The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  While the Jamaican Drax family line came to an end, the Beckfords’ bloomed. Peter Beckford the Younger had 12 legitimate children, six of whom were sons who survived into adulthood. No expense was spared on the boys’ education, all being sent to first Westminster, then Oxford – Balliol College in the main. By the late 1720s, the eldest was installed as assembly member for Westmoreland parish, in Jamaica’s isolated but highly fertile extreme western region, where the Beckfords had been dramatically increasing their holdings.

  Peter Beckford the Younger, now the leader of the extended family, held court at his lavish mansion in central Spanish Town. Here he indulged his new-found taste for beautiful objets and furniture. By the 1730s, the contents of his main home were valued at over £5,500, more than 20 times that of Charles Drax’s Great House. Like his father, Peter Beckford had wide-ranging commercial interests. But most of this mammoth expenditure was from the profits of sugar.

  By 1700, the Portuguese sugar estates in Brazil were in sharp decline, outproduced and undercut by the British West Indian planters. Fifty times as much sugar was being imported into Britain than in 1660, about a quarter of which was re-exported to western Europe, providing about half their total consumption. In the three years after the coming of peace in 1713, the Leeward Islands, Barbados and Jamaica each exported to the United Kingdom more than, or nearly as much as, all the mainland colonies of North America put together.

  No one benefited more than Peter Beckford, who by the 1730s owned 11 plantations in his own right, and had substantial shares in at least the same number again. To work this acreage, he owned 1,737 slaves outright and had part-ownership in another 577. He also now had £20,000 of property in England, but he remained nonetheless focused on Jamaica. Beck-ford’s plantations were spread out over almost the entire island. To manage the far-flung overseers and managers would have required a very firm hand, as other weaker owners found to their cost.

  In the political sphere, the island’s successive governors all but gave up with taking on the local power of the Beckfords. Governor Lord Archibald Hamilton, in letters to London in 1716, described Peter as the ‘chief actor in all the unhappy differences in the country’ and ‘the chief, and allmost absolute Leader’. Hamilton alleged that the Beckfords, Peter and his brother Thomas, controlled the elections to the assembly, through ‘influence, threats and unfair unproceedings’; men were being chosen, he went on, ‘of most violent and pernishious principalls’. The Governor tried to have Peter stripped of his customs-collecting role, but instead saw him reappointed by London.

  Hamilton had crossed swords with Thomas already. In November 1712, the Governor wrote to London that ‘ye younger Beckford just at ye close of ye Assembly, had like to have murdered Mr Tho. Wood’. The argument had started in an assembly committee. When the killing was discovered, the Governor immediately sent for ‘Mr Beckford’, who ‘before us all own’d ye matter charg’d upon him, and with very indecent carriage justifyed it as a matter of gallantry’. The Governor insisted that he give securities for his good behaviour, which Thomas swaggeringly refused, threatening to complain about the Governor in England. Hamilton looked for support from London against this menace, but received in reply only a recommendation that Thomas’s brother Peter Beckford be given his ‘protection and favour’. When Hamilton crossed Peter four years later, blocking his appointment as the island’s deputy secretary, he found himself the same year on the boat home accused of profiting from secret links to local pirates.

  Further governors fared no better. One complained that Peter Beckford was the ‘chief instrument of all our misfortunes’, and the leader of the opposition to the rule of the King. ‘He boasts himself in his riches by means of which he has many dependants’, wrote Governor Sir Nicholas Lawes in May 1718. This gave Beckford great ‘sway’ in the assembly; he used his position as Customs Collector, wrote Lawes, ‘as a cloak to do mischief’.

  Demanding that Beckford be stripped of his position, Lawes found instead that someone had taken copies of his letters of complaint and passed them to Beckford, who then waved them in the Governor’s face, along with his re-appointment from London as Customs Collector. Beckford soon had his revenge, reporting Lawes for illegal trading.

