The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  James Evans has pointed out that during the seventeenth century almost 380,000 Englishmen and women migrated to the Americas; a majority, 200,000, headed for the Caribbean. This far exceeded migration by rivals: Spanish migration to the Americas reached about half that of the English, while the number of French migrants was minute, one fortieth of those from England. The figures are all the more remarkable because there was a similar flow out of England towards Ireland.9 These figures are also greater than those from the eighteenth century. There were many factors driving people across the Atlantic: poverty at home, the wish to practise one’s faith without interference, the search for wealth, as rumours of gold continued to spread, notwithstanding Frobisher’s fiasco with fool’s gold. The sailing of the Mayflower with 100-odd passengers has become part of the American national myth, so it is important to remember that most colonists were not Puritan idealists; those in Britain and Europe who remain mystified by the American cult of ‘Thanksgiving’ are right to wonder how important this voyage really was.10

  In Virginia, moneymaking opportunities opened up for reasons quite other than gold-digging: the fashion for tobacco had created a seemingly inexhaustible demand for a product that was supposed to have impressive health-giving properties.11 At first the labour force consisted of indentured servants, English migrants who sought a route out of poverty by signing away their freedom in return for food, clothing and a roof over their head, so that one third of the settler population in Virginia consisted of these people in the middle of the century. The notoriously cold seventeenth century saw several severe famines, particularly in the 1630s, encouraging emigration. This ‘Little Ice Age’ was a global phenomenon, however: on arrival in North America, conditions were also still unusually cold at this period. Even so, the risk of crossing the sea and of living in a land where unfamiliar and untamed diseases wiped out perhaps half the settlers within a few years of their arrival could seem a risk worth taking.12

  The Caribbean was a different sort of success story to Virginia. England acquired Barbados, on the outermost edges of the Caribbean, in 1625 after Captain John Powell arrived there and planted the English flag in what had once been a flourishing native settlement, but was now empty of people: the Spaniards had not bothered to occupy the island, and had used it as a source of slaves, since the warlike and probably cannibalistic people they knew as Caribs were treated as legitimate foes of the Spanish Crown; the exasperated inhabitants decamped to other, less exposed points in the Lesser Antilles where they could defend themselves better.13 That did not solve their problems, as the English had already installed themselves on St Kitts in 1624, at the price of having to fight a war with the Caribs for mastery over the island, which was given over to tobacco plantations. There was much to learn: a hurricane wrecked the first crop. Then England took charge of Antigua and Montserrat eight years later. Meanwhile the French occupied Guadeloupe and Martinique, as each European nation that followed in Spain’s wake took advantage of the Spanish failure to establish control of the smaller islands; inevitably this led to bitter battles with the warlike Caribs, and the ruthless extinction of Carib communities.14

  In Barbados, on the other hand, attempts to grow tobacco were not particularly successful. The economy took off when Sir James Drax observed the success of the sugar plantations that were spreading across the Dutch and Portuguese colonies in South America. Drax brought Sephardic Jews from Dutch Brazil to help him set up the industry. The result of the sugar boom was that the island attracted plenty of English settlers, 2,000 by 1657 just in the new capital, Bridgetown, which attracted admiring comments from a French Catholic missionary: the houses ‘have an appearance of dignity, refinement and order, that one does not see in the other islands and which indeed it would be hard to find anywhere’.15 In this period, Barbados was already able to export 8,000 tons of sugar to England each year; in the early eighteenth century the sugar output of the small Caribbean islands under English rule exceeded that of Brazil. Barbados became England’s sugar island, just as Madeira had once been Portugal’s. In the early days, the human cost was lighter than it became. About half of those who arrived from England were indentured servants; there were 13,000 servants, mostly young men but also some women, in Barbados in 1652, with an annual flow of roughly 1,500 to 3,000 into the island. It cost up to £8 to bring a servant across the Atlantic, which in mid-century was a cheaper option than buying slaves, the price for which hovered somewhere around £35 – although indentured servants were not slaves and were treated much better than black slaves. As slave prices fell and the numbers volunteering for indentured labour also fell, the slave plantation became the norm, and a new elite of planters emerged, seventy-four of whom appeared in an official list submitted to London in 1673.16

