Both Henry Drax’s heir, Thomas Shetterden-Drax, and Thomas’s son Henry married extremely well, with the result that Henry’s son, another Thomas, inherited three fortunes on the death of his father in 1755 – Drax, Ernle and Erle, part of which included the huge Charborough estate in Dorset. Twice in the next three generations there was no male heir, but each time the man marrying into the fortune took the name Drax, so it has survived to this day. With each successor, the plantation and Hall in Barbados has passed to a new Drax, though none have lived on the island for any length of time. One of these men, John Drax, previously Sawbridge, became an MP in 1841, as most of his Drax forebears had done. He was known as ‘the silent member’; his only speech in the House was to ask if a window could be shut. In the 2010 general election in Britain, Richard Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, who prefers to be known simply as Richard Drax, became MP for South Dorset.54
Outside academic and local circles, the crucial role of Sir James Drax, the first sugar baron, is little known. His only likeness, the bust commissioned by his adoring son Henry, sits unremarked on a high, dusty shelf in the small, unexceptional City of London church of St Anne and St Agnes, almost opposite the Goldsmiths’ livery hall, where Sir James’s eldest son was apprenticed.
Christoper Codrington, although dying without legitimate heir, ensured the longevity of his name, as intended, through the bequests in his ‘soldier’s will’ to create a library at All Souls, Oxford, and to build Codrington College.
The college has endured numerous vicissitudes. Codrington’s heirs, along with most local planters, fiercely opposed the founding mission to educate and convert Barbadian black slaves. Clergy sent out from Britain to lead the project died at a furious rate. One who lasted longer than most was Thomas Wilkie, who reported in 1727 that he had taught five or six Negro youngsters to ‘spel very prettily and repeat the Creed and Lords prayer’. He had three adults under regular instruction, and two of these he had persuaded to attend the Sunday church services. The three slaves had agreed to take ‘one wife apiece, forbare working on Sundays … and live conformably to the laws of the Gospel to the best of their knowledge’. But Wilkie died insane six years later, and when the main building was finally opened in 1745, the priority was the education of white boys, and instruction of the blacks fell away for a time. For one thing, even the slave children were too busy working what was still an extensive functioning plantation.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Overseas lost a fortune through business dealings with the spectacular bankrupt Gedney Clarke, and in 1780 the college buildings were wrecked by the hurricane. Nonetheless, by the turn of the century, the Society’s slaves were the best treated on the island, and about a third were converts, helping to establish the enslaved blacks’ rights to participation in Church society. In 1812, apart from one religious institution in Trinidad, Codrington College was the solitary school for blacks in the entire British West Indies.
The descendants of the strange and troubled Christophers, who were absentee landlords based at Dodington in Gloucestershire and MPs for the area, prospered for a while, as the family continued to expand its sugar and slave business through the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a grand Palladian mansion was completed at Dodington, designed by James Wyatt. The Codringtons still owned substantial Caribbean acreage in the mid-nineteenth century, but the business suffered alongside all other British West Indian sugar establishments. The last Codrington plantations were sold off in 1944.
By the 1970s, upkeep of the huge grey-stone pile of Dodington Hall required it to be opened to the public, with a children’s adventure playground, a narrow-gauge railway and a carriage museum to draw in paying visitors. In 1978, a huge sale of family treasures raised a substantial and much-needed sum. Shortly afterwards, the archive of family papers, held in trust for a long time by the local county records office, was sold for over £100,000. Nonetheless, by 1982, Sir Simon Codrington reported that he and his wife were living in a kitchen and one bedroom with only an electric fire for heating. Planning permission to build a ‘pleasure park’ in the grounds was refused, and the following year Dodington was put on the market, ending more than 400 years of family occupancy. It was eventually purchased in 2003 for a reputed £20 million by British vacuum cleaner tycoon Sir James Dyson.
In contrast, of the British Beckfords there seems at first to be little modern trace, either in people or in buildings. Although his daughters married well, the main Beckford male line ended with William of Fonthill. There are a number of towns and streets in Jamaica named after the family, but travel to Somerly’s old plantations in Westmoreland and all that is left is a scattering of ruins, and stones lying half buried by the vibrant vegetation. One has carved on it the Beckford family symbol of a heron; nearby lies a large iron wheel stamped with ‘Sheffield’. Although sugar is still grown down on the Westmoreland plain, at Hertford Pen, as at the nearby site of Thistlewood’s enterprise, the jungle and bush have largely reclaimed the land.
