The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  The following month, they tried again at Nevis, which up until now had escaped the regular depredations suffered by nearby St Kitts, and was for this reason the wealthiest of the English Leewards. Having tricked the English commander into posting his troops – only about 200 strong – in the north of the island, the French successfully landed 2,000 men in the south. After brief resistance in the island’s mountain stronghold, the planters surrendered. Half of the island’s slaves, just over 3,000, were taken away, and every building except 20 destroyed. The Nevis planters estimated the loss at more than a million pounds sterling. An epidemic of smallpox then ravaged the survivors of the attack.

  The defeat at Nevis sent shock waves through English America. While the nearby islands of Montserrat and Antigua swirled with rumours of further attacks, as far away as Newport in Rhode Island, batteries were hastily constructed to improve the defences against the French threat.

  18

  THE MURDER OF DANIEL PARKE

  ‘It will be very hard with this Island for we have stain’d the Land with so much Blood … I fear a scurge is over our heads.’

  Quaker Abraham Redwood, Antigua, February 1711

  On 14 July 1705, Daniel Parke arrived at last in Antigua. The people of the Leewards, fearful of another French attack, gave the glamorous new governor – known as a favourite of the Queen – a warm welcome; the Antigua assembly ‘furnish’d his Cellars with Wine & liquors’. But Parke soon regretted his appointment. Of no independent wealth, he had hoped for the more lucrative governorship of Virginia, and found the Leewards, devastated by war and disease, a poor place to make his fortune. A fierce hurricane at the end of August and an ongoing drought further impoverished the islands. His salary of £1,100, which had not even been paid, would have been insufficient, Parke complained, had it been three times the amount.

  Parke had a regiment of 928 men at his disposal, which he considered quite inadequate to defend the islands. When he visited recently ravaged Nevis, he took troops with him for his own protection, lest ‘I have my brains knock’t out, [and] the Queen must send some other unfortunate devil here to be roasted in the sun’. He begged London to send ‘some nimble frigots to protect us from the privateers’, who seemed to take every vessel headed to the islands. ‘We are so frighted, every two or three sloops, we believe is another French fleet’, he wrote. ‘I am deservedly punished for desiring to be a Governor.’

  To make matters worse, soon he and his household were ill. Of the 26 who had come out with him, after a few months only four remained. Five had quickly returned to England, but the rest were dead. Parke himself wrote that he had suffered ‘the plague, the pestilence and bloody flux, and have been out of my bed but four days of a malignant feavour; I am so weak I can hardly write to your lordships’.

  To his credit, Parke quickly identified what needed to be done to improve the security and government of the islands, coming to the same conclusions reached by both the Codringtons. He first attempted to bring the four islands under one unitary government; he tried to force the colonists to provide quarters to the troops; and he stopped the big planters buying out the smallholders by fixing land auctions. Martinique had to be conquered, he argued, to vanquish the French threat; could 10,000 Scots soldiers be sent out to perform the task? He even suggested that Porto Rico be taken from the Spanish and the entire populations of the islands moved there. The problem of defence was the same as ever: about Nevis, Parke wrote that it was ‘a rich little Island, but here are but few people, the Island was divided amongst a few rich men that had a vast number of slaves, and hardly any common people’. Parke, according to his own accounts, also worked very hard at stopping the illegal trade, particularly the buying of European goods at the nearby Dutch islands, where they were considerably cheaper. But everywhere he turned he met resistance, lethargy and self-interest. He also quickly acquired a powerful enemy: ‘To the rest of my afflictions’, he wrote home, ‘I would have added Colonel Codrington.’

  From the very start, the two men were bitter foes. Shortly after his arrival, Parke wrote to his superiors: ‘I think I have the good fortune to please the people, except Colonel Codrington. He has opposed everything and is just as much troublesome as I told you he would be.’ Parke was convinced that Codrington, whose hauteur he detested, was plotting to recover his governorship. According to a friend of Parke, Codrington was ‘enraged with Envy, at Colonel Parke’s being preferr’d before him’, and was ‘excited by the wild Starts of a crazy Brain, that much about that Time began to affect him’. This is, of course, a partisan account, but given the family’s history of mental illness and Codrington’s own manic depressive temperament, it might contain an element of truth. For his part, Codrington wrote to a friend in England in September 1706: ‘I continue my resolution of leaving the Indies ye beginning of January. It is impossible for me to live with our brute of a General – he is a perfect frenzy of avarice.’

