The human price paid in colonizing the Caribbean was breathtaking: historian Carl Bridenbaugh calculates that around half of the white men who settled the colonies died in the undertaking. Richard Ligon was shocked to learn upon his arrival that in a decade and a half each island had undergone an almost total turnover in population: most of the Barbadians were “new men, for few or none of them that first set foot there, were now living.”
But George Ashby beat the odds: he not only survived, he adapted. And he also managed to find a wife. We cannot be sure he did not arrive with her, but it is extremely unlikely—cases of married couples travelling to the island in these early years were very rare. To get married in Barbados was also an achievement: the earliest passenger lists in 1627 show no women at all, and only 8 per cent of the servants arriving in the years up to 1640 were female. By the late 1650s, the proportion had risen to just over 25 per cent.
Since women were scarce, they were highly sought after. Colonies across the Americas faced the same problem in the nascent days of settlement. In some parts of North America, colonial promoters formed joint-stock companies to send “girls for sale to the planters as wives.” In places where there was no official strategy to recruit female migrants, planters sometimes resorted to contracting for wives, pre-paying their passage and giving their family a sum of money as a sort of dowry. But most brides were selected from the small pool of women who had completed their indentures.
Many of these women had been recruited from whorehouses and prisons. In 1656, for example, the Venetian envoy to Britain, Francesco Giavarina, claimed that “The soldiers of the London garrison visited various brothels and other places of entertainment where they forcibly laid hands on over 400 women of loose life, whom they compelled to sail for the Barbados islands.” Richard Ligon, en route to Barbados, recalled travelling with such a group: when an attempt was made to assault them at a stop in the Cape Verde islands, the women easily repelled their attackers, being “better natur’d than to suffer such violence.” Hundreds of women (including the fictional Manon Lescaut of Abbé Prévost’s classic novel) were also dispatched from the Hôpital, a notorious Parisian prison, to the French colonies. These were throwaway women with rough lives. Some were prostitutes, some were criminals, some were mentally ill, some were just victimized or unlucky—but mad or bad, virtuous or fallen, once these girls arrived in the New World they were in demand. Despite their colourful reputation, the real defining characteristic of these women’s lives was not their immorality but their powerlessness. Many were desperate—discarded by family, abandoned by husbands, broken by poverty and abuse.
My first known female ancestor would have shared many of the terrifying and transformative experiences as George Ashby. Virtually the only thing I know about her is a name: Deborah. But some of the rest is possible to surmise. By working backwards from the birth of her children, she must have married George Ashby in the early 1640s, and therefore was born in the Old World. In all likelihood, she too would have been assigned a steerage berth on one of the transatlantic ships that sailed from Britain to the Americas almost daily. She would have staked out her tiny piece of territory between decks with her meagre pile of possessions, amid a sorority of indentured, disgraced or disposable women. On disembarking in Barbados, many of the women were hired as domestic servants in the larger plantation households, but some were expected to work the land alongside the men. Unsurprisingly, in these placements the women were vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse and had little redress under the law. It was only once her term of indenture was finished that Deborah would have been able to contemplate a future of her own.
One of the few positive aspects of migration for women like Deborah was the opportunity it provided to reinvent themselves. As Henry Whistler acerbically noted, after his brief visit to the island in 1655: “a Baud brought ouer puts on a demur comportment, a whore if handsome makes a wife for sume rich planter.” Despite Whistler’s disapproval, in this respect the women were no different from their men. They too had crossed an ocean with dreams of beginning again. This was the opportunity this untamed world offered them all, a chance to carve a new life out of the wilderness.
