He was not only very rich and handsome, but also extremely clever, and he knew it. ‘No spark had walk’d up High Street bolder’, wrote a contemporary. According to an otherwise admiring biographer, ‘So early and so continued a pre-eminence bred in him a certain arrogance and contempt for men less gifted than himself … subsequently this defect of his was the cause of much suffering and humiliation.’
While still at Oxford he was in July 1687 admitted a member of the Middle Temple, where he befriended the most eminent lawyers of the day, and acquired what would be very valuable legal knowledge. In 1690 he was elected to All Souls, Oxford, the elite of the elite in English academia, where he established friendships with such luminaries of the age as Joseph Addison and Charles Boyle. He also started collecting books in large numbers, and moving in circles that included the philosopher John Locke. The rough-and-ready life of his father in the West Indies must have seemed a long way away.
But in late 1692, he heard of a new expedition preparing for battle against the French in the Caribbean, and persuaded the college authorities to hold open his fellowship while he returned to the land of his birth. When in early January 1693 Sir Francis Wheeler’s powerful fleet started out from England, the younger Codrington was on board, attached to one of the two regiments.
Some seven weeks later, Wheeler’s force weighed anchor in Carlisle Bay, where they were met by a well-armed and well-equipped Barbados troop of nearly 1,000 men, as well as numerous ships, and word was sent to Governor Codrington in the Leewards to prepare to join the campaign. Codrington had been busy, pressing men into service and repairing forts, and had 1,300 troops ready to rendezvous with Wheeler’s force at Martinique. The armada from Barbados arrived first, now some 45 sail, a frightening prospect for the French defenders watching from Fort Royal (present-day Fort de France). But rather than attack the well-defended capital, Wheeler sailed to the south of the island, where he put ashore a party of three to reconnoitre: the commander of the English regulars, Colonel Foulke, another local officer, and the younger Codrington. They came under fire, with Foulke being wounded, but they found a convenient landing place, and the next day, 12 April, almost unopposed, 2,500 men were landed and started marching northwards, to take the enemy’s strong forts from their weaker landward side. Along the way, churches and other buildings were burned, plunder, including slaves, collected, and crops destroyed.
Eight days later, the army of Codrington senior arrived, landed, and joined in the marauding. (It must have been at this point, on the battlefield or on a man-of-war off the coast, that the two Codringtons met for the first time in 11 years.) But the key defences of Fort Royal and St Pierre proved much harder nuts to crack. A fierce French counter-attack by cavalry stopped a landing near the latter, and with losses and exhaustion among the men mounting – from the scorching sun, the harsh terrain and fever – and the Irish contingent of the force growing restless, the invasion was abandoned on 29 April, in favour of an assault on weaker Guadeloupe. But before this was undertaken, the English, with nearly 1,000 men killed, wounded or incapacitated by sickness, lost heart, and split up to return to Barbados or the Leewards. Most of the army ended up at St Kitts, where it was soon impossible to find accommodation for the sick, who now numbered something like half the army’s original number.
At the end of May, the remnants of Wheeler’s force sailed north, reaching Boston two weeks later. (It would leave in September, its numbers further thinned, having achieved precisely nothing.) In the meantime, Codrington took his son on an extensive tour of his domain, visiting Antigua, Nevis and St Kitts, inspecting fortifications, meeting people, getting a feel for the place. What made the greatest impression on the younger Christopher, however, was the treatment of the enslaved Africans, half starved and brutalised. ‘I have always thought it very barbarous that so little care should be taken of the bodies and so much less of the souls of our slaves’, he wrote before his return to the West Indies seven years later. Back in England, this caused him, he said, ‘many a mortifying reflection’. He determined, should he have the opportunity, to do something about the unhappy situation.
His father also seems to have apprised his son of the identities of his growing number of bitter enemies, and also inducted him into his own freewheeling sexual behaviour. It was during this visit that the 24-year-old Codrington the Younger met the mother of his illegitimate son, William. All that is known of her is from the two men’s wills: Codrington senior in his will of 1698 called her Maudlin Marianus, and bequeathed her her freedom – indicating that she was a black slave – and her son ‘his freedom & £500 at 21, he to be sent to school in England & to have £50 a year’. Christopher the Younger in his will of 1703 called her Maudline Morange, and repeated the bequest of £500 for William, but stipulated ‘he is to be brought up for the sea’. In fact, William, having started in Antigua, ended up a plantation- and slave-owner in Jamaica.
