The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  Thistlewood set to work to rebuild his business, but the destruction had made him lose heart, and he decided to sell up. No buyer was to be found, and the following year his health began to fail. For the first time since he had arrived in Jamaica he started attending church. He died in 1786, aged 65.

  The 1780 hurricane hit Barbados on Tuesday 10 October. In Bridgetown, 3,000 were killed as the city was reduced to ‘a heap of ruins’. Heavy cannon were carried 100 feet from the forts. Outside the town, livestock and crops were devastated. Admiral Rodney, still on station in the West Indies, commented that ‘the most Beautiful Island in the World has the appearance of a land laid waste by Fire and Sword’.

  Further hurricanes in 1784, 1785 and 1786 contributed to the withering of the islands’ agriculture, and led to an appalling death rate among the slave population – 15,000 dying on Jamaica alone between 1780 and 1787, and 3,000 in the Leewards.

  William Beckford of Somerly was hit as hard as Thistlewood in the 1780 hurricane, with his own house wrecked and ‘not a single set of works, trash-house, or other subordinate buildings … not greatly injured, or entirely destroyed’. The next morning, he wrote, ‘the whole prospect had the appearance of a desert, over which the burning winds of Africa had lately past’.

  In the aftermath, Beckford reported, Negroes and ‘many white people’ set about plundering and ‘having made free with the rum that was floating in the inundations, began to grow insolent and unruly’. Several puncheons had to be ‘immediately staved’. Scenes of riot and inebriety continued for several days, and for many weeks after the hurricane the air was full of the stench of unburied bodies, which ‘occasioned a kind of pestilence, that swept away a great proportion of those who had providentially escaped the first destruction’.

  By the following year, the Beckford of Somerly estates owed nearly £80,000 to the ‘rapacious and unfeeling’ mortgage holders. But Somerly was not uniquely incompetent, gullible or unlucky. By 1787, the greater parts of the plantations throughout the West Indies were under mortgage to merchants in London, Liverpool and Bristol. Along with the hurricanes, a succession of droughts and the ravages of the cane-borer, a moth larva, brought the islands to the verge of ruin. With foreclosing, properties ended up in the hands of people utterly unqualified to run tropical agriculture enterprises and who had never even seen the West Indies.

  In September 1784, Somerly wrote from ‘Black River, Jamaica’ to his cousin, Beckford of Fonthill, ostensibly to congratulate him on his election as MP for Wells (the letter indicates that the two cousins had not met). ‘Come not to Jamaica’, he warned gloomily. Somerly added that he was ‘too proud to be dependent’, but hinted at the real purpose of the letter when he praised Fonthill for having a reputation for generosity. Whether his cousin helped him or not is unknown. If he did, it was not enough. (Somerly would later describe his cousin Fonthill as a man ‘of no heart, no feeling’.)

  In the meantime, Somerly’s coterie of artists had come to grief. Wick-stead had fallen victim to the prevalence of cheap rum, heat and boredom, and drunk away his talent and then his life, dying of delirium tremens in Jamaica in 1786. George Robertson suffered at Hertford from ‘the plaguey climate’, and died in London in 1788 less than 40 years old. Both had lost most of their Jamaican paintings and drawings during the hurricane.

  Some time between 1786 and 1788, when he learnt that ‘his creditors were proceeding hastily’, Somerly ‘determined to come to England to put his affairs into the best train he could’ and ‘to recover a constitution broken down by sickness and affliction’. But his carriage was intercepted by bailiffs before it reached London and he was imprisoned as a debtor in the notorious Fleet gaol.

  Here he was visited by the writer Fanny Burney and her father. ‘What a place – surrounded with fresh horrors! – for the habitation of such a man!’ Dr Burney wrote to his daughter in October 1791. Once a week Burney’s nephew visited Somerly, now suffering ‘severe attacks of the gout, and alarming spasmodic complaints’, and played to him ‘on a miserable pianoforte’. Somerly’s friends blamed his guileless and trusting nature for his predicament.

