The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  It appears that the Rhode Islanders were the worst offenders. ‘Smuggling is practiced over all the Northern colonies particularly at Rhode Island’, another witness reported. ‘Goods are landed and exported again as English.’ Indeed, rum made from French molasses was even imported into Ireland and England. Rhode Island was also a leader, along with Philadelphia, in the ‘flag of truce’ trick. According to Knowles, by the end of the war the Governor of Rhode Island was sending 40 or 50 ‘flags of truce’ every year to enemy ports in the Caribbean. Many had only one or two actual French prisoners on board. Indeed, a market grew up in which such valuable prisoners were actually traded for large prices between the northern colonies. Each time, the ‘flag of truce’ would sail ‘laden with provisions and Naval Stores, who bring back French Rum and Molasses’. At one time, there were at Hispaniola no fewer than 42 British colonial vessels ‘with fictitious flags of truce’.

  For the Lords of Trade and Plantations, hearing evidence back in London, this was more than just illegality – it was treasonous disloyalty during a time of war. Knowles reckoned that without the provisions and plantation supplies received from New Englanders, ‘he should certainly have taken Martinique’. These practices, said another witness, meant ‘the prosperity of the French Islands and the ruin of our own’.

  Sometimes the New Englanders were caught. The proceedings in the Court of Admiralty at Boston tell the story of the Victory brigantine, which sailed as a flag of truce from Newport on 12 January 1747 with five French prisoners to Cap François in Hispaniola; she carried, it turned out, ‘a cargo of 300 quintals of codfish, some onions’, and other goods. With the profits from these she ‘bought 174 casks of molasses of different sizes which were to have been delivered to Joseph Whipple, Esquire, of Newport, her owner’. The Victory was taken by the Royal Navy off Lock Island, and her cargo confiscated. Whipple, a substantial Newport merchant, was Abraham Redwood’s brother-in-law.

  Each case caused uproar in England, where the public saw the Americans as guilty of breaking a blockade that would have meant the capitulation of all the enemy islands in the West Indies. In terms of the ‘imperial family’, the New Englanders were increasingly seen as ungrateful children of a parent whose tolerance was fast running out. Just as ominously, the New Englanders, in turn, had demonstrated that allegiance to the interests of the mother country counted for next to nothing compared to the lure of molasses, rum and sugar-fuelled profits.

  Not all Newport interests were entirely served by the war. Abraham Redwood’s Antigua agent John Tomlinson complained in 1744 that he was having difficulties getting his sugar crop harvested and processed because so much of his labour force had been pressed into ‘building Batteries & throwing up entrenchments’. Two years later, Tomlinson reported that ‘We are now in the utmost distress for want of provisions & Lumber of all sorts.’ He had 60 hogsheads of sugar to ship, ‘& no vessel to take them in’.

  Nonetheless, Redwood was clearly enjoying immense profits from Cassada Gardens, helped by a rise in the sugar price from the beginning of the war onwards. Soon after his return from Antigua, he had imported from England a coach and horses (and tried without success to import an English coachman as well). An agent in Madeira now sent him his own special pipes of wine. It had become the practice of Newport grandees to establish elegant country estates outside the town: in 1641, Godfrey Malbone built a country seat that was declared ‘the largest and most magnificent dwelling’ in America. Redwood seems to have been piqued by this, as he was richer even than Malbone, and two years later he spent £6,500 on a 140-acre estate in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Here he built a house and, with the help of an expert gardener imported from Britain, laid out lavish grounds. These included a huge greenhouse and various hothouses. A visitor in the 1760s described it as ‘one of the finest gardens I ever saw in my life. In it grows all sorts of West Indian fruits, viz: Orange, Lemons, Limes, Pineapples and Tamarinds and other sorts. It has also West India flowers – very pretty ones.’

  Elected to the assembly in 1746 and 1747, Redwood had now also become Newport’s leading philanthropist. He gave £500 towards the founding of a Quaker school, and offered another £500 if the mooted Rhode Island university be situated at Newport (he would lose this battle to the Browns of Providence). In 1747 he began the process of establishing what would open in 1750 as the Redwood Library, the oldest lending library in North America, and the continent’s first classical-style building, chartered to promote ‘virtue, knowledge and learning … having nothing in view but the good of mankind …’47 He had his agent in London send over hundreds of pounds’ worth of books, paid for from the proceeds of his Antigua sugar.