  Clearly Antigua was not big enough for both of them, and Parke was not the sort of man to back down. He quickly went after his rival, bringing a suit to recover prize money the Codrington family had accumulated during the wars against the French. He confiscated the Codrington estate in St Kitts, and then questioned the family’s rights to Barbuda. In response, Codrington ‘infused Fears and jealousises into the Minds of the People, and stirr’d them up to Division’, according to a later defender of Parke.

  If that was indeed Codrington’s aim, it was spectacularly successful. The initial glamour of Parke as confidant of the Queen quickly faded as he took on the planters used to getting their own way. He also won enemies by ‘attempting to debauch some of the Chief women of the Island’. This was, it seems, nothing unusual in Antigua: it was ‘not much taken notice of, but looked upon to be a frolick & passed over’, until Parke started a relationship with a Mrs Chester, wife of one of the richest men on the island and a member of the assembly.40 The cuckolded husband, admittedly a major smuggler, found himself locked up in prison.

  There now developed a state of mutual loathing between Parke and his circle, called by a detractor his ‘vulgar associates’, and the majority of the white Leeward Islanders rallying around Codrington. Parke complained to London that the West Indians ‘expect the Queen should do everything for them, though they do not endeavour to help themselves’. The more Parke was criticised for being a ‘great debauch’, the more he reported to London of the Leeward Islanders’ own sexual depravity, ‘a mungrill race [of mulattoes] liveing witnesses of their unnaturall and monstrous lusts’. There were, Parke alleged, ‘a succession of Codringtons … among the slaveish sooty race [of mulattoes]’.41 Christopher Codrington himself, Parke reported, had an Irish ‘wench’, a Kate Sullivan, who ‘layd two bastards to him, but she giving him the pox, he turned her off’. To gain ammunition against his enemies, and intelligence about smuggling operations, Parke now took to patrolling around at night in disguise in St John’s, armed with ‘pocket-pistoles’. ‘You may easily imagine’, he reported to London, ‘that a sea-port town in the West Indies, full of punch-houses and taverns, cramm’d with soldiers and privateers to be very licentious.’ The islanders complained in reply that this sneaking about only brought ‘his person and authority in contempt’.

  In August 1707, Codrington left his home at Betty’s Hope, Antigua, and retreated to his estates in Barbados. It seems he intended to at last fulfil his ambition of returning home to his English garden and library, but either a recurrence of poor health (possibly a sexually transmitted infection, as Parke alleged) or a continued engagement in local politics prevented him making the long and arduous voyage. According to his funeral oration, given by his friend the Reverend William Gordon, he spent the last three years of his life in quiet contemplation and academic study. But another account had it that ‘from [Barbados], by an uninterrupted Correspondence [with Antigua], he continu’d to refresh the Dissensions he had sown’. The Reverend Gordon himself was a scoundrel of the first order, ‘insidious, restless, meddling
’, addicted to gambling, so it is likelier that Codrington continued to seethe with anger and jealousy, and to conspire to regain his Leewards fiefdom. Like his father, in the corrupting heat of the tropics, ‘beyond the line’, he had made a journey from conscientious, idealistic reformer to a man of faction, self-interest and bitterness.

  Encouraged by Codrington or not, soon the Leeward Islanders had prepared extensive complaints against Governor Parke: there was his personal conduct; in addition, he had seized vessels and ‘made prizes of them contrary to Law’; he had concealed wills to buy up for himself supposedly intestate estates; while professing to counter illegal trading, he had sent vessels to Martinique; he had bought land, slaves and cattle for a low price and ‘if any other Gentleman bid higher or nearer the value they were sure to feel his resentments’. Helped by money from Codrington, these complaints were sent to London in March 1709, and every effort made to turn the home authorities against Parke.

