The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  In the same way, because widespread African slavery had started so much earlier in Barbados, there were, in spite of the ferocious infant mortality, a large number of Creole slaves, those born on the island: as many as 50 per cent of the black population. Together with other factors, this contributed to the lack of a major slave revolt in Barbados for the duration of the eighteenth century.

  Barbados was less ‘Africanised’ than the other islands: for instance, Bajan Creole is much closer to English than, for example, Jamaican patois. People even called Barbados ‘Little England’, not a term that was ever applied to Jamaica. Edward Thompson commented on Antigua that most of the estates were run by newly arrived Scotsmen. In Barbados, everything was more settled, and less transient: the vast majority of the plantation managers were island-born, rather than fortune-hunters from Europe.

  A spur to the creation of a Creole Barbadian identity came with the launch of the island’s first newspaper, the Barbados Gazette, in 1731. This gave a forum for the white population to talk to each other as fellow islanders. Theatre productions seem to have started about this time. Although Codrington’s bequest to establish a college on the island still languished under repeated attacks from his heir and others, the 1730s saw the establishment of a number of good-quality schools. Those few who could afford it still sent their children to England to be educated, but an increasing number of white children were not only born on the island, but schooled there. They even started talking in a recognisably Bajan accent, ‘the languid syllables … drawled out as if it were a great fatigue to utter them’, as an English visitor complained.

  The visiting Royal Navy lieutenant Edward Thompson found Barbadians ‘more easy, hospitable and kind, than those on the other islands’. He also admired Bridgetown: ‘extensive and well built, and the merchants’ houses elegant’. The port remained an important entrepôt, rivalled in the British Americas only by Boston.

  Links between the West Indian islands and the northern colonies continued to grow, in spite of suspicions on the part of the Americans of the decadence of the sugar islands: ‘We do not live so flash and fast’, wrote one New Englander, ‘yett wee live well and enjoy life with a better gust.’ As well as commercial and educational links, there were itinerant artists, entertainers and theatrical companies who toured the mainland colonies and the islands.

  Visits were exchanged, often by those seeking the better health conditions of the north. Barbados sent Philadelphia her hard drinkers, with their ‘carbuncled faces, slender legs and thighs, and large, prominent bellies’, as a later account relates. It was jokily suggested that a house be set up in the city called the ‘Barbados Hotel, putting up for a sign, the worn-out West Indian, dying of a dropsy from intemperate living’.

  The traffic also went in reverse. Barbados, in particular, had a reputation as a place good for easing respiratory diseases. Thus in September 1751, future first president of the United States George Washington set sail for the island with his elder half-brother, Lawrence, who was suffering from tuberculosis. His doctor had recommended a stint in the tropics to relieve the disease.

  They left the Potomac river on 28 September 1751. Their vessel was probably the Success, a square-sterned sloop of 40 tons. As well as the passengers, the ship carried nearly 5,000 barrel staves, just under 1,000 bushels of corn and 31 barrels of herring. Having spent six weeks on what George Washington called the ‘fickle & Merciliss Ocean’, they landed at Bridgetown on 2 November.

  The 19-year-old George Washington kept a diary during the seven weeks he spent on the island, the only time in his life that he left North America. Unfortunately the pages that might have recorded his first impressions of Barbados are missing or damaged, but we can assume that Bridgetown, a cosmopolitan port city totally unlike anything he had experienced at home in rural Virginia, must have made a considerable impact. For the first couple of nights the brothers lodged in a tavern in the city, but were soon invited to the house of Gedney Clarke. The Washingtons had family links with the Clarkes through Lawrence’s wife Anne, and Clarke himself owned 3,000 acres in Virginia at Goose Creek. This connection must have influenced the decision to go to Barbados, and presumably the brothers expected to stay at the Clarkes’ house.

  But there was a snag. Clarke’s wife had smallpox; Lawrence had had the disease, so was immune, but George had not. It was not possible, then, to stay at the Clarkes’ although, ‘with some reluctance’, the brothers accepted the invitation to dinner.

