The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  Cromwell responded by instigating a new policy after 1655 of issuing pardons to criminals on the condition that they go overseas. This greatly increased the flow to Barbados of ‘felons condemned to death, sturdy beggars, gipsies and other incorrigible rogues, poor and idle debauched persons’. In a fit of Puritan zeal, 400 women from the brothels of London were shipped to Barbados in 1656, ‘in order that by their breeding they should replenish the white population’. A visitor to the island at this time, not without reason, described Barbados as ‘the Dunghill wharone England doth cast forth its rubidg: Rodgs. Hors and such like peopel, which are generally brought heare’.

  These newcomers, as well as the political prisoners – ‘traitors’ – were generally treated as was considered their due – with great cruelty. The account of one party, shipped to Barbados after the Pennruddock Royalist uprising in 1655, furnishes us with details. The prisoners were kept below decks for nearly three weeks at Plymouth; during the six-week voyage they were ‘all the way locked up under decks amongst horses, that their souls, through heat and steam under the tropic fainted in them’. On their arrival at the island they were sold, ‘the generality of them to most inhuman and barbarous persons’, and then set to work ‘grinding at the mills, attending the furnaces and digging in the scorching land’. They were, it is clear, the absolute chattels of their masters, and ‘bought and sold still from one planter to another, whipped at the whipping post for their master’s pleasure, and many other ways made miserable beyond expression or Christian imagination’.

  Richard Ligon’s account supports this, although with an important caveat. ‘As for the usage of the Servants’, he wrote, ‘it is much as the Master is, merciful or cruel.’ The aristocratic Cavalier newcomers like the Walronds, says Ligon, took a paternalistic approach to getting the most work out of their servants, feeding and clothing them well and receiving in return ‘love’ and ‘diligent and painful labour’. The implication, then, is that the old-timers, hardened by 20 years’ struggle on the island, were the ‘cruel masters’. This seems to have been the case with sugar pioneer James Holdip, who would later be described as ‘extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression’. But James Drax does not seem to have fitted this rule. He was greatly admired by Ligon, and praised for ‘feeding two hundred mouths’. Moreover, most of his workforce were now slaves rather than servants. Ligon said that Drax ‘keeps them in such order, as there are no mutinies amongst them’.

  Clearly Ligon was shocked by the treatment of the servants by the ‘cruel masters’, and he described in vivid detail their ‘very wearisome and miserable lives’. On their arrival, they had to build their own shelters out of sticks, vines and leaves or otherwise sleep on the ground in the open air. The next morning, they were summoned at six and sent to the fields ‘with a severe Overseer to command them’. They had a meagre meal at eleven, then worked on until six in the evening. Often they would be forced to sleep in clothes soaked by rain or sweat, with disastrous consequences for their health. Any complaints led to a doubling of their indenture period, or brutal punishment. ‘I have seen an Overseer beat a Servant with a cane about the head till the blood has flowed for an offence that is not worth speaking of’, Ligon reported. ‘Truly, I have seen such cruelty done to servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another.’

  Thus as the cultivation of sugar – with its attendant intense and back-breaking labour – remorselessly spread, so for most of its inhabitants Barbados became a place of terror, discipline and coercion. Indenture had started as a personal relationship based on a voluntary contract. Now most servants were treated as less-than-human objects, as property. The ground was laid for the horrors of chattel slavery.

  Ligon wrote of the white servants that the hard labour and inadequate shelter and food ‘had so much depress’d their spirits, as they were come to a declining and yielding condition’. The overworked servants responded, then, in the main, with what would later be considered ‘black’ attributes, but were in fact common to all slave classes regardless of race: stereotypes of sullen docility and childlike passivity. This led, in turn, to further coercion and brutality on the part of the overseers, who would, it was reported, beat them like ‘galley slaves’ to force them to work.

  Very occasionally, the worst abuses came to the attention of the authorities. We know of one incident when two planters were imprisoned and forced to pay compensation after hanging a servant, John Thomas, ‘by the handes’ and putting ‘fired matches betweene his fingers’, a torture that cost Thomas ‘the use of severall joynt’s’. On other occasions the servants responded to ill treatment by setting fire to the canefields or factories of their masters. The cruel James Holdip was utterly ruined, losing £10,000, when his vengeful servants burnt his plantation to the ground.

  In 1649, an extensive plot amongst the servants was uncovered in the nick of time. According to Ligon, a large group of servants, greatly ‘provoked’ by ‘extream ill usage’, decided to rise up, cut the throats of their masters and seize control of the island. But on the day before the uprising was scheduled to start, the plot was betrayed and the ringleaders seized. They were extensively tortured, and then no fewer than 18 were hanged. Soon afterwards a raft of laws was passed to further govern the lives of the servants: they now required a master’s permission to marry; any servant convicted of striking their master faced a further two years’ service; all servants had to have a pass from their master to leave the plantation. If they disobeyed this, they served an extra month for every two hours’ absence.

