Richard Ligon was fascinated by the birds: great gulls that “attend the rising of the fishes and if they be within distance, seldom fail to make them their own,” and by the turtles that “lye and sleep upon the waves, for a longtime together.” As time passed, however, he recognized that the sea’s pleasures were often “mixt with Cruelties”: “I have seen 20 Porpisces very large of that kind, Cross the Prow of our Ship one behind another in so steady and constant a course, in chase of some other fishes; as I have seen a kennel of large Hounds, In Windsor Forrest in the chase of a Stag; one following directly in a track.”
Even the skies were different from anything they had seen before. Ligon wrote of the pleasures of viewing “the heavens and the beauty of them, which were objects of so great glory, that the Inhabitants of the world from 40 degrees to either pole can never be witness of.” The sunsets delighted him, the “sun then there being far brighter than with us here in England, caused such glorious colours to rest upon those clouds, as ’tis not possible to be believed by them that hath not seen it, nor can imagination frame so great a beauty.” He noted that though the stars seemed much more brilliant in the tropics, they also seemed disordered: a particular star that appeared large and bright at home was hardly visible in this hemisphere. There were also celestial phenomena that he had never encountered before: for example, when a perfect confluence of moon shining onto clouds produced a rainbow in the night sky.
The length of the voyage also meant that George Ashby and his fellow travellers would have had the time to acclimatize to the profoundly alien conditions of the tropics: the sun so dazzling they couldn’t look at it directly and so hot that it burnt their pale skins. “One might almost believe,” wrote one startled traveller, “that the puny sun that peeps out upon Old England, is not the same refulgent orb that glows within the Tropics.”
But these wonders aside, there came a point in every journey when the travellers’ spirits began to sag. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, boredom became the defining characteristic of the passage, and the two months at sea often seemed as long as two years. Even swashbuckling Henry Colt found himself lamenting, “Surely the Journey is as great and further by a 1000 miles than ever I supposed it to be.” The challenge of a journey like this transcended mere discomfort and became almost existential. Whatever order and routine were observed on board ship, they were mocked by the untameable vastness of the surrounding sea. As Ligon wrote gloomily, “There is no place so void and empty.” Confined for weeks within a small space, afloat on the great wilderness of the ocean, every traveller became aware of his frailty and insignificance.
Eventually, though, they neared the island. The ship’s master proceeded warily. Barbados is the easternmost island in the Caribbean and lies somewhat apart from its neighbours, which made its longitude difficult to calculate. Sir Henry Colt described the challenge of locating the island as being like finding “sixpence throwne downe upon New Market heath.” This problem had dogged sailors throughout the century, and many ships had inadvertently overshot the island. But it was a mistake that was strenuously avoided because once a ship found itself leeward of any Caribbean island it was extremely hard to tack back against the wind and recover position.
It was said that landfall was always made at night, leaving passengers awaiting daylight like “the woman with childe for her good hour.” And so the ship’s inmates’ first glimpse of their destination was often a shadowy one, blurred outlines of the land and buildings only barely illuminated by flickers of candlelight, the water lit by the rays from the moon and stars.
That my forefather should choose to settle in Barbados was in many ways predictable. If the Caribbean was considered more desirable than the American mainland for most seventeenth-century migrants, then Barbados was the most popular choice among the islands. One of the earliest colonizing expeditions in the area noted that Barbados resembled England, was “more healthful than any of hir neighbours” and therefore “better agreeing with the temper of the English Nacon.”
Barbados is geographically and geologically different from its neighbours because it is not part of the long volcanic mountain range in which the Caribbees are rooted. Instead it is a coral island which has fortuitously worked its way out of the sea. Shaped like a leg of mutton, Barbados feels like two islands rolled into one. The eastern coast, which borders the Atlantic, is wild and steep, dotted with huge, sculptural limestone outcrops, while the Caribbean coast is as tame and smooth as a turquoise rug. In 1690, Governor James Kendall described it as “the beauty-fullst spot of ground I ever saw.”
Barbados has a complex history. Columbus did not actually land on the island during any of his four visits to the Caribbean, but Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors reported a number of visits there during the sixteenth century. It was one of the first islands settled in the British Americas, claimed in 1625 when Captain John Powell landed there on his way back to England from Brazil. The party erected a wooden cross at the site of what would become St. James Town, later known as Holetown, and inscribed on a nearby tree: “James King of England and this island.” After inspecting the south and west coasts, the party realized what a promising prospect for “planting” the island offered. It was lush, with rich open land, and entirely uninhabited: the Amerindian population that had once lived there had long since deserted the island. The settlers of Barbados, therefore, would avoid the years of tumultuous and bloody battles that their brethren on the American mainland, and nearby islands such as Martinique, endured in order to settle their colonies.