  Soon after their arrival, Lawrence was visited by Dr Hillary, who recommended that they find lodging in the country. Accompanied by a high-ranking local, they rode out of town seeking a house to rent. Washington recorded that he was ‘perfectly enraptured’ by the beauty of the island, ‘the fields of cane, corn, Fruit Trees &c in a delightful Green’ and the abundance and richness of the vegetation. ‘How wonderful that such people shou’d be in debt!’ he exclaimed.

  After a couple of days, they found a house to rent in the swampy Garrison area, now on the outskirts of Bridgetown (where the house still stands), but then surrounded by canefields. It was owned by Richard Crofton, a captain in the British army. Crofton asked for £15 a month rent, which Lawrence found ‘extravagantly dear’ (it was three times what Crofton had recently charged the Barbados council for use of the house), but felt ‘oblig’d’ to give the asking price. The house was small, but pleasantly situated: ‘the prospect is extensive by Land and pleasant by Sea’, wrote George. ‘We command the prospect of Carlyle Bay & all the shipping in such manner that none can go in or out without being open to our view.’

  Young George’s days were thereafter spent riding around the island, where he carefully noted the intensive plantation agriculture, and enjoyed the hospitality of the local elite at leisurely afternoon dinners. Everywhere, he wrote, he was ‘Genteely receiv’d and agreeably entertain’d’. Like all small, isolated communities, the Barbados gentry were fond of new faces. For George, it was a definite step up from his status in Virginia. On one occasion, he was given a ticket to a play; it seems to have been the first time he had been to a theatre. One night he was invited to dine with the gentlemen’s ‘Beefstake and Tripe Club’, where ‘After Dinner was the greatest Collection of Fruits I have yet seen on the Table’. He enjoyed the new experience of an avocado pear, but like most visitors, was most enraptured by ‘the Pine’.

  The visit was full of new experiences. Perhaps most importantly, he toured the island’s fortifications, taking on a new passionate interest in military matters. He also contracted and survived smallpox – almost certainly from his visit to the Clarkes’ on 4 November. His subsequent immunity to the disease would be of huge importance, since smallpox would kill more Continental soldiers during the American Revolution than would the British.

  His brother, however, did not get better. George left for Virginia on 22 December, and his brother sailed to Bermuda, which does not seem to have helped much either. Lawrence returned home and died in July 1752.

  George commented about the white population of Barbados that there were ‘very few who may be called middling people they are either very rich or very poor’. (In fact, compared to the other sugar islands, Barbados had a fair number of ‘middling people’.) But there is hardly any reference in his diary to the enslaved Africans who made up three quarters of Barbados’s population. George commented about the young white ladies of the island that they were ‘Generally very agreeable, but by ill custom … affect the Negro Style’. Apart from this one mention, the black population seems to have been totally invisible or unworthy of comment to the young Virginian.

  However much Barbados was admired as a comparatively ‘civilised isle’ for the West Indies, other visitors could not help but comment on the realities of the slave society there. ‘The planters at Barbadoes are cruel to their unhappy slaves, who are condemned to servile labour and scanty fare’, wrote a Rhode Islander, John Benson, in the 1760s. Benson was shocked to see ‘the heads of slaves, fixed upon sharp point
ed stakes, while their unburied carcases were exposed to be torn by dogs and vultures on the sandy beach’. Lieutenant Edward Thompson would have been witness to the habitual extreme violence – whippings and executions – used at that time to enforce discipline in the Royal Navy, but he was still deeply shocked to see in Barbados (which he pronounced ‘kinder’ than the other islands) a young slave girl tortured to death for ‘some trivial domestic error’.

  Thompson ascribed this cruelty to the way Barbadians were ‘taught in their very infancy to flog with a whip the slave that offends them’. Other writers agree that a habit of cruelty to the enslaved population was taken in almost with the mother’s milk. A later visitor reported that he had seen children as young as five or six ‘knocking the poor Negroes about the cheeks with all the passion and the cruelty possible … never checked by their parents’. In return, the domestic slaves were expected to indulge every whim of the young Creoles, whose strange characteristics were of increasing interest to the British reading public. Barbadians and other West Indians responded that they were simply ‘of a more volatile and lively Disposition’ than Englishmen who had remained at home; warm temperatures, they said, had put their ‘Animal Spirits … in a high Flow’.

