The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  In fact, the British were simply unable to match the combined forces of America, France and Spain, particularly when there were invasion fears at home. The planters may have felt abandoned, but actually the opposite was the case. George III and his ministers persisted in the war in part because of their belief that the loss of the Thirteen Colonies inevitably meant the loss of the West Indies, which were seen as essential for maintaining national wealth and greatness. (In 1773, exports from Grenada alone were worth eight times those from Canada.) The defence of Jamaica was given priority over the war in America, and when the prospect of a French war had loomed, the British government had agonised over whether to abandon the mainland effort to launch offensive operations in the Caribbean. Following the declaration of war by the French, the British had given up Philadelphia, then the largest city in the United States and the capital of the Revolution, primarily to free up 5,000 troops for the conquest of St Lucia.

  In December 1780, Britain gained a new enemy, declaring war on the Netherlands, having been angered by the sheltering of American privateers in Dutch ports, and in the hope of cutting off naval supplies to France. News of this reached Rodney in the Caribbean in February the following year, along with orders to capture the Dutch island of St Eustatius, which had become a major trans-shipment point for supplies, particularly gunpowder, to Washington’s army in America. The tiny island offered no resistance, and Rodney then proceeded to loot everything he could find in the crowded warehouses, regardless of whether they belonged to neutrals, or even friends.

  Rodney remained at St Eustatius for three crucial months, preoccupied with the sale of the captured goods, leaving his deputy, Rear Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, to attempt to intercept a large French fleet under Vice Admiral the Comte de Grasse. When this failed, de Grasse succeeded in capturing Tobago in June.

  As was usual, with the advent of the hurricane season that summer, naval operations in the West Indies came to an end. Rodney returned to England, partly because of poor health, and also to answer charges of improper conduct over the looting of St Eustatius. He sent three ships to Jamaica, and only 10, under Hood, north to the Chesapeake, where General Earl Cornwallis, the commander of the British army in the southern American colonies, had fortified himself in Yorktown and was waiting complacently for the Royal Navy to come and collect him. De Grasse, however, proceeded north with his entire fleet of 26 ships of the line.

  It was a fatal miscalculation. Heavily outnumbered, even with support from the New York squadron, Hood was unable to break the French blockade of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. A second relief force was sent from New York on 19 October, but it was too late, Cornwallis having surrendered with upwards of 6,000 men the previous day to Generals Washington and Rochambeau. When he heard the news, the British Prime Minister Lord North exclaimed, ‘My God! It is all over.’

  The following month, de Grasse returned to the Caribbean with the intention of sweeping the British from the West Indies. Soon he had almost achieved his mission. In January, he covered a French landing at St Kitts. After an epic siege of the redoubt at Brimstone Hill, the island surrendered on 13 February. Nevis and Montserrat fell soon afterwards. Now only Jamaica, Barbados, newly captured St Lucia and drought-stricken Antigua remained of the British West Indian empire.

  The brave resistance at Brimstone Hill had, however, bought time for Rodney to return with his fleet. Sailing from England on 16 January, told by the head of the Admiralty, ‘the fate of this Empire is in your hands’, he reached Carlisle Bay in Barbados on 19 February. Hearing that de Grasse was at anchor at Fort Royal in Martinique, preparing for a descent on Jamaica with 5,400 men, Rodney headed for St Lucia, taking shelter in Gros Islet Bay (now Rodney Bay), from where Martinique was within sight. Rodney’s men worked day and night provisioning, watering and refitting the fleet.

  The inhabitants of Jamaica had learned of de Grasse’s plans, which included linking up with a Spanish force from Hispaniola, and were in a state of panic. The militia had been called up, heavy taxation imposed to meet the cost of defensive preparations, and the island’s roads had been rendered impassable by felling large trees across them. Trade was at a standstill. A message from a spy on St Thomas read, ‘The attack on Jamaica makes more noise than all North America. Spain has told France that cost what it may they wish to have Jamaica.’