  By the 1750s, Newport rivalled New York, Boston and Philadelphia as a shipping centre. These ports now dominated the supply of provisions, lumber and other goods to the West Indian islands. A visitor to Antigua in 1756 commented that ‘almost every thing’ was brought ‘in the lumber vessels from America’.

  This vibrant sector fuelled a wider trade throughout the Atlantic, as well as providing capital and markets for new industries in the colony. By the mid-century there were 30 distilleries in Newport alone. In Providence, Obadiah Brown and his nephews had established a distillery, and also chocolate and candle factories. An iron furnace would follow soon after. The family was now trading directly with London (bypassing Newport and Boston), and owned outright or jointly more than 60 vessels. In 1759, they dabbled again in the slave trade, although the vessel, the Wheel of Fortune, was ‘taken’ by privateers off the African coast. By this time, however, they were once more making wild profits in privateering and illegal trade in the West Indies, thanks to the mother country’s new war with France.

  22

  BARBADOS, THE ‘CIVILISED ISLE’

  ‘In the slave society, where self-fulfilment came so easily, this liveliness began to be perverted and then to fade, and the English saw their pre-eminence, more simply, as a type of racial magic.’

  V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado

  Barbados, for so long the leading sugar colony and the jewel in the crown of England’s western empire, had by the 1720s been surpassed in sugar production by Jamaica and the Leewards and thereafter acquired the reputation of a place in slow but irreversible decline. Naval surgeon John Atkins was briefly there in the 1720s on his way to Jamaica. He found the white women in Bridgetown to be ‘most Scotch and Irish, very homely and great Swearers’, was impressed with the men’s ‘magnificent way of living’, but observed that ‘the Crops of late years have very much failed … The Soil fertile in the Age past, seems now growing old, and past its teeming time.’

  The slump of the 1730s hit the island hard, not helped by a destructive hurricane in 1731 and a subsequent drought that left the soil ‘a dry crust, burnt up and gaping’. But even more seriously, after 60 years of intensive sugar monoculture, the soil of the island was stripped. This meant that ever more labour – manuring and replanting – was needed to produce the same amount of sugar. During the eighteenth century, then, production fell by some 20 per cent, even though the slave population increased by nearly a third. In the 1760s, soil exhaustion became such a problem that the desperate measure was undertaken of importing soil from Surinam. But this was not a success: wood ants made such ravages in the hull of the ship that the experiment was abandoned.

  It was not just the soil: there was also a feeling that the energy and spirit of the planters were failing. ‘The industry & integrity of its first founders is lost’, one Barbadian wrote of his island. The planters were now merely reaping the benefit of the ‘hardship, sweat, and toil of their forefathers’, reported another. Where the first generations of sugar barons had channelled their ‘fiery, restless tempers’ into the hard work of creating the first sugar plantations, their successors had degenerated into luxury, faction, decadence and drunkenness. ‘Vain and shewy’, many were living way beyond their reduced means, and falling into debt.

  ‘There is no Recreation out of Business,
but in Drinking or Gaming’, reported Atkins. It was too hot for the English gentry pursuits of hunting or hawking, wrote a visitor in 1747; instead the Barbadians were ‘oblig’d, for the most part, to sedentary Diversions at Home; as Cards, Dice, Tables, Quoits, Bowling … There are some good Fellows here, who, ’tis said, will drink five or six Bottles of Madera Wine, to their share, every Day, for which they find sweating the best Relief.’

  It was not entirely sedentary: riding in the cool of the morning was popular; there was some shooting of migratory birds from July to December. Towards the end of the century sea bathing at last became fashionable, and there were always visitors to be taken on trips round the island, and to the impressive limestone caves.

