by Ben Hughes
Another important export was transhipped Spanish bullion and gold and silver coin. Jamaica was the hub of the Caribbean reexport trade. Many of the English manufactured goods landed at Port Royal never got any further into the island than the merchants’ warehouses on the quayside. Instead, they were either sold to one of the Spanish merchantmen that regularly called in at Port Royal in defiance of Madrid’s strict trading regulations, which entirely prohibited trade with foreigners, or smuggled into the Spanish colonies by one of Jamaica’s fleet of small, swift-sailing sloops. These vessels sailed for Havana in Cuba, Portobelo (in modern-day Panama), or Cartagena, on the Spanish Main. Anchoring at spots distant from the prying eyes of the few uncorrupted customs officials, they waited for local traders to arrive with whom they exchanged their goods for treasure and hard currency, the one remaining commodity that the Spanish colonies had in relative abundance. According to Francis Hanson, a resident writing in 1682, Port Royal was awash with “bars and cakes of Gold, wedges and pigs of Silver, Pistoles, Pieces of Eight and several other Coyns of both Mettles . . . wrought Plate, Jewels, rich Pearl Necklaces, and of Pearl unsorted or undrilled.” Added to this was the high-quality gold dust which the Guinea men brought from West Africa which was occasionally used in Port Royal to pay for supplies and repairs. Much of this wealth eventually found its way back to England where it was used to fuel the war effort against France.56
The Port Royal merchants who profited from such transactions were an eclectic mix. William and Francis Hall were brothers who had relocated to Port Royal in 1687 from London to act as Jamaican factors for a variety of individuals and firms based in the English capital.57 Peter Qoudan and Dirck Wessels originally hailed from the provinces of the United Netherlands. The former had moved to Jamaica from Curaçao in the 1660s after finding himself in financial difficulties, while the latter had relocated from New York following its capture by England in the Second Anglo-Dutch War.58 Other factors resident in Port Royal were Thomas, Isaac, and Joseph Norris, part of Jamaica’s growing congregation of Quakers. Originally from London, the Norrises had relocated to Port Royal in 1678 due to the wave of religious persecution sweeping England in the wake of the Civil War. While the father, Thomas, and his eldest son, Joseph, were permanently based in Port Royal, the younger sibling, Isaac, regularly traveled between Jamaica and Philadelphia to manage the family’s business connections in the North American colonies. Despite objecting to the debauchery and ostentation prevalent among Port Royal’s elite, occasional harassment from the town militia for their refusal to bear arms, and the fact that Joseph and his wife, Martha, had lost both their children to disease, the Norrises prospered in Jamaica. As well as working as a factor, Joseph co-owned Thomas Hillyard’s shop on New Street and had a share in at least one London-built broad stern which visited Port Royal roads. By 1690 his estate was worth some £4,000.59
Another powerful mercantile contingent in Port Royal were the Portuguese Jews. Many of them, or their ancestors, had formerly been residents of the Dutch colony established in 1630 in Recife in Brazil, where they had been respected for their mercantile skills and enjoyed the religious freedom afforded them by the laws of the United Netherlands. Driven by sugar production and trade, the colony initially prospered, but in 1645 came under guerrilla attack from the former owners of Recife, the Portuguese. After a decade of struggle, the Dutch were forced to surrender. Under threat of persecution by the Inquisition if they remained, the Jewish community emigrated. Many went to Holland, twenty-three sailed to New Amsterdam (later to be renamed New York), while others chose to settle in the Caribbean. Several of the latter made their way to Spanish Jamaica, where a handful aided the English in their invasion of 1655. Others reached the island later via Suriname or Barbados, and a Jewish cemetery was established at Hunt’s Bay, across the water from Port Royal, in the late 1660s. Immigration became especially notable in the following decade under Governor Molesworth, who valued the new arrivals for their international connections and understanding of global trade, and in 1677 land was purchased on Port Royal’s New Street, or Jew Street as it came to be known, to build a synagogue. In 1683 Rabbi Haham Josiau Pardo, a Jew from Amsterdam who had also lived in Curaçao, arrived to administer to the spiritual needs of his coreligionists, and by 1690, despite the ever-present threat of anti-Semitism, the community is estimated to have numbered between one hundred and three hundred individuals. Many of Port Royal’s Jews were wealthy and the community was of considerable economic importance. The Jews had interests in the sugar and slave trades and the manufacture of items in gold and silver, as well as being the island’s principal moneylenders. Among the most prominent at the time of Inchiquin’s arrival were Isaac Rodriguez de Sousa, a moneylender whose estate was valued at over £9,000; Moises de Lucena, a leading merchant whose trade interests stretched from Jamaica to New York and London and beyond; and Moses Cordoso, a merchant who specialized in buying sick slaves from the Royal African Company at low prices to sell on to the planters at a profit after they had recovered their health to some extent.60
