Indian customs dismayed most European observers. They appeared a race without order, that vital ingredient of what Renaissance men considered to be civilisation. They were idolators and, according to Cotton Mather, a Bostonian Puritan, were ‘Lazy Drones, and love Idleness Exceedingly’. Indolence was a form of devilment for those of his persuasion and it seemed an inevitable outcome of God’s purpose that the Indians should be dispossessed by colonists just as the Israelites had driven out the pagan Canaanites.
Nevertheless, while the Indians, like Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, were unfit to occupy their land, they might be put in the way of improvement. The idea of conversion and elevation was given exotic form in the masque The Virginian Princess, staged in 1614. The pagan Indian nobility, dressed in fanciful gold-embroidered and feathered costumes designed by Inigo Jones, were addressed in James I’s name:
Virginian Princes, ye must now renounce
Your superstitious worships of these suns …
And of your sweet devotions turn the events
To this Britain Phoebus.
In the beginning the promoters of the Virginia Company had made much of plans for the conversion and education of Indians, and during the colony’s early years relations between settlers and natives had been harmonious. But as the colony grew the settlers clamoured for fresh land which could only be gained at the Indians’ expense. War broke out in 1622 and after a massacre in which over 300 colonists were killed, a new and understandably fierce mood prevailed. ‘The way of conquering them is more easy than civilising them by fair means,’ ran a pamphlet issued by the company, ‘for they are a rude, barbarous, and naked people, scattered in small communities, which are helps to Victory, but hindrances to Civility.’ In future the native Americans would be brought to heel by the destruction of their camps and crops and ‘by pursuing them with our horses, and Blood-Hounds to draw after them, and Mastiffs to tear them, which take these naked, tanned deformed Savages, for no other than wild beasts.’
This mandate for extermination anticipated similar calls for ruthless wars against a dehumanised enemy that would be heard from land-hungry colonists in southern Africa, New Zealand and Australia. It was also a reminder that the first colonisation of North America was contemporaneous with the far larger settlement of Ireland, mainly by Presbyterian Scottish immigrants. Between 1620 and 1642 120,000 colonists arrived to help undertake what Sir Francis Bacon revealingly called ‘the reduction to civility’ of the Gaelic-speaking, Catholic Irish. On both sides of the Atlantic the settlers faced sporadic but determined resistance and their response was the same, a resort to counter-massacre and the most extreme forms of repression. Half a century of land wars against the Indians calloused the New England settlers’ consciences. In 1703, soon after the slaughter of Pequot Indians, a soldier wrote, prompted by a clergyman, ‘Sometimes the scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.’ When founded, the Massachusetts Bay Company had set on its seal a device which showed an Indian with a scroll above his head with the inscription ‘Come over and help us’.
Native Americans were not the only people who advanced territorial claims in North America. In 1494, Spain and Portugal had signed the Treaty of Tordesillas by which the New World was divided between them, and their agreement was endorsed by a Papal bull. This accord was naturally disregarded by Protestant Englishmen who undermined its legality with counter-claims based on John Cabot’s 1497 voyage. He had, at Henry VII’s bidding, crossed the Atlantic and made landfall at either Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, no one is sure which, and formally annexed the region in the King’s name. Furthermore, there was the legendary transatlantic expedition made by the twelfth-century Welsh prince, Madoc. This insubstantial tale assumed, in the hands of Elizabethan expansionists, the force of historical truth and was cited to override Spanish and Portuguese claims.
Such antiquarian nonsense was superfluous since, by 1600, it was obvious that the Iberian nations lacked the seapower to defend their New World monopoly. The limitations of their control had been repeatedly and dramatically exposed by French, Dutch and English privateers from 1560 onwards. Nevertheless, Spain did expel the French from their settlement at San Augustin in 1565 and for a few years the Virginians feared similar treatment. It was not meted out by a state which had been at peace with Britain from 1604 and, after 1609, needed all its resources for a renewed war with the Netherlands. For the first thirty years or so of their existence, the North American settlements enjoyed a vital immunity from foreign interference.
