But English involvement was still minimal compared to the great maritime traders of the time, the Dutch. At first there were severe qualms: in the 1590s, several Dutch cities banned the selling of slaves within their precincts for moral reasons. Although Dutch factories and forts were established on the West African coast, the desired goods were gold and ivory, not slaves, and the leadership of the Dutch West India Company, having discussed the issue with theologians, decided that the slave trade was immoral and to be shunned. But independent traders grew steadily in number. It was a Dutch ship that in 1619 landed the first slaves in an English colony, at Virginia; cargoes captured on the high seas from the Portuguese often consisted of slaves, which the Dutch privateers were happy to sell on to any buyer. Then, in 1626, the Dutch West India Company abandoned its previous policy and started giving permission for the shipping of slaves from Africa to Dutch settlements in South America.
More than anything else, though, it was sugar that led the Dutch to take up the trade with gusto. In the late 1630s, with huge cane-growing areas of Brazil under their control, the Dutch started importing into the New World tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. At the same time, Portuguese slaving centres in Angola, the Gulf of Guinea and São Tomé were seized, bringing much of the trade under Dutch control. So when the ‘Hollanders’ helped transfer sugar to Barbados, they were looking for a market for their slaves, as well as new sugar producers for their refineries at home. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that James Drax, with all his Dutch connections, was the first on the island to make the switch from servant to slave labour.
Sugar did not cause slavery in the British Caribbean. Earlier settlements on Providence Island and Tortuga had been slave-owning, and there were a few thousand slaves, alongside the poor whites, working the Barbados cotton and tobacco plantations in the early 1640s, before the Sugar Revolution took hold on the island. But such was the early uncertainty about the institution of slavery that in 1638, the Governor was forced to confirm their status: that Indian and black slaves were to serve for life, unless contracted otherwise. Then, with the triumph of the labour-intensive sugar crop, the demand for slaves soared, and the composition of the island’s population was altered for ever.
It was not just the example of Brazil and the encouragement of the Dutch, nor sugar’s long association with slavery (and more recent links with specifically black African slavery), that led the Barbados sugar planters to switch their labour source. As well as debatable advantages in disease resistance, the bewildered and terrified new arrivals from Africa, speaking a huge variety of languages, were far easier to control than the turbulent Irish or English poor. In addition, racial, cultural and religious differences made it simpler to justify and rationalise the coercion considered to be required to get the gruelling work done in the extreme heat of the factories and fields. Most important of all, though, was the economic imperative. Slaves were cheaper.
With supply from the Dutch abundant, a Barbados planter could buy from a local trader an enslaved African for about £20 – less for women and children. This was in the region of twice the price of a five-year-indentured servant, but it was for life, and the slave-owner also owned any offspring the slave might have (as a contemporary put it: ‘miserabell Negros borne to perpetuall slavery they and Thayer seed’). Furthermore, the planters decided that the black man was the better worker; some said he did the labour of three whites. A young George Downing wrote to Governor Winthrop in August 1645 that the Barbados planters had bought that year as many as ‘a thousand Negroes; and the more they buie, the better able they are buye, for in a yeare and a halfe they will earne (with gods blessing) as much as they cost’.
The main suppliers were the Dutch, but English traders who had thrived in the servant trade, like William Vassall, Thomas Kendall and Martin Noell, simply switched their operations to dealing in slaves. Just as Bristol had been the centre of the servant trade, so now the city became a centre of the slave trade. Aggressive New England merchants muscled in, too. The first slave-trading vessel from there had arrived at Barbados as early as 1643. By the early 1650s, the leading planters, including Drax and his neighbour Middleton, had shares themselves in slave-trading vessels, if not outright ownership.
There has always existed a spectrum of freedom or dependency or powerlessness, from serfdom and peonage to indenture and actual lifelong chattel slavery. Even within slavery itself, there were degrees of freedom granted or won, depending on the enslaved person’s usefulness or threat to his or her master.
