A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Bryan Edwards, with appropriate Anglican reserve, was temperate in his encomia, but he was far from unimpressed. He spoke of ‘the even tenor of their lives and of their habitual temperance and self-denial. . . . Except the exercise of dancing, in which they excel, they have no amusement or avocation to impel them to much exertion of either mind or body. Those midnight assemblies and gambling conventions, wherein health, fortune and beauty are so frequently sacrificed in the cities of Europe, are here happily unknown. In their diet the Creole women are, I think, abstemious even to a fault. Simple water or lemonade is the strongest beverage in which they indulge; and a vegetable meal at noon, seasoned with cayenne pepper, constitutes their principal repast. The effect of this mode of life, in a hot and oppressive atmosphere, is a lax fibre and a complexion in which the lily predominates over the rose. To the stranger newly arrived, the ladies appear as just risen from the bed of sickness. Their voice is soft and spiritless and every step betrays languor and lassitude; they lack that glow of health in the countenance, that delicious crimson which in colder countries enlivens the coarsest set of features and renders a beautiful one irresistible. ... In one of the principal features of beauty, however, few ladies surpass the Creoles, for they have, in general, the finest eyes in the world, large, languishing, expressive, sometimes beaming with animation and sometimes melting with tenderness.’ In Bryan Edwards’ opinion, no women on earth made better wives or better mothers. The Creole ladies were also noted for their white teeth, which they polished with juice of a withe called the chewstick; it was strong, bitter and a powerful detergent. The withe was cut into small pieces and used as a toothbrush.

  The beauty of Creole women did not, however, do more than meagrely diminish the loneliness of the planter’s life. Creole women might be exquisite, but there were deplorably few of them.

  From the very beginning, indeed, the lack of white women had been a problem in the islands, and Colbert’s insistence on the need for engagées was due to a recognition of the inevitable consequences of this lack. In the early days it was possible for French officers and officials to get leave on the grounds that they were returning to France to find a wife. Anxious to restrict illicit unions between planters and their slaves, Colbert issued a number of discriminatory measures. The father of a mulatto child was fined two thousand pounds of sugar if the mother of the child was the master’s slave; in addition to this fine, the Negress and the child were confiscated and sold for the benefit of the hospital.

  This ordinance Labat heartily approved, though he regretted that it led to an even graver offence – the practice of abortion. Very often a master who saw himself likely to be convicted of paternity promised the Negress her release if she would deny his guilt. At one time it was the custom for masters to free their mulatto sons when they reached the age of twenty-four, the argument being that the youth by his work from the age of sixteen had repaid his father for the expense of his upbringing. But when the French islands passed under the direct rule of the throne, this law was changed and it was ruled that the child of a slave was a slave no matter who the father was. Labat only met two instances of a white man marrying a black woman, and nowhere does he approve of such marriages. When a young white girl seduced a black man and became pregnant, his advice was rationalistic. Send the slave to St Domingue, where he could be sold, and the girl to Grenada, where she could have the child in secret. It could be adopted and she could pretend on her return that she had been on a holiday.

  In Labat’s time the problem of the half-coloured and quarter-coloured population was not as acute as it was to become in the course of the eighteenth century. Although colonization in the islands by the French and British was eighty years old, stability had been existing there for barely the length of a generation, and only recently had the scene been crowded by the large half-coloured class which was to present so very acute a temptation to the young emigrant.

  European men have not generally considered the pure bred African woman physically attractive. Her features are coarse, her hair short and crinkly, the nose squashed back against the cheeks, the lips large and protuberant. For such a woman a European man was unlikely to form a strong and permanent attraction. On the other hand, the mixture of African and European blood produced a highly attractive female, for whom it was most natural for a young man to form a strong attachment. The prevalence of such attachments became the problem of the eighteenth century, particularly in the French islands, where the establishment of a mistress was a national institution. In St Domingue, even married planters kept coloured women, whose children they displayed proudly as their own, brought up in the same nursery as their legitimate offspring and made allowance for in their wills. The wives submitted to the system on the excuse that the black mistress was invaluable as a spy, and that there was no other sure means of knowing what the slaves were planning. For bachelors it was the invariable custom. To be the mistress of a white planter was the goal of a coloured girl’s ambition. It was, among other things, her only avenue to freedom. For it was by no means rare for a man to free his mistress and have her children educated. Such a relationship was indeed the chief distraction in his life.

