by Alec Waugh
In Labat’s opinion, slave revolts were more frequent in the English islands than in the French; he attributes this to the fact that the French slaves received religious instruction and the English ones did not. It is probably true that there was less religious instruction in the English than in the French and Spanish islands. There is no indication that the English had any but business reasons or excuses for the slave trade, whereas the French and Spaniards did believe that they were conferring a benefit upon the Africans by offering them the opportunity of salvation. Yet the savage outbreaks of violence in Hispaniola and Guadeloupe a century later make one wonder whether the French planters were any more humane than the English, or whether the French slaves had been softened by their change of faith. In St Kitts, Labat asked the English ministers why they did not baptize their slaves. The ministers replied that they considered it wrong to keep a Christian soul in slavery. Labat retorted that it was surely worse to deny to a human being the opportunity of salvation. Many of the planters were opposed to Christianity for the slaves because it would give the various tribes a sense of unity. In their opinion, there was no greater security than a diversity of language.
Père Labat comments on the drunkenness and brutality of the English overseers, but he recognizes the need for summary treatment of revolt. A recent rising in Martinique had been put down with what could be described as a massacre. Such action he admits is cruel, but he reminds his reader that the white man is outnumbered by ten to one and he has sometimes to pass the bounds of moderation in order to inspire fear, lest he himself should be the victim. Père Labat was an excellent and broad-minded man, but he never condemns the institution of slavery or the trade itself.
6 Rich as a Creole
In 1702 the peace of Europe was disturbed by the war of the Spanish succession. It lasted for eleven years. It was a curious war to have been fought within a hundred years of Philip II’s death. A Bourbon prince, the grandson of Louis XIV, was sitting on the throne of Spain, Louis was proudly announcing that there were no longer any Pyrenees, and the other kings of Europe were uniting in a grand alliance to prevent the complete subjugation of Spain by France. It has been described as a war with limited aims, waged by monarchs with mercenary forces, in their personal, dynastic interests. As far as England and Holland were concerned, it was waged to curtail Louis XIV’s ambitions.
Labat was in Guadeloupe when war broke out. That was in May. The news reached the English islands in July, but the French did not learn of it until the capture of their ships by English corsairs warned them of trouble in the air. That kind of thing was likely to happen in the Caribbean. Eighty years later Rodney was to sack St Eustatius when the Dutch believed themselves to be at peace, and in 1667 the French government was so dilatory in warning their colony in St Kitts that its governor had been killed in action before the news of war had reached the island.
Labat’s accounts of the steps taken at Guadeloupe to alert the populace is typical of what a war was like at that time, in that area. A muster was taken of all the inhabitants capable of bearing arms, and an inventory of all the available military supplies. A store of manioc was requisitioned, to be lodged in the fort and to be renewed every three months. Manioc, peas and potatoes were to be planted in high areas and in valleys distant from the sea; a team of patrols and coast guards was enrolled. The inhabitants of remote districts were instructed to take their families into the hills. Alarm posts were established. Inhabitants were told where to muster in case of crisis. It was all very much what happened in England in the summer of 1940. And as the inhabitants of England were a quarter of a century later to remember that time in terms of their personal peradventures, Labat was in the main concerned with an earthquake that shook Martinique and a whitlow that afflicted his left hand. His doctor wished to operate, but Labat preferred to experiment with a local remedy that he had not yet tried. He took an egg that had just been laid and broke it with a piece of clean wood shaped like a spatula, since it was essential that iron should not touch it. The white of the egg was separated from the yolk; twice as much salt as would be needed for the eating of an egg was then mixed with the yolk. This was spread on a feather and wrapped round the finger; a compress was put on top which was strapped on firmly but not tightly. After two days Labat found that the whitlow had dissolved into a small hole in the flesh through which the pus had flowed. A little oil was applied to soften and close the wound and the good father’s discomfort was at an end.
The war followed its course desultorily, as far as the West Indies were concerned. The British took over the French section of St Kitts, the French raided St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat. Although one of the main aims of the Grand Alliance had been to prevent Louis XIV from gaining control of Spain’s colonial interests, the monarchs involved were more concerned with the European than the colonial battlefields, believing that they could settle the Caribbean issue in Flanders; and indeed Marlborough’s succession of victories – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet – did effectively contain Louis within his frontiers. It was a humiliating war for France. The only benefit that she derived was the beaver catch of Hudson Bay, which established her supremacy in the hat trade. But that was not an immediate advantage. Spain too fared badly. Gibraltar was captured by the British, and at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 she surrendered her Italian and her French possessions. But in terms of her eventual interests, she was better off without a stake in Flanders, and with a Bourbon on her throne, her finances were in the hands of French advisers. The internal custom houses were put down; Castile was no longer the administrative centre of the country; the American trade was centred in Cádiz. States once independent lost local privileges, and though there were separatist agitations in Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia which had to be reduced by armed campaigns, a unification of the country started. A genuine measure of prosperity returned to the Spanish people; the population rose, public works were undertaken, industry and shipping increased, the power of the Inquisition was reduced, and the country as a whole began to shake off the sloth which had settled on it during the seventeenth century. And all the time the treasure fleets were sailing from Panama.
