Apocalypse 1692
Page 5
After Lynch’s death in 1684, Sir Hender Molesworth assumed the governorship. As well as being the owner of eight farms and two sugar plantations spread over 7,500 acres, Molesworth was also Jamaica’s principal agent for the Royal African Company, a role which brought him into conflict with his fellow planters. As sugar production grew, the Royal African Company struggled to keep up with the demand for slave labor. Unwilling to expand operations when it was already losing money due to the costly forts and trading stations it was required to maintain on the West African coast in the face of stiff Dutch opposition, the company was also reluctant to supply the Jamaican planters, who habitually demanded credit in lieu of future harvests when the Spanish agents of the asiento were willing to pay hard currency to purchase slaves for transshipment to Portobelo or Cartagena. Furthermore, Barbados was still a larger and more reliable market than Jamaica despite the deterioration of its soils, and as it was a week’s sail closer to the Guinea Coast, it made a far more attractive point of sale than its Leeward counterpart. Consequently, the Jamaican planters often bought slaves from Dutch and English interlopers. Plying the Middle Passage in small, swift ships, these prototype free traders dared to breach the terms of the company’s monopoly as well as undercutting its prices to a considerable degree.
Conflict between the island’s factions continued on the appointment of Molesworth’s successor. Christopher Monck, the second Duke of Albemarle, was the son of Lord General Monck, a much-lauded military officer who had fought on both sides during the Civil War and had gone on to become England’s leading commander during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. His son, by contrast, had little to recommend him. A profligate and irresponsible man, Albemarle had been appointed, it seems, for no better reason than England’s newly crowned king, James II, wanted to be rid of him. Albemarle divided his time on the island between heavy drinking and carousing and furthering his interest in Jamaica’s profitable wreck-salvaging business, a sideline which had previously netted him £50,000 following an investment of just £800 when a sunken Spanish galleon had been found off the coast of Hispaniola. Albemarle’s governorship also saw a brief reversal of fortunes for the diminishing band of buccaneers remaining in Port Royal. To counter the growing power of the plantocracy and thereby facilitate the Assembly’s adoption of his policies, the duke championed the buccaneers’ cause while also garnering support from the smallholders who continued to scrape a living on the least attractive plots in the island’s hinterlands, the formerly downtrodden Catholic minority, and the white servants who toiled in the fields. Bribery, intimidation, and other heavy-handed tactics were used by the duke’s supporters. Among Albemarle’s adherents was Henry Morgan. Pot-bellied, prematurely aging, and alcoholic, the Welshman was in rapidly declining health. He died in August 1688. Albemarle followed Morgan to the grave one month later after a debauched celebration to mark the birth of James II’s son and would-be heir.
Shortly after Albemarle’s death, news of William of Orange’s invasion of England threw Jamaica into turmoil. The Glorious Revolution proved less disruptive than feared, but the outbreak of war with France was more serious. Having pushed the buccaneers into the arms of their rivals on Hispaniola, the colonists feared that the brethren would turn against them. Equally frightening was the rise of a fifth column from among Jamaica’s indentured servants, many of whom were Irish Catholics, or, most terrifying of all, the possibility of the French somehow instigating an island-wide slave revolt. Out of this chaos Sir Francis Watson, the island’s longest-serving Council member, emerged as the prominent political player. A hard-drinking ex-soldier, Watson had fought under Albemarle’s father toward the end of the Civil War and had gone on to win laurels for his role in a death-or-glory charge at the siege of Maastricht in the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1673. Declaring martial law, Watson executed a virtual coup d’état. Having awarded himself the title of lieutenant governor, he garnered support, as had his predecessor, from among the middling and lower classes, cementing his position through a combination of bribery and intimidation. Unable to challenge Watson directly, his opponents in the plantocracy sent a series of missives to England begging for the restoration of the status quo. William and Mary duly obliged. As well as appointing Inchiquin as the island’s new governor, the monarchs issued an edict canceling Albemarle’s appointments along with any made subsequently, thus allowing Watson’s opponents to return to their former posts. With the balance of power restored, an uneasy stalemate ensued.8