  Except during crop time, the work on a plantation was unvaried and uninteresting. Cane grew itself. There was little for the planter to do except to ride round his estate and supervise the discipline of the slaves, the digging of the ditches, the weeding of the fields. When crop time came, there was, in contrast, a wave of such intense concentration in the heat of the factories that he soon longed for the quiet boredom of the planting season.

  The best picture of that life is to be found in Matthew Lewis’ Journal of a West Indian Planter, which was published after his death in 1817, and was highly praised by Coleridge. Lewis was a remarkable man. Born in 1775, he did not inherit his West Indian estate until 1812, and was not able to visit it until after the Napoleonic Wars, when the slave trade had been abolished, though the slaves had not yet been freed. His early years were devoted to the pleasures of Bohemian society; he was the friend of Byron and Shelley, and he frequented Madame de Staël’s salon. At the age of twenty, when he was an attaché at the British Embassy at the Hague, he wrote a lurid novel called Ambrosia, or The Monk, and was nearly prosecuted for its indecency. Byron said it ‘ought to have been written by Tiberius at Capri. . . .’ He dismissed it as ‘the philtred ideas of a jaded voluptuary; they have no nature, all the sour cream of cantharides. ... It is to me inconceivable that they could have been composed by a man of only twenty.’ Yet it sold prodigiously and earned its author the nickname ‘Monk’.

  Lewis exasperated his friends. ‘Short-sighted and loquacious’, Byron found him, ‘pestilently prolix’, and he wished that ‘he would but talk half and reduce his visits to an hour’. Yet Byron was fond of him:

  I would give many a sugar cane

  Matt Lewis were alive again.

  Lewis was clearly a generous, warmhearted man. He knew Wilberforce and was anxious to improve the conditions of the slaves, though he was not in favour of their emancipation, and considered that The African Reporter – the organ of the abolitionists – presented a highly biased picture of plantation life. He recognized the dangers of the absentee system, with an attorney managing the estate, a salaried lawyer supervising the planting and in charge of labour, with white subordinates, known as bookkeepers, who were nursing their own interests, not those of the proprietor or his slaves, and he inserted a clause in his own will to the effect that his heirs would forfeit their rights to his Jamaican estates unless they spent three months every third year there. He disapproved of flogging, and such a humanitarian was he that other planters accused him of spoiling his Negroes and spreading dissatisfaction. But in spite of his genuine affection for his slaves, he had no illusions about them. He knew that they were indiscriminate poisoners, that they grew arsenic beans in their gardens, although the beans were of no use for food or ornament, and that they fermented the juice of the cassava root until it produced a worm
which they hid under their thumbnail until an opportunity occurred to drop it in the victim’s drink. He knew that they were subject to the orders of their Obeah men.

  He was exasperated by their idleness, stupidity and secretiveness. ‘There is no folly and imprudence like unto Negro folly and imprudence.’ The slaves often went lame, because a small fly, the chica, would work its way into their feet and lay its eggs. They were provided with small knives to extract the eggs, but as there was no pain until the sore had formed they were too lazy to use them. Frequent foot inspections had to be ordered. The slaves were constantly reporting sick, to avoid work, yet when they were ill they concealed the nature of their illness. It was thus very difficult to diagnose the nature of the complaint. A woman, for instance, who had allowed her baby to slip out of her arms, vigorously denied that the child had had a fall, although another woman insisted that she had. After the closing of the slave trade, there was a shortage of labour in the canefields, and the planters tried to replace Negroes with machinery and cattle, but the Negroes distrusted these innovations; they broke the ploughs and starved the cattle. Lewis soon realized that a little flogging was necessary.