Equally powerful economically (and considerably more so in the political realm) were Port Royal’s resident factors for the Royal African Company. Charles Penhallow was a captain in the Port Royal militia with his own company to command, a churchwarden, and the owner of The Three Mariners, a tavern on Honey Lane. As well as holding 204 acres of land in the prime planting parish of St. Thomas, Penhallow owned a valuable plot in Old Harbour, the largest settlement in Clarendon.61 His fellow agent, Walter Ruding, lived with his wife and family on Thames Street, directly opposite the wharfs and warehouses lining the bay on the north side of town. Even better connected than his partner, Ruding was immensely rich and would soon be nominated for a seat on the island’s Council. As well as the salary he earned from the company, Ruding held various trade interests and received regular commissions from the slave auctions held on board the company’s ships upon their arrival from Africa. It is also apparent that he accepted payments from favored customers, principal among whom was the representative of the asiento, Sir James Castillo, in exchange for allowing them first selection when purchasing slaves. Although this angered the planters, who were left to squabble with the Jews over the “refuse negroes” surplus to Castillo’s requirements, it also brought Ruding great riches. Unlike the planters, who lacked currency, demanded credit, and were often only able to pay for purchases in sugar during harvest time, the Spanish had access to silver and gold coin. According to one associate, James Wale, who lived in the house next door on Thames Street and was married to Ruding’s sister-in-law, by the 1690s Ruding’s estate was worth in excess of £10,000.62
The final significant element of Port Royal’s population were several hundred itinerant mariners.63 Although of no fixed abode, this peripatetic band spent the majority of their earnings in Port Royal. Most found work with the island’s fleet of one hundred sloops. Small, well-built, fast, well-armed, and well-manned, these vessels were based out of Chocolata Hole, a bay on the western edge of Cagway Spit near a line of turtle pens under the guns of Fort Charles. The sloops were engaged in a variety of trades. With the outbreak of war, a few would find work privateering; others were engaged in the coasting trade, shipping goods between the island’s secondary ports and Port Royal. Wreck salvage was a potentially profitable yet intermittent alternative. Preying on the half-sunken hulks of the Spanish galleons which occasionally met their ends on the rocks and banks surrounding the island, the wreckers were allowed to keep 90 percent of their findings providing they gave the remainder to the crown. Other options included making the run to the Cayman Islands to fetch breeding turtles to sell at Port Royal’s fish market; shipping logwood harvested at Campeche or Honduras; inter-island trade with the other English colonies in the Caribbean; running the triangular routes between London, Jamaica, and North America; interloping for slaves in West Africa; and the lucrative yet risky option of dealing in contraband with the Spanish Main. Despite the threat of the cre
w’s arrest and the seizure of the ship (as many as four hundred of Jamaica’s residents could be found languishing in Spanish jails at any one time), the potential profits and wages of up to forty-five shillings per month ensured the business was well served.64
Among the sloops operating out of Chocolata Hole on Inchiquin’s arrival were the Rebecca, a fifteen-ton, ten-gun vessel which traded with London and whose master and sometime privateer, William Peartree, would go on to become the twenty-eighth mayor of New York;65 the Speedwell, a sloop occasionally registered to Cornelius Essex, a former pirate who had raided Portobelo in 1680 and had since turned his hand to wreck salvage;66 the Samuel Barque, whose master, Giles Shelley, traded between New York, Jamaica, and Curaçao;67 the Ann, a thirty-tonner commanded by a wrecker and trader named Daniel Plowman who regularly sailed between Gambia and Jamaica breaking the RAC’s monopoly;68 the Diligence, whose master, a slave-owning privateer and wrecker named Robert Scroope, also had a quarter share in the vessel’s ownership worth £75;69 and George’s Adventure, an eight-tonner registered to Thomas Craddock, the unlikely owner of one of Port Royal’s better stocked libraries which featured over one hundred tomes including “4 new gilt Bibles,” “6 common prayer books,” and “thirty plays,” as well as Craddock’s Apostolocall History, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, The Golden Fleece, and a history of the reign of Richard II by Buck Gusman.70