  Codrington would not live to see the grisly fate of his great enemy. On 7 April 1710, having never really recovered his health since Guadeloupe, he died aged just 42. According to the perhaps unreliable testimony of Parke, ‘he was in great perplexity before he died to alter his will and according sent 6 times for one to do it, but those about him prevented the messengers going … and a vollpony will he made takes place, so that ye most of his estate goes to those he mortally hated before he died’. Thus the extraordinary will of 1703 stood, with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Overseas getting the Barbados estates (at that time clearing a huge annual profit of £2,000), and cousin William coming into most of the rest. If Parke’s story about changing the will is to be believed, it is more likely that Codrington would have wanted to disinherit William, a slippery character who at one point sided with Parke, than the Society, though it is not impossible that he had changed his mind about that as well.

  Parke was jubilant that ‘the author and contriver of all this vilany against me is now answering for it’. ‘They say he broke his heart’, Parke went on, ‘not being able to get the better of me.’ But the Governor’s own days were numbered. As indications came from London that Parke’s star was on the wane, the Leeward Islanders responded with growing violence and lawlessness. A riot in St Kitts saw the murder of the former Acting Governor John Johnson. In Antigua, Parke narrowly survived two assassination attempts. He reacted with a further escalation of violence, taking personal charge of the garrison and ordering them to attack and harass his enemies. At last he was recalled by the authorities in London, more through sheer weight of complaints than any decision against his conduct, but he ignored the order, instead becoming ever more reckless and paranoid.

  The Antigua assembly was now dissolved by Parke, but it continued to meet in the island’s capital, St John’s, refusing to recognise his authority. Rumours started circulating that the Governor was preparing to surrender the island to the French. Refusing to back down, on 7 December Parke sent a detachment of troops to an assembly meeting, and dispersed the men at gunpoint. Within a short time, some 300 armed planters had poured in from surrounding area to support the assembly members. Parke retreated to his St John’s house, with about 70 loyal soldiers, and deployed five field guns to cover the main approaches.

  Deputations from the council and from the assembly approached to try to persuade Parke to leave the island while he still could, but in the meantime, the house was surrounded. Parke would not hear of surrender, and as tempers flared out of control, the two sides opened fire. Parke himself fired his cannon at the throng, who then charged the house. One of the rebel leaders was personally shot down by Parke, but then the Governor was hit in the thigh. An eye-witness reports that ‘they then broke in upon him, tore off his cloathes, dragged him by his members about his house, bruised his head, and broke his back with the butt end of the pieces’. The wounded Governor was then dragged from his house and brutally treated as he lay dying; when he asked for water, they spat in his face. Of his 70 guards, 11 were killed and 35 wounded; four rioters were killed and eight wounded. Parke’s house was ransacked, the mob stealing everything they could lay their hands on, including (apparently by ‘One Turnor a farrier’) the miniature of Queen Anne that had hung around Parke’s neck.

  Parke’s brutal murder was outrageous and shocking even by the standards of the ‘beyond the line’ West Indies. But no one was ever punished. A new governor, Walter Douglas, was sent out, but found no one willing to testify against the ringleaders; after all, you could hardly prosecute the entire Antigua white population. Douglas decided instead that it was safer to accept bribes to clear those implicated in the crime. For this, and other misdemeanours, which included stealing the communion plate from St John’s church, he was recalled, tried and imprisoned.

  Thus the colonists had proved themselves almost ungovernable. (In this light, the efforts of the Codringtons, however severely tainted by self-interest and personal psychological issues, look all the more commendable.) But while some Antiguans celebrated their deliverance from the interfering Parke, others never recovered their belief in the happy future of the colony.

