Father Labat, a French priest seconded to the Antilles who wrote extensively about his travels around the islands, including a stay in Barbados, wrote:
The English take very little care of their slaves and feed them very badly. The majority give their slaves Saturday to work on their own account so as to satisfy their own needs and their families. The overseers make them work beyond measure and beat them mercilessly for the least fault, and they seem to care less for the life of a Negro than that of a horse.
He continued: “They are rigorously punished for the least disobedience and more so if they rebel, which does not prevent this happening very often because of the behaviour of their drunken, unreasonable and savage overseers.” On these occasions, “Those who are captured and sent to prison are condemned to be passed through the mill, burned alive or exposed in iron cages in which they are packed and … attached to the branch of a tree, or, are left to die of hunger and thirst.” Though Labat admitted that “these torments were cruel,” he nonetheless cautioned against
condemning the inhabitants of islands of whatever nationality they may be. They are often compelled to exceed the limits of moderation in the punishment of their slaves so as to intimidate the others and to impress fear and dutifulness upon them to prevent them becoming the victims of such men, who being usually ten to one white man, are always ready to rebel and attempt to commit the most terrible crimes to regain their freedom.
The growth of the slave population had not only changed the face of Barbados, it had also altered the atmosphere of the colony. With so many different groups struggling to carve out new identities for themselves—or adjust to the ones that had been forced upon them—the tension on the island had been ratcheted up considerably. Barbados had become a place riven by inequality and teetering permanently on the brink of violence.
7
Sugar is the very Soul of the Place.
—RICHARD LIGON
WITHIN A DECADE or so of arriving, George Ashby and his fellow settlers found their island not just dominated by sugar, but utterly transformed by it. Across the length and breadth of Barbados, field after field that had once cultivated tobacco was now covered in a sea of rustling green cane. Sugar was now the economic engine of the island, the basis on which deals were made and on which goods and services were valued. So when George Ashby traded with his friends or purchased supplies in Bridgetown, he was expected to pay with this new commodity. Most importantly, it permeated the minds of the people who surrounded him, influencing their choices and inflaming their hopes for a more prosperous future. In trading depots and tippling houses, even at church, they debated the relative merits of the crop. They gossiped about who had “gone over” to sugar and who was going to; above all they speculated about how much money their fellows were making. They could think about little else.
The first to convert had been the big planters. The economies of scale associated with sugar production meant that those with a large acreage and an established workforce were inevitably in a stronger position than small men like George Ashby. Starting up such a venture required at least a thousand pounds (a huge sum at that time) to pay for the mill and its equipment, which included the coppers in the boiling house and the boosts and drips in the cooling house, as well as the carts, hoes, pickaxes and machetes. If they did not have the ready cash personally, the elite planters had the collateral and the contacts to raise it, and sugar soon enriched them beyond their wildest imaginings. Small men could only look on in wonder at the lifestyles of these new sugar magnates as they built beautiful new homes that dominated the vistas of the island. From his modest acreage, George Ashby would have watched as Drax Hall, the first and most enduring paean to sugar, was constructed.
Colonel James Drax was a man who epitomized the aspirations of the neophyte planters. He was the emblematic planter of the age, his meteoric rise fuelling the dreams of more recent arrivals. According to legend, Drax arrived, impoverished and desperate, among the first generation of colonists in the late 1620s. He and a handful of his fellows sheltered in a cave and supplemented their scant provisions by hunting and fishing. They cleared a piece of land on which they planted tobacco, shipping the crop back home and making a healthy profit because the commodity was at that time scarce. It was a large enough sum for Drax to buy forty or fifty indentured servants who worked the land for him. Aware that Barbadian tobacco was not the best on the market, and that the North American mainland was producing a superior product, Drax experimented with a number of other crops until he plumped for sugar.