In charge of marshaling this disparate group, as well as the masters and sailors who arrived from North America, West Africa, England, Ireland, and elsewhere, was another of Port Royal’s leading players: the naval officer Reginald Wilson. One of eight sons born in Bradfield, England, in 1645, Wilson had served as an apprentice tailor before arriving in Jamaica prior to 1675 when he was appointed to his current post, yet another example of the opportunities available for those willing to relocate. As well as recording all ships’ arrivals and departures in a leather-bound ledger kept in the property he owned on the quayside where he lived with his son and several slaves, Wilson was charged with ensuring the Navigation Acts were enforced; collecting port fees; apprehending pirates; providing pilots for masters unfamiliar with the rocky shoals which had bested Peter Heywood in 1682; keeping a quayside storehouse stocked with wood and provisions; and taking care that no masters or sailors violated rules concerning the proper disposal of ballast. Typically for the age, Wilson also had several other roles. As well as serving as one of the island’s assemblymen, he was a churchwarden for Port Royal and a judge at the court of common pleas. He also found time to dabble in trade and corresponded regularly with William Blathwayt, the Westminster-based secretary of trade and foreign plantations.71
AS INCHIQUIN WOULD LEARN, seventeenth-century Jamaica had given rise to a peculiarly debauched society. With a population consisting largely of recent immigrants, both black and white, who had had little or no exposure to the virulent diseases of the tropics, mortality rates were high: one in three new arrivals would die in their first three years on the island. Due to the physical demands of plantation work, male immigrants were much more valued than females, leading to a considerable sexual imbalance and a corresponding prevalence of self-destructiveness and lack of restraint.72 The majority of the population had been coerced into migrating, and many of the whites, even those who had somehow risen to the ranks of the island’s elite, came from the lowest reaches of society, and a significant minority had already been criminalized. Immense wealth could be garnered rapidly for little work from investment in trade or sugar production, there was a notable lack of culture and religion, and a climate of gross brutality governed the everyday lives of both blacks and the majority of whites—capital and corporal punishment were frequent, and public, events.
All these factors enabled the residents to develop a self-indulgent attitude toward sin: if one was to die tomorrow, why not enjoy today? As early as 1671 the North American merchant John Blackleach was shocked by the “high presumptuous sinning” in Jamaica; another North American, Samuel Sewall, worried that a young relative would lose his religion if he spent long on the island; and the Quaker Isaac Norris advised his friend to steer clear of Jamaica—“though we do not live so flash and fast [in the North American colonies],” he warned, “yet we live well and enjoy life with a better gust.”73 Alcoholism was rife in Jamaica and gluttony was widespread. Both resulted in a number of common health complaints, not least of which was gout, an illness that the doctor Hans Sloane had had to treat frequently during his fifteen-month hiatus at Jamaica in the late 1680s. Visitors frequently commented on the indolence of the population; sexual morals were loose; and corruption at all levels of society, even by the standards of the age, was endemic.74
GOVERNOR AND LADY INCHIQUIN were allowed precious little time to recover from the ordeal of their transatlantic crossing. After a whirlwind of ceremonies and introductions in Port Royal, the new governor and his family made their way to the administrative capital of Spanish Town to set up home.75 The journey was typically undertaken by wherry, a clinker-built rowing boat with overhanging bows which allowed passengers to step ashore dry-shod. From the quayside of Port Royal these craft regularly ferried passengers six miles across the bay to Passage Fort, a small settlement built in a low marshy valley between two hills where the Rio Cobre entered the bay. Founded by the Spanish to defend the route to the capital, the site’s eponymous fort had long since been demolished and by 1690, the village, a place Taylor noted was “both day and night miserably torment[ed] with stinging insects,” consisted of “thirty houses, ten taverns, and as many storehouses” where the planters from Sixteen Miles’ Walk and the other plantations of St. Catherine’s Parish stockpiled their sugar for dispatch to Port Royal.76 From Passage Fort, the Inchiquins traveled six miles by hackney carriage along “a smooth, sandy road,” flanked by sugar plantations, past a limestone rise known as Craigellachie Hill, before emerging onto “a spacious, grassy plain, sprinkled with wild flowers.” In the shadow of the Blue Mountains, the meadow was fed by the Rio Cobre, “an excelent cleare river of sweet water” on the banks of which the capital of Jamaica lay.77