  On 8 April the French fleet – 37 ships of the line and a large troop convoy – left Martinique to link up with a Spanish force at Santo Domingo to invade Jamaica. As well as siege weapons, French supplies included 50,000 sets of manacles destined for Jamaica’s slaves. Rodney’s fleet, evenly matched in numbers with that of de Grasse, followed in pursuit. After four days of manoeuvring in little wind, battle was joined at seven in the morning under the lee of Dominica.

  As was standard in such encounters, the two lines of vessels started the battle sailing in parallel in opposite directions, blasting their cannons in a naval artillery fight. But at the height of the battle, with visibility impaired by clouds of smoke, a shift in the wind threw both sides into confusion, and a number of British vessels tacked through the French line in three places. The unintended move brought chaos and carnage to the French, with the ships around de Grasse’s flagship, the massive 110-gun Ville de Paris, now surrounded and the main French fleet separated from their van and fired on from both sides. When the battle ended at about half past six in the evening, five French ships had been captured, including the Ville de Paris, one sunk, and the rest, according to a letter Rodney sent on to Jamaica, ‘miserably shattered’. According to a British doctor who boarded a captured enemy ship, ‘the decks were covered with the blood and mangled limbs of the dead, as well as the wounded and dying’. French naval supremacy in the theatre had been consigned to the depths, and Jamaica saved from invasion.

  The ‘Battle of the Saintes’ was not materially as decisive as Rodney made out. The ‘Breaking of the Line’ had allowed much of the French fleet, previously trapped between the coast and the British, to escape to leeward. But it had a great psychological effect, with extraordinary rejoicing in England, and mutual recriminations and a series of courts martial in France. When the news reached Jamaica, the relief was immense. Church bells were rung and flags triumphantly hoisted. Two years later, Stephen Fuller would write to Rodney, now a lord, giving him the news that the Jamaica assembly had voted ‘to prepare an elegant Marble Statue of your Lordship’. The florid monument, with Rodney in Roman toga, still stands in the main square in Spanish Town. Rodney replied to Fuller’s letter, thanking the inhabitants of Jamaica and assuring them that ‘No Man has their Interest more at Heart than myself, being convinced that Jamaica is the best Jewel in the British Diadem, and that too much care cannot be taken to preserve it.’

  Jamaica had been saved, and at the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, St Lucia and Tobago were surrendered, but Britain recovered its former possessions in the Caribbean. Yet the loss of the Thirteen Colonies changed everything for the sugar planters. The West India interest in London, planters on the islands, and statesmen of the new republic of the United States all agreed that trading relations had to be restarted. Stephen Fuller, in a memorial to the government, said it was required by ‘the invincible law of absolute necessity’. John Adams declared: ‘They can neither do without us, not we without them. The Creator has placed us upon the globe in such a situation that we have occasion for each other, and politicians and artful contrivances cannot separate us.’

  But for London, yielding to those wishing to establish the pre-war status quo would have been the death blow to the old continental system and the Navigation Acts. Many argued that the islanders’ clamour to be given access to supplies from a now foreign source should be ignored while they continued to enjoy their peculiar century-and-a-quarter-old monopoly rights for the UK market. Here, for the first time, the powerful West India lobby looked like it could lose the battle.

  However, for the first couple of years after the war, Britis
h naval commanders in the Caribbean turned a blind eye to continued trade with the North Americans. An exception was young Horatio Nelson, a frigate captain, appointed in March 1784 to command the 28-gun Boreas. Nelson had served in the Caribbean before. He was on the Jamaica squadron from 1777 to 1782, and in June 1779 had been appointed to Peter Beckford’s old role as post captain in charge of the batteries at Fort Charles. But he seems to have picked up little understanding of how things were done in the West Indies. ‘Our Governors and Custom-house officers pretended … they had a right to trade’, he wrote, appalled, to his brother in England. ‘I seized many of their Vessels, which brought all parties upon me; and I was persecuted from one Island to another, that I could not leave my ship.’ Although ostracised for ‘doing my duty by being true to the interest of Great Britain’, Nelson did manage to meet and marry a rich Nevis widow, Frances Nisbet, before he left the West Indies in June 1787.

