The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  By mid-century, inequality of wealth was extraordinary in Jamaica; Barbados looked almost egalitarian in comparison. Ten per cent of those who held wealth owned two thirds of the island’s total. At the other end of the scale from the slaves and their young white drivers, the owners of large Jamaican sugar plantations were thriving spectacularly.

  Against a climbing sugar price – from 17 shillings per hundredweight in 1733 to 43 shillings in 1747 – Jamaica had dramatically increased output as new plantations were established and consolidated. By 1750, nearly half of the sugar imported into the UK came from Jamaica, which also had the most productive mills.

  The total wealth of the island had risen fivefold between 1700 and 1750 and would triple again up to 1774 as Jamaica experienced extraordinary economic growth. This was based partly on trade with Spanish America, but mainly on rum and sugar. Between 1740 and 1790, the plantations marched along the north coast, through Llandovery, Rose Hall and Tryall, and southward on to the Westmoreland plain by way of Friendship and the Roaring River and Williamsfield estates. There had been about 400 sugar mills on the island in 1740; by 1786 there would be more than 1,000.

  This sugar production made the colony ‘not only the richest but the most considerable colony at this time under the government of Great Britain’, and its inhabitants the wealthiest. In spite of the radical inequalities, the average Jamaican white was worth between 20 and 30 times as much as the same man in Britain or North America. In 1774, per capita wealth in England was around £42; in Jamaica for a white man it was more than £1,000. While in Chesapeake only the richest planters had more than 30 slaves, in Jamaica the average sugar plantation in 1750 had some 200. Over the following 25 years, some 177,600 further slaves would be imported.

  Major beneficiaries of this sugar bounty were the Beckford family. On one occasion, it was suggested to Alderman William Beckford that he invest in a putative silver mine in Jamaica. Pointing to his fields of cane he said, ‘While we have so profitable a mine above ground we will not trouble for hunting for one underground.’ All the Beckfords had been using sugar profits to add to their inheritances: Richard had acquired three more plantations, Julines two, Francis one. Most aggressive was William, who had 22,000 acres in Jamaica by 1754, with his brothers and cousin Ballard (son of Peter’s brother, Thomas Beckford, killed in a duel) together owning about the same again, spread across 12 of Jamaica’s parishes. All had increased their slave holdings at the same time, William to some 2,000.

  The Price dynasty, founded by Francis, a soldier in Cromwell’s invasion force who had acquired more than 1,000 acres in his own lifetime, also prospered. Francis’s son Charles developed the huge, rich sugar estate at Worthy Park, which by the time of his death in 1730 was the most envied on the island. Of his nine children, only three outlived him, and only one for any length of time. This was another Charles, who had been sent back to England to attend Eton and Oxford. Sir Charles, as he soon became, owned in his prime about 26,000 acres and some 1,300 slaves, located in 11 of Jamaica’s parishes. This bloated portfolio came partly from canny dynastic marriages and successful speculations during Jamaica’s most expansive era, but mainly through Charles’s unashamed manipulation of his political power as close friend of the Governor, Edward Trelawny, and perennial Speaker of the assembly, a position he held almost continuously for 18 years, despite the accusations of his enemies that he was a man ‘of no abilities or experience’ who ‘frequently Lyes with Black women’. This political power enabled him to bypass rules about the size of patents that could be granted, and gave him first refusal when Crown lands came up for sale.

  In 1760, Price built the most grandiose surviving Jamaican Great House, Rose Hall, on the north coast of the island, at the staggering cost of £30,000, even though he was already being described as ‘rich a man as William Beckford, for possessions but in debt’. Eight years later he became Sir Charles, Baronet of Rose Hall. But this was only part of his empire: his house in Spanish Town occupied a whole block, and the mansion at Worthy Park had a staff of at least 20 individuals: a butler, two footmen, a coachman, a postillion, an assistant, first and second cooks, a storekeeper, a waiting maid, three house cleaners, three washerwomen and four seamstresses. Each of the children in the family was provided with a nurse and a boy or girl helper. When Price left his broad acres, he was accompanied by a handyman who made the trip on foot, holding on to the tail of his master’s horse.

