For one thing, the mainland colonies, awash with precious metals, proved a stronger short-term draw for adventurers risking their lives gambling against the frightening new diseases of the tropics. In addition, there were monopolies and government interference everywhere in the nascent industry: all produce had to be shipped through Seville; heavy excise duty was charged on imports, which were then only available for purchase to a closed ring of those buyers who had been wise enough to lend money to the profligate emperor of the time. The powerful Church took its chunk of profits in the form of tithes; a monopoly on imported labour did the rest. For a brief time there were 100 sugar factories at work in Spanish Hispaniola; by 1600 there were only 11. This pattern was duplicated around the Spanish Antilles.
Thus developing the industry (and expanding the market) fell to the other nation of great Atlantic explorers, the Portuguese. In the 1490s, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea were colonised by Portugal and put to cane. When combined with the supply from Madeira, this made Portugal the world’s leading sugar producer. The African islands, like Madeira, would for various reasons quickly fade from the picture, but not before they had acted as a nursery of cane technology for the next great expansion. In 1500, Portugal claimed Brazil, and within 20 years had created a huge industry in sugar, initially manned by the indigenous population, then, as it fled or died out, by imported African slaves. Numerous sugar factories were established by the 1520s, and from the 1530s the industry expanded rapidly, particularly around Pernambuco, Olinda and Bahia.
It was a golden period for Brazil. By the end of the sixteenth century, a narrow coastal strip boasted more than 120 sugar mills in what had now become the richest European colony anywhere in the world. James Drax, visiting in around 1640, would have seen all this: the fabulous opulence of the local planters, their tables laden with silver and fine china, their doors fitted with gold locks; the women wearing huge jewels from the East, precious fabrics everywhere and an army of prostitutes and slaves always hovering. A French visitor at the beginning of the seventeenth century has described his visit to a Portuguese sugar baron, who took his lavish meals to the sounds of an orchestra of 30 beautiful black slave girls, presided over by a bandmaster imported from Europe. All was afloat on a sea of easy profit – the Dutch estimated that in 1620, the Brazilian sugar industry made the equivalent of more than half a million pounds sterling a year, an astonishing figure.
Unsurprisingly, the Dutch, who had emerged after a long struggle against Spanish rule into their Golden Age as Europe’s most extensive and successful international traders and bankers, wanted a piece of the action. When, for dynastic reasons, Portugal merged with Spain towards the end of the sixteenth century, her colonies became fair game.
The Dutch West India Company, licensed to make war in search of profits for its backers, was founded in 1621 to get its hands on some of this trade. Three years later, the Company, with a force of 3,300 men and 26 ships under the command of Admiral Piet Heyn, attacked a town on the coast of Bahia. The port’s two forts were quickly captured and the defenders dispersed. Driven out the following year, the Dutch returned in 1630, landing 7,000 soldiers at Recife. This time, the hinterland was secured, and soon the Dutch controlled a large area of north-east Brazil.
The conflict had been hugely damaging to the sugar industry, with dozens of factories destroyed in the fighting or to prevent them falling into enemy hands. But new leadership of the Dutch colony from 1636 brought the industry to another high, with hundreds of Dutch merchant ships carrying Brazilian sugar to the refineries of Holland. With the control of Brazil, the Dutch owned the sugar business.
The Dutch leadership successfully encouraged the Portuguese sugar-growers to re-establish their plantations and increase production. But the planters always bridled under the yoke of the hard-working, money-obsessed Calvinist Hollanders. By the early 1640s, cooperation was breaking down and there was agitation in the countryside. This, together with a string of poor harvests during 1642–4 (possibly caused by soil exhaustion in the coastal lands), led the Dutch to look for new sugar acres elsewhere to supply the cargoes for their giant merchant marine and hungry refineries at home. Thus when Drax came knocking in the early 1640s, he found a welcome audience happy to help expand sugar production in the Caribbean basin.