And so my forefather made preparations for his wedding. Alongside tending the tobacco crop, the vegetable garden and the stock, he needed to build a house fit for a bride. Together with his servant, and with the customary help of neighbours, he constructed a simple wooden cottage with two rooms and dirt floors. Here the newly married couple settled down to begin their family. Richard Ligon, who had a great interest in architecture, felt that the houses of planters, particularly those of “a meaner sort” like George Ashby, were poorly adapted to local conditions. Their small timber houses had “roofs so low, as for the most part of them I could hardly stand upright with my hat on, and no cellars at all.” In an effort to keep rain from driving through the windows, the houses were typically designed to be closed on the east and open to the west. But since the breezes blew the other way, this effectively prevented “the cooling flow of wind” that would give them “the greatest comfort.” As a result, the rooms were “like Stoves, or heated Ovens.” Richard Ligon concluded that the reason the houses were designed like this was not ignorance but poverty; the colonists couldn’t afford glass or shutters to keep out the driving rain.
The interior of the house was probably furnished only with the bare essentials. A 1643 inventory of the possessions of John Higgingbotham, a blacksmith like George, mentions only “sieves, lamps, pewter platters, tubs, trays, two runlets” and some “smythes tooles.” For the ordinary planter, life was primitive; it took very hard labour merely to survive.
Starting a family was a fraught enterprise in many parts of early colonial America. It was not only adults who tended to have the short and brutish lives in Barbados; the infant mortality rate was devastating. So it is almost inevitable that George and Deborah would have suffered the grief of losing a child. In the end there were three surviving offspring: the eldest, christened George after his father, a middle child called William, and a daughter named Deborah after her mother. Their childhood, despite its difficulties and discomforts, would have had an entirely different texture from that of their parents: savouring the sweet tangy taste of pink-fleshed guavas; feeling the darting surprise of tiny shoals of mercurial fish that flashed silver past their feet as they swam in the clear Caribbean water. At dusk they watched the molten sunsets, chased fireflies and fell asleep to the sound of the cicadas and tree frogs whose symphony accompanied the day’s descent into darkness.
In 1647, when George’s family was still young, Barbados was decimated by “plague”—more likely an epidemic of yellow fever, a disease that was poorly understood by the early planters. According to Ligon, the outbreak—which spread swiftly throughout the region—was well under way when he arrived in September of that year and it raged for several months. Whether the contagion arrived from abroad or was brought on by the islanders themselves because of “the ill dyet they keep, and drinking strong waters,” the “sickness,” according to Ligon, “raign’d so extremely, as the living could hardly bury the dead.”
Richard Vines, a landowner in St. Michael, saw the plague as an admonishment from a vengeful God: “We have felt his heavy hand in wrath, and yet I feare are not sensible of it, for here is little amendment or notice taken of his great punishments. The sickness was an absolute plague; very infectious and destroying, in so much that in our parish there were buried 20 in a weeke, and many weekes together, 15 or 16.” The outbreak surprised Vine, because “It first seized on the ablest men both for account and ability of body. Many who had begun and almost finished greater sugar works, who dandled themselves in their hopes but were suddenly laid in the dust, and their estates left to strangers.” During the epidemic, the capital, Bridgetown, was transformed into a charnel house, with bodies piled up in all available buildings and corpses littering the roadside. By its end the outbreak claimed the lives of an estimated 6,000 people (some put t
he figure as high as 10,000). Hard on the heels of the epidemic came famine, since the sick planters had fatally neglected the subsistence crops that they depended on for sustenance, which pushed the death toll even higher.
The two years that followed were hard. Food shortages continued, further undermining the health and morale of an already vulnerable community. Unsurprisingly, the worst affected were the poorest, and in 1649 the island had its first recorded rebellion. Ligon’s description of the event is dramatic:
Their sufferings being grown to a great height, and their daily complainings being to one another (of the intolerable burdens they labour’d under) being spread throughout the Island; at the last, some amongst them, whose spirits were not able to endure such slavery, resolved to break through it, or dye in the act; and so conspired with some others … to fall upon their Masters, and cut all their throats, and by that means, to make themselves [not] only free men, but Masters of the Island.