  Abraham Redwood was one of those horrified and sickened by what had occurred. Originally from Bristol, Redwood had worked as a slave trader and mariner on the West India route, before marrying the daughter of the wealthy Antiguan planter and Quaker pioneer Jonas Langford and settling on the island. Redwood himself was by now a Quaker, and as well as looking after land in his own name worked as a partner in Langford’s extensive sugar business. In 1709, shortly before Parke’s murder, his third son, another Abraham, was born. Following the early deaths of his elder brothers, this Abraham would turn out to be the inheritor of a great sugar estate in Antigua, and subsequently, based in Newport, Rhode Island, one of the richest men in North America.

  Abraham senior’s thoughts seem to have turned for a while towards the northern American colonies. For him, Antigua was just a stepping stone to a future for his family in the distinctly more God-fearing, calm and law-abiding mainland. We know that he and his wife had travelled to Newport, probably on business for his father-in-law (his eldest daughter, Mary, was born in Newport in 1698). He had sent his eldest children to school in Quaker-friendly Philadelphia, and was in correspondence with Jonathan Dickinson, an old West India hand fast establishing himself in that city.

  On 11 February 1711, only six weeks after Parke’s murder, Redwood wrote to Dickinson that he would himself have been in Philadelphia by now, had not the sloop due to carry him there been ‘Taken’. He had received, he reported, ‘the 3 barrels of bread and 3 barrels of beer’ sent to him to pass on to Langford, and urgently requested news of his children, of whom he had heard nothing for too long. The gloomy letter also reported the ‘miserly Dry Dry Times’ and expressed a hope for a ‘speedy peace’ with France, after so much destruction: ‘We are now daily expecting the French by good Intelligence if not for this Islands for another of the Leeward Islands.’ All this worry caused Abraham great ‘discomposure of mind’.

  On the morning of his death, Parke had written a codicil to his will, appointing a new executor after the death of a previous nominee. That new man was Abraham Redwood. His take on the murder that day is therefore informed by this loyalty, as well as by his growing distaste for life in Antigua. I have ‘much fear’, he wrote to Dickinson, that ‘it will be very hard with this Island for we have stain’d the Land with so much Blood that wee Can expect nothing but Banness [destruction] on this Island and I fear a scurge is over our heads’. ‘I desire to settle in Philadelphia’, he went on, ‘for I see nothing good here for I much fear our Distruction by Drawing god’s Judgemt On Us that So wee are a miserable people … Pride goes before Distruction which is our Miserable Case.’

  Abraham Redwood would remove his family from seemingly tainted Antigua within a couple of years, with fairly tragic results; the predicted retribution came sooner than that, with further misery heaped on the heads of the English Leeward Islanders. In July 1712, a F
rench force, having attacked Antigua unsuccessfully, descended on Montserrat and laid waste the island for several days, carrying away 1,200 slaves and a booty worth an estimated £180,000.

  By then, unknown to the distant West Indies, negotiations were already under way in Europe to end the war. What would eventually become known as the Treaty of Utrecht, signed the following year, for once did not entirely reconstitute the pre-war situation in the West Indies. The French parts of St Kitts were at last permanently ceded to Britain (as it now was called, after the union with Scotland). Although concerning only a tiny amount of land (and of minor international signficance compared to the gaining by Britain of Gibraltar, Novia Scotia and other territories), this was hugely helpful in ending the awkward sharing arrangement – made in the face of Carib and Spanish threats many years before – that had caused so much friction and conflict between France and England in the Leewards.

  Long before the end of the war, the conflict in the West Indies had deteriorated into simple vandalism and looting. Neither side really wanted to flood their home markets by actually conquering more sugar acreage – the English had all they could use in Jamaica, and the French in Hispaniola. With the land everywhere in the hands of a tiny elite, the chance to plunder presented by the conflict had provided perhaps the best hope for the poor whites of either side to gain a quick fortune, but in the medium and long term they were losers in the war, and not just because they made up the cannon fodder. Lands left empty were snapped up by the big sugar barons, and many of the smallholders who left their home islands during the periodic expulsions never returned, giving up on cultivation in favour of privateering or emigration elsewhere. This left the islands more socially divided among the whites, and ever more polarised, with a tiny planter elite precariously perched on the top of a growing slave population.