2
Baubles for the Souls of Men: The West and East Indies
Englishmen had first been drawn to the Caribbean, known often as the Spanish Main, in the middle of the sixteenth century. Sir John Hawkins, a Devon shipowner and entrepreneur, led the way having heard, according to Hakluyt, that ‘Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola [the Spanish colony of Española, now Haiti], and that the store of negroes might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea’. The Spanish settlers were grateful for Hawkins’s cargoes of West African slaves, but their government objected to his infraction of the official monopoly that gave Spaniards alone the right to trade with Spanish possessions. In 1568, Hawkins’s tiny flotilla of trading vessels was ambushed at San Juan de Ulúa and driven off with heavy losses. He soon returned with others, including Drake, as a privateer preying on Spanish shipping.
This was a holy war for Protestantism as well as a trawl for profit in ill-defended waters. Drake recited passages from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to captive Spanish seamen, and one of his captains, John Oxenham, turned the tables on a captured official of the Inquisition by placing a chamber pot on his head and striking him ‘many fisticuffs’.1 Oxenham himself was later taken and burned by the Inquisition for his combination of heresy and temerity. Piracy may not have done much for the Protestant cause, but many pirates prospered. Memories of their more spectacular coups against treasure ships remained evergreen and in 1621, when Anglo-Spanish relations were deteriorating, the Puritan Earl of Warwick proposed the despatch of a massive armada to the Caribbean whose costs, estimated at £364,000, would be met by public subscription.
This scheme for a profit-making, maritime crusade came to nothing, but a preliminary reconnaissance of the Caribbean revealed the existence of Barbados, a fertile, well-watered and uninhabited island that was said to be highly suitable for tobacco-growing. The vision of a second Virginia lured investors and in 1627 Charles I granted a charter to the newly formed Barbados Company. Its settlers were soon in difficulties; Barbadian tobacco failed to compete with the Virginian product and a hurried switch to cotton did nothing to revive the island’s fortunes.
Sugar saved Barbados. It was first planted in 1643 and within fifty years sugar plantations covered four-fifths of the island and refined sugar, molasses and rum made up nine-tenths of its exports. What later historians called the ‘sugar revolution’ transformed the economy of the West Indies, opened the way for a subsidiary but equally profitable commerce in negro slaves and, incidentally, made the region into a war zone where until 1815, Britain, France and Spain struggled for control of the islands and mastery of the seaways. Sugar enabled some plantation owners to become millionaires. In 1681 it was calculated, perhaps optimistically, that £5,000 invested in a sugar estate would within a few years yield £1,000 annually. By this date a mass domestic and European market for cheap sugar was emerging and British producers were getting the upper hand in a price war with competitors in Portuguese Brazil. The boom benefited Britain and its government which levied duties on sugar imports which, between 1699 and 1701, were valued at £280,000.
Barbados’s success story accelerated the occupation of other islands by settlers. By 1660, St Kitts, Antigua, Nevis, Montserrat and Jamaica (seized from Spain in 1655) had been occupied and planted with sugar cane. In 1638 a small party attempted to settle St Lucia but were soon driven out by the native Caribs who, showing considerable ingenuity, ‘smoked out’ the colonists from t
heir forts with bonfires of dried peppers.