Santiago de la Vega, or Spanish Town as its English residents referred to it, had been a large city under Spanish occupation. Built on a regular grid system, its broad streets had covered an area of six square miles. The city had since entered a period of decline with the advent of English control. Three quarters of the buildings had been burned during the invasion, and, on Inchiquin’s arrival, just three hundred remained. In contrast to the towering, four-story brick homes crammed into Port Royal’s twisting alleyways, most of the houses in Santiago de la Vega were built in the Spanish style. Low, sturdy, and spacious with deep wooden foundations, large doors, latticed windows, and palm-thatched roofs, they were designed to provide a cool, breezy retreat as well as being able to withstand the seismic activity which regularly shook the island. Of the original four churches, only St. Paul’s survived into the English era, while the old Spanish monastery, a large, brick building encompassed by a curtain wall, had been converted into the governor’s residence. In the town center stood a vast parade ground, capable of holding five thousand troops, and the Audiencia, a large building used to host the Grand Court of Judicature four times a year.78
Having taken up residence in the old monastery which his wife, Elizabeth, would furnish with such exotic paraphernalia as a Japanese bedstead, table stands and looking glass, a Russian leather couch and twenty chairs, and a patriotic portrait of William and Mary valued at £20, on Wednesday, June 4, Inchiquin presided over the first Council meeting to be held at Spanish Town since his arrival.79 Seated on five of the Council Chamber’s twelve “leather chaires” which were positioned around a central table, Sir Francis Watson, Thomas Ballard, Thomas Freeman, John White, and John Bourden attended. Once oaths of allegiance had been sworn, the governor was presented with a long list of grievances authored by Jamaica’s principal landowners. They complained about Watson’s illegal and partisan government; his use of “arbitrary
and despotical power”; his use of violence and intimidation to achieve his aims; his promotion of “ye meanest tradesmen” to positions of power; and the fact that he had “govern[ed] . . . absolutely by ye sword” during his brief tenure.80 For Inchiquin the process was both confusing and exhausting. “I find the animosities here far greater than I imagined,” he later confessed in a letter to the Lords of Trade, “not due to the late transactions but to fifteen or sixteen years standing of turbulent and pernicious advisers. . . . Since the disease has been of so long duration you will not expect a sudden cure. . . . The Courts of Judicature have fallen [silent] nearly two years. People have lived without law or justice, to the great encouragement of malefactors and to the strengthening of pretensions to martial law. Such exorbitances have been committed as I believe were never heard of, but now that the Courts are open again the offenders will be brought to condign punishment, though all that they are worth will never make amends for the mischief they have done.”81
A second, related order of business for the Council that Wednesday morning was the fate of a long-detained Dutch merchantman, the St. Jago de la Victoria. Under service of the asiento and flying Spanish colors, the ship had left Cadiz for Portobelo sometime in 1689. On its return voyage, laden with eight chests of Spanish silver, its captain, Mr. Daniels, had called in at Port Royal for provisions. Learning that such a wealthy vessel had been dropped into his lap, Watson moved fast, detaining it on the premise that it was a Dutchman trading in Jamaica and therefore in contravention of the Navigation Act. With the aid of Roger Elleston and several other officials, each of whom received a cut of the spoils, Watson stripped the St. Jago of its silver as well as eight of its cannon, which were promptly remounted on the Calapatch, a sloop occasionally used for coastal defense. As Inchiquin soon realized, the charges of unwarranted detention and illegal profiteering leveled against Watson as a result of the incident were clear cut: although the accused had assumed the title of governor, he was not legally so at the time and therefore not permitted to convene a court of seizure; furthermore, specific instructions had been received from England that no new courts were to be held; and the items that Captain Daniels had purchased in Port Royal were merely provisions for use onboard ship and therefore not covered by the terms of the Navigation Act. Nevertheless, due process had to be followed. Once a date had been set for hearing an appeal from Captain Daniels’s lawyers, the Council was dismissed until further notice.82