  Sir Charles was a leading light in the Jamaica Association, formed at his Spanish Town mansion in 1751 by the island’s most powerful planters to check the power of the London-appointed governor and advance their own interests. With him in a triumvirate at the top of Jamaican politics was Richard Beckford, brother of Alderman William, and another man, Sussex-born Rose Fuller.

  The Fullers, originally gun makers (‘JF’-marked cannons are still to be seen in the Tower of London), were beneficiaries of a very lucrative marriage. In 1703, John Fuller had married Elizabeth Rose, the daughter of Fulke Rose and heir to his fortune, built up since the earliest days of English settlement in Jamaica, which now amounted to more than 15,000 acres.50 John Fuller renamed his family house, Brightling Park in Sussex, Rose Hall, and his second son, born in 1708, was named Rose in honour of the Jamaica fortune. The Fullers were also linked to the Price family through the Rose connection.

  Rose Fuller was educated at Cambridge, then trained as a doctor at Leyden, under the same tutor as Alderman William Beckford. He sailed to Jamaica on 11 December 1732 after the management of the inherited estates by attorneys had come in for criticism and, during the difficult 1730s, profits were slipping.

  Rose Fuller was a loud and rough-spoken man, hearty and genial, but prone to towering rages. Enemies said he was not malicious, but marked by a considerable lust for power. His first years in Jamaica, though, were scarred by money worries, homesickness and tragedy. Six or seven years after his arrival, he married a 17-year-old girl, Ithamar Mill, daughter of the island’s receiver general, and possibly a relative of both the Beckfords and the Vassalls. But the letter of congratulation from his father, John, had not even reached him from England before both his wife and her unborn child were dead from disease. Thereafter John constantly nagged his son to make provision for the properties should he die as well, while warning him to avoid the ‘High Living’ he had heard about in Jamaica. Rose did not marry again, although in his will he left a £100 legacy to ‘Mary Johnson Rose of J’ca a free mulatto woman formerly my housekeeper’.

  Rose was fortunate in having a lucrative sideline as a doctor, where, helped by the Sloane connection and a valuable contract to minister to the regular troops, he soon had an ‘Abundance of Business’. Meanwhile, he worked tirelessly to turn round a failing concern. When sugar prices rose at the end of the 1730s, so did his fortune, and in 1742, his younger brother Thomas started work as his sugar merchant in London. By 1745, Rose had inherited in full the Jamaica estates, was rich enough to be lending money to Richard Beckford, and was to be found in the thick of Jamaican politics – which, as with the Beckfords, in large part revolved around getting supporters in England to block anything the Governor proposed that undermined the interests of the planters, and seeing off the attacks of Jamaica’s merchant faction in Kingston, whose interests did not always coincide with those of the planters.

  When the likes of the Fullers, Beckfords and Prices descended – for assembly meetings or social events – Spanish Town came to life. It was ‘surprising to see the number of Coaches and Chariots which are perpetually plying’, one visitor reported. Gentlemen sailed past, ‘very gay in silk Coats, and Vests trimmed with silver’, waited on by blacks in the smartest livery, ‘tho’ ’tis the utmost Pain to the uneasy slave’. The inventory of a merchant tailor who died in 1756, with a client list that encompassed many of the sugar baron families, included black silk breeches, silver spurs, coats with silver or gold lace, Dresden ruffles, silver buckles and expensive belts and swords.

  The ladies, for
their part, were dressed ‘as richly’ as anywhere in Europe, ‘and appear with as good a Grace’. They wore the latest fashions from London or Paris – imported through Martinique – even if it was winter in Europe and the clothes were totally unsuited to the tropics.

  A visitor in the first part of the eighteenth century reported that at Spanish Town they ‘lately have got a Playhouse, where they retain a Set of extraordinary good Actors’. As in Barbados, there were frequent dances. The Governor’s Ball was the social occasion of the year, the best chance for show and one-upmanship. A governor’s residence, known as the King’s House, was completed in 1762 at a cost of £30,000 to the island. With Doric pillars in the grand style, it took up an entire 200-foot side of the main square of Spanish Town. It was, a writer on Jamaica in the 1770s declared, ‘the noblest and best edifice of the kind, either in North-America or any of the British colonies in the West-Indies’. (It is now, following fire, earthquake and neglect, a ghostly ruin, with only the façade surviving.)