  The majority of those arriving in the West Indies fresh from Britain or the northern colonies became ‘Creolised’ in various ways after a series of changes that often started with a sense of overwhelmed bewilderment. ‘Here I find every Thing alter’d … amidst all the Variety which crouds upon my Sight’, wrote one immigrant on his first arrival in Jamaica in the 1730s. In a book of advice for a newcomer to Jamaica, published later in the century, an old planter hand warned that ‘When you get to Kingston, if you had five more senses, they would be all engaged; the compounded stench … the intense heat, and the horrid scene of poor Africans, male and female, busy at their labour with hardly rags sufficient to secret their nakedness, will affect you not a little.’

  In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Mr Rochester, riding out into the country for the first time, finds himself overwhelmed by the sheer energy and strangeness of the lush tropical vegetation. ‘Everything is too much’, he thinks. ‘Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.’ In Jamaican writer Henry de Lisser’s White Witch of Rose Hall, his hero, Rutherford, fresh from England, is similarly overcome by the foreignness, teeming insects and violent heat. Don’t worry, he is told, in a month you’ll be used to it.

  In no time he is taken to bed by a slave girl and ‘hardened to the callous frankness of a Jamaica liaison’. ‘He was secretly startled’, wrote de Lisser, ‘that he had so quickly succumbed to what he had heard at home were the manners and customs of this country … however flagrantly might be violated every principle of circumspect conduct.’ His fellow bookkeeper tells him that he ‘had seen many a young man arrive from England with the noblest resolves and the highest ideals, and sometimes in a week these all seemed to disappear as completely as if they had never existed’. Rutherford starts drinking heavily. ‘This was Jamaica’, he says to himself, ‘to be a model of virtue here would be merely to make oneself ridiculous.’

  Most disorientating of all was the sudden introduction to the violent cruelties of slavery. One of the first sights on arrival at a West Indian island was often a gibbeted slave, starving to death, sometimes with a loaf hanging just out of reach in front of him. ‘I have seen these unfortunate Wretches gnaw the Flesh off their own Shoulders, and expire in all the frightful Agonies’, wrote one shocked newcomer. In 1745, a young man recently arrived in Barbados wrote to George Maxwell, the partner of Henry Lascelles. Maxwell was Barbados born, and seemed to miss the island from his chilly exile in London. The young man, John Braithwaite, reported that he was finding the task of acting as a slave master unpleasant. Maxwell confessed that he had feared the job ‘would ill suit a gentleman of your nature’, but he reassured Braithwaite that experience would eventually inure him to the harsh realities of life on a sugar plantation: ‘It was become familiar to me by use’, he wrote. ‘I was once owner of above 100 [slaves], and perhaps was one of the mildest masters. None clothed or fed better, yet they are by nature so stupid that I found none so ill served as I was; and therefore some correction is necessary. I used to pity their abject state at first, but afterwards found they were just as happy as their nature was capable of being.’ But like his partner Henry Lascelles, who would commit suicide eight years later, there was something anguished about George Maxwell. ‘My mind is in Continual Agitation’, he went on, ‘I have as little enjoyment of life as anyone. Most people here have real or imaginary Crosses, which are the same in effect.’

  John Newton, a slave-trader who turned abolitionist, described the process whereby his crews on the Middle Passage experienced a ruination of their sensitivities: ‘The real or supposed necessity of treating the Negroes with rigour gradually brings a numbness upon the heart and renders those who are engaged in it too indifferent to the sufferings of their fellow-creatures.’ The old Jamaica hand, writing a book of advice to newcomers, explained the process of getting used to slavery on a West Indian plantation. ‘Like wax softened by the heat’, he wrote, men from other countries ‘melt into [West Indian] manners and customs’. ‘Men from their first entrance into the West Indies are taught to practice severities to the slaves’, he went on, ‘their minds are impressed by their brother book-keepers, or others, with strange and cruel ideas of the nature of blacks, so that in time their hearts become callous to all tender feelings which soften and dignify our nature; the most insignificant Connaught savage bumpkin, or silly Highland gauky, will soon learn to flog without mercy to shew his authority.’

