A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  He was a ruthless man. When he needed sailors for his galleys he instructed judges to condemn minor culprits to them. Madame de Sevigne described him as being like the North Star, ‘cold but steadfast’. He knew what he wanted, and he devised schemes for bringing about the fulfilment of his plans. He was alarmed by the power of the Dutch navy and the weakness of the French. Most of the trade with Martinique and Guadeloupe was carried in Dutch bottoms. This Colbert forbade, pleading as an excuse that a pest was raging in Amsterdam. He sent a squadron of French ships to patrol the Caribbean. He ordered his justices that in all cases where there was any doubt, the case must go against the foreigner. He armed the Caribs and incited them to attack the Dutch, who, he said, must lose the habit of West Indian trade. A few years later he opened a factory on the Guinea coast.

  The colonists were indignant. They found themselves without the necessities of existence. They were short of slaves; there were not enough French ships to bring them the goods they needed; but Colbert was adamant. The colonist must be prepared to suffer in the ultimate interests of France. He did not care if the womenfolk were short of shoes. Eventually they would get their reward. In his view, as in that of most contemporary European administrators, colonies existed solely for the benefit of the mother country. He refused, for instance, to allow the planters to barter their rum in Boston for the salt meat and livestock that they badly needed, because the trade would be of advantage to a rival’s colonies. At the same time, he would not allow rum to be sold in France because it might prove more popular than brandy. Bordeaux exported wine, brandy, slaves, flour, salt beef in return for sugar and small quantities of indigo, ginger, cotton, tobacco, hides. Bordeaux, Nantes, and La Rochelle were the ports used in France for the Caribbean trade, the Norman and Breton ports being endangered by European wars. Up to a point, tobacco was an important export and served as currency. But overproduction sent down the price. Colbert made tobacco a state monopoly. This ruined the tobacco trade in the French West Indian colonies, but it helped the sugar industry. Colbert organized imports so that each colony should make its own contribution. The heavy duties imposed made it very difficult to make any profit. When the islands turned to the cultivation of sugar, sugar was refined in Holland. Colbert stopped this and started a refining industry in France. He also allowed refineries to be built in the islands, but not on such a scale as would damage the refineries in France. The colonists were often in a desperate state. It was more profitable to grow sugar than to raise food, but they had to have salt beef. A three-cornered trade with Canada was a year long operation, and the Boston market was closed to them. The slaves, they complained, could not support long hours in the sun on a diet of yams, potatoes and cassava bread. They needed food, livestock, staves, and lumber, which they could have obtained from New England in return for rum and molasses, but this Colbert forbade.

  Colbert, up to a point, made the same mistake that Philip II did of over-concentrating the trade of the West Indies. He insisted, for example, that Irish beef should be trans-shipped at Nantes; he made goods more expensive for the planters than they need have been; he checked the prosperity of the islands by preventing foreign traders from importing the goods which France did not herself produce. The population of the islands did not increase as rapidly as it might have done. He was no doubt right in being more interested in the Far East trade, and the Caribbean company that he had founded did, in fact, go into bankruptcy, so that finally the islands were returned to the King. At the same time, he had a vision which Charles V and Philip II never had had, of a self-supporting, self-sufficient colonial empire. Realizing that Temperate Zone colonies produced the same articles that Europe did, he recognized the value of the West Indies as a middleman. He delayed the advancement of Guadeloupe and Martinique, but their ultimate prosperity was largely due to him; as also was the efficiency and power of the French marine. In 1664 there was not a French ship trading with the islands; ten years later there were over 130, and in 1683 there were three hundred. He was a great man.

  The restrictions that he placed upon his colonists undoubtedly encouraged smuggling, and it was during his period of rule that there flourished in the Caribbean that wild group of lawless men known as the Brethren of the Coast, who, from their strongholds in Jamaica and Hispaniola, plundered the trade of the area. These men were known as buccaneers, an anglicized version of the French word boucanier, meaning one who cures meat over an open fire by the boucan process. The French, on the other hand, adapted the English word ‘freebooter’ into filbustier, which later became re-anglicized as ‘filibuster’. There are those, however, who maintain that the word comes from the Spanish filibote (fee-lee-bote), English flyboat, a small, swift sailing vessel with a large mainsail that could pursue merchantmen in the open sea, but avoid men-of-war in the shoals and shallows.