Nonetheless, certain generalisations can be made about the institution of slavery, at least in the English Caribbean. A slave was defined as ‘chattel’ (a word derived from the Latin for livestock). This meant that he or she could be bought and sold, and lived under the permanent personal domination of his or her master or mistress. Alienated from family, culture, ancestors (even descendants, who would also belong to the master), the slave had no legitimate independent being except as an instrument of his master’s will. It was a state of total degradation and dishonour.
The degradation of the slave gave the master a sense of prestige and superior identity. The slaves were property – the analogy frequently employed is with tame animals – and the greater the quality and quantity of that property, the greater its owner’s status. The other safe generalisation is that the system, whenever or wherever it was to be found, relied on violent coercion to function, and on the continuing degradation of its victims.
Richard Ligon provided one of the very few accounts of how this system worked in Barbados in the late 1640s, and was one of the very small number of contemporaries to write in detail about the black slaves on the island (of course there are no black accounts at all from this time). He was not typical – he was far older, more educated and more sensitive than the sugar barons like Drax, Hilliard or Holdip, hard men who had survived through tough times and then prospered. But Ligon’s narrative is uniquely detailed, and anticipated much of the confused attitude prevalent in later writings about slavery by sensitive English men and women in the Caribbean.
Ligon and Modyford’s vessel the Achilles was originally supposed to pick up ‘Negroes’ as well as livestock during its stop at the Cape Verde Islands, but it is not clear that this actually happened (though we know that the ship, having dropped the Modyford entourage at Barbados, hastened to Africa to collect slaves). Ligon does not write about the ‘Middle Passage’, the journey the arrivals took to get to Barbados, but he clearly witnessed a slave sale in Bridgetown, which reminded him of a horse market in his native East Anglia, with the men, women and children spruced up and then assembled naked to be assessed by potential purchasers. Ligon described the original source of the slaves as ‘petty Kingdomes’ stretching from Gambia to Angola where ‘they sell their Subjects, and such as they take in Battle, whom they make slaves; and some mean men sell their Servants, their Children, and sometimes their Wives’. Talking to enslaved Africans, he discovered that they measured time by the moon, but had only marked with this system the key moments in their lives, namely the ‘notorious accidents’ of being taken into slavery in Africa and then shipped from their homelands.
His description of the slaves, while condescending and obviously racist, also exhibits a sort of baffled pity for their hopelessness and alienation. ‘Their spirits are subjugated to so low a condition’, he wrote, that ‘they set no great value upon their lives.’ New arrivals in particular, Ligon reported, were ‘timorous and fearful’, extremely prone to suicide: starving themselves to death, or hanging themselves, in the belief that they would be resurrected in ‘their own Countrey’. Humphrey Walrond ‘lost three or four of his best Negroes this way’. Ligon described how the supposedly paternalistic Walrond responded by cutting off one of their heads and displaying it on a 12-foot-high pole, forcing his slaves to march around it. How was it possible to return to your country after death, he asked them, if the head is still here? This ‘sad, yet lively spectacle’, Ligon wrote, ‘changed
their opinions; and after that, no more hanged themselves’.
Ligon repeated the mantras of racial slavery. The blacks were ‘as near beasts as may be’. They were ‘natural slaves’, inheritors of the curse Noah put on Ham’s son Canaan, a passage in Genesis used by first the Arabs then Christians to justify slavery. They were idle, superstitious, dishonest, cruel, lacking intellect. Yet his actual descriptions for the most part tell a totally different story. At various times he called the slaves ‘excellent workers’; they were fine swimmers and divers, and adept with tools such as axes. He wrote at length about their music, played on kettle drums of various sizes. ‘So strangely they vary their time, as ’tis a pleasure to the most curious ears’, he commented. ‘If they had the variety of tune … as they have of time, they would do wonders in that Art.’ Macow, one of the senior slaves on Modyford’s plantation, amazed him by succeeding in building himself a theorbo, or large lute, having momentarily picked up Ligon’s own.