  He presents the planter’s life as an endless succession of irritations and complaints. His patience needs to be inexhaustible, and all the time his nerves are exposed to the strain of an exhausting climate. Lewis himself caught fever during his second visit, and died on the voyage home.

  ‘Rich as a Creole’ indeed, but it is not surprising that many planters dreamed of the day when they could retire and live in Europe on the revenue of their estates.

  7 The War of Jenkins’ Ear

  The Treaty of Utrecht kept Europe out of war for twenty-six years. It ended when a Spanish commander, after rummaging a British ship for contraband without success, tortured her captain, a Welshman called Jenkins, and cut off one of his ears, telling him to take it home to his king and master. This Jenkins did, preserving it in a bottle which he displayed to the House of Commons. One of the members asked him what he thought or expected when he was in the hands of such a barbarian. ‘I recommended my soul to God,’ he said, ‘and my cause to my country.’

  History records that those members who were averse to war ‘hung low their heads and sneaked out of the chamber’, and the popular outcry was so great that the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who had assumed power after the financial crisis of the South Sea Bubble, shrugged his shoulders. He was convinced that his country’s interests could be best served by peace. In his opinion, bribery was a cheaper activity than war. But there were certain concatenations of circumstance against which common sense could not prevail. He remarked as the joybells rang, ‘They are ringing their bells now; they’ll be wringing their hands soon.’

  Jenkins’ ear was, in fact, only the final straw in a long series of disagreements whose complete story has been told at length and with much wit by Richard Pares in War and Trade in the West Indies.

  The origin of the dispute went back seventy years to the treaties of 1667 and 1670, which were phrased with such face-saving vagueness that it was impossible to tell what had been agreed. The clause, ‘This present treaty shall in no way derogate from any pre-eminence, right or seigniory which either the one or the other allies have in the seas, straits and fresh waters of America, and they shall have and retain the same in as full and ample a manner as of right they ought to belong to them,’ referred to Spain’s claims that all America belonged to her, but did not include Britain’s acceptance of this claim. A later clause asserted that ‘it is always to be understood that the freedom of navigation ought by no manner of means to be interrupted, when there is nothing committed contrary to the true sense and meaning of these articles.’ This presumably meant that Spain realized that Britain had certain claims, without recognizing what they were or their validity. Many years later a British ambassador in Madrid was to say of this treaty that it consisted of ‘reciprocal propositions made between an English and a Spanish minister, corrective of each other, without bringing the point to so precise a conclusion as might effectually and at all times and in all dispositions of the two crowns toward one another, prevent the evil it was intended to remove.’

  But at the time, the British ministers who arranged the treaty were content in the knowledge that something had been achieved by Spain’s recognition that British ships were actually allowed in the Caribbean. And certainly the treaty of 1670, which, had it been signed a little earlier, would have stopped Henry Morgan’s raid on Panama, did end the power of the buccaneers.

  The Treaty of Utrecht held better promise; a long and bitter war was over. Louis XIV’s reign could only have a few weeks to last; though a Frenchman sat upon the throne of Spain, the two kingdoms were separate. France, England and Holland no longer appeared in the Caribbean as filibusters bleeding the Spanish empire white. Each country had a stake in the area; they had solid settlements, as opposed to bases for smuggling, with which they were conducting legitimate trade. And Britain had been granted the assiento, the monopoly of the slave trade to the Spanish colonies, the right to open factories in the Spanish Main and to send every year a ship of five hundred tons to the fair in Porto Bello. Surely now the European nations could settle down to cultivate their own private gardens.