Two years after Powell’s reconnaissance mission, a colonizing expedition led by his brother Henry and funded by two London merchants—Peter and William Courteen—set out for the island. Their ship set sail with eighty settlers and managed to capture eight African slaves en route, stolen from another ship. Their numbers were supplemented by thirty-two Indians from Maine who had been “hired” to teach the settlers how to plant, and were promptly enslaved as soon as they landed. The two groups, Africans and Indians, were the first slaves to land in the British Caribbean. These original settlers had a simple plan for life in Barbados: they were going to make a living cultivating tobacco and cotton and they would sustain themselves with the unfamiliar crops they had brought with them—cassava, yams, Indian corn, potatoes, plantains, bananas, oranges, lemons, limes, pineapples and melons. Over the next decades, more pioneers—including George Ashby—would swell the ranks of this first wave and the island would emerge as the most important in the region.
As George Ashby saw his new home for the first time, he would have had no idea what a tumultuous story he had been catapulted into. As well as being caught up in the more quotidian dramas of the region—hurricanes, rebellions and famine—he would also survive an outbreak of plague and a civil war with his own homeland, which would see Barbados besieged for months by Cromwellian forces. But most significantly, he would be a witness to a seismic shift in world events, when his little island successfully pioneered the production of sugar through the industrial exploitation of enslaved human beings. And in other colonies in Cuba or Brazil, or Martinique and Guadeloupe, in Louisiana or Georgia, other men and women would soon witness the same.
But for now, morning dawned and the excited immigrants rushed from their berths, clambered on deck and crowded against the rails, pushing and jostling for a view. The first sight of the island evoked rhapsodies in Ligon: “The nearer we came, the more beautiful it appeared to our eyes.” Indeed, Barbados approached by sea was a wonderful sight, as the ship cut through the water and the seafarers were first assailed by the fresh, tangy air. The land was lush and green, covered by “high, large and lofty trees, with their spreading branches and flourishing tops.” As the ship moved on, sailing through the turquoise waters, George Ashby would have been able to see, clustered around the shoreline, several plantations—small and large—carved out of the woods.
When the ship arrived at the entrance to Carlisle Bay, it fired its
guns to salute the fort and manoeuvred gingerly to accommodate its tricky entrance. On that morning it would have taken George Ashby some time to appreciate what was around him. Now that the ship was becalmed in the bay, the sun reflected off the sea and the deck would have made him squint. Shading his eyes with his hand, he would have taken in the body of blue glittering water and the curves of land coated with the green forest that embraced the bay.
He must have felt that all the stories and letters home had understated the awe-inspiring freshness of this new world with its vivid brushstrokes of greens, blues and gold. Directly surrounding him were the azure waters of the bay, which despite the youth of the colony, were busy with vessels of various kinds. These small and large craft—sloops, ketches, barques and brigantines—decorated the bay with their rigging, casting fantastic shapes against the iridescent sky. And beyond, he would have seen the wharves, crowded with men rolling and handling hogsheads of merchandise.
Aboard ship, the travellers would have been busy packing up their belongings and queuing to be ferried to the port by watermen, whose job it was to ply backwards and forwards moving goods and passengers between the ship and the shore. Stepping onto the wharf, George would have staggered and swayed as his feet, so long accustomed to the motion of the ship, adjusted to this new stillness. And, from the wharf, he would have been able to take in the town. George may not have realized it, but he was lucky. In contrast with New England, where the Puritans had disembarked to be confronted with nothing but rough country, Bridgetown was bustling with many of the amenities the traveller needed to refresh his weary body and supplement his waning stores.
Founded the year after Barbados was settled in 1627, Bridgetown was then more commonly known as “The Bridge,” “The Indian Bridge” or “Indian Bridge Town.” It had emerged as the island’s major port because of certain natural advantages: an abundant water supply and a convenient harbour. But the site also had its drawbacks. “Their main oversight,” according to Richard Ligon, “was to build their Towne upon so unwholesome a place where there remains a kind of Bog or Morass, which vents out so loathsome a savour, as cannot but breed ill-blood and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.” Ligon was correct: the town’s position resulted in terrible smells, and outbreaks of fever were a constant problem for its inhabitants.
A fetid, scrambling sort of place, Bridgetown had developed in a rather chaotic manner. It was both a residential and a mercantile district, so houses great and small were interspersed with brothels and taverns. It even had its own cage for containing riotous sailors as well as a ducking stool, situated in the horse pond, to cool the ardour of ladies condemned as common scolds. The town swiftly built up its reputation as the island’s economic centre because of its role of provisionary and supplier to the streams of immigrants who arrived to plant the land. Its importance grew when Governor Henry Hawley established his Courts of Law and built the Session Houses there in the early 1630s. As a result, “The Bridge” became not just the administrative but the political centre of the island; it emerged as the pivotal port in the entire region, positioned alongside Boston to dominate the commerce of the British West Indies in the Western Atlantic colonies.
The population was incredibly cosmopolitan. It was a stopping-off point for Portuguese and Dutch traders, Virginia merchants and French planters, sailors, employees of the Crown, scholars, pirates, priests and other travellers, who gathered here to carry out their business or indulge their leisure under the sweltering heat of the tropical sun. Some of the town’s populace would have been startling to George: he had certainly never seen any Amerindians in the flesh before, and probably no Africans. Both groups had been brought here as slaves, even though the slave trade was not yet a significant part of the Barbadian economy. But still, in these early days of settlement, white faces were in the majority and the planters saw themselves simply as “Englishman transplanted.”