The reality was more prosaic. This first uprising, an uneasy partnership between enslaved Africans and indentured labourers, was, according to another historian, a “small-scale affair,” more of a food riot born out of hunger and desperation. It was nonetheless put down with some ferocity. As Ligon reported: “the greatest part of the plotters were put to death” as an example “to the rest.” Though the rebellion was unsuccessful, it was a harbinger of things to come; over the centuries the island’s slave society would continue to resist their enslavement on both an individual and a collective level, provoking a growing mistrust in their masters which often led to terrible excesses of brutality.
In 1650 George Ashby officially stepped into the island’s history. There he is in that year’s census, the first held on the island. In this he was typical of most of his peers on the island; men and women whose past before their arrival on the island is shadowy and elusive, and whose story only begins to be documented when they arrive in the New World and gain a foothold on the economic ladder. The census lists George among the returns for the parish of St. Philip. Comprised of 12,158 acres, St. Philip was—along with the neighbouring parish of St. George—one of the most populous areas on the island. Most of the white population of the parish were categorized as smallholders, possessing ten to twenty acres. Their lives were in striking contrast to those of the great planters of the same parish: men like the aristocratic Christopher Codrington, who had 618 acres in 1679, and Jon Pearse, the largest landholder on the island, who is credited with owning 1,000 acres in 1673.
The census divided the planters into four categories, which assessed their worth according to a combination of the acreage held and the size of their slave holdings. Those with sixty or more slaves were all large landowners, while those with between twenty and fifty-nine slaves were classified as middling planters. The owner of twenty slaves had a force large enough to operate a sugar plantation, but not a very sizeable one. Most of the middling planters held significantly smaller tracts of land than the big planters, ranging from thirty to a hundred acres. Landholders with ten or more acres and fewer than twenty slaves were classified as small planters. These people qualified in Barbados law as freeholders, and were therefore eligible to vote in the colony elections (unless they were minors, women or Quakers). Lastly, landholders with fewer than ten acres were classified as freemen, indicating that they were not servants but were not entitled to vote.
As the possessor of only nine acres and one white servant, George Ashby would have fallen into the last category and would not have been able to claim the title “planter.” It meant the difference between having some role in the island’s political life and none at all. For the want of a single acre George Ashby was excluded from the privileges that these small planters held, the right that was shared by 25 or 30 per cent of the white adult males on the island, to elect or be elected assemblymen, vestrymen and jurors. Those below the ten-acre threshold were near the bottom of the social pile, only one rung above indentured servants and slaves. Maybe his lack of status gnawed at George. But maybe, after the dramas and deprivations of his life thus far, he felt it enough that he and his wife had survived, and so had some of his children. For despite everything, George Ashby had succeeded in making a life.
4
Too much sugar is bitter.
—NEPALESE PROVERB
WHILE GEORGE ASHBY and his family were struggling to stay afloat in the embryonic years of Barbados settlement, the winds of change were blowing through his island home. This process of transformation became known as “the sugar revolution” because of its speed and impact. This “noble condiment” would have a dramatic effect on the island’s fortunes and on those of the Ashby family. The rise of sugar also coincided with one of the bloodiest periods in Britain’s history: the events that led up to and would follow the regicide of Charles I. The prosperity that this commodity would generate made the island of greater significance to the British Empire and would lure a new set of émigrés to the island, who would in turn drag the island into the motherland’s civil war.
Humans have always craved sweetness and sought methods of sweetening their food. The ancient inhabitants of the Middle East used fig and date syrup; the Romans distilled must from grapes; the Chinese extracted the sap of the sugar palm. Others used grape juice, raisins, honey or manna from branches or leaves. But it is refined sugar that is the most famous sweetener of them all. It is a substance that doesn’t occur in nature, but has to be distilled methodically from the juice of sugar cane or, more recently, sugar beet. It is the only chemical substance that is consumed in almost pure form as a staple food.