  Throughout the eighteenth century Barbados continued to satisfy Britain’s craving for sugar – and continued to import the enormous numbers of slaves who made that possible, in unspeakable conditions. The English taste for sweet tea helped fuel the expansion of production. Thus the Barbadian sugar producers were in part responding to demand created by the tea trade out of China, another example of the way what happened in one ocean could have a powerful impact on what happened in another. Barbados became the model for other sugar-producing islands: for English Jamaica, but also for the French settlement that was established in 1665 at the western end of Hispaniola, known as Saint-Domingue, the lineal ancestor of modern Haiti. Curiously, these cases apart, the ‘sugar revolution’ in the Caribbean took off not in the islands settled by Columbus but in the new colonies of the English, the French and the Dutch – Columbus’s attempts to cultivate sugar on Hispaniola had faltered once the Portuguese brought sugar to Brazil. Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico only became major producers much later, during the nineteenth century (though still thanks to slavery, which continued to exist on the islands).17 In each of the islands, slave labour became the source of the colonists’ prosperity. Yet the slaves were not politically passive. In 1675 and again in 1692 slaves plotted to seize Bridgetown and take control over the island and over the ships in its harbour. Both conspiracies were discovered in time, and ninety-three conspirators were executed in 1692.18

  III

  The short but turbulent history of Port Royal began as a result of a series of mistakes. In 1655 Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, agreed to support an English expedition against the capital of Hispaniola, Santo Domingo.19 As ruler of Great Britain, Cromwell had an extraordinary ability to swallow his profound religious convictions and to make friends, if necessary, with Catholic powers such as Spain, and enemies with Calvinist ones such as Holland. It was therefore in a spirit of mild threat that he summoned the Spanish ambassador a year earlier, requesting free passage for English trading ships bound for the New World in return for continuing friendship. The ambassador flatly rejected the proposal; but Cromwell was prepared for this already, as he had been thinking for a while that he could exploit Spain’s weakness by sending a fleet into the Caribbean. Among those urging the Lord Protector to take this course was supposedly a Portuguese merchant named Carvajal who had taken refuge in London after the Inquisition had run him to earth in the Canary Islands. He is said to have been another of those crypto-Jews who had managed to move around the Iberian lands from which Jews were banned, and he continued to trade in American silver, importing silver bars into England from Seville. In this reading of the very fragmentary evidence, Carvajal is portrayed as a key figure in Cromwell’s willingness to permit the Portuguese New Christians living in London to live openly as Jews – though Cromwell’s support for the readmission of Jews to England had to face bitter opposition from such prominent but disruptive figures as William Prynne, already punished for his constant abuse of his foes by the loss of both ears. In one highly exaggerated account, based on the testimony of an English boy captured by the Spaniards in the Caribbean, Cromwell had promised to turn a London church into a synagogue, in return for the funding pro
vided by Portuguese Jews keen to support this expedition.20

  Cromwell cited the cruelty of the Spaniards towards the native inhabitants of the Caribbean and towards people of other nations when he issued his instructions to the admiral in charge of the English fleet, William Penn (the father of the founder of Pennsylvania), in October 1654. By ‘other nations’ he also meant those like the English who were trying to trade in the Spanish Main. (He had evidently forgotten his own harshness towards the inhabitants of another English colony, Ireland.) Cromwell was strongly encouraged in his view by pamphleteers who insisted on the weakness of the Spanish Empire, among them John Milton. One theme that was taken up by the English invaders was the promotion of evangelical Protestantism in the face of the papist Spaniards – and the Spaniards regarded their fight with the English in the opposite way. The English position was that ‘just as the Spaniards had taken Jamaica from the Indians, so we English have come to take it from them. As for the pope, he could neither grant lands to others nor delegate the right to conquer them.’21