  After a certain amount of debate in London, a decision was made in 1786 to definitively shut out American ships. Canada and Ireland, it was hoped, would fill the gap. As compensation, the Admiralty sent an expedition under Lieutenant William Bligh to the Pacific to bring back breadfruit trees to feed the slaves. This effort came to grief with a mutiny on the Bounty, but a second expedition successfully introduced the tree to the islands. Unfortunately few slaves would eat the resulting fruit.

  In the face of the new embargo, there was large-scale smuggling and Canada massively increased its exports to the West Indies of lumber and fish, but it was not enough. Costs for essential supplies rose considerably for the planters. At the same time, the price of sugar was falling, and duties set during the war were not removed, as the increased Sugar Tax had become one of the most productive sources of national income. Further problems were now crowding in on the sugar barons, some from no fault of their own, others of their own making. Worst of all, pehaps, were the disastrous effects of absentee ownership of the sugar estates.

  28

  THE WEST INDIAN ‘NABOBS’: ABSENTEEISM, DECADENCE AND DECLINE

  ‘Despair … has cut off more people in the West-Indies than plagues or famine.’

  William Beckford of Somerly

  In increasing numbers during the last decades of the eighteenth century, sugar planters, unable to feel that the West Indies was home, and scared of the constant war and frightening mortality rate, returned to Britain to become absentee proprietors. Their plantations almost always suffered.

  The estates of absentee proprietors were managed for them by locally based ‘attorneys’. Some ran 15 to 20 plantations and were ‘nabobs’ in their own right, but most looked after about five or six. The managers were paid a commission out of the crop, in return for running the planting, harvesting, processing and shipping of the sugar, although most of the hands-on work was organised by an overseer.

  The system was wide open to abuse, and few attorneys could resist the temptation to steal from the absent planter. The Codringtons, once they had left Antigua, were repeatedly forced to fire their managers there for dishonesty. In general, short-termism dominated: improvements were seldom made because they temporarily reduced net returns; buildings and equipment were allowed to become dilapidated; fields were tilled until exhausted and then left to grow up in weeds. New lands were seldom opened up to cultivation because of the large initial outlay and great amount of supervision required. There was no incentive to experiment or improvise.

  In most cases, life and conditions for the enslaved workers were even worse on absentee estates. At Drax Hall in Jamaica, the number of live births on the plantation was five times higher when locally owned than when it passed into the hands of the absentee Alderman William Beckford.

  Alderman Beckford’s brother Richard had died in 1756, leaving an estate worth about £120,000, which included nearly 1,000 slaves, two cattle pens and three contiguous sugar estates in Westmoreland parish, about seven miles north-east of Savannah-la-Mar, called Roaring River, Fort William and Williamsfield.

  In 1765, when he was 21, his son William Beckford of Somerly graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, and came into possession of his inheritance of about 7,000 acres of prime Jamaican land. Although sugar output had declined since 1756, the estates seemed to be profitable, and Somerly was in no hurry to sail to Jamaica. Instead, with two friends, he embarked on an extensive Grand Tour of the sights of Europe.

  His father had wanted him to become a politician, but having returned from Europe and married an ‘uncommon beauty’, his cousin Charlotte Hay, he lived the life of the gentry squire at Somerly Hall in Suffolk, giving a large dinner for locals each Sunday after church.

  But when the profits from the Jamaican plantations began to fall, he made a decision to go to Jamaica ‘to view the romantic wonders of his estates, and to witness the resources that might render them more valuable’, as a friend later wrote of him. It was a very different manifesto to those of his Beckford forebears, who had been so hungry for political and financial dominance. Somerly had a plan to write a book, complete with illustrations, about these ‘romantic wonders’, and for that purpose took with him an artist he had met in Rome, Philip Wickstead, to serve as secretary and illustrator. Another artist, George Robertson, was also invited to be part of this vision of a tropical salon, and followed soon afterwards.

  Charlotte, Somerly and Wickstead sailed to Jamaica in February 1774. The promise of ‘romantic wonders’ did not disappoint. Somerly was awestruck by the mysterious beauty of the Blue Mountains, ‘covered with a sapphire haze’. He saw everything through the prism of his Grand Tour. Jamaica, he wrote, was no ‘less romantic than, the most wild and beautiful situations of Frescati, Tivoli, and Albano’. His new home in Westmoreland parish was ‘as agreeable as any spots in Italy, that have had the advantage of a Salvatore Rosa, or a Poussin to perpetuate their beauties’.