  After some four and a half years in the Fleet, during which he wrote his two books about Jamaica, Beckford was released. His estates were gone, although his creditors left him a small annual income. Fanny Burney went to see him and found he had ‘an air of dejection, a look, a voice, a manner, that all speak the term of his sufferings to have been too long for his spirits to recruit’. He lived for a few more years, contributing articles to the Monthly Mirror magazine under the name ‘Recluse’, but died in 1799 of an apoplectic fit.

  29

  PEACE AND FREEDOM

  ‘Now lick and lock-up done wid’

  Emancipation song, 1833

  The French Revolution in 1789 unleashed a new wave of war and tumult in the West Indies. Perhaps most important of all for the region, it led to a sequence of extraordinary events on the island of Hispaniola. Before the revolution, St Domingue, the French half of the island, had been a highly productive sugar colony, but events in Paris threw the delicate balance between slaves, whites and free blacks and mulattoes into turmoil. In 1790, the mulattoes rose, demanding an end to the restriction of their rights. The leader of the revolt was captured, tied to a wheel and battered with hammers before being left out to die. But in August the following year the black slaves rebelled and took their revenge on their masters. Two thousand whites were killed and 180 sugar factories and 200 plantations destroyed as fighting continued. It was the almost total ruin of the previously prosperous colony.

  In February 1793, France declared war on Britain, leading to a fresh round of invasions and counter-invasions. Martinique was taken by the British in March 1794, St Lucia and Guadeloupe the next month, and Port-au-Prince, capital of St Domingue, in June. But later that year, Victor Hugues, a disciple of Robespierre, arrived in the Caribbean, proclaiming the emancipation of the blacks and raising an army of former slaves. Guadeloupe was recaptured, and slave rebellions inspired and supported in Grenada and St Vincent. Both islands were wrecked. At the Alliabo plantation in St Vincent, the British manager was killed by being passed though his own sugar mill.

  In Jamaica there was an unrelated rising by the maroons, triggered by an incident involving pigs being stolen, but motivated by simmering resentments over encroachment by the planters on maroon lands. The island was put under martial law and troops heading for St Domingue were hastily recalled, and sent against the maroons, where they suffered heavy losses from ambushes. But when the Jamaican government imported 100 bloodhounds from Cuba, the maroons surrendered. Six hundred were exiled to Nova Scotia, and then eventually Sierra Leone.

  A large expedition that left England in August 1795 restored British rule in St Vincent and Grenada, and captured St Lucia in May 1796. Trinidad was taken from Spain the following year.

  But the cost was immense. The British army was pretty much consumed in defence of the sugar islands, and in the attempt to defeat the freed slave armies of Toussaint L’Ouverture in St Domingue, then fighting under the flag of revolutionary France. It is estimated that as many as 44,000 British troops died in the West Indies between 1793 and 1801, about half of those sent, together with about 20,000 seamen. On the biggest scale ever, it was yet another repeat of the Hispaniola disaster of 1655.

  In September 1798, the last British positions in St Domingue were abandoned in return for an agreement from Toussaint L’Ouverture to leave Jamaica unmolested.53 Slave owners in Jamaica and elsewhere in the West Indies remained nervous. In November 1798, Henry Wildman wrote to Beckford of Fonthill: ‘I am sorry to inform you St Domingo is totally evacuated by our Troops … I do not like [it]. Black Governors, Black Generals Etc. are very bad examples to our Plantations.’

  But ironically, the 1791 revolt and destruction in Hispaniola and the resulting collapse of sugar production on the island came to the rescue of the British planters, albeit only for a short period. Almost overnight there was a
huge rise in the sugar price, as continental buyers previously supplied by St Domingue looked to London to supply their needs. After 25 hard years, the old prosperity returned, and the collapse of the old plantation system in the British islands was delayed for 20 years. ‘Tho’ we lament the principal cause of such high prices’, wrote the Jamaican assembly to the King in 1792, ‘we declare to your Majesty that only such accidental and temporary increase in the value of our Staples could have saved this Island from absolute Bankruptcy’.