  No doubt some of the New Christians were keen to punish Spain for the continuing persecution of Portuguese merchants by the Inquisition. But Cromwell’s plans went askew. He sent sixty ships and 8,000 men against Santo Domingo, ‘a genuine riff-raff of criminals and vagabonds’, according to a modern Spanish historian, only to find that the campaign was seriously mishandled. For whatever reason, the English camped some way from the city and were soon flushed out of Hispaniola. There was no easy repetition of Sir Francis Drake’s triumphant occupation of Santo Domingo several decades earlier, when he had only 1,000 men at his disposal.22 But the English commanders, who had not helped the campaign by their quarrels, were determined not to return home with nothing. It was the old story, repeated in many armies and navies, of discord between the man in command of the fleet, Penn, and the general in charge of land forces, Robert Venables. They redirected their energies to Spanish-held Jamaica, a poorly defended and neglected island, whose strategic position south of Cuba and west of Hispaniola was, as the Spaniards would learn, much more valuable than they had ever suspected. Cromwell, meanwhile, had no idea what was going on and can at best have had only a hazy notion of Jamaica’s existence.23 When news of the disaster in Hispaniola reached England, it caused deep consternation among the Godly elements of society close to Cromwell: maybe the Almighty had not deemed England virtuous enough to defeat Spanish Catholic power in the Caribbean? But, if so, surely this was a divine test, an opportunity to increase the effort to achieve God’s Design, the defeat of popery. The Spaniards were cast in the role of the Philistines, while the English were likened to the ancient Israelites, whose bad ways had led them to well-deserved defeat at Ai, as the biblical book of Samuel recorded.24

  Yet Divine Providence seemed, on later reflection, not to have abandoned the English. Jamaica was not a negligible prize. No one had previously given much thought to the strategic position of this neglected island – no one, that is to say, of consequence, but a Spanish priest had shown great prescience when he wrote a few years before the conquest:

  The defence of the island is very poor … If the enemy takes possession there can be no doubt from it he will quickly infest all parts, making himself master of their trade and commerce. As it lies in the way of the fleets voyaging from these kingdoms to New Spain and the plate galleons to Havana … it can be gathered how harmful it would be for ships in that trade if the enemy should take possession of this island.25

  So weak had Spanish interest in Jamaica been that the island was granted as a perpetual domain to the descendants of Columbus, who notionally ruled it as a Marquisate, although the benefits were financial – there was no need to go there very often. Columbus’s grandson, Don Luís de Colón, was accused of involvement in contraband trade; he managed to stop further investigation in 1568, which seems to provide perfect proof that he was guilty.26 The lack of rich gold or silver mines was recognized early on, and its sugar industry remained small under Spanish rule, with only seven mills in operation at the time of the English invasion.27 ‘Fulfilling no specific need,’ it has been said, ‘Jamaica nonetheless had to be kept out of the hands of others.’28

  From the moment that English troops landed in Kingston Bay, the Spaniards found themselves on the defensive, for their Jamaica garrison was small, and resistance to the English from forts inland was not effective: the English had what they wanted, a base on the coast in what is now Kingston Bay, where they occupied the Spanish forts and were able to interfere with shipping heading across the Caribbean. In any case, the Spaniards assumed that the English had come to raid the island and resupply their ships, after which they would surely up-anchor and sail away.29 Hearing of the humiliating defeat near Santo Domingo, Cromwell was not particularly impressed with the news from Jamaica; Robert Venables was disgraced and briefly locked up in the Tower of London on his return to England, while Penn fled from the wrath of the Lord Protector to Ireland.30 Not surprisingly, it took a while for the English to work out the implications and advantages of this conquest. Cromwell was being advised by a committee of West Indies commissioners, and they immediately saw that the island would need to be properly defended and populated; they suggested that as many Scottish Highlanders as possible should be sent over there – but as servants, for many or most would be prisoners taken in Cromwell’s Scots campaigns.31

  In the long term, this failure to establish Spanish mastery over the entire Caribbean left interlopers such as the English, the French and the Dutch free to occupy the small islands of the Lesser Antilles. In 1623 Dutch raids on the Caribbean islands disrupted the trade of Cuba. With an eye, no doubt, on the English occupation of Barbados, the Dutch gained control of Curaçao in 1634, and there too they faced no opposition from the Spaniards; many of those involved in its settlement were Portuguese Jews, active also in the colonization of the parts of Brazil seized by the Dutch between 1630 and 1654. And it has been seen that the Danes too intruded into the area by the 1670s.32 Spain had become too feeble to stand in the way of any of these maritime powers.

