Harding went on to describe his resulting vengeance. Tomba and the other main leader were too strong and valuable to be killed, so escaped with a severe whipping. The three others, ‘Abettors, but not Actors, nor of Strength for it’, looked less valuable and so were sentenced to death. After the first was killed, the other two were forced to eat his heart and liver (the only case of cannibalism Atkins came across during his time on the African coast) and then executed. ‘The Woman he hoisted up by the Thumbs, whipp’d, and slashed her with Knives, before the other Slaves till she died.’
Atkins commented that ‘there has not been wanting Examples of rising and killing a Ship’s Company’. The slaves, he wrote, thought themselves ‘bought to eat’ – that the cannibals were the Europeans. Moreover they believed that ‘Death will send them into their own Country’. With seemingly nothing to lose, at least one in ten slave voyages saw a major rebellion, along with frequent fights and brawls. Most took place while the ship was still close to the African coast. A small number were successful, but most were bloodily suppressed, often with the aid of other European ships nearby.
20
PIRACY AND RUM
‘I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?’
William Cowper, ‘Pity for Poor Africans’
Dealing with slave rebellions was not, however, the primary purpose of Atkins’s warship the Swallow and her sister ship the Weymouth as they cruised off the coast of West Africa in 1721. Instead they were an anti-pirate force, protecting the slave trade. Some three months after arriving off the coast of Africa, Atkins heard that notorious pirates ‘under the Command of Roberts’ were in the area, causing ‘great Ravages upon the Merchant Ships’. Local traders were panicking. Thereafter, the Royal Navy vessels played cat-and-mouse with Bartholomew Roberts’s pirate flotilla; several times they were told the pirates were windward of them, ‘which kept us Plying’. But soon afterwards they would hear a contradictory rumour. Then at Whydah they missed Roberts by only 48 hours; the pirates had ‘plundered and ransomed 11 Sail of Ships’, but on hearing they were being pursued, quickly left the harbour. At last Atkins’s ship, minus its leaking sister ship the Weymouth, encountered Roberts’s three vessels at anchor near Cape Lopez, south of the Gabon river. Straight away, battle was joined.
As in the West Indies, pirates and state-sponsored privateers had infested the West African coast and far beyond since almost the very earliest European voyages. The growth of the slave trade had increased the traffic and number of targets. Some years before Atkins’s visit, a ship called the Beckford – 200 tons, 24 guns, 30 men – had been taken by pirates while loading slaves at Madagascar. Apparently while the master was on shore, men under ‘Ryder the Pirate’ had boarded the vessel, ‘turned’ nearly half the crew, and put the rest ashore before sailing off with their prize. The seven owners of the vessel, with old Colonel Peter Beckford at their head, had appealed to the Council of Trade and Plantations for the capture of Ryder, ‘a middlesized man, of a swarthy complexion, inclinable by his aspect to be of a churlish constitution; his own hair short and brown, and apt, when in drink, to utter some Portuguese or Moorish words’.
At the end of the war in 1713, a large number of Anglo-American sailors, previously engaged in privateering or on naval vessels, found themselves unemployed. They turned en masse to piracy, attacking vessels whatever their nationality in the Caribbean, the American eastern seaboard, the West African coast and the Indian Ocean.44 This launched the climax of the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’, during which English island governors complained endlessly about the dangers of the sea routes and of the daily increase of ‘pyrates’. Charismatic pirate leaders such as ‘Blackbeard’ (Edward Teach), ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham and Charles Vane became well-known names, even in England.
The disruption to the hugely profitable sugar and slave trades was such that the European governments were forced to take action. A Royal Proclamation by George I of Britain in 1717 promised amnesty to those pirates who gave themselves up, and a number surrendered in Jamaica and Bermuda, several on more than one occasion. But hundreds remained at large, based in the Bahamas and elsewhere. The Royal Navy, helped by local auxiliaries, waged a determined campaign against the pirates during the early 1720s. Teach was killed during a fight on the high seas in 1718. Rackham and Vane were captured, hanged and then gibbeted outside Port Royal shortly afterwards, along with 20 of their crews. (Female pirates Anne Bonney and Mary Read were also sentenced to death but were spared execution on the grounds they were ‘quick with child’.) Others were executed in Barbados and the Leewards.