Indigenous diseases, especially the mosquito-borne malaria and yellow fever, together with the labour-intensive processes by which sugar was cultivated, harvested and refined, presented enormous problems to the early planters. Contemporary medical wisdom cautioned Englishmen against leaving their temperate homeland for the tropics. Applying current Hippocratic principles concerning the balance of internal humours, one physician wrote in 1602 that Englishmen should shun the ‘burning zones’ for, ‘Nature framed the Spaniards apt to such places where melancholy and choler were generated.’2
Such warnings were widely ignored by emigrants keen to make money, but their day-to-day existence in the Caribbean was always precarious. Soldiers and sailors, whose diet was sparse and unhealthy, suffered the worst and a West Indian posting was always dreaded. During a brief campaign on the Nicaraguan coast in 1778–79, three quarters of an 1,800-strong force died from fevers, and most of the survivors, including Captain Horatio Nelson, were infected with malaria.3
Preventive and curative medicine were primitive and in some cases added to the patient’s sufferings. In 1704, Sir Christopher Codington, a planter and governor of Antigua, dosed himself with ‘vast quantities of laudanum’ to assuage a ‘bloody flux’ (dysentery) that he imagined had been caused by overwork. This nostrum triggered fresh distempers including paralysis of the limbs and internal pains which he treated by sea-bathing and drinking ‘great quantities of cold water (which I take to be the West Indian panacea)’ which was probably contaminated and contributed to the persistence of his dysentery. The value of the chinchona bark, from which quinine was extracted, as a prophylactic against malaria had been discovered from the Amerindians, but it was not used generally until the mid-nineteenth century. In its absence, victims of malaria had to suffer stoically like General Robert Venables. ‘I was but a mere skeleton,’ he wrote during the 1655 Jamaican campaign, ‘and per times had been in a raving condition about three weeks.’ He attributed his own and his army’s sicknesses to God who was chastising them for ‘the Sins of the Nation’, knowledge which may have given them some extra, inner stamina.4
Endurance of infections and extremes of heat and humidity was the common lot of the men and women who emigrated to the West Indies to make their fortunes from sugar. But the drive to make money alone could not compensate for physical suffering and, by the end of the century, it was customary for the richer planters to place their estates in the hands of managers and return to Britain and live, often in high style, from the profits.
The early planters were not so fortunately placed, nor were the indentured servants they hired in Britain. To begin with, the sugar estates followed the precedent established in Virginia and imported their labour, but it was soon apparent that British labourers were not up to the physical demands of sugar cultivation in the tropics. Knowledge of the conditions they would encounter and the planters’ habit of working new arrivals hard to recoup the cost of their transport deterred men and women from freely committing themselves to indentured service in the West Indies.
Various stopgap measures were adopted to overcome what, by the 1650s, had become a permanent labour shortage. After Oliver Cromwell’s Scottish and Irish campaigns of 1650–52, captured rebels were transported for fixed periods to the West Indies, a punitive measure that was revived in 1685 after the suppression of the Duke of Monmouth’s uprising. Irish labourers, whether deported for treason or driven by poverty, were the most numerous, but they proved sullen and unwilling workers. ‘Scotchmen and Welshmen we esteem the best servants,’ the St Kitts planters observed in 1673, ‘and the Irish the worst, many of them being good for nothing but mischief.’ They were also disloyal; in 1674 Irish workers on Montserrat assisted a French attack on the island and twenty years later their countrymen in Jamaica were suspected of being pro-French.5
Reluctant to employ Irishmen, the desperate St Kitts planters were bargaining in 1677 to pay £1.11 shillings (£1.55) a head for convicts from English gaols and pay the costs of their passage. This was a private arrangement although, in 1664, the home government contemplated the mass deportation of ‘all vagrants, rogues and idle persons that can give no account of themselves, felons who have benefit of clergy … gipsies and low persons having resort to unlicensed brothels’ to the sugar colonies. Those under twenty were to be bound for seven years, those over for four.
The prospects for those, whether the hopeless poor, the criminal or the rebellious, who found themselves compelled to undertake indentured service were not entirely bleak. If they survived until the end of their term they received £10 or 400 pounds of sugar with which to better themselves. Some became overseers, earning as much as £50 a year, and those with such skills as carpentry could make twice as much. Nevertheless, work on the plantations remained intensely unpopular and for many, perhaps the majority, it was a gruelling alternative to the gallows, prison or starvation. ‘We had nothing before us but slavery,’ wrote the spokesman for a handful of Jacobite rebels transported to the West Indies in 1716 who, in desperation, overcame their gaolers and seized the ship which they steered to Bordeaux and freedom.6
* * *
It is instructive that these bold men likened their future condition to that of the negro slaves who since the 1650s had taken the place of the increasingly scarce white workers. There were many occasions when negroes and Europeans worked alongside each other in the fields and boiling rooms, an experience that the whites found degrading even though, unlike their black counterparts, they were not their masters’ property and there was a period to their servitude.