The National Portrait Gallery holds a number of paintings of Beckfords, but only one is on display. The subject is Henry Beckford, who appears in the foreground of a depiction of the London anti-slavery convention of 1840; at the centre of the picture, Thomas Clarkson is in full oratorical flow. But this Beckford is black, a freed slave and Jamaican delegate to the conference. In Westmoreland, on the land that once belonged to William of Somerly, there are, indeed, a host of Beckfords. One elderly black gentleman of the name claims, gesticulating vividly, to have had 27 children. In fact the Beck-ford name is alive and well – among clergy, academics, sports and media stars. It is now indisputably a black Jamaican name.55
The West Indian islands have never recovered their pre-eminent global importance, achieved in an astonishingly counter-intuitive moment of world history. As early as the 1830s, their value as markets for British manufactures had started to decline. In 1846, the same year as the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws, the prohibitive duties on imports to Britain of cheaper foreign sugars started to be lifted. Protection for the West India interest was an outdated priority. Less clear was how the massively over-populated islands were to survive.
On the majority of the British islands, sugar production slumped. From a high in 1805 of 100,000 tons, for most of the rest of the nineteenth century Jamaica only exported 20,000 tons of sugar annually, falling to a nadir of 5,000 tons in 1913. In the 60 years after 1850, the number of sugar plantations on the island shrank from over 500 to just 77. Sugar consumption in England continued to grow, allowing refiners like Sir Henry Tate to make fortunes, but little of the money was returned to Jamaica, and even less to the black workforce. Frantic belated attempts were made after 1900 to diversify the island’s economy away from sugar monoculture.
Barbados stuck with sugar. When, in 1902, the price fell sharply yet again, widespread malnutrition appeared on the island, with an infant mortality rate reaching nearly half of live births in some places. When this was reported in London, Joseph Chamberlain, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, labelled the West Indian islands, formerly so prosperous, as the ‘Empire’s darkest slum’. An American journalist who visited Barbados at this time wrote, ‘The island has always been and still is run for the whites … it is a heavenly place to live for the white man who can ignore the frightful misery of the negroes.’
Barbadians have improved their lot by emigration and a fierce attachment to education. The island is now relatively prosperous, although, as elsewhere in the region, many assets are in the hands of foreign interests or the tiny white minority. Other parts of what was the sugar empire are in a less happy situation. In general, throughout the smaller islands, the dominance of sugar has been replaced in modern times by a reliance on the shifting sands of tourism and offshore banking. The latter has attracted unsavoury characters and ‘beyond the line’ financial shenanigans, including fraud and money-laundering linked to mainland drugs cartels. Tou
rism, for its part, has, for some, awkward resonances with the region’s history. In the large plantation-house-style hotels, the tourists are almost all white, the waiters, the cleaners the gardeners, the servants are all black.
The legacy of the sugar barons is most vividly shown in Jamaica, which was perhaps the most violently brutal of the British slave colonies. Jamaica has much to be proud of: it has world-beating sportsmen and women, and is probably the most influential place on earth in terms of modern music. But it has barely half the per capita GDP of Barbados and twice the infant mortality rate. Sadly, corruption and crime are endemic, and the island has a staggeringly high murder rate that demonstrates scant regard for life and respect over riches and status. If you venture away from the cool of the beach and the safety of the closely guarded tourist resorts, Jamaica seems chaotic, damaged, angry; still, as in the days of Ned Ward, ‘Hot as Hell, and as wicked as the Devil’.
SOURCE NOTES
Abbreviations
B. Arch.
Barbados Archives, Black Rock, Bridgetown, Barbados
BL
British Library, London
Cal Col
Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies
J. Arch.
Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica
JBMHS
Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society
JCBL
John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island
Journal
Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations
LNHA
Redwood papers, Library of the Newport Historical Association, Newport, Rhode Island
MSS Beckford
Beckford papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS Eng lett.)
PRO
Public Record Office, Kew, London
TD
Thomas Thistlewood’s Diary, Lincolnshire County Archives, Monson 31/1-37. Used with permission of Lincolnshire County Archives
Introduction ‘Hot as Hell, and as wicked as the Devil’
p. 1
It was January 1697: for clarity’s sake, for all dates before 1752, the year is taken to start on 1 January.
p. 1
‘with one Design, to patch up their Decay’d Fortune’ and following quotes: Ward, A Trip to Jamaica.
1. White Gold, 1642
p. 9
‘The great industry and more thriving genius of Sir James Drax’. Scott, ‘Description of Barbados’, 249.
p. 9
far from prying eyes, he planted a new crop: Southey, History of the West Indies, I:285, says, with no source given, that the first cane was planted in 1642 and the ‘method remained a secret to the inhabitants in general for seven or eight years’, an exaggeration.
p. 9
‘ingenious spirit’: Foster, A Briefe relation of the late Horrid Rebellion, 2.
p. 10
the canes … had rooted in seven days: Deerr, History of Sugar, 1:117.
p. 11
A French visitor at the beginning of the seventeenth century: ibid., 1:105.
p. 12
as the language of the sugar factory – ingenio, muscovado – demonstrates: Bridenbaughs, No Peace Beyond the Line, 89.
p. 12
‘being eternall Prolers about’: Thomas, An Historical Account, 36.
p. 13
‘… Discovery of the Art he had to make it’: ibid., 13–14.
p. 13
‘Sir James Drax engaged in that great work’: Scott, ‘Description of Barbados’, 249.
p. 13
‘the disbersing of vast summes of money’: Foster, Briefe relation of the late Horrid Rebellion, 2.
p. 13
‘the Model of a Sugar Mill’: Anon., Some Memoirs of the first Settlement, 3.
p. 13
‘and by new directions from Brazil’: Ligon, A True and Exact History, 84–5.
p. 13
£5 per hundredweight: Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 397.
