The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  French and Dutch privateers were in the vanguard. Indeed, on his third voyage, Columbus himself had had to take action to avoid French pirates. In 1523, a privateer squadron originating from Dieppe hit the jackpot, capturing the Spanish treasure fleet and a huge prize of gold bars, pearls, emeralds and sugar as well as the crown jewels and wardrobe of Montezuma. Generations of adventurers from a host of countries would be inspired to attempt to repeat the feat.

  For the English, though, the Caribbean had a particular resonance (particularly for those, like Drax, of solid Anglican sensibility). After the lucky defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, English identity and self-esteem had become ever more closely tied to a new anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish nationalism. The heroes of this new mood were the Protestant ‘sea dogs’, such as Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh, and their stage was the Caribbean. Hawkins was the first, trading illegally in the West Indies in the 1560s. The next decade saw Sir Francis Drake rampaging around the Caribbean basin, sacking Nombre de Dios in Panama (and bringing home £40,000 in loot), and then, in the 1580s, capturing and ransacking Santo Domingo in Hispaniola and Cartegena on the Spanish Main. All was justified as revenging the terrible cruelties of the Spaniards.

  Because the West Indies was ‘beyond the line’, it made little difference whether countries were at war or not; no quarter was given or expected. But the raw pursuit of Protestantism and profit, not necessarily in that order, often had a wider strategic aim – to attack Spain at the source of its wealth. Thus during the struggles of the Counter-Reformation, the Caribbean basin became, not for the last time, the ‘cockpit of Europe, the arena of Europe’s wars, hot and cold’. The most effective way for the rival powers to sap Spain’s strength was to commission privateers to attack its trade and bullion lines in the West Indies. This also promised the chance of great dividends for those who fitted out and provisioned the privateers; for the first time, merchants in London started investing in faraway imperial schemes.2

  The exploits of the Elizabethan corsairs and adventurers were read about in England in the works of Hakluyt, Purchas and Raleigh as well as in translations from Spanish accounts. But it was soon apparent that the swashbuckling was only part of the story. Many ships’ captains found that it was almost as profitable and far less dangerous trading clandestinely with the Spanish rather than looting their settlements with fire and sword. Furthermore, the curiosity of these men about the new, exotic lands proved highly infectious. From the first shipwreck of Englishmen in Bermuda in 1609, the idea of the ‘paradise island’, untouched by time, gripped the English imagination even as strongly as that of pirates. For Andrew Marvell in his poem ‘Bermudas’, it was a Garden of Eden. For Shakespeare, or, more exactly, his Prospero, the emptiness of the island gave free rein. There was no barrier to Prospero’s self-assertion and his control over the lower orders of man and beast, and even nature itself. Raleigh described Guiana, where he disastrously ruined his life and reputation seeking a mythical ‘El Dorado’, as ‘a country that hath yet her Maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought’. The inhabitants of Guiana, told by Raleigh that he was there to free them from the Spanish yoke, were for him just part of the scenery, a chorus to sing the praises of the great new conquistador. So if the deserted paradise turned out to be occupied after all, that did not matter. For Defoe’s later Robinson Crusoe also, the ‘natives’ are part of the landscape, rather than the owners of it.

  These intoxicating stories were complemented by a new English knowledge of the region. Drake watered and rested his crews at various of the Leeward Islands, burying his dead and sometimes trading with the native Caribs. Between 1584 and 1602 all Raleigh’s Virginia fleets passed through the Antilles on the way. Hundreds more mariners had brought back information about where was dangerous and where looked promising. Thus, although plundering and smuggling would continue unabated, a new impulse emerged alongside: settlement.

  However much imperial strength had ebbed, the first settlements were concentrated nonetheless around the peripheries of Spanish power, probing at weak spots.

  North of Florida, Spanish potency was negligible. Colonies still failed, but in May 1607, a lasting English settlement was established in Jamestown, Virginia. After early setbacks, it prospered, thanks to its cultivation of tobacco. In 1620 the Plymouth colony was started, and further north the Dutch were settling around New Amsterdam by 1624.

  Partly inspired by Raleigh’s El Dorado fantasy, 1604 saw the first of many doomed English attempts to settle around the Waiapoco River, situated in a semi-no-man’s-land between the Amazon, controlled by Portugal, and the Orinoco, held by Spain. The first British effort to settle in the Caribbean came the following year, when a relief ship for the Guiana colony lost its bearings and ended up depositing a group of 67 settlers at St Lucia. The small but mountainous island had not been occupied by the Spanish, partly because it was home to a tribe of Caribs, whose warlike and supposedly cannibalistic nature was fast becoming legendary. The Caribs were at first friendly with the English, but then fell out over a sword sold to them against the rules and then reclaimed without compensation. After a sharp exchange, the surviving 19 settlers fled the island. An attempt at nearby Grenada four years later met with a similar fate, though fewer escaped.