  Jamaican sugar production, helped by the recent introduction of Bourbon cane, a new variety more resistant to the ravages of pests, now soared, and once again the island was considered in Britain as ‘the principal source of national opulence’. The newly returned confidence of the sugar interest is evidenced in the construction of the West India Dock in London, completed in 1802, when it was the largest dock complex in the world. Its huge storage capacity, some 80,000 hogsheads, enabled sugar importers to control the supply, and therefore sustain high prices for their product.

  Jamaica enjoyed something of an ‘Indian summer’. Accounts by visitors to the island in the 1790s are as full of wonder at the opulence of the planters as were stories from Barbados in the seventeenth century. It was, read an account from 1793, ‘no uncommon thing to find, at the country habitations of the planters, a splendid side-board loaded with plate, and the choicest wines, a table covered with the finest damask, and a dinner of perhaps sixteen or twenty covers’. The new houses of the planters, we are told, ‘may vie, in the elegance of design, and excellence of the workmanship, with many of the best country seats in England … The mahogany work and ornaments within have been justly admired for their singular beauty, being, as I am informed, selected with great expense.’ Huge sums were also spent on alcohol, by freemen of all classes – in Kingston alone there were 270 rum shops in 1787.

  ‘Such eating and drinking I never saw!’ wrote Maria Nugent, the wife of the Governor of Jamaica. Born in New Jersey in 1777 to a loyalist family, she had moved to England at the end of the War of Independence and married George Nugent. She arrived in Jamaica in 1801 and kept a detailed diary of everything she came across in her new home. She was amazed at the conspicuous consumption of the planters. ‘Such loads of all sorts of high, rich, seasoned things, and really gallons of wine and mixed liquors as they drink!’ she exclaimed of one meal, which included claret, Madeira and hock. And this was just breakfast. In short, she concluded, ‘it was all as astounding as it was disgusting’.

  Nugent gives us a rare glimpse of the lives of the white ‘Creole’ women in Jamaica, many of whom she found ‘clumsy’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘awkward’. She mocked their accent: ‘saying dis and dat and toder’, ‘an ignorant drawling out of their words that is very tiresome if not disgusting’. In fact, white women in the West Indies suffered from lack of jobs or access to education, and often crippling isolation on country estates. With slaves performing duties in the home and in the bedroom, there was little for them to do except be decorative. Somerly wrote that the white women of Jamaica ‘suffer much, submit to much and lead a life of misery’.

  Maria Nugent’s diary also traced her constant concern for the health of her children and the chances of them getting off the island alive. Indeed, the West Indies remained deadly. An arresting account from around 1800 tells of the arrival of a shipload of white visitors. As soon as the vessel neared Kingston, ‘a canoe, containing three or four black females, came to the side of the ship, for the purpose of selling oranges, and other fruits. When about to depart, they gazed at the passengers, whose number seemed to surprise them; and as soon as the canoe pushed off, one of them sung the following words, while the others joined in the chorus, clapping their hands regularly, while it lasted.

  New-come buckra

  He get sick;

  He tak fever,

  He be die;

  He be die.

  New-come, &c.

  The song, as far as we could hear, contained nothing else, and they continued singing it, in the manner just mentioned, as long as they were within hearing.’

  Two years after Maria Nugent’s arrival in Jamaica, a case came to court that caught the eye of the public in Britain. In September 1781, a ship owned by a Liverpool merchant, the Zong, had sailed with a cargo of slaves from Africa for the Caribbean. But the vessel lost its way, water began to grow even scarcer than usual, and an epidemic started on board. Crew and slaves began to die. At this point, the captain, Luke Collingwood, called together his crew and pointed out that if the slaves died naturally, the loss would be to the ship’s owners; but if, on some pretext of the safety of the crew, ‘they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters’. In spite of the objection of the first mate, a total of 133 slaves were flung overboard. The insurers refused to pay, and the shocking case went to court, thoroughly publicised by Granville Sharp.