  For many eighteenth-century writers on the West Indies, and on the nature of the ‘Creole’ whites, the institution of slavery seemed to have ruined everything and everybody – slave and master. The ‘despotick government over their poor slaves’, wrote Lieutenant Thompson, had made the planters ‘haughty, ignorant and cruel’. The violence that lubricated the whole system had turned the men who wielded it into sadists: one visitor reported that he had seen ‘terrible Whippings … for no other Reason, but to satisfy the brutish Pleasure of an Overseer’.

  This ‘brutish Pleasure’ is nowhere better illustrated than in the diaries of the violent and sadistic Thomas Thistlewood, an associate of the Beck-fords, who worked as an overseer for many years in Jamaica from 1750 onwards. Thistlewood tells us a lot about the unspeakably cruel day-today ‘ground-floor’ management of a provision or sugar estate in mid-century Jamaica. Most striking, however, is what emerges in these particular diaries from the human wreckage of slavery: perhaps the eighteenth century’s most unlikely love story.

  23

  THOMAS THISTLEWOOD IN JAMAICA: ‘TONIGHT VERY LONELY AND MELANCHOLY AGAIN’

  ‘Would to heaven I had been dropped upon the snows of Lapland, and never felt the blessed influence of the sun, so had I never burnt with these inflammatory passions.’

  Jamaica planter Belcour, in Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, 1771

  Thomas Thistlewood landed at Jamaica in April 1750, aged 29. Like Ned Ward, Richard Ligon, John Taylor and so many others, he came out at a time of personal crisis, to ‘mend his fortune’. He would live in Jamaica for the rest of his life.

  Thistlewood was born in Tupholme, Lincolnshire, a second son. His father died when he was six, leaving him a small inheritance of £200 – enough for a good education and a reasonably comfortable childhood, but not sufficient thereafter to set him up in business or property. He had spent his twenties drifting between agricultural jobs, and at one time, after a scandal when he got a young local girl pregnant, he spent two years travelling to India with the East India Company. But the end of his twenties saw him unemployed and penniless.

  He was also heartbroken: the family of the woman he loved had refused to let her marry a man with such meagre prospects. At this point, he decided, after a visit to the Jamaica Coffee House
in the City in October 1749, to try his luck in the West Indies.

  He collected some letters of introduction from local Lincolnshire gentry with Jamaican connections, one of whom recommended he contact Alderman William Beckford. In November he took a letter of introduction to Little Grosvenor Street, near Grosvenor Square, ‘to enquire for Mr Beckford Esqr … but was informed he is now in Jamaica’. Other contacts proved more rewarding, in particular William Dorrill of West moreland parish, in the underdeveloped extreme west of the island, near where Richard Beckford, William’s younger brother, held his substantial sugar acreage. Dorrill, who lived openly with his wife and coloured mistress, put Thistlewood up on his arrival, and promised a job when one became available.

  In the meantime, Thistlewood took up an offer from Florentius Vassall, scion of the Anglo-American family whose interests stretched across the Atlantic. Thus, a month after his arrival, he found himself in charge of 42 slaves as an overseer of the Vineyard Pen in the parish of St Elizabeth. Here, in one of the hottest parts of the island, cattle and provisions were raised and logwood harvested. Vassall paid Thistlewood an annual wage of £50, together with an allowance of rum, sugar and beef. After a year, Thistlewood had fallen out with Vassall and accepted a more lucrative position as head overseer on a sugar plantation called Egypt, owned by William Dorrill and manned by about 60 slaves and a handful of more junior white employees. Egypt was distinctly undercapitalised and had insufficient slaves, a tough place to make a success of.

  While running the sugar plantation, Thistlewood branched out into slave ownership, investing his wages in a young Ibo boy, Lincoln, in 1756, and three further slaves in 1758. All were branded with his TT mark on their right shoulder, using a silver branding iron purchased on 3 January that year. These slaves were then rented to other planters and provided a steady supplementary income. At other times they helped Thistlewood with small-scale trading of vegetables and fruits he grew on his own initiative. Profits were reinvested in further slaves and by 1767, he had accumulated some 20 workers and enough capital to take on a small plot of land himself, where he grew provisions and experimented with horticulture.