  They were, these men, the riffraff of seven nations and the seven seas; they were homeless, rootless, with families long since forgotten. They were mutineers, escaped prisoners, shipwrecked pirates; they had no country, they owed no allegiance to anyone except themselves. They settled originally in the western section of Hispaniola. Potentially one of the richest islands in the Caribbean, it had been abandoned by the Spaniards in their quest for gold. The Indian population had been reduced to a few thousands; only a meagre number of scattered plantations and villages remained, and the untamed jungle was infested by wild horses, the descendants of the dogs whom the Spaniards had brought out to chase the Indians, and herds of pigs and oxen. The Spaniards had tried to reduce the menace of the dogs by strewing the savannahs with the carcasses of poisoned horses, but the horses were outnumbered by the hounds. It was here that the refugees of tyranny made their homes.

  They had first come here from St Kitts, whence they had been expelled by the Spanish raid. At the beginning their life was relatively pacific. They had plenty to eat, they enjoyed a free and easy existence; they enjoyed hunting, and they went out in parties of five or six, with their muskets. They chose pork for their staple diet. They cut the meat in long strips and laid it over open fires (boucans). Gratings were constructed of green sticks, a form of barbecue; the meat was exposed to the smoke and saturated with the fat, bones and offal of the carcass and the trimmings of the hides. This method of cooking left the meat with a bright red colour and gave it an appetizing flavour, preferable in that damp climate to the jerked beef that was prepared in Chile, Peru and on the River Plate by drying the meat in the sun.

  The buccaneers might have been well enough content to lead their life in the bush if they had been left alone. They lived so prosperously, indeed, that the French governor-general of St Kitts decided to change his seat of government to Tortuga, an island off the north coast of Hispaniola, in 1634, the year after the colonization of Guadeloupe and Martinique had started. Four years later the Spanish attacked Tortuga and cleared out its inhabitants. It was the last gesture of the old Spanish imperialism, but it lit a flame of wrath that was to harry the Caribbean for thirty years.

  The Spaniards could not hold what they had taken. Within a few months the buccaneers had returned, this time in a far from pacific mood. They had been twice dispossessed by the Spaniards; they were ready for revenge, and they were to be joined in the months immediately following by sea beggars – gueux de la mer – from the revolted Netherlands, by French Huguenots, and by traders whose ships had been intercepted by the Spanish revenue cruisers, the guarda costas, who regarded every foreign ship as contraband; all of these new arrivals were to have a hatred of Spain as one of their most insistent instincts. They were not only bent on self-support, on mere subsistence. They were set on plunder.

  They were a motley crew, from many stocks, from many ways of life, but they managed to achieve in their exile an indistinguishable similarity of appearance. They wore a common uniform, a small close-fitting cap, a jacket of cloth with breeches that came halfway to their knees. One had to look carefully to tell whether this garment was of cloth, so stained was it with blood. They
wore a belt, set with a bayonet and four knives. There were few of them that were taller than their musket. On their feet, like the Indians, they wore moccasins, made out of oxhide or pigskin. As soon as the animal was dead they would cut away the skin that had covered it. Setting the big toe where the knee had been, they would bind it with a sinew. The rest of it was taken a few inches above the heel and tied there till the skin had dried, when, having taken the impress of the man’s foot, it would keep its shape.

  They had neither family nor children. There was scarcely a woman on the island. Each was constrained to take one of his fellows to himself, to help him in the ordinary business of life, to tend him when he was sick. They lived together, sharing their possessions; he who lived the longer inherited them. They divided their work. The one would hunt, while the other would protect the hut and cook.