George Ashby’s first task would have been finding somewhere to stay. He would probably have been directed to the taverns on Cheapside like the Rose or Three Tunns or Cook’s Arms. These places were the commodity, financial and information exchanges of the period where visitors could not only take up lodging and enjoy a bite to eat but also find out more about the new society they had come to join. Here, George would have been given advice about the best places to obtain any goods he needed such as machetes and axes.
But the most significant purchase was, of course, the land, which required George to make an appointment with the island’s “fire-eating” governor, Captain Henry Hawley. Hawley had been appointed governor of the island in 1630 with the power invested in him by the Earl of Carlisle to establish a council and depose Sir William Tufton, his mild-mannered predecessor, by force if need be. Hawley proceeded to do just that, arresting Tufton for “mutiny” and putting him to death. Most of the islanders felt that Hawley had been too harsh, concluding that “Sir William Tufton had Severe Measure.” Hawley’s belligerence continued; he fell out with the son of the Earl of Carlisle, who had inherited the colony from his father, and then arbitrarily imposed a poll tax upon the unwilling islanders. It was widely believed that he had men locked up merely because “they would not submit to his yoke.”
Hawley’s fearsome reputation was such that George must have felt some trepidation at the thought of meeting him but, if he wanted land, there was no alternative. Hawley, who had received a grant from the first Earl of Carlisle for 1,000 acres, was busy making a fortune by selling on plots in variable sizes to aspiring planters. The encounter between George and Hawley probably took place at the Session House, where Hawley did most of his official business. I can just picture my ancestor being presented to him there, his hat twisting in his hands and his hair limp with sweat and plastered to his skull, while Hawley sat resplendent in his coat and stockings, intermittently scratching his periwig as his scalp itched in the heat. After the customary exchange of pleasantries, a certain amount of haggling inevitably ensued, and Hawley—for a consideration (that little something extra that eased the bureaucratic wheels and made the relevant documents appear more swiftly)—eventually agreed to sell George Ashby a nine-acre plot in the parish of St. Philip. My first known ancestor had finally acquired his longed-for property, later to become known as “Ashby Land.”
3
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked
I cried to dream again.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
THE TEMPEST, ACT III, SCENE ii
AT SOME POINT on the journey to his new plot of land, George Ashby must have cursed the duplicity of this small island. The tangerine sunsets, the cooing doves, which had seduced him as they did all newcomers, had deceived him into believing in the island’s benign felicity. But now as he moved inland, the orderly vistas of Bridgetown gave way to a nightmarish jungle.
During a brief stay in 1634, Father Andrew White found the island “growne over with trees and undershrubs without passage, except where planters have cleared.” There were only a few roads outside the capital and those that did exist were poor: muddy and slippery in rainy weather and full of the stumps of recently felled trees. Early settlers relied on the narrow tracks made by stock such as sheep, donkeys and even camels that had been specially imported to cope with the island’s terrain. In many places there were no tracks at all, so for some of the thirteen-mile trip to St. Philip, George, his guide and their pack-mule had to fight their way through dense undergrowth, slashing their path with machetes. As they slogged their way up and down gullies, their shirts sticking to their bodies, dazed by
humidity and heat and weighed down by supplies, the pair would have fought for every yard of progress.
I wonder how my ancestor felt when he finally arrived at his acreage, the blank canvas onto which he was going to paint his new life. Was he elated, as only someone who had never had the chance to own anything substantial would be on becoming a man of property? Or was he overwhelmed and dismayed, as so many early settlers were, when first confronted by the untamed wilderness that was to be their new home? To many it seemed impossible that they could make an impression on the unruliness of this place; a world older than Genesis, labyrinthine, virtually untouched by the hand of man.
The nine acres that George Ashby had purchased are cradled in a gorgeous valley in St. Philip, the easternmost parish on the island, where it borders neighbouring St. George. (The island only had six parishes until 1645, so the boundaries are different from today.) Three centuries on, the area, which is verdant and green with breathtaking views, still has a preternaturally peaceful feel to it. To the east lies one of the most beautiful beaches on the island, the Crane, with wide expanses of talcum-fine white sand; to the west the vista is dominated by rustling cane fields bordered by huge palms. Just visible in the distance are the Jacobean walls of Drax Hall, the oldest and most famous plantation on the island. Built in the early 1650s, several years after George’s arrival, it is a place that came to encapsulate the dreams of the later generations of immigrants: the legacy of a humble man, like them, who built one of the greatest sugar fortunes ever made.
Today George Ashby’s land is part of a working sugar plantation called Edgecombe. His plot alternates between a functioning field covered with a sea of sugar cane and a piece of “resting” land waiting to be replanted later in the year. Perched atop the dark brown soil is a triumvirate of dilapidated but pretty wooden chattel houses, in sherbet shades of green, coral and purple. The land, which abuts a number of famous plantations, is still directly connected to the family. It is known as Peacocks, taken from George Ashby’s daughter’s married name. Here the loamy earth is good—not the best on the island, but good. George had been lucky.
Sugar in the Blood Page 4
