by Ben Hughes
Ruding and Penhallow divided the Hannah’s slaves into three categories. The first, comprising forty-four men, twenty-two women, six boys, and three girls, was handed over to John Zebbett. Along with £1, 8s. 11d. in cash, the slaves were the captain’s payment for freighting his cargo from Africa.9 In wartime such a service was deemed to be worth £11 for each slave delivered still capable of “going over the side.”10 The remainder would face auction. The 170 deemed of high quality, or “lusty” as the parlance of the trade would have it, were priced at £26 per head and divided into thirty-four lots, each containing three males and two females. The remaining one hundred (sixty-six men, seven women, eighteen boys, and ten girls) were to be sold only once all those of the first category had been purchased. The adults in this group, being considered of inferior quality, would go for £25 per head, while the children would be sold at either £17 or £13, depending on age, health, attractiveness, muscle development, and fitness.11
Another factor which may have influenced Ruding and Penhallow’s categorization was the region from which the slaves were thought to have hailed. The English most valued the Akan, or Coromantees. “They are . . . the best and most faithful,” opined Christopher Coddrington, the Barbados-based commander in chief of all English possessions in the Caribbean. “[They are] grateful and obedient to a kind master, but implacably revengeful when ill-treated.”12 Captain John Phillips of the Hannibal and the author Aprha Behn both shared Coddrington’s opinion. “[The] gold coast negroes . . . are very bold, brave and sensible,” wrote the former, noting they “yield 3 or 4 l. a head more than” other slaves, while the latter recorded that they were deemed both “warlike and brave.”13 By comparison, the Papa, or Popos, from the Slave Coast, were thought docile and agreeable, although not as hard working as the Coromantee, while Hans Sloane wrote that the few who were transported to the West Indies from Madagascar were “reckoned good enough” in terms of workload, “but too choice in their Diet. . . . Being accustomed in their own Countries to Flesh . . . [they] do not well here, but very often die.”14 Ibos from the Niger delta were held to be timorous and despondent; there was no market in Jamaica for slaves from the Gambia River; while the worst of all, according to the English planters, were the Bantu-speaking Angolans, who were considered both rebellious and lazy.15 Curiously, Spanish slavers held different opinions. They were happy to purchase Papas, Angolans, and Gambians and preferred darker-skinned slaves with tightly curled hair. The Spaniards also believed that the bellicose Coromantees, whose reputation for rebellion was universal, were more effort than they were worth, while scarification, also practiced by the Akan, and the habit of filing teeth, common among the natives of the Tooth Coast, were also disapproved of.16
Once Ruding and Penhallow had left the Hannah, Zebbett and his crew prepared the slaves for auction. Over the course of the next two days, the Africans were exercised and well fed—£3, 15s. 7½d. being spent on extra rations on June 18;17 fresh water was provided for washing, and tobacco and pipes were handed out, to render the slaves cheerful and calm prior to sale. Their heads and beards were shaved “and their Bodies . . . anointed all over with Palm-Oil,” the latter being thought to “add . . . a great beauty to them.”18 A doctor, who charged £4, 17s. for his services, was brought aboard to treat the sick, while armed guards were hired to ensure that none escaped while the Hannah was moored so tantalizingly close to shore.19 It was common practice to send seasoned plantation slaves on to newly arrived ships “to pacify” the arrivals. This happened when Olaudah Equiano reached Barbados. “They told us we were not to be eaten, but to work,” he explained, “and were soon to go on land, where we would see many of our country people. This report eased us much,” Equiano recalled.20