Whatever the attractions of his relationship with Maudline Morange or of his father’s lifestyle, and in spite of his obvious admiration for him, Codrington the Younger did not linger in the West Indies with his father. Instead, he returned to Oxford, taking his Master of Arts in January 1694. Clearly he had acquired a taste for the martial, for that spring he joined King William’s army in Flanders as a captain. There he gained what would prove useful experience in siege warfare. A year later, having distinguished himself during the siege of Namur, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, commanding the second battalion of the First Foot Guards – a brilliant achievement for a man of 27 – and caught the eye of King William. Codrington’s friend Addison wrote a poem about the heroic episode, deducing that it was the ‘fierce sun’ of the land of his birth that had created ‘This heart ablaze, this spirit’s surging foam’.
For the next four years, Codrington the Younger divided his time between campaigning in Europe and studying at Oxford, where his star continued to rise. At the same time, he became a London society wit, writing verses for the theatre and enjoying in coffee shops and clubs the company of the likes of Richard Steele and John Dryden. When the war ended, he visited Paris with the rest of London’s most fashionable young men.
In the West Indies, in contrast, his father was struggling. After 1693, the English government, inefficient, corrupt and nearing bankruptcy, could ill support sending fleets and armies to the West Indies. In the six months after the departure of Wheeler’s fleet, the French captured no fewer than 30 vessels bound for the Leewards. Its regiment of regulars, without pay and almost starving, were soon on the verge of mutiny. Codrington toured the islands, urging the repair of forts and trying to restore morale, but nerves remained stretched. (Codrington’s own pay stopped arriving the following year.)
In December 1695, Codrington wrote to London from Antigua that his islands had enjoyed a bumper sugar crop, but had not the ships to carry it home securely. He also repeated his requests for settlers from the northern colonies for St Kitts, but it appears that few were forthcoming. At last, in 1696, pay and clothing arrived for the soldiers, and a fleet was sent out under the command of Rear Admiral John Nevill. There were grand plans for him to join with Spanish naval forces, but such was the local mistrust between the two countries – in theory allied against France – that this came to nothing. The French in the meantime, who had been fighting the Spanish in Hispaniola, had attacked and looted Cartagena. Nevill attempted to intercept the French fleet as it returned home laden with plunder, but only succeeded in capturing the enemy’s hospital ship, from which his men promptly caught yellow fever.
At last, more through mutual exhaustion and bankruptcy than because anything had been resolved, peace was made between France and England at the Treaty of Ryswick in September 1697, thus ending the War of the Grand Alliance. For many Leeward Islanders, the coming of peace removed any qualms they might have had about criticising the Governor, and the following year a torrent of allegations about Codrington reached London. His plantation in St Kitts had been illegally seized, compla
ined its former owner. Codrington had promoted the worst sort on the island – Jacobites, Papists and Irish. He had traded illegally with the French and Dutch, even during the war, and this had continued since, it was said. In fact, the failures at Guadeloupe and Martinique were Codrington’s fault, as he ‘minded nothing but plunder’. He had also, it was alleged, taken for himself or his cronies estates of those who had died intestate or with complicated wills; on one occasion he ‘threatened to break ye head of any one that should offer to prove ye will’. Those who opposed him found themselves arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned; letters of complaint were intercepted and opened. The story of Consetts reared its head again: ‘In Barbadoes’, an anonymous letter that reached London accused, ‘he raised himself above ye Levells of ordinary planters by most wicked practice well known to every Barbadoes Gentleman.’ ‘Extremly Coveteous and wicked’, ‘He is hated beyond Imagination’, the letter continued. ‘From a Governour, planter, trader without breeding, word, honour, and religion, good Lord deliver us.’
Governor Codrington had clearly provoked violent passions. During his term, two lieutenant-governors were murdered, one in Nevis and one in St Kitts. Both the killings seem to have been provoked by trouble arising out of the allegation that Codrington had been trying to get hold of someone else’s estate. According to the largely admiring Codrington family historian, by the end of his life, ‘the exercise of almost unlimited authority over a turbulent community turned his head’.