When the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, it may well have seemed that the development of the West Indies had reached a decisive stage. Spain’s monopoly had been broken, and Spain had accepted her limited position as owner of the treasure fleets, with stout bastions in Cuba and Puerto Rico. The buccaneers were a common black market enemy. France was established between Guadeloupe and Grenada; she had originally owned St Croix, and a small but prosperous colony had taken root there, but it was too close to the Danish island of St Thomas and was trading with it in defiance of Colbert’s pacte coloniale; orders were consequently issued to the colonists to move to Hispaniola, where there was a need of colonists, and they established themselves at Léogane. The British owned what are now known as the Leeward Islands – St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat – along with Jamaica and Barbados. The Danes held St Thomas. Labat considered St Thomas the most prosperous of all the islands because Denmark was never involved in wars, and it was one of the first points of call for ships bound westward on the north-east trade. Her warehouses were invaluable for privateers. The Dutch, who were more interested in the East Indies than the West, and whose concern in the area was less agricultural than mercantile, owned Curaçao, Saba and St Eustatius.
The Caribs, who had proved so truculent to the Spanish settlers in Guadeloupe, had been for the most part reduced or domesticated. In Dominica, where today their last settlement remains, they capitulated peacefully. In Grenada they put up a desperate resistance. They signed a treaty with the French but made no attempt to keep it. Forming themselves into small squads, they ambushed and killed every Frenchman whom they found travelling alone; finally a troop of three hundred Frenchmen was sent to deal with them. After a series of savage battles a remnant of forty men were surrounded on a mountain; rather than surrender they jumped to their destruction. The rock is named today
Carib’s Leap, and the village beside it, Sotairs, an anglicizing of the French Sauteurs. Fighting continued until the last Carib had been slain. In St Lucia and St Vincent the Caribs were more successful, but the area as a whole was engaged in a brisk and broadening economy.
Conditions were in fact sufficiently stable for white women to accompany their husbands to the Caribbean and for marriages to be contracted by young persons of good family. A new word was coined, ‘Creole’, meaning native to the colonies. It bore no relation to the colour of the skin; in terms of human beings it meant ‘born in the islands’. You could have a black, white or mulatto Creole. In the same way you could have Creole cooking – dishes prepared out of local ingredients – and Creole dresses – costumes that were appropriate to the climate. Men and women were being born in the West Indies, were growing up and being educated there; families who thought of Barbados, Martinique and Cuba as their homes were creating a civilization of their own.
In each case that civilization was an echo, a reflection, an amplification of the home country. Colonies bear the same resemblances to their mother country that children do to their parents. Cuba and Puerto Rico were Spanish, just as Martinique was French and Barbados English. Cuba reproduced the life of the Hidalgos of Seville and Andalusia; the sugar planters of Barbados lived on their estates as did titled Englishmen in their country seats; the French tried to reproduce in Fort Royal and Cap Français the life of Versailles and Fontainebleau.
The extent of these differences was to have an effect upon the course of history. England in the eighteenth century was Whig and Protestant, with a German-speaking King who ‘did not like boetry and did not like bainting.’ Squire Western in Tom Jones is the prototype of the eighteenth-century English gentleman; they were hard-hunting, hard-drinking men consuming their daily bottle of port; and port at that time was very different from the noble and mellowed wine that today graces our dinner table. It was a fierce mixture of rough wine and raw spirit. They were heavy trenchermen with florid complexions and persistent gout. They lived in the Caribbean as they lived in Shropshire.
In France, on the other hand, under Louis XV, the worst punishment that could befall a nobleman was expulsion from Versailles to an exile on his own estate, and in St Domingue and Martinique the French planters laboured in the sun so that they could return with full pockets to a holiday at home. Paris, Paris, Paris. That was their constant dream. They relieved their loneliness and boredom, as their cousins did in France, with gallantry. The British, fettered by a Puritan conscience, though not addicted to excessive chastity, concentrated upon sport. In Jamaica, as in Wiltshire, they rated the pleasures of the table more highly than the pleasures of the bed.
Père Labat was deeply impressed by the comfort of the Barbadians’ plantation houses. He would not, fifty years later, have found a parallel situation in Jamaica, both because it was colonized more recently and because the climate was less clement. The Jamaican was more concerned than the Barbadian with making a quick profit and getting back to England. He did not spend as much money upon his home. Lady Nugent referred to the contrast between the general plenty and magnificence of their tables and the meanness of their houses and apartments, it being no uncommon thing to find, at the country habitations of the planters, a splendid sideboard loaded with plate and vintage wines, a table covered with the finest damask and a dinner of perhaps sixteen or twenty courses, and all this in a hovel not superior to an English barn. A stranger could not fail also to observe a strange incongruity and inconsistency between the great number of Negro domestics and their appearance and apparel, the butler, and he but seldom, being the only attendant who was allowed the luxury of shoes and stockings. All the others, and there was usually one to each guest, waited at table in barefooted majesty, some of them perhaps half naked.