  Food was plentiful in Tortuga. There was a profusion of fruit, of yams, pineapples and bananas, and on the mainland there were herds of wild boar, and flocks of pigeons which in certain seasons of the year were admirable but after the season, because they fed on a bitter seed, were as rough as gall upon the palate. They sold beef to homebound vessels.

  Every so often boredom, lack of money and a need of adventure and revenge would send them out to sea. Their expeditions were carefully planned. They held a meeting to decide when they should attack, to raise funds and to elect officers who would be allowed an extra share of the plunder.

  In spite of their lawlessness, the Brethren of the Coast showed in regard to one another a very precise observance of the law. Their motto was ‘no prey, no pay’. The articles of their code established the principle of equality. Each brother was entitled to a vote on matters of policy and to an equal share of the plunder. An exact scale of penalties was agreed upon. Death was the punishment for the brother who brought a woman in disguise on board. Whoever stole from a comrade had his ears and his nose slit and was disembarked on the handiest strip of beach with no other provisions than a fusee, some shot, a bottle of gunpowder and a bottle of water.

  In the same spirit, indemnities were fixed. For the loss of a right arm a brother was recompensed with six hundred piastres or six slaves. A left arm or a right leg was valued at five hundred piastres. A finger or a toe was worth one slave. The hauling down of the flag on a hostile ship was rewarded with fifty piastres, and there were such innumerable minor bounties as the five-piastre reward for the throwing of a hand grenade over the walls of a besieged fort.

  There was little variety in the general strategy of a raid. There was a privateer to be boarded; a town to be descended on; a garrison to be put to the sword; churches to be plundered; cellars to be emptied; girls to be ravished; old men to be tortured till they divulged the hiding places of their neighbours’ gold; a final ransom to be levied; then, with the holds full, a sailing back to the taverns of Cayon.

  Thus it went on, month after month, with every township, every harbour as frightened of this ‘scourge of the West Indies’ as they had been of El Draqui a century before.

  Among the recruits to this strange brotherhood was a type of adventurer to whom reference has not yet been made, the bondman, the indented man, the engagé. He was a free man of white skin with no record of crime who signed on for three years’ service in return for his passage out, his board and keep and clothing. He was in a very difficult position. The planter was resolved to make all the possible profit out of him, well aware that the margin of profit was very small. For the first months of his apprenticeship an engagé would be of little use. He would be learning his job and getting acclimatized to new conditions. He was of less value than a slave, so that a slave’s health and welfare were of greater concern to the planter; a lifetime’s service was set in the balance against three years’. In the early years these bondmen had been useful as house servants, and when tobacco was the chief crop in St Kitts they had worked on the plantations. But when sugar supplanted tobacco their value dropped; they were unequal to the hard work of the canefields. Colbert tried to encourage the sailing of indentured servants; he wanted to maintain the proportion of white to black. Prescient here, as in so much else, he visualized the necessity of a buffer state, loyal to the crown, between the white oligarchy and the slaves, but economic necessity was too strong. Imported Negroes alone were useful in the canefields, and in 1674, on the insistence of the planters, the importation of white ‘indented labour’ was forbidden in the French islands. But at the time when the Brethren of the Coast were gathering in Tortuga, the grievances of the indented man were deep and bitter. He had been brought out under false pretences. His position was worse than that of a slave. In British colonies, an escaped bondman who was recaptured had branded on his forehead the letters FT – Fugitive Traitor. Their recruitment by the merchants of Dieppe, Le Havre, St Malo, Brest and La Rochelle was in fact parallel in spirit to the slave trade of the Guinea coast; and in the same way that the African traders forced into the slavers those who had been sold into captivity, so did the merchants find their cargo among the destitute penniless men, unemployed servants, peasants weary of hard conditions, artisans who saw no hope of becoming masters, women who could not find a husband. The women were assured that when they did find a husband they would be released from their engagement; the men were promised a property on the expiry of their service. The terms of contract stipulated the standard of clothes, food, lodging and pay that would be provided. In the early days, when there had been an immediate need for artisans and qualified agriculturists, the system had not worked badly, but the rapacity of the colonists, the low value that was then set on human life, and the impossibility of control soon set it in decline.