  Above all, there were dances. At every social gathering, even lectures, the evening would always end with dancing. Every assembly meeting in Bridgetown was accompanied by a succession of balls. ‘Though a Creole was languishing on his death bed’, wrote an islander later in the century, ‘I believe the sound of the gumbay or violin would induce him to get up and dance till he killed himself.’ Indeed, William Hillary, a respected doctor who wrote about the illnesses of Barbados, even warned: ‘Dancing is too violent an Exercise in this hot Climate, and many do greatly injure their Health by it, and I have known it fatal to some … But most of the Ladies are so excessive fond of it, that say what I will they will dance on.’

  By the 1730s, a number of the leading proprietors had followed the example of Henry Drax and become resident in England. In their place at the top of Barbados society came a new breed: merchants with juicy government contracts; moneylenders; beneficiaries of official positions. Never entirely honest, civic life now became further mired in corruption. The first half of the eighteenth century saw a procession of crooked governors; assembly elections were frequently fixed; judges were appointed who were illiterate or corrupt (in 1716, a man got himself appointed a judge for one of the districts of Barbados where a case against him was to be tried). Lucrative official positions were bought and sold regardless of honesty or competence: in 1728, one man held eight civil and military posts.

  In around 1715, the founder of one of the greatest Barbados fortunes, Henry Lascelles, was appointed Collector of Customs for the port of Bridgetown, amongst the most valuable revenue posts in the British customs service. Henry’s father Daniel had married the daughter of Edward Lascelles, from another branch of the family. This Edward had been in Barbados in 1648, when he had bought a small sugar estate called Frames. The following year he had purchased a further 100 acres in an adjoining parish, and in partnership with his brothers had built a valuable sugar and trading business, before returning to England in 1701 having lost three young children to the Barbados climate. Two further sons were produced, but both died childless, the elder drinking himself to death, so most of his property descended through his daughter to Daniel’s branch of the Lascelles family.

  Daniel Lascelles’ eldest sons, George and Henry, were trading in Barbados by the 1710s, shipping as well as planting. Soon afterwards their half-brother Edward (credited with introducing the mango to Barbados) joined them on the island; in 1730 he would succeed Henry in the post of Collector of Customs (George died in 1729).

  Henry became a force to be reckoned with in Barbados politics and, partly thanks to his official position, immensely wealthy. According to accusations made against him, he submitted fraudulent accounts concerning the 4½ per cent duty on sugars shipped from the island. In 1720 he was summoned to London to answer the charges, but was cleared. Soon afterwards he was accused of importing cheaper French sugar from Martinique and sending it to London to benefit from the higher price arising from the monopoly. Again he held on to his job. His brother faced similar charges in 1744, which led to his suspension and a surcharge against Henry of just under £40,000. But Henry and his second son Daniel became MPs the following year, and also gave financial support to the Hanoverian regime. The nasty fine went away.

  In 1730, Henry returned to London, leaving Edward in charge in Barbados. From London Henry became victualler to the armed forces and a substantial slave-trader, taking over forts on the West African coast. With a partner, George Maxwell, he established a banking house and started lending large amounts of money to planters – £85,154 by 1753 – while selling his own land in the West Indies.

  By the time of his death in 1753, Henry Lascelles had installed his eldest son Edwin as Lord of the Manor of Gawthorpe and Harewood, estates that Henry purchased in 1739 for just under £64,000. (His second son, Daniel, was by now established as a partner in Lascelles and Maxwell.) In spite of this outlay, Henry was still worth around half a million pounds; without doubt, he died one of the richest men in Britain.

  Independently of Henry, his half-brother Edward had prospered. His son would purchase an estate at Darrington, commissioning John Carr to build Stapleton Park. The manner of Henry’s death is a mystery. He is reported ‘to have cut his throat and arms and across his belly’. The reason for his suicide remains unknown.