But of all of them, Bartholemew Roberts was perhaps the most successful and thereby infamous. It has been estimated that he captured as many as 470 vessels during a spectacular career that lasted less than three years. Roberts, a Welshman born in 1682, had been serving as a mate on a slaving ship when in 1719 it was captured by pirates off the Gold Coast. He was forced to join the pirates’ crew, but took to it, pledging himself to a short but merry life, and was soon afterwards elected captain of the band. He adopted an outfit consisting of a rich crimson damask waistcoat and breeches, a red feather in his hat, a gold chain with a diamond cross round his neck and two pairs of pistols slung over his shoulders.
Roberts’s leadership saw successes off Barbados and Martinique before he headed north to Newfoundland in search of fresh victims. Each time a bigger vessel was taken, Roberts would ‘trade up’ his flagship for a new model, while most of the time keeping a ‘fleet’ of two or three captured ships under his command. In late 1720 he returned to the Caribbean, where he took vessels in the roadstead of Basseterre, St Kitts, and a month later, seized 16 French sloops off Dominica and Martinique, capturing the Governor of Martinique in the process and unceremoniously hanging him from the yardarm, as well as torturing other prisoners.
By the spring of 1721, Roberts’s depredations had almost brought seaborne trade in the West Indies to a standstill, so with potential victims few in number, he headed to West Africa. He soon heard about the presence in the region of the Royal Navy vessels the Weymouth and Swallow, but continued his attacks with his three ships the Royal Fortune, the Ranger and the Little Ranger, capturing a number of vessels before his successful descent on Whydah in January 1722. Thereafter he proceeded south to Cape Lopez for repairs.
On 5 February the crew of HMS Swallow, with Atkins on board, spotted the three pirate ships. But on her approach to engage, the Swallow was forced to veer away to avoid a shoal. This unwittingly deceived the pirates into thinking she was a merchant ship fleeing at the sight of them. One of Roberts’s flotilla, the Ranger, raced off in pursuit. Once out of sight of the other pirates, the Swallow opened fire, and after a short engagement, the Ranger surrendered.
The Swallow returned five days later and found the two other pirate ships still at anchor at Cape Lopez. In fact, they had just captured an English ship, the Neptune, and were celebrating hard in true pirate fashion. At first the pirates thought that she was the Ranger returning, but a deserter from the Swallow alerted them. Roberts donned his finest outfit, and ordered a daring break for freedom. But at the crucial moment, his crew proved too drunk and disorderly to carry out his commands (Roberts himself is said to have preferred tea to rum). The Royal Fortune lost its course and came under sustained broadsides from the Swallow. Roberts was killed – hit in the throat by grapeshot while standing on his deck – and his crew surrendered soon after.
‘The Pyrates, tho’ singly Fellows of Courage’, concluded Atkins, had been undone by their ‘Drunkenness, Inadvertency, and Disorder’. The death of Roberts, previously considered by many to be invincible, is now seen as the end of the golden age of piracy.
Roberts’s third ship was soon afterwards captured, and the prizes and prisoners taken to the English castle at Cape Coast. According to Atkins, ‘the pyrates in this Passage were very troublesome to us, from a Project or two they had formed for their Deliverance�
�, but they were delivered safely to justice. The captured crews, totalling 272 men, turned out to consist of 75 blacks, who were quickly sold to slaving ships, a large number of West Country Englishman, and a mix of Londoners, Irish and Scots, together with Dutch and Greeks. More than 50 were hanged; 20 were allowed to take on indentures with the Royal African Company, by reputation ‘a lingering death’, 20 were sent to London for trial, and about a third were released.
The captain of the Swallow, Challenor Ogle, was rewarded with fast promotion and a knighthood, the only British naval officer to be honoured specifically for his actions against pirates. He also became instantly a very rich man. According to Atkins, on board the ships was ‘great plenty of trading Goods, and, what more attracted the Eye, a large quantity of Gold Dust, by computation, 8 or 10,000l.’ The gold disappeared into Challenor’s pockets. In the division of the spoils, Atkins got only £26.