The earliest accounts of Barbados at this time are partial and contradictory. All agree, however, that Dutch influence was crucial in the establishment of the sugar industry on the island in the early 1640s. The actual technology was Portuguese, as the language of the sugar factory – ingenio, muscovado – demonstrates. But it was the Dutch, as a 1690 account has it, ‘being eternall Prolers about, and Searchers for moderate Gains by Trade’, who were the engine of its transfer, as well as offering to provide labour, tools, easy credit, and the ships to carry away the finished sugar. Most early Barbados narratives also agree on the importance of James Drax, who was about 30 years old at the time. The same 1690 account suggests that ‘a Hollander happened to arrive in Barbados, and … was by one Mr Drax, and some other inhabitants there drawn in to make Discovery of the Art he had to make it’.
Drax’s was not the very first sugar to be planted in Barbados. That honour belongs to a Colonel James Holdip. But as an account from around 1667 has it, the colonel’s efforts ‘came to little till the great industry and more thriving genius of Sir James Drax engaged in that great work’.
According to a friend of Drax, bringing the business of sugar growing and processing ‘to perfection’ during the 1640s took ‘divers yeeres paines, care, patience and industry, with the disbersing of vast summes of money’. Drax, an early account maintains, imported from Holland ‘the Model of a Sugar Mill’ for crushing the canes to extract the juice, and some copper cauldrons for boiling the liquid until it was ready to crystallise.
Whatever advice he had received in Recife, along with the infant cane plants, it did not all go to plan at first. Drax, who may have been in partnership with a kinsman, William Hilliard, made several mistakes over the first year or two of his new enterprise. Unlike cotton and tobacco, sugar is difficult and time-consuming to grow, and very tricky to process. It appears that Drax cut his first crop too soon – after 12 months rather than the required 15 or more – and made a mess of the manufacture.
Drax’s first sugar was awful, ‘so moist, and full of molasses, and so ill cur’d, as they were hardly worth the bringing home for England’. But he and his men stuck at it, learning from trial and error, ‘and by new directions from Brazil’. Instead of planting the canes vertically into holes in the ground, they started laying them lengthways in trenches. This anchored the plant and prevented it being blown over on the exposed St George’s hillsides, as well as producing new shoots from each buried knot. The vertical rollers that crushed the cane were strengthened with plates of iron and brass, and the correct boiling sequence was established in copper cauldrons of varying sizes.
As soon as Drax’s first competent Barbados sugar arrived on the London market, it yielded a far higher profit than any other American commodity, fetching as much as £5 per hundredweight. Drax reckoned it increased his income per acre fourfold over any other crop.
The stunning success of his experiment would see James Drax and his heirs – as well as other families – accrue fortunes beyond their wildest dreams. More than that, it would decisively affect the course of history, the fate of empires and the lives of millions. Most immediately, however, it would radically alter the nature of the 15-year-old colony in Barbados.
2
THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS, 1605–41
‘I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple.’
Shakespeare, The Tempest, II: 1
The father of the British West Indian sugar empire was a second son of undistinguished, though not impoverished, Midlands stock. James Drax’s father William was the Anglican vicar of the village of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. James had five siblings who
survived into adulthood; three of his sisters married middling artisans in London – two joiners and a goldsmith.
It has been suggested that Drax’s unusual name indicates some foreign connection, most likely Dutch. Although this is possible, what seems more certain is that someone in his family had links with the Courteens. William and Philip Courteen were the sons of a Dutch emigrant to England, who had fled Holland during the tyrannous reign of the Spanish Duke of Alba. His trading company, with links to Holland (his son William married the daughter of a powerful Dutch trader), had been expanded by his sons to take in almost all of Europe, Greenland, the East Indies and the Caribbean. Recently, a director of the Dutch West India Company with experience in the Americas had been taken on board as a partner.
The Courteen Company was of the new model of trading businesses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In a very short time, the ancient overland trade routes, bestridden all the way with middlemen after their percentage, had been bypassed by the newly discovered ocean highways, a short cut to undreamt-of profit margins. Suddenly there was a new breed of businessman in London – the transnational merchant prince, with connections across the globe and the merchant fleet to link them all together under his control.
