Falling yields from Barbados’s plantations did little to detract from the importance of Bridgetown as a colonial city. By the 1740s, it could boast a population of some 10,600 inhabitants – the equal of Boston and New York in British colonial America. Equally attractive, for colonial society, was the much higher ratio of whites to blacks than in other West Indian colonies. In Jamaica it was one white to ten blacks and in Antigua as high as one to eighteen, but in Barbados only one to four.68 This gave Bridgetown, the historic capital of the ‘Mother-Colony’ and ‘very Mart of all other plantations in these parts’, a powerful sense of racial and cultural security all amplified by that reassuring footprint of forts and garrisons overlooking Carlisle Bay. Within the city, a merchant class had developed, partly peopled by a growing Jewish community who were banned from owning slaves but able to make a good living in urban trading. With the development of a regional sugar and slave economy across the West Indies, Bridgetown exploited its position as the easternmost island to become the Caribbean hub for market intelligence, military news, fashion, culture and influence.
For the medical doctor George Pinckard, sailing around the Caribbean in the 1810s, Barbados was ‘the London of the West Indies – the great capital to which we anxiously look for events, and for news’.69 The first destination of William Hickey’s tour around the West Indies was Grenada, but, ‘wishing to gain information’, the captain naturally ‘ran close in to Bridgetown, capital of Barbadoes, and there hove to. A boat, with only caffres in her, having fruit to sell, came off, and we purchased pines, oranges, plaintains, guavas, star apples, etc., all of which were highly acceptable.’70 The Royal African Company instructed all its ships to dock first at Bridgetown to test the market for other islands. ‘I have seen 300 sail of merchant ships, with their convoy, enter Carlisle Bay, in one fleet,’ noted William Dickson in 1780, ‘and have known large fleets of men of war, once as far as 32 ships of the line, besides frigates, at anchor, for a considerable time, in that harbour.’71 In 1788 alone, over 350 ships left Bridgetown carrying nearly 38,000 tons of cargo. With its Cheapside warehouses, its merchant class and London connections, Bridgetown was easily the dominant trading and cultural centre of the British Empire in the West Indies.
And more than any of the other cities of the British West Indies – such as St John’s, Antigua or Spanish Town, Jamaica – Bridgetown offered a way out of the tedium of plantation living. ‘Being hot and moreover, not fit for Hunting or Hawking, the Planters and other Gentry here are obliged, for most part, to sedentary diversions at home: as cards, dice, tables, quoits, bowling, balls, and concerts,’ was how one 1740s visitor described daily existence in the Barbados big house. Then, of course, there were the ‘five or six Bottles of Madera wine, to their share, every Day, for which they find sweating the best Relief’.72
In Bridgetown, by contrast, there was culture and refinement: there were assembly rooms, racecourses, musical societies, dancing schools, bowling greens, coffee houses, taverns, inns, literary societies, Masonic lodges and a Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce.73 The Barbados Mercury was laden with adverts for events such as an ‘Elegant Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Musick’ (November 1784), or more excitingly, ‘A Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Musick by the Gentlemen of the Musical Society. Proper MUSIC FOR DANCING after the Concert will be provided’ (November 1787). And just as in pre-revolutionary Boston, so in Bridgetown the conspicuous display of consumer goods, the construction of Georgian mansions and the circulation of London novels and journals cemented an imperial, Atlantic identity. Above all, there was the theatre (much frequented by George Washington). While the Patagonian Theatre went highbrow with productions of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the shows at the James Street theatre were a little more bawdy with titles such as Beaux Stratagem and The Spouting Club, or Dick the Apprentice. Indeed, the pages of the Mercury or the Barbados Gazette – founded in 1731 by Samuel Keimer (a former business associate of Benjamin Franklin) – were full of a vernacular, eighteenth-century humour straight from the pages of Grub Street. In between shipping announcements and ‘Foreign Affairs’ correspondence and minutes from the General Assembly, there were squibs from ‘Celia Epigram’ and a series of ‘amusing’ announcements: ‘MISPLACED Three languishing glances, and as many sighs, which escaped from Miss –, and were directed to a gentleman in the grenadier company, who, it is shrewdly suspected, has a wife on the other side of the Atlantic’; ‘LOST from the bosom of Miss – a very valuable heart, set around with graces, supposed to be dropt near a young officer, who it is hoped if he should have the luck to discover it, will make an honourable use of this accident’.74
We gain a rich sense of this urban, commercial society from the diaries of Eliza Fenwick, a flighty but well-connected young English actress, who arrived in ‘Barbadoes’ in 1811, to a welter of social invitations. ‘After a short passage through purgatory, we arrived yesterday in Heaven,’ she wrote back to her mother with a rather different version of the Atlantic ‘middle passage’. ‘This is indeed the Land of Promise, – I hope it is not too good to last.’ Soon enough it was lunchtime.