The Swallow, with its prize the Royal Fortune in attendance, now left Africa for Brazil, Barbados and Jamaica, accompanying English slave-traders, who would then return to England with sugar and other tropical products, completing the famous trade triangle.
Atkins was impressed with a lot of what he found in Jamaica: the wide streets of Kingston, open to the sea breeze; the ‘Magnificence of Living’ of the ‘Gentlemen’, whom he described as ‘true Republicans in Disposition’. But the slavery he saw – men, women and children treated as ‘beasts of burthen’ – confirmed him in his view that the Africans were not, as had been suggested, better off in the West Indies. He was also concerned about the ratio of blacks to whites, now in the region of eight to one: ‘a Disproportion, that together with the Severity of their Patrons, renders the whole Colony unsafe’. Maroons, he wrote, ‘daily increase’.
There was to be a more immediate danger, however. A week after his arrival in Jamaica, Atkins had first-hand experience of a hurricane. The island had been hit 10 years before, but this one was worse. For 48 hours the storm gave warnings of its imminent arrival: waves crashed noisily against the wharfs and the nights saw ‘prodigious lightnings and thunder’.
When the hurricane started on 28 August 1722, Atkins found himself ‘left alone proprietor of a shaking old house, the streets full of water and drift, with shingles flying about like arrows’. Most of the population of Kingston took shelter in the church, as the two blocks nearest the sea ‘were undermined and leveled with the Torrent’. But the flimsy church then collapsed too, killing 300–400 people in the ruins.
Only six of the 50 vessels in the harbour survived, (including the Swallow, though not her prize), but all had their masts and booms blown away. Wrecks and drowned men were everywhere to be seen along the shore, ‘a melancholy scene’. Left behind were pools of stagnating water, which ‘brought on a contagious distemper, fatal for some months through the island’.
Along with epidemics of disease, natural disasters remained a fact of life in the West Indies, contributing to the colonies’ pervading sense of crisis and impermanence. Jamaica would be hit once more by a hurricane four years later, then again in 1734. The French settlements, where sugar production was now rising sharply, were just as vulnerable. Guadeloupe, for one, was visited by hurricanes in 1713, 1714 and 1738. Antigua was now, in terms of production, the fastest-growing British Leeward sugar island, but this was in spite of losing a sixth of its inhabitants to a fever epidemic in 1725, followed by a severe drought and then a hurricane in 1728.
Bristol-born Quaker Abraham Redwood, who had written to a friend in Philadelphia after Parke’s murder in 1710 that Antigua had called down God’s judgement on itself, inherited, together with his sons, substantial estates on the island on the death in 1712 of his father-in-law, the ancient Quaker Jonas Langford (all of whose sons had predeceased him). Almost immediately, Redwood removed his family – now consisting of four or five children – north to Newport, Rhode Island, safe, he must have hoped, from the threats of war and disease in Antigua.
But by the spring of 1714, Redwood was preparing to return to Antigua. His family, it seems, had not taken to the New England winter. It is ‘too Cold in this place’, he wrote to John Dickinson from Newport in January 1714. The whole family had been ill, and his eldest son, 16-year-old William, had died in October 1712. William’s three-year-old brother John died the following year.
However, the return was not a success. Abraham’s wife Mehitable died in 1715, and, leaving his estates in the hands of an attorney, Redwood relocated north again, to Salem, Massachusetts, where he remarried. Although by now 51, he went on to have a further five surviving children with his new wife, Patience, including one son, William. Nonetheless, there would be further tragedy: in October 1724, Redwood’s eldest son, Jonas, aged 18, died after a fall from a horse. This meant that his third son, another Abraham, was now set to inherit the Antigua plantations.
Abraham junior rose to the challenge. From 1726, although only 17, he based himself in Newport and, using his family’s Quaker business contacts, started selling the Antigua produce there – sugar, rum, molasses and cotton – shipping out to the West Indies in return peas, beans, candles and horses, as well as occasional gifts of fruits and cheese, and corresponding with his family’s agent in Antigua, at that time Edward Byam.
