by Alec Waugh
The French planter was harassed by the restrictions of the pacte coloniale, but the administrative difficulties of the English planters were in their own way just as great. Bryan Edwards, who at the moment of his death in 1793 had nearly finished a history of the British West Indies, is our most reliable informant on those difficulties. He himself was a typical example of a Jamaican planter; he was born in Wiltshire, in Westbury, in 1743. His father inherited a small estate which yielded him about £100 a year. Without any experience, he tried to supplement this income by trading in malt and corn; he was not successful, and when he died in 1756 his widow and six children found themselves in distressed circumstances. Luckily this widow had two rich brothers in Jamaica; one of them undertook the education of Bryan, who was the eldest son, and sent him to a French boarding school in Bristol. He spent three years at this school, acquiring there a knowledge of French and a love of literature. When he was sixteen, his younger uncle returned to England, established himself in London in a style worthy of a rich Creole, and soon had a seat in Parliament. Nephew and uncle did not, however, get on well together, and Bryan was dispatched to Jamaica, where his education was continued.
He was to write, in describing the planter’s life, ‘There seems universally a promptitude for pleasure. This has been ascribed, perhaps justly, to the levity of the atmosphere. To the same cause is commonly imputed the propensity observable in most of the West Indians to indulge extravagant ideas of their riches, to view their circumstances through a magnifying medium and to feast their fancies on what another year will effect. This anticipation of imaginary wealth is so prevalent as to become justly ridiculous; yet I am inclined to think that it is a propensity that exists independent of the climate and atmosphere and that it arises principally from the peculiar situation of the West Indian planters as landholders. Not having, like the proprietors of landed estates in Great Britain, frequent opportunities of letting their plantations to substantial tenants, they are for the most part compelled to become practical farmers on their own lands, of which the returns are in the highest degree fluctuating and uncertain. Under these circumstances a West Indian property is a species of lottery. As such it gives birth to a spirit of adventure and enterprise and awakens extravagant hopes and expectations – too frequently terminating in perplexity and disappointment,
‘The business of sugar planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages must engage deeply. There is very seldom the possibility of retreat; a British country gentleman who is content to jog on without risk on the modest profits of his own moderate farm will be startled to hear that it requires a capital of no less than thirty thousand pounds to embark in this employment with a fair prospect of advantage. To elucidate this position, it must be understood that the annual contingencies of a small or moderate plantation are very nearly equal to those of an estate of three times the magnitude. ... In speaking of capital, I mean either money or a solid, well-established credit; for there is this essential difference attending loans obtained on landed estates in Great Britain and those which are advanced on the credit of West Indian plantations. An English mortgage is a marketable commodity while a West Indian mortgage is not. In England if a mortgagee calls for his money other persons are ready to advance it; now this seldom happens in regard to property in the West Indies. The credit obtained by the sugar planter is commonly given by men in trade, on the prospect of speedy returns and considerable advantage, but as men in trade seldom find it convenient to place their money out of their reach for any length of time the credit which they give is ofttimes suddenly withdrawn and the ill-fated planter compelled, on this account, to sell his property at much less than half its first cost. The credit therefore must not only be extensive but permanent.’
Every colonist complained about the trade restrictions that were imposed on him. At the very start of the colonial period Sir Thomas Warner had written: ‘Through the restraint on tobacco, the poor planters are debarred from Free Trade and unable to furnish themselves with necessities, much less to buy ammunition,’ while the Barbadians were later to complain: ‘If our island is an integral part of the British Commonwealth, we have a right to that trade with foreign nations that is enjoyed by Britain.’ They objected to having to buy in Britain goods produced abroad. The citizens of Rome, though they lived in the remotest parts of the world, were still Roman citizens to all extents. ‘But we poor citizens of England, as soon as our backs are turned, and we are gone a spit and a stride, are presently reputed aliens and used accordingly.’
The planters’ political situation also was anomalous. The governor was a go-between. He was the King’s representative, working under the privy council, but he was also part of the colonial legislature. The legislature of Jamaica, for instance, was composed of the governor, of a council nominated by the crown consisting of twelve gentlemen, and a house of assembly containing forty-three members who were elected by the freeholders. The qualification required in the elector was a freehold of ten pounds a year in the parish where the election was made, and in the representative a landed freehold of three hundred pounds per annum in any part of the island, or a personal estate of three thousand pounds. The assembly copied, as nearly as local circumstances permitted, the legislature of Great Britain, all their bills having the force of laws as soon as the governor’s assent was obtained. The most important of these laws dealt with regulations of local policy, to which the laws of England were not applicable, such as the slave system; on which, and other cases, the English laws were silent. The colonial legislation made such provision as the exigencies of the colony were supposed to require. But the crown retained the right of veto.
