Wiener, Frederick Bernays. ‘The Rhode Island Merchants and the Sugar Act’. The New England Quarterly 3:3 (Jul. 1930): 464–500
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: UNCP, 1944
——— From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969. London: André Deutsch, 1970
Wright, Richardson. Revels in Jamaica 1682–1838. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1937
Yorke, Philip C., ed., The Diary of John Baker 1751–1778. London, 1931
Zahedieh, Nuala. ‘Overseas expansion and Trade in the Seventeenth Century’. In Canny, ed., Origins of Empire, 398–422
Footnotes
1 Unlike the volcanic Leeward Islands, Barbados was formed primarily from coral, and the resulting porous limestone meant that water drained away rather than forming rivers.
2 Between 1585 and 1604, more than 200 English privateers visited the Caribbean, carrying home between £100,000 and £200,000 each year in gold, silver, pearls and sugar.
3 The most tragic fall-out of the triumph of the Carlisle faction was that the Arawaks, stripped of the protection of their patron Henry Powell, found themselves enslaved. When news of this outrage reached the Dutch colony in Guiana, only the nimble-footed actions of the governor, Groenenwegen, in marrying a local girl prevented a furious Arawak uprising. Many years later, in 1652, Henry Powell succeeded in having three survivors of this original party freed. In 1676 an Act was passed prohibiting bringing Indian slaves to the island, as they were considered ‘a people of too subtle, bloody and dangerous inclination to be and remain here’.
4 Hawley would return to Barbados, and died in 1677 allegedly as a result of falling down the stairs of the Roebuck Tavern in Bridgetown while intoxicated.
5 Ligon, who had what he described as a painter’s eye for young female beauty, was particularly taken with Yarico, an Indian house slave who had the responsibility of picking the chiggers out of his feet. She was ‘of excellent shape and colour, for it was a pure bright bay; small breasts, with the nipples of a porphyrie colour … this woman would not be woo’d by any means to wear Cloathes’.
6 Soon afterwards, the word ‘kidnap’ entered the English language, its original definition being ‘to steal or carry off children and others for service on the American plantations’.
7 Drax’s last deal in Barbados, which has survived in the records, was in late March 1654. He sold to fellow Barbadians Robert Hooper and Martin Bentley ‘one-eighth part of the Ship Samuel and one-eight part of Pinnace Hope, llately set out from England for Africa for negroes, and one-fifth part of cargo and profits’. The cost was £454 sterling or ‘54,480lbs weight of good muscavado sugar’, to be paid within the year, and part of the deal allowed Drax to select from the cargo ‘two male negroes and two female negroes’ from each vessel once they arrived in Barbados.
8 This was German mercenary Heinrich Von Uchteritz, captured after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, who spent about four and a half months on the island in 1652 before escaping his bondage thanks to a visiting Hamburg merchant. He had joined a plantation with a workforce of 100 blacks and 100 whites.
9 The saying went that the first thing the Spanish did when they started a settlement was to build a church, the Dutch a fort, the English a tavern.
10 Other prominent figures in the island’s early history who came with the Cromwellian army are John Cope, Thomas Lynch, Samuel Long, Henry Archbold, Samuel Barry and Thomas Freeman.
11 Among the beneficiaries were his sisters, nieces and nephews, his cousin, William Drax the Younger, son of his father’s brother, and godchildren, who included among their number three Codrington children, his cousins through the marriage of old Sir James’s sister Frances to the first Christopher Codrington.
12 Unlike Drax Hall, which, amazingly, has remained in the same family since it was built 350 years ago, the ownership of St Nicholas Abbey perhaps more accurately reflects the impermanence and transitory nature of the island’s inhabitants: the long list of former owners includes a string of different families, including such illustrious Barbados names as Dottin and Alleyne. It is now a tourist attraction and small-scale rum business. Sugar cane is still to be seen planted all around.
13 Locke would later change his stance on the trade, writing: ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable a state of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly possible to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.’
14 Sugar paid import tax of 1s. 5d sterling per hundredweight of raw sugar or muscovado. Foreign sugars paid 3s. 10d. Colonial clayed, or semi-refined sugar paid 4s. 9d, the foreign version 7s.
15 The threat is acknowledged in Willoughby’s 1663 instructions ‘to treat with the natives … or if injurious or contumacious, to persecute them with fire and swords’.