  The experience of St Lucia and Grenada did not bode well for further colonising attempts in the Carib-dominated Antilles. Furthermore, the islands, although not occupied by Spain, were on the imperial shipping routes, and the policy of the Emperor was to expel any European found trespassing on his American domain.

  Nonetheless, on 28 January 1623, Englishman Thomas Warner landed a small group of settlers on the island of St Christopher, better known as St Kitts, a mountainous island of 65 square miles, situated in the northern Antilles. Warner, described as ‘a man of extraordinary agility of body and a good witt’, was a younger son of gentleman-yeoman stock. He had been involved in one of the many failed English settlements in Guiana. There, he had been advised to look at St Kitts, seemingly fertile, well watered and neglected by the Spaniards. Warner had returned home and gained the support of London merchant and his Suffolk neighbour Charles Jeaffreson. His party was at first welcomed by the local Carib chief Tegreeman, and allowed to make a settlement at Old Road. The purpose of the colony, like Barbados four years later, was tobacco. By September, Warner had raised his first crop, only to see it destroyed by a hurricane. Undaunted and, frankly, with no other option, Warner’s men set to planting again, but in the meantime, relations with the Caribs had deteriorated. The English were building a fort, something that seems to have displeased the Carib chief, and rumours started circulating that the Caribs were planning a surprise attack. Warner reacted quickly and ruthlessly. Having invited the Caribs to a lavish, drink-fuelled feast, he then had them massacred as they lay dozing in their hammocks. Only a few were able to escape across the water in their canoes.

  This was not the end of the Carib threat, because there were other settlements on neighbouring islands within sight of St Kitts. Warner realised his appalling weakness in numbers, and so, when a French ship arrived carrying a crew of adventurers under Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc, he welcomed them and offered to join forces. D’Esnambuc, a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu, had sailed from France on a piracy mission, but after taking a beating in battle with a Spanish galleon, he had ended up beaching his wrecked vessel at St Kitts.

  The Frenchmen were persuaded to accept the northern and southern extremities of the island, leaving the English a consolidated holding in the middle. They all agreed to maintain strict neutrality in the event of their parent countries going to war, and to render each other aid in the event of a Carib or Spanish attack. The former was not long in coming. In 1625, a large Carib raiding party arrived in enormous canoes, each holding up to 100 men, and attacked the French settlement of Basseterre. After fierce fighting they were driven back into the sea with help from the English.

  This turned out to be the hi
gh point of Franco-English cooperation in the Caribbean. Before the end of the century, as Spanish power faded further and the French and English became the leading competitors in the West Indies, they would be constantly at each other’s throats, both on St Kitts and in the wider Caribbean. But for a brief period mutual interest dictated friendly relations, at least for most of the time. Perhaps the similarities between Warner and d’Esnambuc helped. The Frenchman had been, in effect, a pirate before a settler. Warner, having carried his first tobacco crop back to London, took time off to go hunting for prizes in the Channel and the Baltic. On his way back to St Kitts, he tried an attack on Trinidad. Both men were essentially transitional figures between privateer-plunderer and settler.

  Warner brought back more settlers with him, many from Ireland, and others from south-west England, and in 1628 a number crossed to nearby Nevis to start a new settlement on its mountainous 50 square miles. In St Kitts, Warner now lived in a modest timber dwelling and had built a ‘great tobaccoe house that stood to the windward’. Their product was far superior to that of recently established Barbados, and although it was a hard struggle, the colony prospered and its population continued to grow.

  But on 7 September 1629, the annual voyage of the Spanish galleons, on their way to Panama, was diverted from its usual more southerly route and appeared off St Kitts in the late afternoon. Its 35 large galleons and 14 armed merchant vessels must have been an awe-inspiring sight, for the colonists put up little resistance. As night fell, entrenchments were thrown up along the shore, but when the Spanish landed the next morning, their troops made rapid progress. A counter-attack was led by d’Esnambuc’s nephew, but when he was killed, the effort failed, and the defending force of English and French fled the battlefield. The majority of the Frenchmen managed to escape across the sea to St Martin, and 200–300 English took to the woods in the high centre of the island, but 700 English were forced to surrender. The Spanish admiral destroyed the tobacco plantations, but was merciful with his captives, sending the majority home to Europe with a warning not to return on pain of death; the rest were condemned to the mines of the mainland, a perennial hazard of crossing the Spanish.

  As the conquering force sailed away, the refugees in the woods crept back to their ruined farms and started replanting. Soon after, a French contingent returned. The settlement recovered, and in the early 1630s established daughter colonies in nearby Montserrat and Antigua. But the Spanish and Carib threat remained.