SUCH WAS THE STATE of affairs as HMS Swan and its convoy of eleven merchantmen dropped anchor off Port Royal on Saturday, May 31, 1690. Boarding the frigate’s barge, which was decked out with gaily colored bunting, Inchiquin and his family were rowed ashore through a sea of small boats crammed with those keen to get a glimpse of their new leader. A series of salutes fired from forts Charles, Walker, James, and Carlisle as well as by the island sloops and armed English, North American, and Spanish merchantmen in the roads, coughed clouds of lingering, acrid smoke across the water. Port Royal was in the mood for celebration. As well as welcoming a new governor whose arrival promised to put an end to the chaos which had reigned since Albermarle’s death, the inhabitants were relieved by the arrival of new supplies. With the threat of French attack, no fleet had reached Jamaica from England for some time: provisions were scarce and the wine, spirits, dry goods, and salt meat brought out in the ships’ holds were very welcome indeed.9
On the sun-baked quayside a cosmopolitan crowd awaited. Among African slaves wearing loincloths and threadbare shirts were sunburned white servants dressed in coarse canvas breeches and smocks. Others had lined the length of Thames Street and gathered in and around the busy fish market, where hawkers tried to keep the flies off the barracuda, manatee, snapper, shark, tuna, stingray, and swordfish slowly putrefying in the heat. Crammed onto the balconies above and behind the glass windows of the two-, three-, and four-story houses overlooking the sand-surfaced thoroughfare, were the town’s chief merchants and their families, well-to-do shopkeepers and artisans, planters who had left their country residences to be in town, and several employees of the Royal African Company. Waving hats and handkerchiefs, with the ladies resplendent in their best flowered silks adorned with gold and silver lace, the crowd gave three cheers as Inchiquin’s barge approached. A militia band added to the jubilation, rattling their drums and sounding their trumpets as the governor stepped ashore at the Wherry Bridge in the heart of Port Royal’s commercial district.10
The first to meet the new governor were the island’s ruling elite. At their head stood Sir Francis Watson, a heavy man, prone to asthma, no doubt sweating heavily in the heat.11 Also present were several councilors. Dressed in their finest wigs, silk coats, patterned cottons and vests trimmed with silver, and mohair shirts, they carried silver-tipped canes and wore broad-brimmed hats, stockings, and gloves to keep off the sun. Among them were Thomas Ballard, a veteran of the 1655 invasion, a colonel in the militia, and the owner of a 2,391-acre sugar plantation in St. Catherine’s Parish; Peter Beckford, a Council member and colonel in the militia who had risen from humble beginnings to become the owner of a 1,000-acre estate in Clarendon Parish and a house and several warehouses in Port Royal; Simon Musgrave, the island’s attorney general since 1686 and a major in the militia; John White, a respected administrator, former chief justice, and Council member since 1671; Thomas Freeman, an ensign during the invasion, now the aging owner of plantations in St. David’s and St. Thomas’s Parishes as well as of several properties in Port Royal including the Three Tunns, one of many taverns located in town; James Walker, a forty-seven-year-old who suffered from chronic gout and had been suspended from the Council for a year for daring to challenge Watson’s right to govern; Samuel Bernard, a resident since the mid-1660s who owned a large property on the quayside at Port Royal and had held the post of chief justice since 1685; John Bourden, an Irish Protestant and retired soldier who owned a considerable tract of land near Spanish Town; and Peter Heywood, a former Royal
Navy captain who had risen to prominence as a planter despite having lost his frigate, HMS Norwich, within sight of Port Royal after striking the rocks on the East Middle Ground in 1682.12 In the words of John Pike, one of several Quaker residents, these were “great men,” but full of faults. “[They] were so swallowed up with pride,” Pike had written to his brother, “that a man could not be admitted to speak with them.” The councilors’ women, “whose top-knots seemed to reach the clouds,” were equally guilty of ostentation and arrogance, a mix all too prevalent in the fundamentally flawed societies of the English West Indies.13