The Courteen brothers employed people of many nationalities and had fingers in many pies. One of their mariners was an Englishman, John Powell, a veteran Caribbean trader and pirate, who in 1625 found himself blown off course on a regular return trip from supplying one of the infant English colonies on the northern part of mainland South America. He steered his vessel, the Olive, to the leeward, west coast of Barbados, where he dropped anchor. His men briefly explored the heavily wooded interior, and then erected a cross, claiming the uninhabited island for their monarch by inscribing ‘James, King of England’ on a tree.
On his return, Powell told the Courteens of the ‘goodness of the island’, and through the efforts of the Earl of Pembroke, an enthusiastic promoter of colonial ventures, the brothers soon afterwards obtained a patent from the crown to establish a new settlement. The first vessel dispatched to Barbados was the William and John, commanded by John Powell’s brother Henry, and carrying some 50 settlers, along with arms, ammunition and provisions. At some point on the voyage, they came across a Portuguese vessel, no doubt on the way from Africa to Brazil. The ship was overpowered, and 10 black enslaved Africans were taken on to the William and John – the English sugar empire’s very first slaves. In mid-February 1627, they came in sight of Barbados, and could make out ‘a great ridge of white sand’ fringed by palms, above which could be seen a land ‘full of woods’.
On board the William and John, a later report affirms, were all three of the later sugar pioneers – Holdip, Hilliard and James Drax. According to the available evidence, Drax was 18 years old.
Henry Powell took his men ashore on 17 February at a point, now known as Holetown, about halfway up the west coast, where a small stream flows into the sea. Huge trees, many 200 feet tall, clustered thickly right up to the edge of the beach, the outer screen of a jungle of such fantastic tangled thickness as to be virtually impenetrable. As before, there was no sign of human habitation, no footprints on the beach. In fact, Barbados had once supported an Amerindian population as high as 10,000, but a combination of raids by the Spanish and by the warlike Carib Indians, together with lack of water,1 had meant that by soon after 1500 it was deserted. For the arrivals in 1627, then, it was an empty, virgin new world.
Mastering the strange new land would, however, require urgent hard work. The first priority was to build shelter – from the sun, the tropical rains and hurricane storms, and the insects and rats. Holdip later told the story of how he and Drax lived at first ‘in a cave in the rocks’. Soon, primitive shelters had been built, each consisting of little more than a frame of forked sticks stuck into the ground, with palm leaves and reeds for walls and roof.
In the energy-sapping heat and humidity, clearing land for planting proved extremely difficult. The subtropical forest was immensely thick: ‘growne over with trees and undershrubs, without passage’. Ponds and wells had to be dug. Tools were in short supply and rusted rapidly in the warm damp climate. Few of the settlers had performed this sort of work before, many of the trees had wood ‘as hard to cut as stone’, and most were lashed together by prodigious vines. There was a ‘multitude’ of black ants, which would drop on to the men’s heads as they worked. Eventually, though, a small plot of land was cleared and sown with wheat, with the felled trees used to build log cabins near the beach.
The earliest accounts from the island give us a feel of what life was like for the first settlers. It was above all a battle against nature and the elements, the ‘dayly showres of raine, windes’, and the ‘cloudy sultry heat’ that made the air as thick as jelly. ‘With this great heat’, wrote another earlier settler, ‘there is such a moisture, as must of necessity cause the air to be very unwholesome.’ On the seashore, there was an ‘aboundance of smale knatts … yt bite’, which at sunset would descend on the men. The settlers slept in hammocks with their ropes plastered with sticky tar to protect them from cockroaches, ants and rats, and a fire lit underneath to drive away noxious flying insects. Night-time brought a cacophony of unfamiliar noises: the sawing, ticking and trilling of insects, the ‘squeakinge of Lisards & other cryinge creatures’.