  However, by this time, the servant and wider poor white population was starting to decline. Some finished their indenture period and, finding no land to settle in Barbados, headed for other islands; a number escaped; very many died from a combination of overwork, hunger and disease. But the narrowly avoided 1649 rebellion confirmed the Barbados planters in their opinion that the white servants were an extremely dangerous threat and that they needed to look elsewhere for the enormous labour requirements of their sugar industry. Indeed, many were already doing so.

  5

  THE PLANTATION: MASTERS AND SLAVES

  ‘Slavery … is a weed which grows in every soil.’

  Edmund Burke

  For some, the process whereby the sugar islands (all of which followed the model established in Barbados) became slave societies was simple, and had an air of inevitability. In 1645, a Barbados settler wrote to Governor John Winthrop Jr in Massachusetts explaining that the usual practice was to bring out servants from England – on as many years’ indenture as you could get away with – to get a sugar operation up and running, ‘and in short time [to] be able with good husbandry to procure Negroes (the life of this place) out of the encrease of your owne plantation’. Indeed, by the time that sugar took over the island’s land and economy, a pattern was established of using the profits of servant labour to invest in enslaved men, women and children shipped from West Africa.

  Why did the English planters choose this terrible option? Were not the English in the Americas supposed to be radically different from the notoriously cruel Spaniards? Slavery had disappeared from England hundreds of years before, ‘liberty’ was a national watchword – wasn’t slavery ‘un-English’? In 1618, an Englishman called Richard Jobson was in West Africa trading for gold and ivory when he was offered slaves to buy by an Arab middleman. Shocked, he replied, ‘We were a people who did not trade in any such commodities, neither did wee buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes.’ The Arab merchant was surprised, saying there were white people on the coast ‘who earnestly desire’ to acquire slaves. Jobson answered that ‘They were another kinde of people different from us.’ So how did the English, within only a few generations, become the world’s leading slave traders?

  Before this time, English people were far more likely to be the victims of slavery rather than its perpetrators. Slavery had been abandoned in northern Europe by the twelth century, but it was still common around the
Mediterranean, and thousands of English and Irish travelling there found themselves enslaved by Muslims. This would continue well into the eighteenth century. Islamic law forbade the forcible enslavement of fellow Muslims, but ‘inferior’ people such as Christians were fair game.

  Slavery had always been about ‘inferior’ peoples – for the Greeks it was the ‘barbarians’, for Jews, the Gentiles (and vice versa) – but Muslims believed that they had identified the most inferior of all: black Africans. The Arabs were the first to develop a specialised long-distance slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, bringing workers to drain the Fertile Crescent to grow cotton and sugar. In almost all cultures, colour of skin was seen from the earliest times as an indicator of status. The darker you were, the more likely to be a humble field worker; the lighter, the more chance it was that you performed skilled indoor work away from the sun, or, indeed, no work at all. Thus, increasingly, black-skinned African slaves were given the most degrading forms of labour by their Muslim overlords.

  The rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle gave this idea of racial inferiority weighty support. Aristotle had suggested that some peoples were ‘natural slaves’ – like tame animals, unable to look after themselves, they needed masters almost for their own protection. Soon the characteristics of these ‘natural slaves’, as decided by Aristotle – excitability, emotional immaturity, lack of reason, sometimes sullen stupidity – were being applied to black Africans.

  In terms of numbers, though, most slaves in the Mediterranean were still white. From the early thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, Italian merchants transported tens of thousands of Slav people as slaves (hence the word ‘slave’) to the region, a good proportion of whom were used for the production of sugar. But the capture of Constantinople in 1453 stopped this flow, causing the Italian merchants to look westwards for a new source of supply.

  Almost from their first voyages of discovery, Portuguese mariners had been bringing Africans back to Lagos to be sold as slaves. In 1444, 253 were landed in the Algarve, with 46 – the ‘royal fifth’ – being given to Prince Henry the Navigator, who rejoiced at the prospect of their conversion to Christianity, as well as at the income he got from selling them on. A contemporary witness wrote of the ‘piteous company’ of slaves: ‘Some kept their heads low, and their faces bathed in tears, looking one upon the other. Others stood groaning very dolorously.’

  A great number ended up in Lisbon, where, by the mid-sixteenth century, slaves would number 10,000, a tenth of the population. Here, they often functioned as decorations, denoting social standing. The Portuguese loved African music and enlisted slaves to perform at plays and other public entertainments, even royal functions. Marriage between white and black was not forbidden, and there were even some high-profile free blacks.

  But a large number also ended up working in the sugar cane fields, where it was a different story. Sugar has a long association with slavery. It is certain that the cane carried by the Muslim expansion into the Mediterranean was to a large extent slave-grown and slave-processed, particularly in North Africa. When wages skyrocketed after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, the labour-intensive industry relied even more on coerced workers. Then, when the Portuguese and Spanish started growing sugar on the Atlantic islands close to Africa, black slave labour became the norm for the crop.