Given the insoluble problem of finding a willing and hardy workforce, it was inevitable that British plantation owners would adopt the Spanish colonial system of using imported African slave labour. The Spaniards, having through forced labour, overwork, the spread of alien germs and viruses, and systematic massacre exterminated most of the Caribbean Amerindians by the mid-sixteenth century, turned to negro slaves. They were the only means by which the highly labour-intensive Spanish latifundia and mines could be sustained. For economic rather than demographic reasons, British planters followed the Spanish example and, from 1650 onwards, slaves gradually replaced indentured labourers on the plantations. At the same time slave labour was introduced to the Chesapeake basin tobacco estates and, soon after, slaves were imported into Carolina.
Economic necessity was always the first and, for its supporters, the strongest justification for slavery. Their reasoning was simply outlined in a report prepared in 1663 to procure royal backing for the occupation of the Dutch colony of Surinam on the Guianan coast. ‘Were the planters supplied with negroes, the sinews and strength of this western world,’ it was claimed, ‘they would advance their fortunes and His Majesty’s customs.’7 Slavery underpinned the expanding West Indian economy and enriched both planters and the home government which, it went without saying, would direct additional revenues towards the protection and enlargement of this new source of national wealth.
There was, and few would have denied this in a country where much store was set on individual freedom, a moral issue involved in the sale and exploitation of slaves. In his Reform of Manners (1702) Daniel Defoe, usually a fervent upholder of British overseas enterprise, expressed doubts about ‘the barter of baubles for the souls of men’, but overcame them by reference to what he imagined to be the ‘Natural Temper’ of the negro, that is awe of and thraldom to the white man. This view, found in Defoe’s novel Colonel Jack, was widely and uncritically held throughout Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was based upon Old Testament and Graeco-Roman traditions of thought which represented the negro as an inferior creature who, at one and the same time, was the descendant of the accursed Ham and a specimen of that lesser humanity described by Plato and Aristotle.
As with the Native Americans, the negro was measured against the standards of contemporary European civilisation and judged unfavourably. He was, asserted the eighteent
h-century philosopher, David Hume, ‘naturally inferior’ because his race possessed ‘No ingenious manufactures … no arts, no sciences’. Whenever he displayed what might pass for wit, his behaviour was akin to that of a parrot ‘who speaks a few words plainly’ but cannot grasp their meaning. Those who travelled to Africa, often in connection with the slave trade, endorsed such conclusions with lurid tales of a dark and chaotic land whose people indulged in fetish cults, cannibalism, massacres and tribal wars.
Although burdened by moral and intellectual disabilities, the negro was part of a divinely ordered world in which the prime justification for a man’s existence was his productive usefulness. This principle of the utility of all humankind impelled British governments to deport idlers, vagrants and criminals to the colonies where they would redeem themselves through work, and the French to condemn miscreants to perpetual labour rowing war galleys. Plantation slavery was the means by which negroes could fulfil the role for which God had intended them and add to the general well-being of the world. ‘I was shock’d at the first appearance of human flesh exposed for sale,’ wrote John Pinney, an absentee Nevis planter in 1764. ‘But surely God ordain’d ’em for the use and benefit of us: other his Divine Will would have been manifest by some sign or token.’
Enslavement was not without its advantages. With breathtaking smugness Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, argued in the early 1700s that since the slaves had given so much to Britain it was only proper that they should receive Christianity in return. This exchange was unwelcome to planters who imagined, with good reason as it turned out, that conversion would make their slaves ‘more perverse and intractable’. Addressing the Barbadian plantocracy, assembled in the island’s parliament in 1681, the governor Sir Richard Dutton remarked that slaves deserved the ‘good usage of Christian servants, but as to make negroes Christians, their savage brutishness renders them wholly incapable’.8 Slave-owning was compatible with the Christian life, at least in the form it was taught by Catholic and Church of England divines. One of the latter, Bishop Fleetwood, preached in 1711 that, ‘The laws of God did not forbid the keeping of Christian slaves, nor do the laws of the land. The following year his church’s missionary organisation, the Society for the Propagation of the Christian Gospel, was bequeathed a plantation in Barbados. Each of its slaves was branded on the chest with the word ‘Society’ to denote his new owner; not surprisingly the rate of conversion was disappointing.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 3