On June 19, the sale began. Zebbett hoisted an ensign at the Hannah’s masthead and ordered a single cannon fired, “according to custom,” to announce that the auction was about to commence. Ruding and Penhallow came aboard and had the slaves stripped and mustered on deck by the previously arranged lots, while two dozen potential purchasers, chiefly planters and farmers, were rowed out from the quayside and helped aboard. Typically, such sales were conducted as auctions, with each lot timed “by inch of candle,” a system which meant that buyers were free to bid while the candle burned, with the greatest price offered by the time the prescribed amount had expired being accepted. With human judgment a deciding factor, such a procedure was open to abuse. As such it is little wonder that a high number of contemporary complaints about the method were registered in the Royal African Company’s files. Due to the fact that the prices had been preordained, it would appear that such a system was not used during the sale conducted on board the Hannah. What is recorded is that Santiago Castillo, the agent of the asiento who had traveled to Jamaica with Inchiquin, purchased the majority of the slaves sold that day. The twenty-one lots bought by the Spaniard included sixty-three males and forty-two females, valued at £26 per head, as well as a further fifty-eight males and five females for which he was charged £25 per head, and thirteen boys and seven girls valued at between £13 and £17 each.21
As well as infuriating the Jamaican planters, who believed subjects of the English crown should be favored customers, the sales also left Castillo unsatisfied. In London the previous year, William and Mary had decreed that the Spaniard was to be supplied with two thousand slaves by the Royal African Company over a period of twenty months at eighty pieces of eight (roughly £20) per head. With prices increasing due to the outbreak of war with France, it appears that Ruding and Penhallow were reluctant to stick to the terms of the agreement. Not only was Castillo forced to pay more than he had bargained for, but he was also restricted in the total number of individuals that he was allowed to buy. In due course the Spaniard would address an official complaint to Westminster. For the time being, however, he chose to pay the price demanded, while ordering Captain Hewetson of the Lion, the English privateer he had contracted in Barbados, to sail to Curaçao and purchase six hundred more slaves from the Dutch as a means of making up for the shortfall.22
The remainder of the slaves auctioned at Port Royal that day were sold in smaller quantities.23 As the second purchaser paid in cash, his or her name went unrecorded. The third, who took credit in lieu of future commodity sales to the company, as was normal in such circumstances, was Jeremiah Tilley, a Quaker from Bristol who had lived in Port Royal since at least 1685 and owned a house in town along with seventy-four cattle and several horses.24 The next four buyers were Samuel Lewis and George Ivy, John Hillyard of St. Thomas, and James Banister, the son of a former governor of Suriname who had been ousted by the Dutch in 1671 and murdered in Jamaica three years later. The island’s surveyor general had subsequently been hanged for the crime.25 Anthony Swimmer, a Bristolian by origin who rented an estate in Clarendon for £300 per year, took a single lot, as did Peter Shuler and Smith Kelly, the provost marshal of Port Royal who was also one of Jamaica’s principal planters, while Reginald Wilson, the port captain, purchased two lots. Other buyers included Fulke Rose, a noted physician, long-term resident, and planter of St. Thomas and the father of three illegitimate mulatto children, and Governor Inchiquin, who bought two men, one woman, and two boys for £100.26
Most of the purchasers, with the possible exception of the newly arrived governor, would have been perfectly accustomed to “the noise and clamour” typically attendant at such scenes. One witness commented on purchasers’ “eagerness” to buy, while Richard Ligon noted how they made their selections “as they do Horses in a Market; the strongest, youthfullest, and most beautiful, yield the greatest prices.”27 For the slaves themselves, the moment of sale was often the most traumatic of their entire ordeal, particularly when it involved being separated from family members or fellow countrymen with whom they had shared the miseries of the Middle Passage. On the ship which carried Equiano to Barbados, for example, were “several brothers, who . . . were sold in different lots. . . . It was very moving . . . to see and hear their cries a
t parting,” he recalled.28 Other sources state that the most experienced slave owners were careful to keep families together. As separating relatives could result in suicide, avoiding this possibility was a sound financial expedient.