Individuals like Macow do emerge, but on the whole Ligon saw the slaves as a group, particularly when it came to physical properties. He admired the torsos of the male slaves, ‘well-timber’d … broad between the shoulders, full breasted’, and is one of the very few ‘masters’ to write about being sexually attracted to the young black women. During his brief stop in the Cape Verde Islands, Ligon encountered some ‘pretty young Negro Virgins’, and ended up, through an interpreter, elaborately praising their ‘beauty and shape’ and offering them English spirits. (Reading between the lines, he appears to have made a bit of an old fool of himself.) In Barbados he commented on the ‘young [black] maids’ who ‘ordinarily [have] very large breasts, which stand strutting out so hard and firm, as no leaping, jumping, or stirring, will cause them to shake any more, than the brawns of their arms’. The latter phrase reminds us of the fact that these were manual workers – this was their primary purpose; the awkward gallantry Ligon showed in the Cape Verde Islands was now gone, even if his sexual interest remained.
The overall impression, then, is one of confusion and contradiction, at times reading like a battle between received – but still firmly held – views about blacks and slaves, and the evidence of his own experiences. The slaves were ignorant of ‘Letters and Numbers’, but the two slaves Ligon described in detail were both clearly resourceful and intelligent. They were compared several times to animals, but surprised Ligon by being ‘Chast … as any people under the Sun.’ He said that in general they were not to be trusted, but then described how he saw a group putting out a cane fire by stamping on it with their bare feet and rolling on it with their naked bodies ‘so little they regard their own smart or safety, in respect of their Masters benefit’.
Ligon several times tried to resolve this contradiction by saying that as a people the blacks were cruel and false, ‘yet no rule so general but hath his acception’. Among them, he said, are some as honest and faithful ‘as amongst those of Europe, or any other part of the world’. He could not decide which racist cliché fitted: the docile, pitiable slave or the resistant and troublesome.
One of these ‘acceptions’ was Sambo, who worked with Ligon on clearing the church paths. There seems to have developed between the two men something akin to friendship, however unequal. To find the right way through the thick jungle, Ligon employed a compass, which fascinated Sambo. Ligon explained the points of the compass, which Sambo ‘presently learnt by heart, and promis’d me never to forget’. According to Ligon, the reason why the needle pointed north (described by Ligon as being because of ‘huge Rocks of Loadstone’ ‘in the north part of the world’) ‘was a little too hard for him’ and threw him into a ‘strange muse’. To ‘put him out of it’, Ligon told him to hold his axe near the compass and move it about to see the needle turn. This so impressed Sambo that he decided he wanted to be made a Christian, so as ‘to be endued with all those knowledges he wanted’.
Ligon promised to do his best, and brought up Sambo’s plea with his master. It is not clear if this was Modyford; if not, then it is likely to have been Drax or Middleton, whose properties bordered Kendal. The ‘master’ explained the position: ‘That the people of that Island were governed by the laws of England, and by those laws, we could not make a Christian a slave.’ Ligon had a clever response ready: ‘I told him, my request was far different from that, for I desired him to make a slave a Christian. His answer was, that it was true, there was a great difference in that: But, being once a Christian, he could no more account him a slave, and so lose the hold they had of them as slaves, by making them Christians; and by that means should open such a gap, as all the Planters in the Islands would curse him.’ Ligon ‘was struck mute, and poor Sambo kept out the Church; as ingenious, as honest, and as good a nature’d poor soul, as ever wore black, or eat green’.
Sambo may have been patronised and ridiculed for his reasons for wanting to become a Christian, but the issue of slave conversion would remain hugely important. When slavery was justified by the Church, as, most famously, in the Papal Bull of 1454, this support was clearly dependent on the conversion of those enslaved (‘the Trade must be allowed’, ran the argument, ‘the Christian Scheme of enlarging the Flock cannot well be carried on without it’). In the same way, the defence of slavery, that their condition was ‘bettered’ by being removed from Africa to the West Indies, was also underwritten by the idea that the slaves would be Christianised. The fact that this did not happen would severely undermine the planters’ defence of their practice.