‘Rich as a Creole’ had its obverse side, and Edwards is the planter’s advocate with this special pleading. ‘Seeing,’ he argues, ‘that a capital is wanted which few men can command and considering withal that the returns are in general but small, and at best uncertain, how has it happened that the sugar islands have been so rapidly settled and many a great estate purchased in the mother country from the profits that have accrued from their cultivation? It is to be wished that those who make such enquiry should note on the other hand how many unhappy persons have been totally and irretrievably ruined by adventuring in the cultivation of these islands, without possessing any adequate means to support them in such great undertakings. On the failure of some of these unfortunate men, vast estates have indeed been raised by persons who have had money at command; men there are who, reflecting on the advantages to be derived from this circumstance, behold a sugar planter struggling in distress with the same emotions that are felt by the Cornish peasants in contemplating a shipwreck on the coast, who hasten with equal rapaciousness to participate in the spoil. Like them too, they sometimes hold out false lights to lead the unwary adventurer to destruction; more especially if he has anything considerable of his own to set out with.
‘Money is advanced and encouragement given, to a certain point, but a skilful practitioner well knows where to stop; he very well knows what very large sums must be expended in the purchase of the freehold, and in the first operations of clearing and planting the lands and erecting the buildings, before any return can be made. One third of the money thus expended he has perhaps furnished, but the time soon arrives when a further advance is requisite to give life and activity to the system by the addition of the Negroes and the stock. This is the moment for oppression, aided by the letter of the law and the process of office, to reap a golden harvest. If the property answers expectation and the lands promise great returns, the sagacious creditor, instead of giving further aid or leaving his too confident debtor to make the best of his way by his own exertions, pleads a sudden and unexpected emergency and insists on immediate repayment of the sum already lent. The law on this occasion is far from being chargeable with delay, and avarice is inexorable. A sale is hurried on and no bidders appear but the creditor himself. Ready money is required in payment and everyone sees that a further sum will be wanting to make the estat
e productive. Few therefore have the means who even have the wish efficaciously to assist the victim. Thus the creditor gets the estate at his own price, usually for his first advance, while the miserable debtor has reason to thank his stars if, consoling himself with only the loss of his own original capital and his labour for a series of years, he escapes a prison for life.’ Piracy, in fact, under a different banner, was still afloat in the Caribbean.
Richard Pares in A West India Fortune – a book of exceptionally alert erudition, the result of long and acute research – has told the story of an English west country family whose prosperity was based on a West Indian adventure. Pinney is one of the best-known and respected family names in Dorset. In 1685 Azariah Pinney, a refugee from the Monmouth Rebellion, landed in Nevis with £15 in his pocket. He died in 1719. His son survived him by only a few months, but his grandson’s plantations were to be valued at £20,000, and his great-grandson John Pinney, when he retired to settle in England in 1783, was worth £70,000. For another thirty years, John Pinney, an absentee owner, acted as a merchant and a factor in Bristol. In September 1817, a few years before his death, he distributed his wealth among his children. The paper value of his assets was estimated at £267,000 and the moneys that were owed him in debts and mortgages raised the score to £340,000.
This clearly is one of those West Indian fortunes that justified the label ‘rich as a Creole’, but Richard Pares’ narrative explains to what extent John Pinney was exceptional, in his prudence, caution, temperance and meticulous regard for detail. He made substantial profits as a planter, and as a factor he drew a 2 per cent, commission on the consignments of sugar that he handled, but the great part of his wealth came from the interest on his loans to planters. Most of his friends were in debt and he was very careful how he invested his money. He never, for instance, loaned money to planters who had coloured heirs. ‘Judgment,’ says Pares, ‘rather than activity, was the factor’s contribution to the sugar market.’
Bryan Edwards’ contemporary estimate of the situation is amply endorsed by Pares’ twentieth-century researches. Pares points out that so heavily were the estates in debt in the 1830s that only a small proportion of the £20,000,000 compensation that the British government paid to the planters, when slavery was abolished, reached the planters’ pockets. Most of it went to the mortgagors. Of the £145,000 that was paid to Nevis, £32,500 went to the Pinney estate in England, and Pinney was only one of the mortgagors in Nevis.
Merchants and financiers made money much faster out of the sugar estates than the planters did.
Another constant problem for all the settlers in the Caribbean was the long-distance control exercised over them by the home government – British, Spanish, French and Dutch. It was very difficult for the home government to obtain exact information from and about the colonies. It was easy to make a mistake in their administration. And since a letter could not receive an answer for many weeks, it took a long time to rectify a mistake once it had been made. The history of Antigua during the first decade of the eighteenth century provides a pertinent example of these conditions.
In 1704 a Mr Park, while serving as an officer in Flanders, had the good luck to attract the notice of the Duke of Marlborough, whom he served as an aide-de-camp and by whom he was sent to England to announce to the Queen the victory of Ramillies. The Queen rewarded him with a purse of a thousand guineas and her picture richly set in diamonds. In the following year, when the government of the Leeward Islands became vacant, Mr Park was offered the appointment.