Codrington did get his friends to write to London in his defence: ‘we are not sensible of any mismanagement or irregularities’, they said, pleading ignorance, but such was the weight of complaints that the Board of Trade in London, usually careful to take into account the fractious and feud-riven nature of the islands, was moved to publicly chastise Codrington. Just before what seemed like his inevitable recall and disgrace, Codrington died, aged 58, on 30 July 1698.
Codrington’s greatest regret at the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick had been the return of the formerly French parts of St Kitts. This inevitably caused friction and ongoing arguments, and it left the English on the island vulnerable to yet another destructive attack (the French were also ceded by Spain the western part of Hispaniola, which they quickly converted into the world’s most productive sugar factory). So within only a couple of years, war threatened again. This time, the ‘dapper’, scholarly Christopher Codrington the Younger would be in charge.
16
THE FRENCH INVASION OF JAMAICA
‘War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.’
Karl Krauss
Fortunately for Jamaica, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake of June 1692, the French were distracted by their struggle against the Spanish on Hispaniola. Nonetheless, a small French force had to be expelled from the north coast later in the year. The arrival of Wheeler’s fleet in the theatre in early 1693 deterred any major attack on Jamaica, but with his departure, raids became more frequent. In October 1693, the Governor, Sir William Beeston, reported that ‘the enemy daily infests our coasts’. Many abandoned their plantations on the north coast, as raids by French privateers from nearby Hispaniola increased relentlessly in size and frequency. English settlers were carried away, sometimes to be ransomed, often tortured, and always robbed of all they had. Governor Beeston even took the extraordinary step of sending a protest to the French governor in Hispaniola in a ship under a flag of truce, but his envoys were imprisoned and their vessel seized.
The French-controlled part of Hispaniola was under the command of Captain Jean-Baptiste Du Casse, a notorious former privateer. According to Beeston, he had spies everywhere in Jamaica, particularly among its Irish inhabitants, and they now reported to Du Casse that the ‘island was easily taken; the fortifications at Port Royal were out of order and few men there, so that two hundred men would take that place, and two hundred more would march in any part of the country the people were so thin and so little used to arms’. Then, on the evening of 31 May 1694, Beeston was sitting in his house with a small group of friends when they were disturbed by the entrance of an Englishman, ‘in a very mean habit, and with a meagre weather-beaten countenance’. The man identified himself as a Captain Stephen Elliot. Some months before, he had been taken prisoner by a French privateer and had been held in prison at Petit Goave on the west coast of Hispaniola. But he had escaped from captivity, and with two companions in a small canoe had succeeded in crossing the 300-mile stretch of water between Hispaniola and Jamaica. He now carried an urgent warning: the French had assembled a force of 20 ships and more than 3,000 men, mostly buccaneers; an attack on Jamaica was imminent.
Beeston immediately declared martial law and quickly weighed up his tactical options. Although he had command of some 4,000 men in seven militia regiments, they were currently strung out over more than 100 miles of coast and thus would be unable to stop a determined landing force. He had faith, however, in the defences of Fort Charles. During the chaotic governorship of the second Duke of Albemarle, Colonel Peter Beckford had lost his position as commander of the fort. Along with other ousted and disgruntled planters, Beckford had withdrawn to England, but after the Duke’s death, he had returned and resumed his position. According to his friend Beeston, Beckford had got the fort ‘into excellent order’. Using pressed labour, he had rebuilt the bastion, laid a gun platform, and mounted powerful cannon. He now prepared a fire ship to defend the harbour, and built barricades to protect the fort from the landward side.
Beeston decided that the only way to save Jamaica was to concentrate his forces. He thus ordered the abandonment of the eastern part of the island, where, given the prevailing wind, the landing was likely to take place. A system of beacons was established to warn of an approaching fleet, and Beeston announced that any slave who killed a Frenchman would earn his freedom. Free inhabitants, provisions and slaves were now withdrawn into the area around Spanish Town, Kingston and Port Royal.