  To function, the institution of slavery requires the suppression of spirit, intelligence and initiative on the part of its victims. Sugar, with its mind-numbing, simple but repetitive and physically exhausting tasks, demanded exactly the same thing. Sugar and slavery were found to be a perfect fit.

  So, the first stepping stones to the slave islands of the Caribbean were the Atlantic possessions of Spain and Portugal. Although there were a number of waged and indentured labourers, the mainspring of sugar production was handled by slaves imported from nearby West Africa. By the time of Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, Madeira was already a thriving plantation colony worked by enslaved Africans, producing more sugar than the entire Mediterranean area. By the 1550s, there were nearly 3,000 slaves on the island, and many more in Portugal’s African island colonies of São Tomé and Príncipe. São Tomé alone imported more African slaves in the first half of the sixteenth century than Europe, the Americas and the other Atlantic islands combined, and included wealthy Africans among its financial backers. The island, conveniently situated off the coast of West Africa, also acted as a gathering point for slaves to be re-exported back to mainland African buyers and on to the Americas.

  Black slaves were shipped to the New World very soon after European contact. Of course, Columbus and his successors quickly enslaved the indigenous populations of the Americas, setting them to work in the fields and mines, with appalling consequences. But alongside them, from 1501 at the latest, were black enslaved Africans, with direct shipments from the continent recorded as early as 1518.

  At the same time, the ‘Indians’ started receiving high-profile support. As early as 1516, the Dominican priest Bartoleme de Las Casas was calling for the importation of African slaves in order to save the beleaguered native population of the New World. His campaign brought about the outlawing of ‘Indian’ slavery in 1542, although this was widely ignored. Most importantly, de Las Casas argued not against the idea that there were ‘natural slaves’ – simply that with the picturesque indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean, Spain had chosen the wrong race. The distinction was also pragmatic. It was soon discovered that the Africans were hardier than the rapidly dwindling aboriginal population, who were poor workers, and were unable to sustain the physical and psychological degradation of slavery. An early Spanish account, while explaining that the growing of sugar made it ‘requisite to send over blacks … from Guinea’, marvelled that ‘unless one happened to be hanged, none died’. Indeed, an African was considered to be worth four of the sickly Indians.

  Not that African slavery did not present practical problems of its own to the Europeans. The same account that commended the black Africans’ supposed resistance to disease commented that ‘when they came to be put to the sugar-works, they destroyed themselves with the filthy liquors they made of those molasses’. Worst of all, this led to the black slaves fleeing ‘into the mountains in whole gangs, revolt[ing] and commit[ing] murders and other outrages’. Rebellion ignited further tyranny and brutality in the masters, leading to more slave resistance. For Hispaniola, this must have had a good deal to do with the puzzling failure of the Spanish sugar industry on the island. In 1546, three sugar estates put up for sale could find no buyer because of the slave danger, and six years later, orders came that all new factories should be built of masonry and in the style of forts. This was understandable on an island with only 1,000 whites and some 7,000 ‘maroons’, as runaway slaves were known. An Italian traveller of the time wrote that ‘Most Spaniards think that it is only a matter of years before this island is taken over entirely by the blacks.’ This would, of course, remain the perennial, ever-present nightmare of the white West Indian planters for the duration of slavery and beyond.

  However, in Brazil, where the industry had succeeded spectacularly, there were more and more black slaves. In the 15 years after 1576, as many as 50,000 were imported, and possibly even more, mainly from Congo and Angola. And already, the plantations were showing all the signs of the familiar commercial enterprise of later days: excessive toil, especially during the harvest; severe punishments for minor offences; and fatalities because of dangerous machinery working badly. There also operated an assumption that the slaves would die within a short time and need to be replaced by continual imports.

  The shocking cruelty of this system attracted opposition not just from the enslaved victims, but also from influential voices – including popes, kings and emperors – in Europe. A number of Dominican and Jesuit friars who had seen the slave trade in action denounced it as a deadly sin. The shipments continued, but by 1600 there were enough critics of the trade and of slavery for it to be foreseeable t
hat abolition could come within only a few generations. But it was not to be, for at that point new players came into the business – the aggressive new Atlantic powers of northern Europe.

  Whatever the protestations of Richard Jobson in 1618, the English had entered the trade as far back as 1562, with the slave-trading voyages of Captain John Hawkins. Hawkins was backed by a host of luminaries, including the Lord Mayor of London. Queen Elizabeth, who also enjoyed a proportion of the profits of these voyages, naively announced that ‘if any African should be carried away without his free consent it would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertaking’. Both James I and Charles I licensed companies to trade in slaves, and by the 1620s, black slaves were to be seen in ports in England such as Bristol and London.