  Thomas, who by the late 1720s had followed his brother to the position of Speaker of the assembly, eventually had his comeuppance. In 1731 he was killed in a violent fracas – fighting a duel with Richard Cargill, an assembly member for Vere parish. According to a contemporary account, Cargill had been ‘justly provoked’ to defend his honour.

  By the time of his brother’s violent death, Peter Beckford was the richest man in the British Caribbean. As well as his sugar fortune, he had made money from his dozen or so provision plantations, and from moneylending: by the 1730s he was owed £135,000 by 128 other planters. It was a frequent complaint of incomers that the Jamaica plantocracy at its highest level was indolent and useless. Not so Peter Beckford, who also found time to operate as a leading wine shipper, factor and slave-trader.

  For merchants of the Caribbean, the years following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 were a golden time. Part of the treaty had given Britain the asiento, the monopoly contract, previously held by Portugal and then France, to supply slaves to the Spanish American empire (Spain herself had no forts or factories on the African coast). Along with this deal came the right to a send a 500-ton galleon of trade goods to the great annual fair at Porto Bello in Panama. Most importantly, the contract provided a host of loopholes through which a far wider trade could be established with the Spanish settlements. Both Jamaica and Barbados soon became flourishing entrepôts, thanks to this trade.

  As was usual practice, the asiento was passed on to a private syndicate. The South Sea Company, founded recently, now took on the contract in return for shouldering nearly £10 million of Britain’s national debt, accumulated during the recent war. The government promised to pay annual interest on this debt of about 6 per cent, money it planned to raise by a new duty on goods imported from the Spanish empire.

  The scheme was met with open arms by a public aroused by the seemingly unlimited potential of the Americas, and who saw the capture of the asiento as the greatest achievement of what had been a less than spectacularly successful war. The great and good all piled their savings into shares in the company, which soon soared. Isaac Newton, Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Alexander Pope, most of the House of Lords and the entire royal family were among the investors.

  Amid widespread speculation and fraud, the shares crashed suddenly in August 1720. Many great fortunes were wiped out. A small number made a killing, among them speculator Thomas Guy, who gave his profits to found a hospital in his name in London. Most lost heavily – Isaac Newton found himself down £20,000.

  But the bubble was more about English domestic politics, finance and corruption than about the company’s undertaking in the West Indies. The contract specified that the company deliver 4,800 slaves a year to the Spanish American colonies. At this they were relatively successful, shipping thousands from West Africa to Barbados or Jamaica. Here the strongest and most valuable were ‘refreshed’ – fattened up with two meals a day, bathed in water in which herbs had been soaked, given rum or even a pipe to smoke – then sent off to the Spanish colonies on the mainland to fetch the highest prices. The company also bought slaves from independent traders, allowed to operate freely after 1713, and then sold them on to the Spanish.

  By 1720, there were nearly 150 British ships engaged in the slave trade, mostly from London and Bristol, but also Liverpool, and lesser ports such as Whitehaven, Lancaster, Chester and Glasgow. During the following decade, the British shipped more than 100,000 enslaved Africans to the Americas, about a tenth of whom ended up in the North American mainland colonies, and a great number in Cuba. But the English Caribbean also maintained a seemingly inexhaustible demand for new slaves.

  Sugar production was being expanded, particularly in Jamaica, whose slave force grew to 80,000 by 1730 (with only 7,50
0 whites), but the need for such huge regular replenishment was in the greatest part caused by the appalling mortality rate on the plantations.

  According to the Reverend William Robertson, a clergyman-planter from Nevis writing in the early 1730s, about two fifths of the imported slaves died in the first two or three years, while in theory they were being ‘seasoned’ – kept from the hardest jobs – until accustomed to the climate. The others, he wrote, died at a rate of about one in 15 each year, rising to one in seven during dry years when provisions were scarce, or in ‘sickly seasons; and when the small pox … happens to be imported, it is incredible what havock it makes among the Blacks’. Mortality actually worsened during the early eighteenth century, at which time a slave would have a life expectancy after arrival of only seven years. To blame, along with smallpox, were parasites such as hookworm, yellow fever, colds, elephantiasis, yaws (similar to syphilis) and other venereal diseases, leprosy and tetanus, all worsened by malnutrition, alcoholism, overwork and cruel treatment together with the unhealthy psychological state caused by captivity. Thus traders found that new slaves were always needed. For example, between 1708 and 1735, the Barbados planters imported 85,000 new slaves in order to lift the black population on the island from 42,000 to 46,000.