  Much of the money Henry lent went to New Englander Gedney Clarke, a close trading partner based in Barbados. Back in 1637, John Gedney, a Norwich weaver, had sailed from Yarmouth to New England on the Mary Ann with his wife and three children. After his wife’s death he had married a wealthy widow, Callie Clarke, and had taken over a tavern and small farm on the border of the townships of Salem and Lynn. The family grew rich through trading, shipbuilding and marriage, and during the eighteenth century the Gedney Clarkes dispersed along the eastern seaboard and overseas to the Caribbean. John Gedney’s great-grandson Gedney Clarke migrated to Barbados in 1733, aged 22. Having forged links with international trading networks that took in London, New England, Virginia, Barbados, Lisbon and Bilbao, a decade later the New Englander was one of Bridgetown’s leading merchants. In the 1740s he moved into land, acquiring huge tracts of Virginia as well as estates in Barbados and new investments in Dutch Guiana and Demerara (one such investment is said to have recouped the £12,000 outlay in just one year). By now he was in close partnership with Henry Lascelles’ operation.

  Lascelles and Maxwell were Gedney Clarke’s London bankers, and they had many shared interests in slave-trading vessels. Clarke illicitly sold slaves in the Dutch colonies and even smuggled slaves into New York itself, making use of the coves and inlets of Long Island, where happily the Gedney family owned 200 acres astride a fine natural harbour. He also supplied slaves to Henry Laurens in Charleston, who on one occasion was requested to send back in return a number of deer to grace the Gedney Clarke lawns in Barbados.

  As his family had done in New England, Gedney Clarke combined commercial interests with military and public service. In 1748, he succeeded Edward Lascelles as customs collector for Bridgetown. The position would stay in the Clarke family for the next 30 years, despite allegations of bribery and other misconduct. When, on one occasion, he was suspended from his post, such was his influence in England that orders came by return packet for him to be restored.

  Naval power was crucial to the security of the plantations and the defence of colonial trade. The Clarkes’ influence in this area was, therefore, of paramount importance to the family’s commercial interests, and Clarke’s house was famously welcoming of military and colonial officials. As well as wining and dining at his lavish Belle plantation those who might prove useful, Clarke also went into partnership with a number of naval officers in order to prosecute the slave trade and to profit from victualling and privateering. The delivery of slaves to Charleston, for instance, was a venture he conducted jointly with Admiral Thomas Frankland. In the wars of the early 1740s, Clarke took prize cargoes in partnership with Edward Lascelles and, again, Admiral Frankland.

  Such arrangements between traders and the military were not exceptional, nor were they illegal, although they could frequently involve participants in conflicts of interest. The influence wielded by the Clarkes, however, exceeded the norm and, on occasion, obliterated the distinction between private and
public interest.

  In 1755, Clarke’s son, Gedney Clarke Jr, was sent, aged 20, to Amsterdam to learn Dutch and become naturalised, so that restrictions on the Clarkes’ property ownership in the Dutch South American colonies could be avoided. In 1762, Gedney Clarke Jr married Frances Lascelles, daughter of Henry’s half-brother Edward, cementing the close business relationship between the two families.

  As the Seven Years War got underway in 1756, a naval lieutenant, Edward Thompson, wrote a series of intriguing letters from various outposts around the far-flung empire. By the time he got to the West Indies, he had seen it all, from Europe to the Far East. From Antigua he reported, ‘I am sorry I cannot say any thing pleasant about this place.’ Barbados was the next stop, and he was optimistic that from there he could ‘entertain’ his correspondent ‘with more pleasing accounts’. Arriving in Barbados in early December 1756, he found that ‘This island looks more like a Christian country, than any of the Caribbees.’

  Barbados was indeed different from the other islands in important ways that in the eyes of European visitors and white Barbadians alike made it, in comparison, ‘the civilised island’. For one thing, the ratio of blacks to whites was in the region of four to one, rather than the 10 to one in Jamaica, and 18 to one in Antigua. This proportionally larger white population, unlike the tiny garrison communities in the other islands, was substantial enough to exhibit rigid class distinctions reassuringly similar to England. The early arrival of the Sugar Revolution in Barbados might have wrecked the island’s soil, but it also meant that a number of families had now been there for four or even five generations: a small number even began to think of themselves as Barbadian or Bajan rather than English. There were, indeed, high-profile absentee owners, but because of the falling yields, only those with the best and most substantial estates could actually afford to retire to England. This kept many of the planters physically on the island and emotionally connected to its future.