After greeting the councilors Inchiquin was ushered across Thames Street. Proceeded by Major Smith Kelly, the provost marshal carrying his ceremonial sword, and Charles Boucher, the recently appointed secretary of the Council, who bore a mace and the governor’s seal, Inchiquin stepped onto a field of green cloth laid on the street’s sandy surface, flanked by twin files of scarlet-coated militiamen standing to attention with their muskets presented.14 The governor’s train moved east down Thames Street away from the fish market, past the brickbuilt Feathers Tavern, with its second-floor billiard table, and skirted the entrance to Honey Lane.15 Another company of militia fired a musket volley into the air as Inchiquin entered the grounds of King’s House. A large, “timberwork” building surrounded by a high brick wall, it had last been occupied by Governor Molesworth and, until recently, had been used, with Watson’s consent, by the Reverend Thomas Churchill for Catholic mass, much to the Protestant majority’s displeasure.16 Despite recent work carried out by slaves hired by the Council and a certain Margaret Boone, who had been paid £20 to whitewash the place, the building remained in a state of disrepair.17 The refreshments arrayed on a long table in the yard were lavish. Two “tunns” of French claret had been decanted into bottles for the reception along with two whole pipes of Madeira wine.18
Jamaican feasts were noted for their extravagance. Eyewitnesses to similar scenes as that which confronted Inchiquin mention a wide selection of dishes: turtles cooked in their shells, imported salt beef and pork, wild jerked hog, roasted goat, tongue, fricasseed rabbit, brawn, capons, hashed pullet, fried and baked fish, roasted turkey, duck, turtledove, and pigeon. Other contemporary Jamaican dishes included potato pudding, pickled oysters, anchovies and olives, Irish butter, apples from New England, and English cheese. The Jamaican elite also enjoyed the great variety of fruit available on the island, many of which Inchiquin and his entourage had probably never seen. Watermelons, plantains, bananas, avocados, prickly pear, custard apples, and pineapples, the latter considered by many visitors to be the finest island fruit of all, would have been served along with pies, tarts, and pastries. Numerous toasts would have been drunk: to the longevity of the new king and queen, to the health of Inchiquin, and to the imminent defeat of the French.19
The next stop for the governor was St. Paul’s Church. Heading south down Sweeting’s Lane, a passage lined with shops, storehouses, and two-and three-story residences, the crowd passed beneath a covered stone walkway whose roof was supported by “large cedar pillars of ye dorrik order” where the town’s merchants met in the cool of the morning to discuss fluctuations in prices and the state of international trade. The adjacent church was a small, sturdy structure, built in the shape of the cross and boasting a tall crenelated tower. Entering via the northern cloister, Inchiquin crossed the marble floor and was ushered into a chair of state, “cover’d with azur velvet, richly bost, fringed and embroider’d with . . . golden lions like Solomon’s throne.” Once Inchiquin was seated, the secretary of the Council, Charles Boucher, read his commission from King William and Queen Mary. The new governor was sworn in and an order read, proclaiming that all those holding public office were to continue in their posts until further notice.20 A final tradition in the English colonies of the Caribbean was the presentation of a “Jew Pie” to the newly inaugurated governor. The “gift,” consisting of a piecrust covering a purse of gold doubloons presented by the island’s Jewish community as a means of currying favor, was no doubt warmly received.21
COVERING AN AREA of sixty acres, the Port Royal that welcomed Inchiquin that day contained over two thousand buildings crammed along a series of crooked streets and meandering thoroughfares and wedged into the intersections of narrow alleyways. Principal among them were the forts: Rupert, Charles, James, and Carlisle. Stone-built with strong ramparts and bastions, they housed magazines stocked with powder, muskets, pistols, hand grenades, fuses, and round shot and were manned by two companies of regular soldiers as well as two specialist gunners, Nathaniell Frigg and Richard Arnold, respected professionals who earned a salary of £27. The southern shore was guarded by a long breastwork known as Morgan’s Line, studded with fourteen cannon. In all, the fortifications mounted over ninety guns, including heavy mortar which could lob shells high over the water to fall upon enemy shipping. Designed to