Muriel and Dottie—have provided me with pictures and other family material. And, to end, I offer a special salute to all the new relatives whom I have uncovered in researching this book, especially Andrea Ramsey, Diana Miller and Robert Wulf. To them and all the other Ashbys I have spoken to or heard about, from Australia to America, Canada to Trinidad, France to Holland, this book belongs to you.
AS
FEBRUARY 2012
Introduction
In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
—ALEX HALEY
I HAPPENED UPON the name of my earliest known ancestor while sitting in a brutally air-conditioned library at the Barbados Museum, poring over a seventeenth-century census. There he was: George Ashby, my maternal grandfather eight times removed. I knew how unusual it was for family research to reach back that far and I felt utterly exhilarated: my stomach lurched and my eyes filled with tears. This sense of elation lingered for a long time and my previously vague interest in genealogy suddenly sharpened. I decided to find out more.
The journey that followed wasn’t always joyful. There were unpleasant shocks as well as happy surprises, perhaps the most painful being the discovery of one of my ancestors on a slave return (a register of slaves held on an individual plantation): just another commodity, listed like pigs and cows and farm machinery. My sorrow and fury were tempered only by my gratitude that I had found him, as if somehow he could draw comfort—as I did—from having his life noticed and honoured by a free descendant.
Eventually I built up an unbroken family tree reaching back to 1620. I was initially triumphant, but as time went on a sense of anticlimax overwhelmed me. What did my neatly formatted family tree really mean? It was, after all, just names on a page. Genealogical research has its limitations: it yields the skeleton, not the body. But between the bones I had, nonetheless, glimpsed something intriguing: a story of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Atlantic world. I realized that there was a book here, struggling to emerge. I continued investigating, but now focusing on secondary sources that brought to life the context and detail of the period. Over time, my maternal line began to gain both shape and colour. I followed George Ashby from seventeenth-century England, where he, alongside thousands of others, turned his back on his homeland and migrated to the Caribbean island of Barbados in search of a new life. I tracked the lives of his descendants as they became enmeshed in the sugar industry and the Atlantic slave system. And I followed the offspring of those descendants, myself included, as they migrated back to the cold winters of England, the U.S. and Canada.
Although this book is not about me, the story is of course my own. It forced me to revisit my own Caribbean childhood: the holidays spent at the family plantation, Plumgrove, where we could look out of the bedroom windows and watch the fields of waving sugar cane being harvested by other, poorer Barbadians. At the time, I had no idea how privileged this life was; that understanding came later, after I had grown up and made my home in England and had come to see that the cane fields in which I played had once been drenched in exploitation, grief and death. And I had recognized something else: that my family’s story is at once very specific, very particular, but also wholly typical and representative. It is a story that belongs not just to me but to many, many others.
My family, like the families of those others, is the product of sugar and of its siblings, settlement and slavery. This book is the story of how those forces shaped the minutiae of the Ashby family’s intimate relationships—and how, in turn, those family relationships rippled outwards, transforming the societies in which they lived. It is, then, more than a family history: it is a global story, too—one that fixes its gaze on the connections between continents, between black and white, men and women, the free and the enslaved—demonstrating that the individual is not just a victim of global history, but an author of it as well.
1
There was a wind over England, and it blew.
(Have you heard the news of Virginia?)
A west wind blowing, the wind of a western star,
To gather men’s lives like pollen and cast them forth,
Blowing in hedge and highway and seaport town,
Whirling dead leaf and living but always blowing,
A salt wind, a sea wind, a wind from the world’s end,
From the coasts that have new wild names, from the huge unknown.
—STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT, “WESTERN STAR”
GEORGE ASHBY’S STORY began as all migrants’ stories do: with a journey.
Some time in the late 1630s, when George Ashby was finally given notification that his ship was ready to sail, he must have been afraid. He was a blacksmith, a young man in his late teens, about to leave behind everything he had ever known. Though the voyage carried the seeds of his dreams he, like most of the population, had probably never undergone a long sea journey before and had no real idea of what to expect when he arrived in the Americas.
Those who chose to undertake the fearsome Atlantic crossing in search of a new life were generally tough—or else dangerously foolish. But what else can we know about George Ashby, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? Was he fleeing from a family or seeking a new one? Did he dream of religious freedom or of wealth? Was he ambivalent about leaving his homeland or were his life experiences so bitter that he believed nothing in the Americas could be worse? As he set sail for the adventuresome world of the Caribbean he would have had no idea how heavily the odds were stacked against him. (According to one historian, men like him were “pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp,” since very few of them ever achieved the better life they longed for.) He could not know that he would be one of the lucky ones: that he would not just survive but found a dynasty that endures to this day, built on sugar and forged by slavery.
The first sight of the ship would have done nothing to allay his trepidation. The typical merchant vessel that plied the route between the Caribbean and Britain was rated at around 200 tons (meaning that it could accommodate 200 casks or tuns of wine). Trussed against the stone walls of the dock, the ship looked like a gigantic gutted carcass afloat upon the water. The gaunt ribs of the wooden hull curved menacingly into the sky and the base was coated with a shaggy pelt of seaweed and barnacles. It would have been hard for George to countenance that he would be confined in the belly of this behemoth for almost two months, with the real possibility that his journey would end, like that of so many b
efore him, in massacre by pirates or drowning at sea.
After unpacking and settling in, the passengers were summoned on deck to present their documents to the “searchers.” These officials administered the oath of allegiance to the king, stamped each traveller’s ticket with the crucial “Licences under their hands and seals to pass the seas,” and then cleared the vessel for departure. Since every passenger had to undergo this process, no matter what their individual circumstances or where they came from, it represented their first rite of passage, one that made their new status as migrants starkly real.
Still gathered on the bridge, the passengers chatted among themselves or waved to family and friends gathered portside to wish them bon voyage. Then, all of a sudden, a flurry of activity: the sailors scrambling across the deck, busying themselves with a series of tasks that were inexplicable to most of the passengers, the screeching of the anchor as it was winched aboard, the screaming of the hoisted sails, the shouting of the master and the sailors, all combined in a violent auditory assault. As the crew worked furiously in the bows, stern and dock, the passengers jostled to be as near the rails as possible.
Despite the noise and bustle of the ship, most of the migrants would have been as hushed as worshippers in a church, fearful of what the voyage might hold or trying to imagine what lay at the other end. They were aware that the journey was, in all probability, final. Some may have dreamt of returning to their homeland enriched, perhaps even ennobled, but most rightly sensed that they would not be coming back.
To truly grasp what this sea journey meant, what bravery and audacity it required, one must understand how the world was seen and known at that time. Though George Ashby and his contemporaries had been born in the Age of Discovery (1500–1700), most of the world was still terra incognita for Europeans. Maps were often sketchy and inaccurate. Two continents, Australia and Antarctica, had not been traced at all, and vast areas were still blank. The interiors of South America, Africa and Asia had scarcely been explored. Beyond the eastern fringe of North America, which George’s fellow pioneers had begun to document, were millions of square miles of uncharted wilderness.
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