  The large numbers dying soon after arrival in the Caribbean were in part the result of their exposure to unfamiliar diseases, but also because of how they were transported. The horrific details of the infamous ‘Middle Passage’ remain profoundly shocking. Even before being chained up in the filthy hold of a ship, the typical slave would already have been weakened by the trauma of his or her original capture and the often long and hungry journey to the coast. Most slave ships were small – perhaps 80 feet long and 20 feet wide, so that they could negotiate the river mouths of West Africa. Crewed by about 30 whites, the majority carried between 200 and 400 slaves, and never anything like the water required to prevent severe dehydration. According to a famous account by Olaudah Equiano, the male slaves chained below deck ‘scarcely had room to turn’ themselves, and almost suffocated in the intense heat. ‘The wretched situation’ was made worse ‘by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.’

  Dysentery was commonplace, and in the fetid and enclosed conditions of the ship, many other illnesses thrived. One white sailor likened a slave ship to ‘a slaughterhouse, Blood, filth, misery, and diseases’. On average, 11 to 12 per cent of all slaves taken from Africa died during the voyage. Many more, of course, were so weakened and demoralised that they died shortly afterwards. (The white crews, often men or boys press-ganged in Liverpool or Bristol, proportionately fared even worse, losing on average a fifth of their complement each voyage, sometimes much more. This was largely due to spending longer on board ship and exposure to West Africa – the only place in the world more deadly to Europeans than the Caribbean.)

  The distinguished investors in the South Sea Company may have had little idea of the reality of the trade they supported. Most would have concurred with the views of a majority of the slave ship captains: that ‘these poor wretches’ they took on board would be happier as slaves in the West Indies than slaves in their own countries, ‘subject to the caprices of their native princes’. To remove them was ‘an act of humanity’. Some even claimed that a West Indian slave was, in fact, better off than a free man at the bottom of the pile back in Europe – ‘Think of the miserable beings employed in our coal-pits … Think of the wretched Irish peasantry! Think of the crowded workhouses!’ one wrote.

  This dominant view was challenged by John Atkins, a 36-year-old naval surgeon who saw the trade face to face and wrote an account of his experience. Atkins had been at sea – though never before to Africa – since the age of 18, but was widely read, knowing Pope, Milton, Horace and Juvenal among others. He sailed in early 1721 in the Swallow, one of two warships protecting a convoy of slave-traders making the journey from England to the West Indies via West Africa. From the beginning of April, and for several months thereafter, his convoy cruised along the coast from Sierra Leone to Elmina, and as far as Whydah and the Gabon.

  Braced by tales of savagery and cannibalism among the Africans on the coast, he was surprised to find that they were actually in the main a ‘civilized people’. Rumours of cannibalism were caused by ‘the credulity of the Whites’, he wrote. The defence of the slave trade was that the savage Africans would be conveyed ‘to a Land flowing with more Milk and Honey, to a better Living, better Manners, Virtue and Religion … a better state both of Temporals and Spirituals’. But by the time he wrote his book, Atkins had seen the West Indian plantations and societies: as for the spiritual side, ‘few have the Hypocrity to own’, he wrote, and the temporal side was far from being an improvement: ‘hard Labour, corporal Punishment’. Africans at home might be poor, but they were, Atkins decided, ‘happily ignorant of any thing more desirable’. He concluded that ‘to remove Negroes from their Homes and Friends, where they are at ease, to a strange Country, People and Language, must be highly offending against the laws of natural Justice and Humanity’.