  IV

  Most of these islands were exploited for sugar and tobacco; but from being a backwater Jamaica was transformed into one of the major commercial centres of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. With an eye on the success of other trading centres such as Livorno and Amsterdam, where people of all religions had been welcomed, Jamaica was thrown open to settlers of all religions and nations, Protestants, Quakers, Catholics alike; and, just as Amsterdam and Livorno, the new colony attracted settlement by Portuguese Jews, whose presence brought Jamaica into a network that embraced London, the Dutch cities and Brazil.33 These Jewish settlers, who had shrugged off their supposed Catholic identity and operated their own synagogue, have been labelled the ‘Jewish pirates of the Caribbean’; but here, once again, sensationalism has corrupted the reading of the evidence. They funded the privateers; they invested in trade, and that trade included contraband goods smuggled past the Spaniards; they built a warm relationship with the English Crown, which protected them from hostile rivals among the other settlers in Jamaica; but the idea that a kosher version of Captain Morgan plied the high seas is fantasy.

  What Charles II hoped for was the discovery of mines bearing gold, silver or copper on Jamaica, and some of the Jewish entrepreneurs optimistically built up his hopes. Benjamin Bueno de Mesquita, also known as Muskett, arrived on board the Great Gift in March 1663 with a number of Portuguese Jewish colleagues keen to find the mines; he may have been sincere about the mines, but filled his time with contraband trade in ammunition across the straits to Cuba. What was probably a stolen Spanish treasure chest, bearing on its keyhole the royal coat of arms, has been excavated close to a house he owned in Port Royal. King Charles II had high hopes for developing the island’s economy, and he was angry when no mines were found, and thought of expelling the Jews from Jamaica (though he was too dependent on Portuguese Jewish loans to think of expelling them from England).34 Although Jamaica became
an important centre of sugar production, the hopes of mineral wealth raised by its conquest had not been realized. It was therefore a relief to find that it was still very prosperous; and the reason for that was not its own resources but its proximity to the main shipping lanes of the Spaniards. Jamaica successfully challenged the Spanish monopoly on trade through the Caribbean. The English sought more than an occasional boost to their fortunes from the capture of a treasure fleet; they wanted rights of navigation on the high seas that (as Grotius had already assured the world of lawyers) should be free to all.35

  Within four years of its occupation by the English, Jamaica had become the base for successful raids on Spanish shipping. At first the major role was played not by pirates but by the English navy. Gradually the involvement of privateers became greater and that of the navy smaller. The assumption that this was an unlicensed pirate war is based on the constant and contemptuous use of the term pirata by the Spaniards, who eagerly dismissed all their foes in the Caribbean as enemies of mankind. This assumption has provided the basis for popular ideas of reckless and bloodthirsty ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, whose existence at various times is not in doubt, but whose presence at this period has been greatly exaggerated, especially since the seas around Jamaica were policed by the English navy, which committed its resources to Jamaica even while it was very strapped for cash.36 So the picture is much more complicated: Cromwell was content to encourage buccaneers to come to Jamaica, so long as they remained under some sort of English command. He could see that they would be the ideal force to deploy against Spanish ships: their relatively small vessels rendered them much more mobile than the heavy treasure ships; they were accustomed to finding hiding places among the creeks and coves of the Caribbean islands; they were strongly motivated and self-sufficient, even if that made them, from the point of view of the English governor, unruly. They were not all English; the first buccaneers in Jamaican service were drawn from the island of Tortuga, off Hispaniola, which had become a nest of pirates of the most varied origins, English, Irish, Scots, French, Dutch, with a smattering of Africans and native Indians as well.37