To supplement the by now elderly and unpleasant provisions from the ship, the settlers hunted for turtle and hogs. Almost a hundred years earlier, a Portuguese ship’s captain had left some pigs on the island, and their numerous descendants, gorged on the tropical fruits and sweet-tasting roots of the island, were now set about with abandon by the English. In the meantime, however, Henry Powell, having left his nephew John Powell Junior behind as the island’s governor, had taken a small group of men and set sail from Barbados to a Dutch settlement on the Essequibo river in Guiana. The governor there, Amos van Groenenwegen, was a friend of Henry Powell; they had been shipmates working for the Courteens. It is likely that Powell’s visit was long planned, as the Courteens were amongst the backers of the Dutch settlement. In return for trade goods from England, Powell acquired seeds and plants – tobacco, Indian corn, cassava, sweet potatoes, plantains, bananas, citrus fruits and melons. He also brought back from Guiana to Barbados some 30 or so Arawak Indians to instruct the settlers in the growing of these new and unfamiliar crops. In return, the Arawaks were allowed a piece of land and promised that if they wished, they would be returned home after two years, with £50 sterling in axes, bills, hoes, knives, looking-glasses and beads.
It would be some time before many of the plants were properly established. A visitor seven years later reported a wide range of fruits, ‘but not in any great plentie as yet’. Nonetheless, as more land was cleared, the English settlers, increased by another 80 after the arrival of John Powell Sr in the Peter in May 1627, concentrated on growing tobacco. This was why the Courteens had invested in the settlement, inspired by the success of the Virginia colony established 20 years previously.
The initial results were encouraging. The tobacco plants ‘grew so well that they produced an abundance’, which was carried back to London (in one account by Henry Powell, in another by James Drax), where it arrived on the market at a time of scarcity. The considerable profit was invested in another 50 men to help work the island.
But there was a problem. Barbados tobacco, it turned out, was of a very inferior quality. One of the first settlers, Henry Winthrop, sent his initial crop back to his father John in England in early 1628. John Winthrop (who two years later would found the Massachusetts Bay settlement) wrote to his son that the rolls of tobacco were so ‘very ill conditioned, fowle, full of stalkes and evil coloured’ that he couldn’t sell them even for five shillings a pound.
But although the more enterprising settlers like Drax started to look around for another staple, most of the white settlers, swollen to 1,800 by 1629, persisted with tobacco, which remained quick and easy to cultivate.
In the meantime, the growing population, even those at the top of the hierarchy, often went hungry – ‘much misery they have endured’, reads an account from 1629. Then, in late 1630/early 1631, a combination of factors put the very survival of the colony in doubt. First, the price of tobacco fell sharply to a tenth of its previous value. Barbados’s inferior product was now almost worthless. The island’s hog population, hunted with reckless abandon, had dwindled almost to extinction. At the same time, a severe drought blasted the wheat crop. The result was what would soon be known as ‘the Starving Time’.
Of course, colonies in the Americas had failed before, with disastrous, usually fatal consequences for the settlers. For a long time, the Caribbean had been a ‘Spanish lake’; by the Treaty of Tordesailles in 1494, the Pope had granted to Spain the whole of the Americas bar Brazil, but with the fading of Spanish power after the long war of 1585–1604, a number of other European powers – France, England, Holland, Denmark, Prussia, Sweden – had scrambled for ‘a place in the sun’. The first were the Dutch; before the end of the century, they had established settlements in Guiana, and in 1600 they landed on the tiny island of St Eustatius near St Kitts. Emboldened by their success, French and English merchants also sponsored a number of attempted colonies.
The West Indies had always been ‘beyond the line’. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, the French and Spanish, unable to settle their disputes over the Americas, had agreed that there would be a line in the Atlantic beyond which accepted European treaties, and, in effect, accepted European codes of conduct, would not apply. The English, in treaties in 1604 and 1630, implicitly accepted the same agreement. Thus, from the earliest days of the Spanish empire, the Caribbean was a constant theatre of violence and war – declared or not – infested by privateers, pirates, corsairs, call them what you will. It was a lawless space, a paradise for thieves, smugglers and murderers.
The Sugar Barons Page 2