At 3 we sat down to a grand dinner: sucking-pig, fowls, soup, mutton, game, yams, plantain, sweet potatoes, sour cabbages, and a hundred other nasty things … Afterwards they compelled me and Miss Simms to lie down. We slept till tea time, when Miss Lewellyn and her Negroes brought us tea, Coffee and cakes, made us take them in bed, and then rubbed our legs, which really were almost as big as our bodies. At 8 o clock we had Chocolate, and at 9 Supper. Miss L. gave us up her room and when we were in bed brought us up hot Madeira, bathed our feet with camphorated wine, and then all the ladies came and kissed us most affectionately.75
The ensuing weeks entailed only more lemonade, luncheons with the planters, piano duets and dinners with the Attorney General. It was such fun that she stayed for a decade, starred in many a Bridgetown production and even shipped over her mother.
Those ‘Negroes’ rubbing Eliza’s legs highlight another unique aspect of Bridgetown life: a growing population of domestic servants, skilled slaves and freed coloureds who created a far more multicultural urban environment than the binary racism of the plantations. Between 1765 and 1818 the free coloured population of Barbados expanded from 500 to 3,000, almost all of them based in the capital. Their numbers shaped the relatively unusual topography of the city, as land shortages, high prices and the need for slaves and servants to live alongside their masters produced high levels of mixed-race living. Unlike other cities of the British Empire, there was no clearly segregated ‘black town’ or ‘white town’ (which would have had to include the Jewish residents and impoverished white labourers). Indeed, Bridgetown became notorious for the remarkable degree of social licence granted to the urban black community. ‘The inhabitants of the towns may, in general, be said to be humane,’ William Dickson noted carefully. ‘Many of them, indeed, treat their domestics with a degree of indulgence, which in their present uncultivated state … they are in general but ill able to bear, and which they often abuse.’ What Dickson regarded as unacceptable behaviour was most likely black urban culture – spread through kinship networks across different domestic settings – which found its voice during funerals, Saturday-night gatherings (unnerving white residents with drumming and dancing), storytelling and gaming. Just as concerning for many white residents was the economic challenge posed by this expanding, mixed-race community. As merchants, haberdashers, tavern- and innkeepers, tailors, jewellers and artisans, the skilled slaves and freed coloureds easily undercut the often unskilled, white working class. Dickson thought it was ‘almost impossible for a poor free [i.e., white] man to find a market for his work, when it came into competition with the slaves of the rich’.76 So time and again the planter-run Barbados House of Assembly had to resort to racial solidarity to pass laws limiting the competition that freed slaves could pose to white merchants. However, it could never eliminate this ‘black’ economy altogether – and Bridg
etown received a powerful economic boost from the presence of such an aggressively entrepreneurial community.
One sector of the economy where the freed coloureds faced little competition was in the running of brothels. Across the colonial Caribbean, Bridgetown was also famous for a highly developed sex industry. This was partly the traditional product of a port servicing a large volume of sailors, but also because of the racial dynamics of the island – what the Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles calls ‘the institutionalization of prostitution by the white elite’.77 Within Bridgetown society, there were examples of more consensual intimacy, as revealed through the wills of various merchants seeking either to manumit a slave lover or provide for their joint offspring. The 1776 will of the merchant Richard Adamson, for instance, left his property to his mother, Jane Stoute, in trust for his slave mistress, Joan, and their seven children. The 1787 will of Charles Cross manumitted his three mulatto children, and made his ‘negro woman’ Nanny the property of their son George as a means of securing her freedom. In contrast to the brutalism of the plantation, the urban culture of Bridgetown appeared to offer some avenues for more loving relationships – albeit within a context of racial dominance.78 For the most part, enslaved women would be coerced into relationships with plantation owners and powerful whites, who might then grant them their freedom. In turn, many of these free mulatto women branched out into running brothels. ‘The hostess of the tavern is, usually, a black, or mulatto woman who has been the favoured enamorata of some backra [the negro term used for white] man, from whom she has obtained her freedom, and perhaps two or three slaves to assist her in carrying on the business of the house,’ helpfully explained the army doctor George Pinckard, following his visit in 1796. She then employs a series of young, good-looking assistants.