Following the tribulations of the auction, the slaves bought by Santiago Castillo faced the further ordeal of transshipment. Their immediate destination was Cartagena, the principal port of the Spanish Main, located on the coast of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in modern-day Colombia. Due to the ravages of the voyage from Ouidah, Castillo decided to delay the next leg of the journey to allow the 188 men, women, and children he had purchased time to recuperate.29 After the auction, they were landed and taken to a holding pen, probably located in Port Royal, where they would remain for two weeks. Guards were hired to prevent their escape while a physician would probably have been on call. Sick slaves were routinely bathed in “sweet herbs” to speed their recovery, others had their mouths washed out with lime juice to prevent scurvy. Slaves due for transshipment were normally well fed, receiving meals of beef, rice, flour, yams, biscuits, fish, or bananas twice a day. There may even have been rum and tobacco, and they were likely to have been exercised on occasion.30 Castillo, meanwhile, hired a vessel to transport his cargo to Cartagena. By the first week of July he had chartered “a small ship” and the slaves were taken back to the quayside and hustled on board.31
Loath to have such a valuable cargo intercepted en route to the Main, Castillo arranged to have HMS Swan assigned as an escort. No doubt Inchiquin helped to broker the deal and was compensated by Castillo as a result. To give the mission a veneer of respectability, Inchiquin ordered Captain Johnson to deliver “some letters to the Spanish Ambassador for the release of certain English prisoners” held in Cartagena, most likely the crews of Jamaican sloops who had been detained for engaging in illegal trade.32 The Swan was also loaded with trade goods. Starved of supply from home due to the inefficiency of the flota system, the colonists of the Spanish Main were a ready market for English manufactures.33 The trade also provided a cash-strapped Jamaica with a supply of hard currency: the silver Spanish pieces of eight which had long since become the unofficial coinage of Port Royal. The crew of the Swan, for their part, had spent their first month in Jamaica acclimating to the tropical heat, wooding and watering their vessel and making minor repairs. As well as the six men who had been lost to illness and accident during the transatlantic voyage, several more had died in Jamaica, among them the gunner, Robert How, who had been discharged dead on June 23. On July 1, in preparation for his imminent departure, Captain Johnson had Jonathon Stephens entered into the Swan’s muster. Listed as a pilot, Stephens would have had valuable local knowledge of the shoals and keys surrounding Jamaica and may even have had experience of the waters off Cartagena.34
On July 6, 1690, the Swan and the small ship Castillo had hired departed from Port Royal.35 Sailing due south, they reached Cartagena within ten days without incident. With a population of several thousand Spaniards, creoles, and Indian and negro slaves, the walled city boasted numerous whitewashed churches, forts, convents, and cathedrals built on a spit of land projecting into the sparkling Caribbean. To the south lay a magnificent double bay, the inner of which was projected by a series of booms and fortifications bristling with over one thousand cannon. The whole was dominated by the San Felipe de Barajas Castle rising above the city to the south. While the Swan beat back and forth off shore, Castillo’s hired ship sailed into the harbor, where it was boarded by local officials charged with ensuring that the slaves were not infected with disease. Having passed the inspection, Castillo’s slaves were unloaded and taken into town, housed in temporary holding bays known as “casas del cabildo,” branded once more in preparation for resale, and divided into lots which typically numbered between fifteen and thirty individuals. Some may have been sold to residents, while others were purchased by agents who would keep them in Cartagena until a sufficient number had been gathered to dispatch inland for resale. Some of these went north to Panama, others headed south for the sugar plantations of southern and central New Granada, while a significant number traveled as far as northern Peru.36 The Swan picked up six prisoners at Cartagena before returning to Port Royal laden with Spanish pieces of eight. The voyage proved difficult: the frigate was a remarkably poor sailor. Beating up against the prevailing winds, it would not arrive back at Jamaica until September 12, some six weeks after its departure.37
MOST OF THE Hannah’s slaves who had remained in Jamaica were destined for a short, brutal life on one of the island’s sugar plantations. By the 1690s Jamaica’s economy was coming to be dominated by such concerns. By examining inventory records dating from between 1674 and 1701, it is possible to identify some two hundred planters. Perhaps half were smallholders. With an average of two slaves or indentured servants each, most owned provision farms aimed at supplying regional markets and the central hub of Port Royal with pork, poultry, fruits, and vegetables for local consumption. Others owned cotton plantations or cacao walks. These were businesses which required relatively little investment but were diminishing in importance. Jamaican cotton, being considered an inferior crop, struggled to compete with that grown in the North American colonies, while the island’s cacao crop was regularly ruined by blight and the hurricanes which swept the Caribbean annually in August and September. Many of the other small to mid-sized estates were cattle pens which supplied fresh beef for internal markets. Hog farming was also popular, but by 1690, all the largest and wealthiest planters were dedicated to sugar production. In the sample of two hundred mentioned above, some fifty-four can be assigned to this category due to the mill rollers, boiling coppers, sugar pots, and stills listed among their inventories. Of these, six were small scale. Owning less than twenty slaves each, they would have struggled to make their labor-intensive businesses profitable. The majority of the remainder owned at least forty slaves, while the biggest seven planters had more than one hundred slaves each and owned estates valued in excess of £3,000.38