The young Redwood was part of a Rhode Island colony that had found its role in the imperial system. The overriding purpose of the commercial economy of colonial New England was to obtain the means with which to purchase English manufactures (an objective the Virginia planter accomplished by the simple expedient of exporting tobacco). Rhode Island had turned out to be too barren to compete on agricultural production and had no access to fisheries. What it did have was excellent ports and an enterprising population. The answer was to build ships and to trade. Hundreds of vessels of all sizes were constructed in the colony during the early decades of the eighteenth century, during which time New England came to dominate the supply of provisions, horses and lumber to its key market – the West Indian sugar colonies.
Self-assured, decisive, and independent-minded, Redwood was an able but headstrong young man, a great contrast to his gloomy and God-fearing father. Certainly Abraham junior felt no compulsion to follow in his parents’ devout Quaker tradition, as evidenced by his marriage, aged just short of 18, to Martha Coggeshall, from an old but far from wealthy Rhode Island family. To the shock of the Newport Quaker community, the youngsters married outside the Society of Friends. A marker had been laid down: Abraham would pay scant regard to the Friends’ distaste for luxury and, in time, slavery.
By the time of his father’s death in January 1729, Abraham Redwood junior, although remaining in Newport, had acquired solid experience of managing the family’s interests in Antigua, centred on the Cassada Gardens plantation, now bringing in £2,000–3,000 a year profit on the back of the work of more than 200 slaves. By this time, he had laid down firm roots in North America, having acquired an elegant house with a large garden on the Newport wharf at Thames Street, as well as warehouses and loading facilities on the docks, and another house in Spring Street. To compete with the showiness of his neighbours, the pre-eminent Newport merchants, the Malbones, he had imported gates and bricks from England for the entrance to his mansion, as well as specially commissioned carved stone pineapples to top the gates (the English West Indian symbol of welcome that is today everywhere to be seen in the older parts of Newport).
From as early as 1727, Redwood was also importing enslaved Africans from Antigua to Newport. This was in part, like the mansion gates, a question of status – it was suddenly the thing to have in attendance a black child as a page or maid. There is voluminous correspondence about ‘negro’ boys and girls requested by Redwood (‘I have bought you a negro Girle of about nine or ten years of age …’) and sent to him by his Antigua agents. Sometimes this was tricky: on 20 July 1728, Byam wrote: ‘I would have sent ye girle you desired but … those on your plantation who are in family are very unwilling to part with their children.’ In the same letter, B
yam congratulated Redwood on the birth of his first child.
But slaves in Newport were not just ornaments. By the 1730s, they were doing a lot of the hard physical work of a trading and shipbuilding colony, and made up 10 per cent of the population of Newport. Most were imported from Barbados, some 30 a year, and it seems that unlike in the West Indies, the slave owners were ‘supplied by the offspring of those they have already, which increase daily’. (In contrast, the Carolinas at this time were importing about 1,000 slaves a year; by 1732, the population of South Carolina was 14,000 whites and 32,000 blacks.)
More significantly, a number of North Americans were now involving themselves directly in the slave trade from Africa. As early as 1700, Rhode Island and Boston ships were to be found on the West African coast, picking up slaves who were then sold in Barbados or the other West Indian islands, with perhaps one or two brought back to North America. But in the 1720s, this trade surged.
The key to this was rum. Places like Newport and Boston had been distilling since the 1690s, but most of the resulting spirit had been for local consumption, or for sale to the ‘Indians’ in return for furs, and, according to later complaints, to ‘debauch them’. But from the 1720s onward, about a third of Rhode Island’s rum production was loaded on to ships for Africa, where it was traded for slaves. Rum was perfect: cheap to produce; easy to transport; it did not deteriorate with age; and it lent itself to adulteration by clever North American traders. Most importantly, the super-proof ‘Guinea’ rum produced by the New England distilleries was massively popular in West Africa, much preferred to its rivals, West Indian rum, English spirits or French brandy. Soon the New England rum was a de facto currency of the Slave Coast. Adult male slaves could be bought for as little as 80 gallons, which cost only five pence per gallon to produce. Within a short time, there were as many as 20 vessels from Newport alone making the voyage every year, carrying about 1,800 hogsheads of rum. Slaves were sold on in the Caribbean or in New England for between £30 and £80.
The Sugar Barons Page 31