  The rules for the indented man were very strict. He began to work a quarter of an hour after sunrise; he stayed at his work until a quarter of an hour after sunset. He had two hours off for lunch. He could not leave his billet without his master’s permission. Captains of ships could not take him on board. He could not work for another master. He had no remedy against ill-treatment. His cabin was put near the slave quarters. Sometimes he had to share his cabin with a slave. He was dressed poorly. He was thrashed, as the slaves were. It is not surprising that many of them escaped, that some of these fugitives joined the Brethren of the Coast. Among them was a Dutchman, John Alexander Esquemeling, who sailed from Le Havre in May 1666 as a servant of the West India Company of France, and to whom we are indebted for most of our knowledge of this wild fraternity.

  Esquemeling sailed, as was the custom of the time, under a convoy, guarded by a man-of-war with twenty-seven guns and a crew of 250. Two of the conducted ships were bound for Senegal, five for the Lesser Antilles, Martinique and her dependencies; his own ship was due at Tortuga. She arrived without the loss of a single man, but there his good fortune ended. The Company of the West Indies was in such grievous financial straits that it had recalled its factors, instructing them to sell at whatever price they could raise such property as they possessed. Esquemeling, as a servant of the company, was regarded as one of its assets, and he found himself sold to the ‘most cruel tyrant and perfidious man that was ever born of woman’, who was then governor, or rather lieutenant general, of that island. ‘This man treated me,’ he wrote, ‘with all the hard usages imaginable, even with that of hunger, with which I thought I should have perished inevitably, withal he was willing to let me buy my freedom and liberty but not under the rate of three hundred pieces of eight, I not being master of one at that time in the whole world. At last, through the manifold miseries I endured, as also affliction of mind, I was thrown into a dangerous fit of sickness. This misfortune, being added to the rest of my calamities, was the cause of my happiness. For my wicked master, seeing my condition, began to fear lest he should lose his monies with my life. Hereupon he sold me to a surgeon for the price of seventy pieces of eight. Being in the hands of this second master, I began soon after to recover my health through the good usage I received from him, as being much more humane and civil than that of my first patron. He
gave me both clothes and very good food and after I had served him but one year he offered me my liberty, with only this condition, that I should pay him one hundred pieces of eight when I was in a capacity of wealth to do so.’

  We do not know whether he ever did repay this debt, but he took the most effective steps to enable himself to do so; he enrolled with the Brethren of the Coast. He was, he said, received ‘with common consent both of the superior and vulgar sort’. He was the more welcome because his second master was a surgeon, and he had received from him not only kindness, but elementary instruction in medicine that would be highly valuable to a group of pirates. It was in this capacity that he was of particular use to Henry Morgan, the most famous of all pirates, who eventually became a legitimate administrator and, as governor of Jamaica, was knighted by Charles II.

  Morgan was the son of a Welsh farmer; his father was not a poor man, but the life of the fields held no attraction for him. As a boy he accepted the lure of the Spanish Main and signed on as a bondman in Barbados. On the voyage out, as the youngest sailor, he was, in order to start the week well, flogged every Monday morning at the mast. Barbados is a small island, for the most part flat; its climate is dry and healthy, so dry that at this time it had no waterpower and its headmills were worked by horses. Its soil is very fertile. It is admirably suited for the sugar crop. It is today the most densely populated territory in the world. No flag other than that of Britain has flown from its mastheads. It was protected so effectively by the trade wind that no French fleet from Martinique or Guadeloupe was ever able to launch an attack against it. Its loyalty to the British crown is constant. After the execution of Charles I, it refused to acknowledge the commonwealth, and declared Charles II King. It has produced some of the world’s greatest cricketers.

  Morgan served seven years in Barbados, then, on having earned his freedom, crossed to Jamaica, which had been captured by Cromwell from the Spaniards.