One privilege, indeed, is allowed them, which, you will be shocked to know, is that of tenderly disposing of their persons. This offers the only hope they have of procuring a sum of money, wherewith to purchase their freedom: it is so common a resource among them, that neither shame nor disgrace attaches to it; but, on the contrary, she who is most sought, becomes an object of envy, and is proud of the distinction shown her.79
Bridgetown was populated by a series of internationally renowned brothel keepers, of whom by far the most celebrated was the lady known as Rachel Pringle. Today, a 1790s cartoon of her generous physique seated on a stool outside her tavern serves as a popular tourist print, highlighting her remarkable, transatlantic notoriety. Pringle’s origins are shrouded in Bajan myth, but it is thought that Rachel was the daughter of an African slave woman and her master William Lauder, ‘a Scotch schoolmaster’. Mr Lauder then sought to impose himself on young Rachel as well. ‘Lauder’s conduct to his offspring, is a damning proof how debasing to the human mind is the power given us over our fellow creatures by holding them in bondage!’ was how a mid-Victorian pot-boiler described it. ‘The ties of consanguinity were all merged in the authority of the master, and he saw but the slave in his own daughter! She … awakened the libidinous desires of her disgraceful and sinful parent; who made many – but to her eternal honour be it spoken – unsuccessful attempts on her chastity.’80 Thankfully, at this moment, the Royal Navy officer Thomas Pringle intervened to purchase her freedom and set her up in a house as his lover. But she soon tired of Thomas: she borrowed a child to fake a birth and so send Captain Pringle back to Britain. For by then she had found a new patron in the form of a Mr Polgreen – and Miss Rachel becomes Miss Rachel Pringle Polgreen. By the late 1780s she is listed in Bridgetown’s tax records as having five properties, and by the 1790s as the owner of ‘a large house, 2 side houses, 5 tenements in a yard, formerly Mary Ann Bellamy’s and two houses’. This added up to a real estate fortune of over £1,300, combined with property (including slaves) at over £1,600.81
Her first ‘tavern’ or ‘hotel’ was in Canary Street, and it rapidly became the most sought-after brothel in Bridgetown – not least because of the patronage of one of Bridgetown’s more surprising visitors, the priapic, red-haired Prince William Henry, the future King William IV. By the time he arrived in Bridgetown, the then Duke of Clarence was notorious as a drunken, bullying, coarse, self-regarding, lascivious letch. He was also a passionate pro-slavery advocate, using his maiden speech in the House of Lords – as ‘an attentive observer of the state of the negroes’ – to explain how well the slaves lived on the plantations, in their ‘state of humble happiness’. Take away slavery, he argued, and the imperial edifice of navy, colonies and inward investment would crumble; he, naturally, neglected to explain how much he also enjoyed its freer, urban incarnations. Clarence repeatedly toured the West Indies in the 1780s as part of his duties in the Royal Navy as commander of the frigate Pegasus and, it seems, had a particular penchant for Rachel Polgreen. ‘We perfectly recollect this immense mass of flesh (she was nearly as big as a sugar hogshead) walking with the Prince, actually leaning on the Royal Arm, and accompanied by other Naval officers, and a host of mulatto women, as His Royal Highness promenaded the crowded streets,’ as The Barbadian magazine later recalled.82 Indeed, the whole of Bridgetown gave itself over to festivities when the Prince sailed into Carlisle Bay. ‘The short time which the prince remained in Barbados was the season of mirth and festivity,’ as one history recalled. ‘Besides the balls and entertainments given by Governor Parry in honour of his illustrious guest, his royal highness was sumptuously entertained by the legislature, at the public expense.’83
The problem came when he left. As the nineteenth-century collection of Barbadian tales Creoleana relates,