His was one of the plantations on which the new crop had first been trialled. After numerous expensive errors, Drax finally got it right. Soon Colonel Drax began to boast that he would not think of returning home to England until he was worth £10,000 a year. He swiftly exceeded even this exalted total. The French priest Antoine Biet noted that Drax was held in such esteem on the island that when he did leave to visit England in the 1650s, he “was accompanied to his ship by more than two hundred of the island’s most important people … all well mounted and marching two by two in a column headed by Drax and the island’s Governor.”
According to Biet, the elite sugar planters “all lived like little princes,” driving around in grand coaches and wearing the finest clothes. Since they were able to delegate most of the estate’s labour to their servants and slaves, these men led pleasant lives, with ample time to enjoy pursuits like hunting, fishing and paying calls. They were the Russian oligarchs of their day, ludicrously rich and determined to show it.
Their hospitality was legendary. In a feast thrown by Colonel Drax for Richard Ligon (who despite his financial travails was sufficiently the gentleman that he was much feted by the planters), the guests were presented with a menu that included beef—a rarity on the island—served in fourteen different ways. Some cuts were roasted, breaded or boiled, while the tongue and tripe were made into pies “seasoned with sweet Herbs finely minc’d, Suet, Spice and Currans.” After this course was completed, another was brought in, which featured among its delights a “shoulder of a young Goat,” “A Kid with a pudding in its belly,” as well as “a loin of veal and eight turtle doves.” The next course included Spanish bacon, pickled oysters, caviar, anchovies and olives. To finish there were desserts such as cheesecakes, tansies and custards, as well as fruit platters that included bananas, guavas, custard apples and prickly pears. All of this was washed down by a dizzying array of beverages: local tipples like mobbie and rum, as well as “all the drinks available in a privileged home in England” such as brandy, white and Rhenish wine and sherry or “red sack.” As opulent as these spreads were, the decoration of these planters’ homes was often a bit patchy, with touches of great ostentation in the form of Smyrna carpets and rich hangings set in vast but rather neglected rooms. This reflected the rather contingent nature of settlement in the colonies during these years; many planters were loath to spend too much on possessions that were not portable, since they planned to return home once they had made their fortune.
There were just enough tantalizing role models like Drax to sustain the fantasies of the hopefuls now flooding into the island. But in reality it was difficult to succeed in the sugar industry without a certain amount of capital. The great sugar magnates were generally not self-made; they arrived with some funds with which to seed their plantation venture. The most notable of these was the aristocratic Christopher Codrington (1649–98). The scion of feudal magnates of Gloucestershire, he built up one of the most profitable estates in these the earliest and most lucrative days of the island’s sugar conversion. His son, also called Christopher (1668–1710), followed in his father’s footsteps. Educated in Britain, he went on to become an Oxford scholar. On his return to Barbados he became a councillor at twenty-six and was made deputy governor at the youthful age of twenty-nine. He later moved to Antigua to exploit that island’s nascent sugar industry. At the time of his premature death in 1710 he was described as “the richest and most splendid of al
l early West Indian Grandees.” More philanthropically inclined than his father, he left his two Barbadian plantations, including their slaves, to the Church of England to fund a theological and medical college for young white Barbadian men. The product of this legacy, the immense and graceful Codrington College, remains the most noticeable artefact of the golden age of Barbadian sugar.
The success of the big planters inspired the middling and smaller planters to follow suit and by the 1660s nearly the whole island was covered with sugar cane estates. A sense of desperation bedevilled these men; they had come here to get rich, and now the opportunity to do so had finally presented itself. If they didn’t jump on the sugar train now they feared they might be left behind. George Ashby was no exception. How does one stand by a gold rush and not hunger for gold? But how could he finance this venture? Men like him who relied solely on their own physical toil to amass their fortunes were at a distinct disadvantage, so they had to plan their strategy carefully. George Ashby chose a gradual, rather stealthy entrée into the sugar industry, ploughing his profits back into further land acquisitions, thereby painstakingly extending his holdings, until he had acquired an impressive nineteen acres.