On Sunday morning, 17 June, lookouts reported the French fleet ‘coming into sight with a fresh gale’. They landed unopposed in the easternmost parish of the island, and marched inland, plundering, burning and destroying all in their path. Cattle and sheep were killed, crops burnt, fruit trees hacked down. ‘Some of the straggling people that were left behind they tortured’, Beeston later reported, ‘particularly Charles Barber; and James Newcastle they murdered in cold blood after a day’s quarter: Some women they suffered the negroes to violate, and dug some out of their graves.’ After a month or so, the French re-embarked and cruised westwards, before landing at Carlisle Bay, about 35 miles west of Port Royal, with a view to attacking Spanish Town from the south. The English forces were quickly on the defensive. Reinforcements were sent from the Port Royal area, and after a forced march of 36 miles, they arrived just in time to hold a number of fortified estate houses. The buccaneers among the French force, happier looting than taking casualties, withdrew, and on 3 August 1764, the French re-embarked and sailed back to Hispaniola. Slaves, pressed into service, fought for the English, and at least 14 were subsequently freed for their bravery.
The French had caused immense damage, destroying more than 50 sugar works, and carrying off nearly 2,000 slaves.36 In the process, however, they had lost something like half their number to sickness. Learning nothing from this experience, or, indeed from that of previous military adventures in the islands, within a year the English were preparing a revenge attack. Led by an 1,800-strong force from home, the English linked up with the Spanish to attack the French in Hispaniola. In charge of a corps of volunteers from Jamaica – and paying for them out of his own pocket – was Peter Beckford, now a colonel in the Jamaica militia. The French were heavily outnumbered, and soon several of their towns had fallen. But as Colonel Beckford reported, ‘here I reckon that our misfortunes began’. Naval personnel had been the first into a captured town, and had laid their
hands on everything worth taking. ‘As soon as the land forces came in’, wrote Beckford, ‘they were for taking all from the seamen and threatening to shoot all of them that carried off anything.’ A full-scale battle was narrowly avoided, but soon the Spanish fell out with their English allies, and on all sides disease began to take a heavy toll. Once again, the English naval and army commanders squabbled with each other, no decisive victory was obtained, and the port of Petit Goave, whence all the troublesome privateers had emanated, was left undisturbed. By the time the English left the island, they had achieved nothing and had lost more than half their number to sickness. Colonel Beckford himself was ill as well, though he recovered within a few months.
The sorry coda to the war in this part of the West Indies involved another English attack on Hispaniola in mid-1697, the year that peace was made at the Treaty of Ryswick. This time a squadron under Rear Admiral George Mees succeeded in surprising the defences of Petit Goave, and by 8 July the town was in English hands. But at that point the men of the landing party found a large quantity of liquor in a dockside warehouse. Within a short time, they were out of control, and were in no fit state to repel a French counter-attack led by Du Casse. After heavy losses, they set fire to the town and re-embarked.
***
For Jamaica, the fighting during the 1690s would have a side effect more devastating than any of the burning and looting of the French. When Du Casse’s men gave up their attempt to conquer the island, they left behind a deadly virus. Until this time Jamaica had been relatively free of yellow fever. Now it struck the island with such ferocity that the white population came close to demographic collapse.
Even before the French invasion, early mortality was common in Jamaica. In 1691 the Governor wrote to London that ‘people die here very fast and suddenly, I know not how soon it may be my turn’. In the same year, Peter Beckford’s wife Bridget died, presumably of disease (he remarried the following year to Anne Ballard, from another wealthy planter family). The aftermath of the invasion, however, saw the death rate at its worst in Jamaican history. In Kingston, a quarter of the population perished, and it has been estimated that as many as 200 per thousand of the town’s population died every year during the first decades of the eighteenth century. (Comparable rates for England and New England respectively were 25 to 30 and 15 to 20 per thousand.) While on active service in Hispaniola, Colonel Peter Beckford received a letter from his friend Governor Beeston: ‘Mrs Beck-ford has been ill but is recovered, and pretty well again and longs to see you.’ But soon she was ill again, and died in 1696. Thus Colonel Beck-ford had lost two wives and two daughters in the space of only five years. Beeston himself wrote to London that he had lost his entire family save his wife and one child, and of his servants, only his cook survived. By 1699, there had been no let-up in the epidemics: ‘the sickness is still there after nine to ten years’, wrote Beeston, ‘and the Country is soe reduced that it is difficult to fill posts. There are so many dead that it is hard to bury them.’ Beeston pleaded to be allowed home, ‘finding a great decay in his health’, a request eventually granted in January 1702. His replacement wrote on 30 March that year that the island was still ‘at present sickly.’ To blame was ‘that mortal distemper called the bleeding fever’ – yellow fever. The new governor was unable to finish the letter and was himself dead six days later.
The Sugar Barons Page 25