2. The First Settlements, 1605–41
p. 15
‘goodness of the island’: quoted in Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 29.
p. 15
carrying some fifty settlers: Davis, ‘Early History of Barbados’, Timehri 5, 51.
p. 15
‘a great ridge of white sand’: Colt, ‘Voyage of Sir Henry Colt’, 64.
p. 15
On board the William and John: Handler, ‘Father Antoine Biet’s Visit’, 69.
p. 15
Drax was 18 years old: MacMurray, Records of Two City Parishes, 315–16.
p. 15
‘in a cave in the rocks’: Handler, ‘Father Antoine Biet’s Visit’, 69.
p. 16
‘growne over with trees and undershrubs, without passage’: White, ‘A Briefe Relation’, 37.
p. 16
rusted instantly in the warm damp climate: Ligon, A True and Exact History, 27.
p. 16
‘as hard to cut as stone’: Smith, True Travels, 55.
p. 16
‘dayly showres of raine, windes, & cloudy sultry heat’: Colt, ‘Voyage of Sir Henry Colt’, 65–7.
p. 16
‘there is such a moisture’: Ligon, A True and Exact History, 27.
p. 17
with £50 sterling in axes, bills, hoes, knives, looking-glasses and beads: Harlow, Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies, 115.
p. 17
‘but not in any great plentie as yet’: White, ‘A Briefe Relation’, 35.
p. 17
‘grew so well that they produced an abundance’: Handler, ‘Father Antoine Biet’s Visit’, 69.
p. 17
‘very ill conditioned, fowle, full of stalkes and evil coloured’: Forbes, Winthrop Papers, 1:338.
p. 17
‘much misery they have endured’: Smith, True Travels, 55.
p. 18
in 1600 they landed on the tiny island of St Eustatius near St Kitts: Williams, Columbus to Castro, 79.
p. 19
‘cockpit of Europe, the arena of Europe’s wars, hot and cold’: ibid., 69.
p. 19
‘a country that hath yet her Maidenhead’: quoted in Strachan, Paradise and the Plantation, 30.
p. 19
between £100,000 and £200,000 each year in gold, silver, pearls and sugar: Appleby, ‘English Settlement’, 88.
p. 22
‘great tobaccoe house that stood to the windward’: Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 7.
p. 23
the Courteens, who had by now sunk £10,000 into their venture: Innes, ‘Presugar Era of European Settlement’, 5.
p. 23
on the pretence of holding a conference: Davis, ‘Early History of Barbados’, Timehri 6, 344.
p. 23
‘I cannot from so many variable relations give you an certainty for their orderly Government’: Smith, True Travels, 56.
p. 24
promptly executed by firing squad. Davis, ‘Early History of Barbados’, Timehri 6, 347.
p. 24
‘vntell we haue doone some thinges worthy of ourselues, or dye in ye attempt’: Colt, ‘Voyage of Sir Henry Colt’, 91.
p. 24
‘I neuer saw any man at work … all thinges carryinge ye face of a desolate & disorderly shew to ye beholder’: ibid., 66–7.
p. 24
‘a people of too subtle, bloody and dangerous inclination to be and remain here’: Cal Col 1675–6, no. 946.
p. 25
‘an Aromaticall compound of wine and strawberries’: White, ‘Briefe Relation’, 36.
p. 25
‘marvellous swiftness’: Colt, ‘Voyage of Sir Henry Colt’, 67.
p. 25
‘Slowth & negligence … liue long in quiett’: ibid., 66, 73.
p. 25
the 40 or so men he left behind were ‘servants’: Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 37.
p. 25
two or three ser
vants to be sent out, bound to him for three to five years: Innes, ‘Pre-sugar Era of European Settlement’, 17.
p. 25
Some 30,000 indentured servants: Beckles, ‘“Hub of Empire”’, 223.
p. 26
A visitor to Barbados in 1632: Captain John Fincham, in Campbell, Some Early Barbadian History, 65.
p. 27
a battered chest, a broken kettle, three books and a handful of pewter plates: Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 54.
p. 27
from under 2,000 in 1630 to 6,000 by 1636: Chandler, ‘Expansion of Barbados’, 109.
p. 27
a density of population unrivalled anywhere in the Americas: Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 25.
p. 27
Seventy per cent were aged between 15 and 24: Games, ‘Opportunity and Mobility in early Barbados’, 171.
p. 27
incest, sodomy and bestiality prevalent on the island: Handler, ‘Father Antoine Biet’s Visit’, 68.
The Sugar Barons Page 48