  Most of the rest of Spanish Town, usually home to about 500 whites and some 800 slaves, free blacks and coloureds, was less impressive. Visitors could not help remarking that its most elegant days seemed to have passed with the departure of the Spanish, and the wrecking of the town by the Cromwellian soldiers. Those buildings that had survived had been ‘suffered to decay’, and many existed only as broken columns.

  Spanish Town was very much the planter capital, but most of the grandees only made brief visits before retreating to the relative cool of their upland plantations. Kingston was the merchant centre, and a much more vibrant and seemingly prosperous place, with about 5,000 each of whites and slaves, and some 1,200 free blacks or mulattoes. Here were superior brick-built houses of two or three storeys, their fronts shaded with a piazza below and a covered gallery above. With nearly 2,000 buildings by the 1770s, Kingston had grown beyond its original grid and straggled out into the hills behind.

  Beneath the civilised veneer of planters and merchants plying the streets in their smart carriages, both Jamaican towns featured many less salubrious activities. Gaming was the island’s favourite vice – dice, shovel-board, faro, ace of hearts, passage and hazard were all played. Prostitutes, including barely pubescent mulatto girls, touted openly for business, and in Kingston in particular there exisited an ‘incredible number of … grog shops, occupied by people of the vilest characters (rogues and whores) who … in those dens of infamy, riot away days and nights drinking new rum’.

  An eighteenth-century visitor to Jamaica was shocked by the appearance of passers-by in the streets. ‘The People seem all sickly’, he wrote, ‘their Complection is muddy, their Colour wan, and their Bodies meagre; they look like a Corpse … Death deals more in this Place than another.’

  Few children born to slaves survived. Thomas Thistlewood recorded in his diary 153 pregnancies, which produced 121 live births. Of the 66 whose fate is known, only 15 survived beyond seven years of age. In contrast, slave women in the Chesapeake were each bearing between six and eight children, of whom about four survived into adulthood. A 1757 letter to Abraham Redwood from his Antigua manager, ‘An Account of negroes and Stock dead on the Casada Garden Estate since our last Account’, gives a vivid picture of how death arrived to all ages: ‘Nestor a woman superannuated 80 years died with the timpani Hatty a man aged 40 Year died with the Dropsy constant runaway. Sombah a man aged 30 Years died with a disorder in his head and dropsy a constant runaway. Sarah a Girl aged 6 Years died with the Kings evil and small pox. Hannah a new negroe woman aged 20 Years died with the pox. Sarah a new negroe woman aged 22 years died being obstructed. Mary a woman aged 90 years died with old Age. Puthena a woman aged 22 years died a sudden death Oct. 4th. Gritta a Girl aged 7 Years died a sudden death Octob. 27th. Nanny aged 60 Years died with the Cax and flux, 15th Nov. Cudjoe a man aged 30 Years died with the pleurisy 5th January. Scipio a man aged 60 Years died with the Dropsy a constant runaway.’

  But in the streets of Kingston, this song was sung:

  ‘One, two, tree,

  All de same;

  Black, white, brown,

  All de same:

  All de same.

  One, two, &c.’

  Indeed, in Jamaica, the ever-present shadow of an early death, like the intimacy of sex, was a great leveller. In fact the proportionately few whites died at an even greater rate than the overworked, half-starved and brutally treated black slaves. Africans often had some immunity to yellow fever and malaria, but for white Europeans, Jamaica was the most deadly place in the world after West Africa. Kingston had the worst death rate, with as much as 20 per cent of the town’s population dying every year in the 1740s and 1750s. This is a similar rate to that suffered by London during the Great Plague; but in Kingston it continued every year. This was partly accounted for by the presence of vulnerable newcomers, seamen and transients, but elsewhere was bad too, with mortality at about 10 per cent per year. This was a worse rate even than South Carolina and Chesapeake during the seventeenth century, famously described as a ‘great charnel house’. Infant mortality in Jamaica even increased from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Before 1700, 46 per cent died before the age of five. After 1700 it was 60 per cent, as Jamaica’s commercial success made it a hub for new and more virulent strains of fever and smallpox. Surviving infancy was no guarantee of a long life: a third of 20-year-olds did not get to their thirtieth birthday, and half of 30-year olds were dead before reaching 40. John Taylor commented that the ‘Creolians … seldom live to be above five and thirty years, for as soon as they are twenty they begin to decline.’