  Somerly’s part of Westmoreland is, indeed, beautiful and dramatic. Water draining from the limestone ‘Cockpit Country’ to the east bubbles up in deep blue springs; there is a profusion of bird and animal life, and wildly rich and almost overpoweringly green vegetation everywhere. Most days, in the early afternoon, the temperature and humidity rise sharply, the skies darken, and suddenly, with a huge rushing round, the air seems almost completely full of water as rain spouts down.

  Somerly also saw great potential in his lush tropical acreage: ‘the vegetation here, and the stamina of the land are of such a nature’, he wrote to a friend in England, ‘that it argues infatuation, or sloth in the inhabitants, that they are not in general more rich and independent’. The state of his own plantations, he wrote, ‘was sufficient to convince me of the negligence of my attornies; and had I delay’d my projected voyage a few years longer the consequences might have been fatal to my properties’. The managers, he said, were ‘vacant and inactive’, more concerned with eating and drinking the products of the plantations than with stopping the estates falling into ruin.

  Taking up the reins of business himself, he set up home at Hertford Pen, in the low mountainous region of Westmoreland parish. This afforded him and his wife a more salubrious climate than his sugar plantations on the flat plains. ‘The situation of Hertford is one of the pleasantest in the country’, an English visitor wrote. ‘It is on very gently rising ground, nearly equally removed from the sea, and lofty mountains covered with wood, and at a short distance from a fine river.’

  Somerly set about expanding the animal pens to raise cattle and horses for market (and to manure the canefields), and planted guinea grass for fodder with great success. Experiments planting English wheat, barley and oats fared less well. He also expanded the provision grounds available to the estates’ slaves for growing their own food. At the same time he set about repairing or replacing the estates’ sugar-processing machinery. He also built and lavishly furnished a new house for his family, costing nearly £10,000. By 1776, two years after his arrival, he was calling Jamaica ‘My native country’ and ‘paternal soil’.

  Putting
the estates in order had not come cheap, but for now, William of Somerly remained optimistic. ‘I have endeavor’d as far as was in my power to correct [the attorneys’] past abuses; and I shall expect to see my estates establish’d, in the course of a few years, upon an economical and an advantageous footing’, he wrote in a letter of 1776. He was concerned, he said, about the very considerable increase in the money he now owed in England, but, he wrote to a friend, ‘I hope to make an annual reduction of my DEBTS, and to see my properties increase as THEY diminish; and when this shall be in any degree effected, I shall carry Mrs Beckford back with tenfold satisfaction to her friends in England.’

  Two months after landing in Jamaica, the Beckfords had been invited to dinner with the local Cope family, where they met Thomas Thistle-wood. Thereafter, Beckford would occasionally hire out some of the slaves owned by Thistlewood. Two men of such different rank would never have socialised in England, but in June 1778, Thistlewood spent the day at Hertford Pen. In the morning they played billiards, and ‘Looked over many Folio Volumes of excellent plates of the Ruins of Rome’, as Thistlewood noted in his diary. After a ride around the Pen, they were joined for dinner by a handful of local worthies, with the men then playing a game of cricket. Thistlewood, a keen horticulturalist, was sent home with ‘some geranium slips, flower seeds, jonquil roots, &c’.

  Beckford of Somerly was uneasy about ‘the levelling principle that obtains among the white people of Jamaica’, who, of course, stuck together for their mutual protection. He preferred the ‘chain of subordination’ prevalent in Europe, which, he wrote, ‘preserves the strength of the whole’. Somerly found the lower classes of white people in Jamaica ‘idle, drunken, worthless and immoral’. However, whatever else he was, Thistlewood was neither a drunk nor lazy, and he seems to have passed muster with Somerly, who was ‘very affable and free’ with him. A few days after his visit, Somerly sent Thistlewood six engravings made from George Robertson’s paintings of the Fort William estate, and would later return the visit and be treated to a lavish feast of the very best of Thistlewood’s produce and be lent some of his impressive collection of books.