16 Warner, the story goes, then imprisoned his wife in a keep built for the purpose in a lonely nook, jealous of her violation by her former captors.
17 In 1657, Samuel Winthrop, at great expense, sent his sons John and Samuel to Boston to be educated. He deemed ‘that place more fit for it then this … I doe not find this country good for children’.
18 In March 1663, a group of Dutch refugees arrived in Martinique, but were swiftly expelled under Jesuit influence as Jews and heretics. The party crossed to Guadeloupe and were welcomed by the Governor there, who was himself involved in the sugar industry. The Governor of Martinique realised his mistake and invited them to come to his island as well.
19 Myngs subsequently returned to London, was knighted, and was then killed fighting de Ruyter in June 1666 in a battle off the North Foreland.
20 Montserrat is today the only country except for Ireland to have St Patrick’s Day as a public holiday.
21 Rose’s widow would marry Sir Hans Sloane and his daughter into a Sussex family, the Fullers, the next generation of whom would be key players in the sugar business in both Jamaica and London.
22 In April 1669 he wrote to London that he was ‘very glad to find himself so well backed by his Majesty’s commands, since his former actions of this nature have with some gained him the imputation of severity’.
23 Blacks were in the majority by 1660, and outnumbered the whites by two to one by the 1680s. By the end of the century, by which time a quarter of a million had been shipped to the English sugar islands, there were, according to most estimates, 50,000 enslaved Africans and fewer than 16,000 whites in Barbados: more than three slaves for every white person.
24 Only once in the Act was the word ‘slave’ used rather than ‘Negro’, which indicates both the squeamishness that the English had over the term ‘slave’ and also how increasingly status and race were being collapsed.
25 Emigrants to South Carolina were not just poor whites, many of whom still held on in Barbados. A number were younger sons of the island’s big planter families, such as the Sandifords and Halls. With no more room to expand there, lesser offspring were sent off with whatever members of the household could be spared. From the Caribbean they brought with them slaves, the plantation system and ‘mentality’, a slave code, speech patterns and architectural styles. In all, Barbadians had a decisive role in shaping the new colony, creating a slave-based plantation society more similar to the islands than to the rest of North America. Lowland Carolina would soon have a population ratio of four blacks to every white, similar to the ratio in Barbados. Parts of Charleston’s ‘brittle, gay and showy society’ of the eighteenth century would echo the Barbados atmosphere of a century before, and between 1669 and 1737, nearly half of the governors of South Carolina had lived in the West Indies or were sons of islanders. Seven of the early Carolina governors had Barbados backgrounds.
26 An eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica would write: ‘The French [are] less haughty, less disdainful, consider the Africans as a species of moral beings. The English consider them as productions which ought neither to be used nor destroyed without necessity. Bu
t they never treat them with familiarity, never smile upon them, nor speak to them.’ Certainly, the Code Noir of Louis XIV was more benevolent than the slave laws in the English colonies. For slaves in the French colonies, rudimentary religious instruction and baptism were compulsory.
27 ‘And such others that have more favour shown them by their masters, which adds abundantly to their crimes.’
28 John Codrington died in about 1688, his will giving a stark reminder of the precariousness of these new possessions, in comparison to relatively safe property in Barbados: the land in Antigua and Barbuda is covered by a caveat ‘if estate lost or taken by enemies …’
29 Taylor was born in 1664, on the Isle of Wight, the son of a minor gentleman. Having studied mathematics, he fought for James II during the Monmouth Rebellion. He had much in common with Richard Ligon, in his curiosity about the slaves and creole culture, and like Ligon came to the West Indies at a time of personal crisis (in his case a family argument), and left having been floored by illness.
30 A small number of their names have survived, their signs uncovered by archaeologists: Black Dogg, Blue Anchor, Catt & Fiddle, Sign of Bacchus.
31 Peter Beckford’s portrait has him standing by an open window with a fort in the background, probably Fort Charles, wearing a magnificently embroidered coat that reaches to his knees. On the windowsill is an enormous hat, with ostrich plumes.
32 A subsequent fire in 1704 completed the work of the earthquake, although the remaining tiny spit of land remained a Royal Navy base for many years.
33 The War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97) is also known as the Nine Years War, and King William’s War. Across the Americas, France fought against England, Spain and the Dutch.