The rise of sugar has been remarkable. For many centuries few Europeans even knew it existed, then it metamorphosed into one of the most coveted commodities in the world. Now it is so ubiquitous, abundant and easy to procure that we can barely imagine life without it. Our consumption of sugar is prodigious; its only rival, in both ubiquity and symbolic value, is the substance we often classify as its opposite: salt. But it is sugar that represents tenderness, comfort and love in many languages. It saturates our cultural references, and is invested with a significance far exceeding its innate properties. More than any other commodity in human history, sugar has shaped our tastes, transformed our landscape and influenced our politics.
Indigenous to the South Pacific, sugar cane is a giant grass, part of the Gramineae family that includes maize, rice and sorghum. There are numerous species of cane, but the one that dominated cultivation in the Americas was known as the “Creole.” It thrives in hot and humid places, flourishing in a range of soils including the coral limestone of Barbados. It often grows to twelve feet in height, and sometimes exceeds twenty feet. Its stalks can be green or yellow or rust-red, and divide into joints or nodes from which extrude the leaves, long narrow blades of green.
Some of the earliest linguistic references to sugar are from northern India, where the cultivation of cane is likely to go back to 500 BC. From there the crop migrated to China some time around 300 BC, when cane juice or “sugar liquor” became a popular fermented drink. By the third century AD, cakes or loaves of hard sugar, made by drying the juice of the cane in the sun and then forming the paste into the shape of men or animals, were known as “stone honey.” But the Chinese were slow to master the process of sugar manufacture, and in 640 the Emperor Tai Tsung sent a mission to Bihar in the Ganges valley to find out more about Indian distilling techniques. The resulting report invigorated the Chinese industry and sugar production flourished there down the years. In the thirteenth century, writing about the region around the mouth of the Yangtze, the trader and explorer Marco Polo noted that “the production of sugar is immense in this province, much greater than all the rest of the world, and it brings in a huge revenue.”
While sugar flourished in India and China it was, according to the historian W. Aykroyd, unknown to the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews and Greeks. There is no mention of sugar in the Bible, the Talmud or the Koran, in contrast to the frequent appearances of honey, and there a
re only a few vague references to sugar in the classical literature of Greece and Rome. The Arab conquests that followed the death of Mohammed in AD 632 saw the crop travel to Persia, Mesopotamia and the Lower Nile. There are numerous references to sugar in the Arabian Nights and, by the fifth century, it was cultivated on a large scale in Baghdad. By the tenth century it was being planted along the coast of East Africa, Zanzibar and Madagascar.
It was in Palestine and Syria, between the thirteen and fifteenth centuries, that the Crusaders developed a taste for sugar and brought it home to Western Europe, where it became a highly prized commodity, in the same category as musk and pearls. Sugar was so precious it was bought by the ounce instead of the pound. It was used as a spice, alongside cinnamon and nutmeg, to enliven savoury dishes, and was also used for medicinal purposes. Its value as a drug during this period explains the tag “an apothecary without sugar,” which was a popular way of describing someone who lacked the essential materials for their trade.
In November 1565 a sculpture was unveiled at the wedding of Alexander Farnese to Princess Maria of Portugal depicting the voyage of the Portuguese princess. It consisted of tableaux of all the cities she had passed through, complete with models of palaces, theatres and ships. Each one was so large it had to be carried by three or four men. Every part of this extravaganza was made from sugar, one of the greatest status symbols of the sixteenth century.
Sugar cane arrived in the New World with Columbus. But as a crop for cultivation, it crossed the Atlantic with the Portuguese and the Spanish: the former took it to Brazil and the latter to their colonies in Hispaniola. Realizing the ideal match between territory and crop, they began to invest in cane heavily and by the late 1500s the Spanish and Portuguese held a virtual monopoly on the supply of sugar to Europe. As the scale of production grew, prices fell and sugar began to appear not only on the tables of princes but on those of the merely rich.
Sugar in the Blood Page 7