  There was a flutter of concern at the head offices of the South Sea Company, which in 1721 ordered an investigation asking how slaves were obtained – whether they were genuine prisoners of war and criminals, or else volunteers who had sold themselves into slavery to pay a debt or prevent ruin, as defenders of the trade argued, or, as some complaints alleged, innocent victims of kidnap. But it was almost impossible to establish the truth. By the time the captives reached the coast, they had sometimes covered as much as 1,000 kilometres on their forced march from villages deep in the interior, driven from market to market and sold on many times.

  Atkins found highly suspect the idea that the slaves being sold were facing a just punishment for a crime, as those in charge of them seldom had jurisdiction beyond their own town. Nor did he believe that they were legitimate prisoners of war, as ‘By War for the most part is meant Robbery of inland, defenceless Creatures, who are hurried down to the Coast with the greatest Cruelty’. Slaves were procured by ‘Villanies and Robberies upon one another’. Atkins remarked that ‘it is not unfrequent for him who sells you Slaves to-day, to be a few days hence sold himself at some neighbouring Town’.

  The trade did, indeed, provide a disastrously destablising influence on the region for hundreds of miles inland from the long coast. As early as 1703, reported a Dutch official, the Gold Coast had ‘completely changed into the Slave Coast’, where ‘the natives no longer occupy themselves with the search for gold, but rather make war on each other in order to furnish slaves’. It was not just the demand for captives, but also what the European traders brought in return: Atkins reported them selling iron, linen and tools, but most popular were guns and gunpowder and ‘strong English spirits, whiskey and gin’. By 1730, it is estimated that 180,000 guns had been sold into the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin areas, creating a vicious circle whereby captives were sold for guns to procure more captives. Atkins concluded that the slave trade was ‘illegal and unjust’, ‘an extensive Evil, obvious to those who can see how Fraud, Thieving, and Executions have kept pace with it’. At fault, for Atkins, was the very idea of empire: ‘the Settlement of Colonies are Infringements on the Peace and Happiness of Mankind’, he wrote.

  Throughout his voyage, Atkins made careful notes not just about the Africans he encountered, including their languages, diets and spiritual practices, but also about wildlife, topography and the currents of the coast. He was kept busy, as well, nursing the crew; during an attack of fever, three or four were dying each day for six weeks. To keep the ship sailing, it became necessary to ‘impress Men from the Merchant-Ships’.

  Near the Sierra Leone river, they had encountered the Robert of Bristol, taking on 30 slaves before heading further along the coast. A short time l
ater, the Swallow met the Bristol ship again, and heard from its Captain Harding that there had been a slave uprising on board.

  Among the 30 slaves transported from their last stop had been a Captain Tomba. Beforehand, Tomba had led an effort to unite a group of inland villages against the raids of the slave-traders. But after early successes, the traders had found Tomba and ‘surprised and bound him in the night … he having killed two in his defence before they could secure him’. Tomba had been himself enslaved and then sold to Captain Harding. Keen to strike while they were still in sight of their homeland, Tomba ‘combined with three or four of the stoutest of his Country-men to kill the Ship’s Company, and attempt their Escapes’. A female slave, given more freedom on board, was recruited to pass them hammers and give the signal when the crew was at its weakest. Breaking out of their shackles, Tomba’s party urged the other slaves to join them, but procured only one further recruit. The first guards encountered, however, were fast asleep, and two were quickly ‘dispatched, with single Strokes upon the Temple’. The third roused himself enough to seize one of the escapees, but was then similarly ‘dispatched’ by Tomba. ‘Upon the confusion’, however, the other guards were alerted, and grappled with the handful of slaves. According to Atkins (or, more precisely, Harding’s own account), the ship’s captain saved the day by rushing into the melee, seizing a ‘Hand-spike, the first thing he met with in the Surprize, and redoubling his Strokes home upon Tomba, laid him at length flat upon the Deck, securing them all in Irons’.