34 Johnson took 100 slaves with him and became a wealthy planter, serving as governor of South Carolina for six years from 1703.
35 Like most Englishman of his time, Codrington hated and despised the Irish, but would admit, in a letter to the Governor of Montserrat, that ‘the Irish have never had any great kindness from the English … witness Ireland itself … they have a grievance against you, and doubtless hope for revenge’.
36 This was the moment that Ned Ward visited Jamaica – when it was at its most wretched.
37 The worst periods for disease would always coincide with military expeditions from Europe, for example 1693, 1703–4, 1732 and 1745.
38 That said, he did find a lucrative job for his cousin William, his uncle John’s son, then aged 21, according to his uncle ‘a young gentleman of great virtue and efforts’.
39 Codrington would later write of the people of St Kitts that ‘They are a parcell of Banditts, and wd willingly be without government, religion, or any appearance of order.’
40 Parke and Mrs Chester had a daughter, Lucy. In his will, Parke requested that she change her name to his, and that anyone marrying her also become a Parke.
41 William Codrington, Chistopher’s nephew and heir, would father a number of mulatto children, whom he cheerfully acknowledged and took with him to England when he became an absentee sugar baron.
42 The plantation went to his sister and brother-in-law Samuel Reynold.
43 William Beckford became an alderman of London in 1752; he is known as Alderman William distinguish him from his son, William Beckford of Fonthill.
44 It was not just Anglo-Americans; all nationalities engaged in piracy. One of the worst was a Spaniard, Miguel Enriquez, who was based in Puerto Rico, and whose favourite tactic was to maroon the crews of the ships he attacked on deserted islands to die of hunger or thirst.
45 A slaver owned by the Malbones of Newport was attacked by pirates, whereupon the captain offered freedom to all the slaves who would join in defending the vessel. The enemy was repulsed and the freed slaves settled on the Malbone estate in Pomfret, Connecticut.
46 On 6 March, James Brown wrote to Captain Fields: ‘it is ticklish times here my neighbors threaten to inform against us, so I hope you will not be too bold when you come home, enter in the West Indias [western inlet] if you can, and if you cannot bring too down the River and send your cargo some to Rhode Island and some up here in boats, so as not to bring but a few hhds. up to Wharff’.
47 The style of the library would be hugely influential: it was much admired by Thomas Jefferson, when he visited Newport in 1790. Thereafter Jefferson began championing classical architecture as the model for public building in the new republic.
48 Thistlewood had met Cudjoe back in 1750, and found his men a reassuring presence: ‘He Shook me by ye hand and Begg’d a Dram of us, which we gave him – he had on a feather’d hatt, Swords at his Side – gun upon his Shoulder &c Bare foot and Bare legg’d, Somewhat a Majestick look – he brought to my Memory ye picture of Robinson Crusoe.’
49 During Tacky’s Revolt, a group of rebels shot the three white people they found on an estate, then raped and prepared to kill the white overseer’s mulatto mistress. She was spared after the intercession of the plantation’s slaves, who saw her as their friend.
50 It was a double wedding, with Rose’s widow marrying the distinguished Sir Hans Sloane, who would thereafter be looked upon by the Fuller boys as their true grandfather. The links between the two families strengthened further when Rose’s sister Elizabeth married Sloane’s son William in 1733.
51 By 1767, there were nearly 600 sugar works in St Domingue, producing, with the labour of more than 200,000 slaves, some 60,000 tons of sugar, about twice the production of Jamaica.
52 This Dallas became Secretary of the US Treasury. His son, George Miflin Dallas, was Vice President of the United States, 1845–8. The city of Dallas is named after him.
53 Napoleon would try to re-establish slavery in St Domingue in 1802, but apart from the treacherous capture of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the expedition was a failure, with up to 40,000 French troops succumbing to yellow fever. Independence, as the new republic of Haiti, was declared in 1804.
54 Bond villain Sir Hugo Drax was named after Ian Fleming’s friend Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, Richard Drax’s grandfather. As well as a distinguished Navy man, he was a pioneer of solar power, using it to heat his pool, but he failed to get the idea to catch on.
55 There are pages and pages of Beckfords in the Jamaican phone book, as there are of Codringtons all over what was the British West Indies. In contrast, there is only a single Drax in the Barbados phone book, a Greta Drax, who lives in Bowling Alley, St Joseph.
By the Same Author
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