George also found other methods of getting his hands on land to cultivate. A deed registered on 23 May 1660 demonstrates that, in his modest way, he was becoming something of a sugar entrepreneur. It detailed an agreement with Ralph Kersey, “a tailor,” for the seven-year rental of eight and a half acres of Kersey’s land. At the end of the contractual period the land would revert to Kersey, but the profits that the land had yielded would go to George Ashby and his business partner. It was a wealth-generating strategy that was exploited by many of those who did not have enough capital to buy new land outright, or could not find properties adjacent to their holdings available for sale.
The success of the sugar crop over the following decade saw the island’s status transformed from a beautiful backwater colony to the star of Britain’s overseas possessions. The impact of sugar on the mother country was equally profound. According to the historian Larry Gragg, in 1634 only 5 per cent of London’s imports came from the Americas, but from the 1660s the transporting of sugar and tobacco dominated England’s overseas trade. Though most of this sugar was earmarked for domestic use, almost 40 per cent was re-exported. In turn this generated profits for shipping, ports and merchants in the form of freight, commission, and handling charges. Ports in London and Bristol expanded to accommodate this new business. Jobs in shipbuilding boomed, with greater demand for crews as well as skilled tradesmen like shipwrights, carpenters, sail-makers and gun-makers. Sugar refineries opened up and by 1695 there were nearly thirty of them in England processing ten million pounds of muscovado annually. Other trades also expanded—from hat-makers to haberdashers—to meet the needs of the newly enriched planters and merchants.
Thomas Tryon, an Anabaptist who visited Barbados in 1663, summed up sugar’s importance to Britain enthusiastically: this “excellent Juice,” he wrote, “is of much more importance than all other Fruits and Spices imported to us,” arguing that “No one could be insensible as to how sugar had enriched the Kings purse.” In addition, he claimed: “Sugar finds an Employment for many Thousands in England it self, [such] as … Sugar-Bakers or Distillers, Coopers, Grocers yea and many Ladies who had more sugar in their kitchen than Confectioner shops had in former days.” It was also extremely useful to apothecaries, “since more than half of their Medicines are mixed and compounded with Sugar.” In short, he concluded:
it spreads its generous and sweet influences thro’ the whole Nation; and there are but few Eatables or Drinkables that it is not a Friend to, or capable to confederate with: And upon the whole, as there is no Commodity whatever, that doth so much to encourage Navigation, Advance the Kings Customs, and our Land, and is at the same time of so great and Universal Use, Virtue and Advantage as this King of Sweets.
In Barbados, the transformation was not just economic and environmental, but social and cultural too. Bewitched by the financial potential of sugar, the atmosphere in the island became feverish. Prompted by news of what great profits there were to be made out of the crop, new colonists were flooding into the island. In a tumult of desire and expectation they arrived, hoping to cash in on the sugar boom. Blinded by their dreams of what they would do once they had made their fortune, they struggled to gain what toeholds they could in the new industry. It did not matter that sugar planting and its attendant exploitation of black Africans was desperately hard work, full of drudgery and boredom and debasement; they came anyway. If they didn’t have the funds to finance a plantation they took jobs as managers; if they didn’t have the skills to be managers they became bookkeepers; and if not bookkeepers they became overseers. Others realized that there was a killing to be made in the innumerable businesses that functioned on the periphery of the sugar industry: slave trading, sugar processing and shipping.
There was a new pace to island life and a new intensity to its commerce. Taverns sprang up to provide lodging and libation for those who came to work in the industry, make deals, or visit relatives. Warehouses started up in Bridgetown to sell harvesting equipment and the merchants pitched up to sell them. Physicians arrived to care for their health; lawyers came to litigate their business affairs. Some of the new arrivals had been dispatched by relatives who wanted rid of them; and so the sugar colonies became a repository for footloose second sons, delinquent debtors, legally compromised uncles and unwanted orphans. All came on the chance that they might become rich men. That many of these hopefuls would eventually leave the island disappointed and disillusioned did not at this point matter one jot; they were gamblers all, each convinced that he would be the one to beat the odds and strike it rich.