His Royal Highness had dined with the mess of the 49th regiment, then on this station, and returning to the hotel in the evening, more than ‘half seas o’er’, accompanied by some of the choice spirits of the corps, he commenced a royal frolic by breaking the furniture, etc., and with the aid of his boon companions carried on the sport with such activity, that in a couple of hours every article was completely demolished – the very beds cut up, and their contents emptied into the street, and the whole neighbourhood strewed with the feathers, representing a mimic snow storm! Crack went the pier glasses, pictures, chandeliers and lamps; smash went the decanters, goblets, wine glasses, porcelain and crockery, all, all went in the general havoc, while the sly and cunning Rachael sat quite passive in her great arm chair at the entrance door of the hotel. Servant after servant came running to announce to her the destruction that was going on, but the stoical hostess moved not!… She would, as each fresh communication was made, reply with perfect nonchalance, ‘Go, go long man, da’ no King’s son! If he no do wha’ he please, who d’en can do’um? Let he lone! lay he muse heself – da no King’s son! Bless he heart! Da’ no King’s son’ … It was, however, now time for the Prince to return on board, and as he had literally (in nautical phrase) ‘cleared the decks’, he was ‘taking his departure’, when encountering Rachael still occupying the ‘gang way’, he bid her ‘good night’, and to crown his sport, upset her and chair together, leaving her unwieldy body sprawling in the street, to the ineffable amusement of the laughing crowd. Rachael showed no ire even at this – but calling out in her sweetest dulcet tones, ‘Mas Prince! Mas Prince; you come ma-morning, to see wha’ mischief you been do!’ – and after a little floundering and much assistance, she was reseated.
But when she discovered the prince was to set sail for Saint Vincent the following evening, she took an inventory of all the damage the drunken royal had wreaked and duly presented him with a bill for a sizeable £700. ‘Our most generous hearted Tar, with a magnanimity as conspicuous in him after he became sovereign, as at this juvenile and sailor-like period of his life, made no question of the correctness of the account, but sent her an order for the amount on Firebrace and Co., (merchants of the town,) which was duly paid.’84 Rachel Polgreen used the funds to re-equip her hotel, which then recalled its distinguished visitor by renaming itself Bridgetown’s ‘Royal Naval Hotel’. Following Polgreen’s death in 1791, the establishm
ent was passed on to another free black woman, Nancy Clarke – who managed the establishment so successfully that by 1810 she had become, as an affidavit from the Lord Mayor of London decreed, ‘Nancy Collins of the island of Barbados, free mulatto, now residing in Duke Street, St James, in the Kingdom of Great Britain.’ Charlotte Barrow was the last of the hotel’s owners before it burned down in 1821.85 With the inferno went an intriguing remnant of Barbadian history – on the one hand a familiar story of a plantation investor’s exotic predilection for a mulatto lady; on the other, an account of bawdy, Bajan culture and a more complicated interracial relationship between a freed black woman and a prince of the realm which could only take place in Bridgetown.
Such tales – repeatedly recycled and embellished during the nineteenth century – connected the Barbadians with the metropole across the ocean. Prince William Henry was honoured with his own street in Bridgetown, as the public space of the port became increasingly codified around the imperial identifiers of Trafalgar Square, ‘Wellington Stairs’ and the Nelson monument. Of course, by that time Bridgetown’s real contribution to the imperial story – sugar and slavery – had faded. Barbados’s cane production had been overtaken by that of Jamaica, while William Wilberforce finally succeeded in abolishing the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Indeed, many Barbadian planters even supported abolition as, by the beginning of the new century, they had barely enough work for their own slaves and didn’t want further competition from other islands. The riches that had come from ‘the civilized island’ had done their work in Britain and abroad, providing capital for industrialization, funds for infrastructure and – via the merchant navy – much of the manpower for the Royal Navy. Bridgetown’s finest exports had expanded the reach of Empire and helped to secure its economic foundations. And so, with its work done, Barbados remained for the Victorians, as it had been since 1625, ‘little England’ – a Caribbean paradise captured forever in aspic, with a society and economy pleasingly dependent upon the largesse of its colonial master.
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