  The contrast with the northern mainland colonies is striking. There had been similar emigration from Europe to the Caribbean and to North America – about half a million; but in 1776 there were only 50,000 whites in the British Caribbean compared to two million in the Thirteen Colonies. Although the white population of Jamaica did grow to nearly 20,000 by the 1770s, in the same time the population of some of the North American colonies had increased tenfold.

  Eighteenth-century writers on Jamaica, hoping to promote white migration to the colony, could not deny the fearsome death rate. One even wrote that although Jamaicans ‘declined sooner’, ‘They console themselves, however, that they can enjoy more of the real existence here in one hour, than the fair inhabitants of the frozen, foggy regions do in two.’ Most, though, like earlier promoters of Barbados, blamed the habits of the Creoles for contributing to their own downfall. Too many, wrote one, ‘keep late hours at night: lounges a-bed in the morning; gormandizes at dinner and supper on loads of flesh, fish, and fruits; loves poignant sauces; dilutes with ale, porter, punch, claret, and Madeira, frequently jumbling all together; and continues this mode of living till, by constantly manuring his stomach with such an heterogeneous compost, he had laid the foundation for a plentiful crop of ailments’. Everyone agreed that rum, or ‘Kill Devil’, had accounted for thousands.

  Certainly the diet and alcohol consumption of the typical planter was far from healthy; it has been estimated that Jamaica in the late eighteenth century imported as much alcohol per white as was consumed per capita in the United States in 1974. This doesn’t even include home-produced rum. But the sober sickened and died as well. One visitor remarked at being shocked at seeing ‘three English ladies, wives to some of the officers here, who only three months ago had come to this country as fair as lilies, blooming as roses, now pallid, sallow and sickly, with the appearance of being ten years older than they really are’. An old planter who had headed a respectable family wrote to a friend at the end of his life that he had lost to disease two wives and 16 children out of 21.

  So death, rather than reproduction, dominated Jamaican life. Family life, which underpinned society in England and in northern America, was virtually non-existent. Marriages only lasted an average of eight years before one of the partners died, and few left surviving children. As in Barbados, those youngsters who did reach adulthood would seldom have parents still a
live. Lack of parental supervision and early inheritance of property contributed to the ‘anarchic individualism’ of the West Indies.

  ‘The frequent occurrence’ of death, one visitor to Jamaica noted, ‘renders it an object of far less solemnity than in England. The victims are almost immediately forgotten: another fills their office, and their place knows them no more for ever.’ When Thomas Thistlewood arrived in Jamaica in 1750, he was told that of the 136 who had arrived on a ship 16 months earlier, 122 were dead. He reacted fearfully, worrying about diseases and trying to ascertain treatments that worked. But this only lasted a year; thereafter he assumed a more fatalistic attitude to death. In the same way, his early days see him shocked at the cursoriness of a slave’s burial, and noting with alarm the deaths of the people he knows. But soon the frequent deaths, even of his own family, elicit little emotion. In contrast, New Englanders, in a much healthier climate, thought about death all the time.

  ‘No Sett of Men are more unconcerned at [death’s] Approach’, wrote an observer of the Jamaica Creoles. ‘They live well, enjoy their Friends, drink heartily, make Money, and are quite careless of Futurity.’ Indeed, the imminence of death contributed to the sense of impermanence, the narrow hedonism and the absence of the preserving spirit found in North American colonies. There was, one writer complained, a ‘lack of public spirit’ in Jamaica: there were hardly any bridges, fords or roads. Schools were thin on the ground, and universities and libraries non-existent. While the North Americans had Harvard and Yale, Jamaicans who could afford it almost all sent their sons to England to be educated (the number of West Indian boys attending Eton increased sixfold in the second half of the eighteenth century, dwarfing the number of boys from North America by a factor of about seven). Only in 1721 did Jamaica get its first printing press, nearly 100 years after Massachusetts. Few people went to church or read books (Thistlewood being an exception), preferring ‘gaming’ to ‘the Belles Letteres’ and ‘a Pack of Cards’ to ‘the Bible’.