A less judicious choice could not have been made. Mr Park, a native of Virginia, was a man of singularly dissolute behaviour. Having married a rich American woman, he possessed himself of her wealth and deserted her. With this money he came to England and obtained a seat in Parliament. Exceptional bribery having been proved against him, he was dismissed from the House. A friend whose wife he had seduced having opened proceedings against him, he escaped, as other men have done, by accepting his sovereign’s service in a foreign field. Here, as has been already told, fortune smiled on him.
He arrived in Antigua in July 1706, and was warmly welcomed by the community, who believed that his connection with America would prove profitable to their commerce; they added a thousand pounds a year to his income to relieve him of the expense of house rent. But their delight in him was of short duration. Having seduced the wife of a Mr Chester, the most considerable merchant in the country and the factor to the Royal African Company, and fearing that the injured husband might attempt revenge, he decided to protect himself ‘by adding the crime of murder to the misdemeanour of adultery’. Chester had recently by accident killed a man. The governor brought him to trial for his life, having first taken the precaution of raising a common soldier to the office of provost marshal, directing ‘his creature’ to impound a jury of persons who would bring in Chester guilty. The evidence was, however, so overwhelmingly in the defendant’s favour that even a pressed jury was compelled to acquit him.
Mr Park then got the bit between his teeth. He ordered the Codrington family to prove before himself and his council their title to the island of Barbuda, of which they had held unchallenged possession for thirty years; an act which made every proprietor in the island wonder whether he himself held any other security for his own possessions than the governor’s forbearance.
Park insisted that the provost marshal should always summon juries of his own selection; he changed the mode of electing members to the assembly so that he would be able to exclude persons he did not like, and when he failed even by these means to procure a subservient assembly, he refused to summon it, even when the French threatened an invasion. He raided Mr Chester’s house, arrested a number of the men he found there, on the grounds that they were concerting measures against himself, and kept them in the common jail without bail or trial.
The community in their indignation sent an agent to England to complain against him, but, unable to endure the delay that was inevitable in such a case, they had resort to violence. Several attempts were made upon His Excellency’s life, through one of which Park was seriously wounded. His behaviour now became more arrogant and unrestrained. At last instructions came from the crown, ordering him to resign his command to the lieutenant governor and return to England by the first convenient opportunity; at the same time commissioners were appointed to listen to evidence on the spot. The Antiguans gave way to transports of delight not dissimilar to those which they were to exhibit two and a half centuries later when Lord Baldwin returned to the island confirmed in office. Their exuberance provoked the governor beyond the frontiers of sanity. He announced that he had no intention of leaving the country, although a ship was about to sail for Europe, and issued a proclamation dissolving the assembly. The assembly, however, refused to be dissolved, asserting that, since Mr Park had been recalled by his sovereign, his continuance in the government was usurpation and tyranny, and that it was their duty to protect the peace and safety of the island.
The governor retorted by surrounding the assembly house with troops. But the representatives had been warned; they escaped and summoned the inhabitants from all parts of the island to gather, armed, to protect their rights and representatives. They intended no ill to the governor, they asserted. They were concerned only with his removal from the island.
A body of five hundred colonists marched upon Government House, which Park had converted into a garrison to be defended by every regular soldier at his command. At this point Park lost his nerve, and when it was too late attempted a concession. He sent by his provost marshal a promise that he would meet the assembly and consent to whatever laws they might think fit to pass; moreover, he offered to dismiss his soldiers, provided six of the principal inhabitants would remain with him as hostages for the safety of his person.
The speaker of the assembly and one of the members of the council offered themselves as hostages, but the crowd was not prepared to prevaricate; delay might prove fatal to their cause. In two divisi
ons they marched upon Government House. For a couple of hours there was a fierce exchange of fire, then the assailants burst through the palisades. The governor, at the last, showed courage. With his own hand he shot dead one of the chief men in the assembly, but a bullet brought him to his knees. His attendants, seeing him fall, threw down their arms and the enraged populace seized the prostrate governor and, tearing him to pieces, ‘scattered the street,’ so the record has it, ‘with his reeking limbs’.
It was an episode without parallel in British colonial history, and the people of England heard of it with astonishment and indignation, looking upon it ‘as an act of rebellion against the crown’. But when the British government had investigated the matter, they were so satisfied of Park’s misconduct that they issued a general pardon to all who were concerned in his death; two of the principal actors in the drama were later promoted to seats in the council.
The episode is important because it shows how easily an unsuitable man could be appointed to an important post, how difficult it was for the victims of this appointment to obtain redress, and to what lengths of savagery a mob can go under a tropic sun. It must be remembered that the mob in question was composed of white men, and it was a white man who was dismembered.
There was another phrase, too, that was familiar to Europeans: ‘beautiful as a Creole’. The exotic conditions of the tropics were breeding a special type of woman, pale and languid, with small hands and feet, with luminous long-lashed eyes, with indolent and graceful movements, and the slow singsong voice which had been acquired from a coloured nurse. It was from this type of beauty that was to spring Josephine de Beauharnais.