  The same year, the Quakers delivered a petition against the slave trade to Parliament, and numerous tracts started appearing condemning or defending the activities of the slavers. In 1787, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in England. At its core were Quakers, but it also included Anglicans such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson had won a student prize for an essay he had written while at Cambridge University, published in 1786 as An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. He now became a fulltime and paid agent for the new Society, and went to Liverpool to collect evidence.

  The campaigners took the tactical decision to go after the trade, rather than the institution of slavery, in the hope that if it ended, the planters would be forced to treat their slaves better and ultimately move towards emancipation. They also recognised that they needed representation in Parliament; in 1787, Clarkson called on William Wilberforce, a wealthy independent MP for Hull and evangelical Christian. He gave Wilberforce a copy of his essay, and became a regular visitor. Clarkson also toured the country, organising petitions, holding public meetings and encouraging the establishment of local chapters of the Society.

  With the encouragement of William Pitt the Younger, in May 1789 Wilberforce made his first speech in the House of Commons condemning the slave trade, and in April 1791 he introduced his first Parliamentary Bill to abolish the trade, calling the ‘bloody traffic’ a ‘scandal’. ‘Posterity’, he said, ‘looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country.’ But Parliament, alarmed at the radicalism of the French Revolution, defeated the Bill comfortably.

  Nonetheless, Thomas Wildman, writing to his brother in Jamaica in May 1791, predicted that ‘the Slave Trade will in a few years be abolished, as the party against it will never rest’. He urged the stocking of the Beck-ford plantations to the maximum while they still could.

  In response to the defeat of the Bill, an attempt was made to effect social reform through economic pressure. Every person who consumed West Indian produce was ‘guilty of the crime of murder’, wrote one pamphleteer. Tea was a ‘blood-sweetened beverage’. Furthermore, he went on, West Indian sugar contained the pus from sores on the bodies of blacks suffering from yaws and jiggers. As for rum, in a puncheon of the product from Jamaica ordered lately by a merchant it was said there had been found ‘The whole Body of a roasted Negro’. In turn, writers sympathetic to the planters fought their corner. As this debate continued, the import of East Indian sugar increased tenfold as buyers called upon their grocers to supply them with the free-labour product from the Orient. In the United States a similar campaign was waged, which saw a huge increase in the production of sugar from maple.

  Wilberforce tried again the following year, supported by more than 500 anti-slave trade or anti-slavery petitions, with the signatures of nearly 400,000 ordinary people as well as those of such parliamentary giants as Charles James Fox and William Pitt. The latter declared: ‘no nation has plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain�
�. A compromise solution – that the trade would be outlawed in four years’ time – was passed, but the Bill met defeat in the House of Lords.

  Wilberforce introduced further measures during the decade, but public interest was now waning, and the sugar lobby in Parliament still strong enough to keep abolition at bay. On 4 March 1795, Jamaica’s agent in London, Stephen Fuller, wrote to the island’s council: ‘I have the great pleasure to inform you that on Thursday last we mustered up Force enough in the House of Commons to put off Mr Wilberforce’s Motion for six months, by a Majority of 17.’

  In the United States, individual northern states had started outlawing the importation of slaves from the 1780s onwards (with partial measures enacted even earlier). In 1787, Rhode Island became the first state to ban its citizens from any involvement in the slave trade. Moses Brown, together with the Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport, had led the campaign that produced this victory. Hopkins described Newport as the ‘town the most guilty, respecting the slave trade, of any on this continent, as it has been, in a great measure, built up by the blood of the poor Africans’. In 1789, Moses Brown organised an abolitionist society in Providence that was instrumental in achieving passage of the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794, prohibiting ships destined to transport slaves to any foreign country from outfitting in American ports. The Abolition Society, wrote an anonymous critic in the Providence Gazette, was ‘created not to ruin only one good citizen but to ruin many hundreds in the United States … these people you have called “Negro Dealers” and “kidnappers” are some of the “very best men” in Rhode Island’. The diatribe was signed ‘A Citizen’, but it was actually John Brown, Moses’s brother. In 1797, John would be prosecuted by Moses’s Society having once more fallen for the lure of the ‘Guiney’ trade. Although he was acquitted, his vessel, the Hope, was condemned.