Yet the Jamaican as much as the Barbadian tried to take root in the country of his adoption and to reproduce the customs of the shires. Labat, by no means an abstemious man, commented both on the heavy drinking and the copious meals of the British colonists. Lady Nugent, a century later, was shocked by their gluttony. ‘I don’t wonder now at the fever that people suffer from here,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Such eating and drinking I never saw. Such loads of all sorts of high, rich and seasoned things and really gallons of wine and mixed liquors. They eat a late breakfast as if they had never eaten before. It is as astonishing as it is disgusting.’ She described as typical a dinner that started with black-crab pepper pot. The pepper pot consisted of a capon ‘stewed down’, a ham also stewed to a jelly, six dozen land crabs with their eggs and fat, flavoured with onions, okra, sweet herbs and such vegetables as were in season, the whole well-stewed. This was the prelude to further courses of turtle, mutton, beef, turkey, goose, duck, chickens, capons, ham, tongues, crab patties. The meal was rounded off with various sweets and fruits.
Such a regime was not conducive to a life of gallantry, and though Lady Nugent was continually deploring the moral lapses of the young Jamaicans, the British way of life did not lead, to anything like the extent that the French way did, to the creation of an important half-white class. Jamaica and Barbados were reproducing the atmosphere of Tom Jones, Martinique and St Domingue that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In Jamaica most of the young unmarried planters had native housekeepers who spoke of them as their husbands, but these were established relationships, and Monk Lewis considered that mulatto girls would not accept such relationships unless they could think of themselves as morganatic wives. In St Domingue, on the other hand, the dusky mistress was as accepted a feature of Creole as of Parisian life, and the children of these unions had a status in the French islands that they did not have in the British. Their fathers sent them back to the Sorbonne for their education, and Paris took kindly to the type. It was an exciting novelty. These young men were handsome, dashing, lively; they had money to spend. Why should not Paris welcome them? Paris could afford to welcome them. Paris had not a colour problem. The Parisians, indeed, preferred them to the Creole planters who annoyed them with their ostentation and thoughtless extravagance. There was no equivalent to this class in London.
These differences in national characteristics were to have important consequences later.
Throughout the eighteenth century the Caribbean was a boom area, and the phrase ‘rich as a Creole’ was in familiar use in London and in Paris. Yet the life of the planter was very far from easy. At the moment of writing – the 1960s – the West Indies are the most favoured playground in the world. The most popular period for tourists is from December 15 to April 15. But this is only because the climate in northern latitudes is then at its worst. From the Caribbean point of view one month is very like another. There is officially a dry and a wet season, but a Rip Van Winkle suddenly marooned there could only recognize the season from the shrubs and trees that were in flower. The only poor period is in the early autumn when there is danger of a hurricane. These come, when they do, between late August and late September. As the jingle has it:
June too soon,
July stand by,
August you must
Remember September.
October all over.
The hurricanes blow at a speed of 150 miles an hour, and most islands have been visited by them at some time or another. They inflict great damage, destroying houses and uprooting trees. The gaps between their visitations are considerable, and it is the custom every year nowadays, when the hurricane season approaches, for the prudent family to ensure that their shutters and locks are firm, and that there is a store of food and blankets in case of trouble. But otherwise there is little difference between June and January. One day is like another; too like another. There is no variety. When Lady Nugent arrived in Jamaica in 1800 as the wife of its governor, she remarked to Lord Balcarres that it was a very fine day. His Lordship replied, ‘I assure you that you will be tired of saying this before many days are over.’
To the contemporary tourist, as to Christopher Columbus, the West Indies seem
an earthly paradise, but the lack of variety in the climate has a deleterious and debilitating effect upon the northern settler. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the incidence of fever was very great. Lady Nugent’s diary is full of references to residents and members of her husband’s staff who suddenly fall sick and die. She was soon writing of ‘this dreadful, this deceitful climate’.
The planter had a great deal to contend with besides the climate. The sugar islands were mainly in the hands of the French and British, and each group of settlers had their separate problems. The French and English managed their estates on a different method. The English planter had an agent in London with whom he placed his orders and he sent home sugar on his own account. The French merchants resident in France sent out cargoes at their own risk, which were sold for them by agents in the islands or by captains of the ships; the proceeds were invested in West Indian produce. To a far greater extent, therefore, the English planter had a stake in the colony, and from the start the system of absentee ownership was more firmly established in the French islands.