George Ashby must have been swept up in this frenzy and shared the belief held by almost all the islanders that sugar could transform their fortunes and make everyone wealthy. Certainly his plot of land was now a great deal more valuable than it had previously been. For a man like him, it must have felt like such a vindication; at a stroke, his decision to migrate to Barbados and his years of struggle were justified: he was finally in the right place at the right time.
But the “white gold” created unrest as well as wealth across Barbadian society. Men who had previously been content to be tobacco or cotton farmers could no longer countenance such a humble fate. Their beloved plots of land were no longer just “competences,” places that would provide them with sustenance and independence; instead, through the alchemy of sugar, they were transformed into potential gold mines that owed them riches.
In fact, the leisurely and lavish lifestyles of the plantocracy were miles away from those of “the more inconsiderable of the Inhabitants,” like George Ashby, who were still “forced to earn their bread with the labour of their hands and the sweat of their brows.” For many of these men sugar had improved their finances somewhat but had not radically changed their day-to-day lives. They still rose at dawn and spent their days labouring alongside their bedraggled servants in an effort to make sure their property was yielding as much as it could and therefore provide the best possible future for their families.
Barbados was no longer a society of peasant farmers like George Ashby, struggling alongside one another to stay solvent; it was now a rigidly hierarchical society. At the top were the elite planters, who were reinventing themselves according to an aristocratic model derived from the feudal culture that they remembered from back home, and which shaped their attitudes and behaviour. They dominated the political, military and financial infrastructure of the island, where they held high ranks in the government, militia and Vestry. Beneath them was a middling group of planters and merchants who acted as something of a buffer between the elites and the poorer planters who were struggling to keep their heads above water. The sugar industry was creating extremes of wealth and poverty that would eventually produce a yawning gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, with disastrous consequences. Alrea
dy, the most successful Barbadians were aware that their new-found riches were increasing the threat from the enemy within their own plantations: that toxic brew of resentful labour made up of disgruntled indentured servants who realized that they would never be able to afford land on the island, and the huge number of exploited and abused slaves, many of them freshly transported from Africa, who carried rebellion in their hearts.
Meanwhile, the rise of sugar not only attracted a flood of migrants into the island; it also prompted another, substantial stream of people to leave it. Some of these were second and third sons with no chance of inheriting the family plantation, but most were ex-indentured servants, without land or prospects, or struggling smallholders who had sold out to bigger planters when they realized that their plots of land simply weren’t big enough to make a fortune from sugar. It was no surprise then that Barbados became known as “the nursery for planting other places.” The islanders sometimes moved to other less populous territories, but most frequently they went to North America; indeed many areas, such as the Carolinas, were largely settled by Barbadians. These migrants took with them knowledge of the plantation system and the blueprint of how to organize and manage a large number of slaves. Thus it could be said that Barbados was “the laboratory” for the slave and plantation system in many parts of America where cotton, tobacco and rice were later grown.
Not everyone was impressed with the quality of these new arrivals. A Carolinian parish priest wrote: “They are a perfect medley or hotch potch, made up of bankrupt pirates, decayed libertines, sectaries and enthusiasts of all sorts who have transported themselves hither and are the most factious and seditious people in the whole world.” But these questionable, rather unsavoury migrants kept on coming. By the final decades of the century almost half the whites and considerably more than half of the blacks (slaves brought over by their masters) in the Carolina colony had come from Barbados. A 1685 map of Berkeley County shows that of thirty-three prominent landholders, twenty-four had connections with Barbados. Their economic and political dominance of the Carolinas was such that contemporaries complained that “the Barbadians endeavour to rule all.”
Sugar in the Blood Page 12