At the time of the auction held on board the Hannah, the largest and most profitable sugar plantation in Jamaica belonged to Thomas Sutton, an assemblyman and colonel in the island militia. Sutton’s estate, valued by contemporaries at over £10,000, covered 1,100 acres on either side of the upper Minho River near the hamlet of St. Jago in Clarendon Parish.39 The single most valuable asset, representing 70 percent of the estate’s total value, were the four to five hundred slaves who lived on the plantation. Three hundred were “working” slaves. At least sixty were women and children. The estate also contained a great house: a grand, fortified building which combined luxury with the need for defense.40 Built on rising ground some distance from the sugar works, thus allowing Sutton to keep an eye on his charges, the great house would have been surrounded by formal gardens, while the interior would perhaps have featured finely cut stone, seasoned timber, and highly polished floors.41 Sutton lived with his wife, Judith, his infant son, John, and his daughters, Anna and Sarah.42 Nearby was a dwelling house, home to six or seven indentured servants and the plantation’s caretaker, who looked after the estate when Sutton was away on business in Spanish Town or Port Royal. Inside was an arsenal. As well as four small cannon, perhaps 2 or 4 pounders, it also housed at least six barrels of gunpowder and fifty firearms, including blunderbusses and muskets.43 Elsewhere on the grounds, on the far side of the extensive cane fields, was a watermill powered by the Minho River, a boiling house with furnace and coppers, a still, a curing house, and a village for the slaves.44 The plantation produced roughly four hundred hogsheads of sugar per year, roughly a thirtieth of that produced by Jamaica as a whole.45 Each hogshead sold for about £10 at Port Royal. Judging by the inventories of contemporary estates, Sutton’s would have also contained various livestock pens and provisions grounds. Cattle, goats, and sheep were commonly raised for their meat and manure, while horses served as mounts or beasts of burden.46
Nothing is known of Thomas Sutton prior to his arrival i
n Jamaica in 1670. On November 26 of that year, he emigrated from Barbados, along with several other planters who made the move during Modyford’s governorship, and purchased his Clarendon estate from Henry Tennant for twenty-two slaves and £80.47 Sutton was acting as an agent for his brother John, a ship’s captain, merchant, and planter of Barbados.48 This seems to have been a common pattern at the time: Richard Guy and William Drax, both of whom became prominent planters in the 1680s, also arrived on the island in the same period as agents for wealthier elder siblings.49 Thomas Sutton prospered in Jamaica. By 1677, when he received his first appointment as one of the two assemblymen chosen for Clarendon each year, he must have been a well-respected and recognizable figure in the parish. Reappointed as assemblyman in 1678, 1679, and 1686, Sutton rose to a position of local political prominence and made close alliances with several of the other leading planters in the region, including Henry Tennant, from whom he had purchased his estate and who was married to Sutton’s niece; Edward Pennant, whose daughter, Elizabeth, was married to Sutton’s son John; and Francis Blackmore, a fellow resident of Clarendon Parish who shared a bookkeeper with Sutton, lived near the port of Withywood, and owned two hundred and fifty slaves and two sugar and indigo plantations.50
Although Sutton was a rising star, there were also one or two black marks on his record. These chiefly stemmed from his involvement with the interlopers. Many planters were dissatisfied with the Royal African Company. Its prices were high, largely due to the expense of maintaining a string of forts and factories on the West African coast; the RAC favored Spanish buyers such as Castillo, whose seemingly bottomless purse could cope with the agents’ inflated demands; supply was irregular, especially in wartime; and the demand for slaves in the Caribbean was considerably higher than the company could satisfy. All this led to the rise of the interlopers: independent, monopoly-busting traders who sent small, swift vessels to the African coast to purchase slaves who were sold directly to the planters in the West Indies at low prices.51 Due to the trade’s illegality, evidence is sketchy. Nevertheless, at the time of Inchiquin’s arrival it is possible to identify a few individuals involved in the trade. One was Oliver Cransborough, a Port Royal mariner who owned a part share in at least two of the island’s sloops and was also involved in shipping horses to Jamaica from Rio de la Hacha on the Spanish Main. In 1687 Cransborough had embarked on a voyage to Southeast Africa and the Indian Ocean islands on board the Margaret. Having picked up 187 slaves, he returned to Jamaica on December 7 and sold the 128 who survived the voyage.52 A second interloper recorded that year was an unnamed Dutchman who reached Jamaica with 477 slaves from Madagascar and West Central Africa,53 and in 1686 a certain Captain Hawke arrived with “somewhat under a hundred” slaves. Landed on the sparsely populated north coast to avoid the attentions of the RAC’s agents in Port Royal, the Africans were collected by two Jamaican merchants, Josiah Barry and a Mr. Waterhouse. The sick were left on nearby plantations to recover, while the rest were guided over the mountains by a hunter and sold directly to plantation owners in the savannahs in the south.54