Richard Ligon shied away from detailing cruelty to blacks. In his largely benign description of slavery, he refused to face the implications of his own evidence, for instance about slave suicide. In fact, he contributed to the formation of racial stereotypes. His is the first recorded use of the word ‘Pickanninney’ to describe a black infant, and his suggestions that the ‘Negroes’ were ‘a happy people, whom so little contents’ would become a stereotype of blacks in America. Ligon was more forthcoming about cruelty to the white servants, as if this somehow made up for the much grimmer position of the enslaved Africans. He even goes so far as to say that the bonded whites had ‘worser lives’, though his own account contradicts this. In his model of plantation expenses he recommends spending £58 16s on clothes for 14 white servants, but only £35 in total for 100 black slaves. When an ox died, he wrote, the white servants feasted on the meat; the blacks ended up with the head, entrails and skin.
Both the white indentured servants and the black slaves had very poor diets. Some planters imported salted fish of the lowest quality from Europe or North America, but the staples were cassava bread, and a porridge-like mush made from Indian corn, known as loblolly. This was particularly disliked by the slaves, who preferred to roast the corn on the cob, considered animal food by the Europeans. To drink was water for the slaves, and ‘mobby’ or ‘perino’ for the servants and poor whites. As the Reverend James Parker wrote to John Winthrop, the ‘common people’ ‘are very meane in respect of provisions … though its true the rich live high’.
Indeed they did. The contrast with the diet of the poor was spectacular. Richard Ligon described in lip-smacking detail one feast he attended at the home of James Drax. There was beef, ‘the greatest rarity in the Island’ – great roasted breast, boiled rump and baked cheeks. The tongue and other delicacies had been made into pies ‘season’d with sweet Herbs finely minc’d’. In all, there were 14 dishes just of beef. The next course brought pork prepared in three different ways, chickens, turkey, duck, veal and shoulder of young goat, all cooked in a variety of fruit, spices, herbs and wines. ‘These being taken off the table’, wrote Ligon, ‘another course is set on.’ This consisted of bacon, fish roe, pickled oysters, caviar and anchovies, together with olives, fruits and pies. The puddings and fruit kept on arriving, to be rounded off with Ligon’s favourite, the magnificent pineapple, ‘worth all that went before’. All of this was washed down with gallons of perino, English beer, French, Spanish and Madeira wines, together with sherry and bra
ndy (Madeira, unlike other wines, which deteriorate in the tropics, improves in a high temperature and retains its quality almost indefinitely). Ligon evidently relished all this, or, more exactly, was impressed by it, but it is hard to envisage enjoying such a mass of food and alcohol at the hottest time of the day in the tropics.
Of course, the Jacobean court was well known for its Lucullan feasting. The Earl of Carlisle himself, Barbados’s earlier proprietor, was famous for his culinary ostentation. Guests would arrive to ogle a vast table spread with food, at which point the whole thing was removed, thrown away and replaced with identical food just come from the kitchens. Such displays denoted status, and conspicuous hospitality was part of the code of the Stuart gentry. Nonetheless, the punishing heat aside, such extravagance in Barbados, where so many provisions were expensively imported, and so much of the population was close to starvation, is shocking. The Drax meal, most of which must have been carried by hand up from the coast, stands as a vivid testament not only to the astonishing new wealth that the Sugar Revolution brought to Barbados, but also to the wild disparities in lifestyle and consumption.
Certainly, after a mere three or four years of growing and processing sugar, at a serendipitous time when later competitors – the French and Dutch – were yet to get off the mark, the soil was fresh and the price on a high spike, Drax was suddenly extremely wealthy. He boasted to Ligon that he had started his sugar business with only £300, but had now built up so much money that it was only a matter of time before he bought an estate in England worth £10,000 a year, ‘and all by this plant of Sugar’.
The Sugar Barons Page 8