  But the tradition of lawlessness in the Caribbean died hard. Buccaneers could not become respectable citizens overnight, particularly when the Spanish governors were prepared to approve their raids, provided they themselves had their percentage of the booty. The Spanish definition of contraband was responsible for innumerable disputes. The Spaniards tended to regard as contraband goods that not only had been, but that might have been, exported from Spain, and on these grounds they claimed the right to interfere with ships plying between two British colonies. Under this interpretation of the law, a cargo that had been landed in Jamaica and was then being reshipped to Boston could be confiscated. Once a Spanish product, always a Spanish product, although Spanish products could have been acquired legitimately by the annual assiento ship, or surreptitiously through the practice of certain Spanish governors of obtaining the necessities for their parishes by sending to British colonies the merchandise they could exchange for them. Spanish coin was regarded as contraband wherever it might be found, although it was the recognized currency in the French Antilles.

  Dyewood in particular presented a problem. It came from the Bahamas, and the Spaniards claimed the Bahamas as their own, although they had never settled them. An even more pressing issue concerned the logwood trade. Logwood was of great value to the English woollen manufacturers for dyeing purposes. Some logwood grew in Jamaica and was occasionally shipped to England, but most of the English logwood came from the Spanish provinces of Honduras and Campeche. In these areas definite British settlements had been founded. It was a hard life that was led there by these pioneers; while they were at work they were up to their knees in swamp; but there is a certain type of man who can tolerate any existence, provided he is independent and his leisure can be relieved by heavy drinking and native women. The Spanish themselves had no wish to make use of the land, but they resented the presence of the English, whom they were continually attempting to evict; the English maintained that they had a right there under a vague clause in the treaties of 1667 and 1670. The question of effective occupation was one of the most vexed in Anglo-Spanish relations, the Spaniards regarding as illegal any settlement in the New World that they had not expressly licensed. The logwood controversy was still an irritant on the eve of the Anglo-Spanish War in 1762, and was a contributory cause of it.

  Illegal confiscation led to constant lawsuits. The most fervent admirers of the Spaniards will hesitate to number alacrity among their qualities, and the machinery by which claims for depredations were adjusted would have been slow even if it had been handled by a twentieth-century American. If an English captain felt that he had been ill-used, he was expected to apply for redress in the Spanish courts, but knowing how long such an action would take and h
ow expensive it would prove, he preferred to approach his own government. If the British ambassador could be persuaded to take up his case, the Spanish authorities would at first retort that the captain must have acknowledged his own guilt because he had not complained through the proper channels. When that objection had been overcome, the Spanish authorities would explain that they had not yet received their own governor’s report; they must hear both sides of the case. The law’s delays were indefinitely prolonged, and even when it was accepted that the plaintiff had a legitimate complaint and the ship and cargo were ordered to be returned, the case was far from finished.

  An order to restore the ship and cargo would be given and the claimant would be provided with a royal letter, a cédula. The restitution had, however, to be made at the spot where the action had taken place. This necessitated a costly voyage, from which the prudent claimant would endeavour to recoup himself by taking out a cargo of merchandise. Often this was his sole reward. The governor would question the cédula’s authenticity and send a protest home. The ship and the cargo had probably been sold, and it would be impossible to recover the proceeds which had been dispersed in a hundred directions. In vain would the claimants protest that the money should be paid in Spain, since the guarda costas were acting under the King of Spain’s directions. Many sea captains felt that it was easier to obtain redress in the way that Henry Morgan favoured.

  Nor did the Spaniards lack causes of complaint. The South Sea Company, which held the rights in the assiento, made no attempt to keep to their agreement. Their single ship was followed into harbour by a flock of frigates, from which the ship was reloaded overnight. Far more than five hundred tons were brought into Porto Bello, and there is little doubt that the single ship used its privileged position for smuggling. It is surprising that the declared profits of the company were so small; it can only be assumed that the profits found their way into the pockets of the chief shareholders by concealed channels, particularly in view of the fact that a quarter of the stock was held by the King of Spain himself.