prevent a naval descent, the guns covered the sea approaches which meandered between the numerous shoals and keys that dotted the bay, as well as dominating the shipping in the roads. On the eastern boundary of town, near the port’s parade ground, was a wooden stockade known as the Pallisadoes which guarded the land approaches to the east. This common land, thickly planted with prickly pear to hinder infantry attack, was used for grazing goats and cattle, and a cleared area housed the town’s principal burying place. Along with the resident battalion of one thousand militia armed with muskets and swords and divided into ten companies, at least one of which was on duty at all hours of the day and night, these fortifications made Port Royal one of the best defended towns in the Americas.22
Other buildings of note included the Jewish synagogue, the Audiencia where the courts of judicature were held, and the Marshalsea Prison, a brick building on Thames Street a few hundred yards east of the Wherry Bridge where the wharfs gave way to a strip of sand lined with canoes. Along with the town’s second holding house, the Bridewell Prison, the Marshalsea housed Port Royal’s “lazie strumpet[s],” pirates awaiting the gallows, mariners, and any others whose crimes were deemed too serious to be dealt with by the stocks, cage, or “ducking stoole.”23 Among those who had had the misfortune to be incarcerated in the period before Inchiquin’s arrival was Lucretia Hall, “imprisoned . . . on pretence of witchcraft,”24 and Roger Elleston, the former chief judge of the colony. Once a friend of Henry Morgan’s and one of Francis Watson’s principal supporters, Elleston was described by one contemporary as “one of the most pernicious &Vexatious sheriffs that was ever known.” Charged with corruption and the illegal seizure of a Dutch merchantman and its cargo which had been divvied up by Watson and his supporters, Elleston had been arrested in October 1689.25
Port Royal had three markets: the fish market on Thames Street, where “for a royall you may have enough . . . to satisfie fouer reasonable men’s appitites”; a “herb and fruit market held in the hart of the high street,” where “fruitts and fowles” were available “fresh every morning, unless on the Sabbath”; and the “fleash and turtle” market at the west end of the High Street. “Plentifully stored with beef, mutton, hog, veal, lamb, kid and tortoise,” the latter did its principal business “in the cold of ye morning and eavenings.” The turtles in particular attracted the interest of first-time visitors, who often afforded these strange animals human traits. “This creature is . . . exceeding[ly] sencible,” one recorded, “for when he is layn on ’s back, and he perceiveth the butcher coming to cut his throat, he will sigh, groan and weep like a child that is beaten, or a woman when she wants mony from hir husband.” Turtle meat provided the principle source of protein for Port Royal’s poor, identifiable by the fact that they “develop[ed] a strange yellowish tint to their skin and clothes” as a result. “[The meat] infect[s] the blood of those feeding on them,” one of Port Royal’s doctors explained, “whence their shirts are yellow, their skin and faces the same colour, and their shirts under the armpits stained prodigiously.”26
Of Port Royal’s private buildings, roug
hly six hundred were built of stone. According to John Taylor, a visitor in the late 1680s, many were “fouer story high, cellar’d, covered with tiles and glazed with sash windows.” They had “large shops and comodious store-houses belonging to ’em.” Due to the climate, the only fires used were those kept burning in the kitchens, typically built apart from the main buildings to reduce the heat. “These houses,” Taylor continued, “yield as good rents as those in Chepeside in London, seldom less than £80 or £60 yearly rent, and lodgings are here very cleane, soe that you must give six dollars a month for one chamber reasonably furnished.” Many were private residences; others were used as bakeries, butchers’ shops, or artisans’ workshops, their dim interiors partially illuminated by candle light. There were also several whorehouses, principally catering to the town’s transient seafaring population, as well as numerous taverns and inns where customers could enjoy “a good glass of wine, a sangaree, or a joly bowl of good punch.” Other attractions in Port Royal included “a bull and bear [kept] . . . for sport at ye bear garden and billiards, cockfitting, shotting at the target, etc.” Others spent their leisure time playing shuffleboard or walking or riding in the common land beyond the Pallisadoes, where a tavern known as Barre’s served excellent “silabubus, creamtarts, and other quelquechoses.”27