  So in comparison with Guiana and the new Leeward Island colonies, Barbados enjoyed key advantages. It was, for now, comparatively healthy, and its isolated position south of the galleon routes and upwind of the rest of the Caribbean islands had kept it free from hostile incursions. But the first few years of the colony were blighted by more than the ‘Starving Time’ food shortages of 1630–1.

  No sooner had the Courteen-funded William and John left England with Barbados’s first settlers, than James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, came forward to claim that the island had been promised to him by the recently deceased James I. Carlisle was a Scot who had come south with James Stuart, and as a court favourite had received an earldom and a number of lucrative government sinecures. But he was a man of spectacular extravagance and enormous appetites, and he was by now deeply in debt, in the large part to a syndicate of London merchants, who urged him to claim his rights in the West Indies and thereby repay at least some of what was owed. Charles I had a habit of signing anything put before him, and in July 1627 he duly granted to Carlisle the whole of the ‘Caribee Islands’.

  The Earl of Pembroke protested vigorously on behalf of his grant and the Courteen interest, but in the meantime Carlisle leased 10,000 Barbados acres to the merchants’ syndicate and dispatched a party of 64 men to take possession, led by a Captain Wolverston, who was to be the colony’s new governor. As soon as they reached Barbados in June 1628, they arrested and imprisoned Governor John Powell and started clearing Courteen settlers off the allotted 10,000 acres around ‘the Bridge’ (later Bridgetown).

  While the argument between Pembroke and Carlisle continued in London, in Barbados, might made right. In February 1629, Henry Powell returned to the island with nearly 100 men, enticed Wolverston to a conference, and then had him seized and manacled. John Powell was released and reinstated as governor, and all the Carlisle party’s possessions were confiscated, including a large tobacco crop. Henry Powell then took this back to England to be sold by the Courteens, accompanied by Wolverston in chains.

  But soon afterwards, the characteristic dithering of Charles I’s court came to an end. Although most lawyers thought Courteen had the better claim, royal instructions were issued in May 1629 confirming Carlisle as the rightful proprietor. To the fury of the Courteens, who had by now sunk £10,000 into their venture, Carlisle had proved the more dextrous courtier.

  A new Carlisle governor, Sir William Tufton, was appointed, and while he prepared to take up his new post, a deputy governor, Henry Hawley, was quickly dispatched to the island. Hawley arrived in August and initially made conciliatory noises to the Courteen settlers. But he then tricked the Powell group on to his boat anchored in Bridgetown’s Carlisle Bay on the pretence of holding a conference. Once on the ship, they were arrested. Some of their number escaped by jumping overboard, but Governor John Powell and his brother William were stripped and chained to the mast for over a month. Eventually they were shipped to St Kitts, where they arrived just in time to be taken prisoner by the Spanish during their descent on that island.

  A visitor to Barbados that year wrote of the islanders that ‘there have beene so many factions amongst them, I cannot from so many variable relations give you an certainty for their orderly Government’. While tensions simmered between the Carlisle party, now established in the area near ‘the Bridge’, and the Courteens, based around Holetown, Henry Hawley was cultivating his own particular ambitions, aware that the island’s isolation gave the man on the spot free rein to assert himself. The arrival of Governor Tufton in September precipitated a power struggle between the two men. When Tufton became embroiled in armed clashes between the Courteens and the Carlisles, Hawley seized the chance to have him arrested on trumped-up charges and promptly executed by firing squad. This fait accompli would allow Hawley to remain as governor for the next decade, running a spectacularly corrupt regime, during which he concentrated entirely on enriching himself and rewarding his friends and supporters. Drax and Hilliard were among those from the original Courteen party who now reconciled themselves to Hawley’s victory and became close to the new governor.3

  But the turbulence caused by Hawley’s coup continued, magnifying the tensions and frictions that any small, isolated community would suffer, and contributing to the nature of the islanders as described to us in the earliest detailed account of life in Barbados, that of Sir Henry Colt. Colt was a settler – he was on his way to St Kitts to start a plantation – but he still carried the whiff of the corsairs, writing in his journal that his party were determined not to rest ‘vntell we haue doone some thinges worthy of ourselues, or dye in ye attempt’. On his way to St Kitts, he spent two weeks in Barbados in July 1631. In 10 days’ travel around the plantations, he wrote, ‘I neuer saw any man at work.’ To clear the forest, it appears, the settlers had now resorted to burning, leaving all the earth ‘couered black wth cenders’. Nonetheless, the ground was littered with the stubs of half-burnt trees, and ‘nothinge is cleer … all are bushes, & long grasse, all thinges carryinge ye face of a desolate & disorderly shew to ye beholder’.

  In spite of this unfavourable impression of the new, still raw plantations, Colt – like so many later visitors – was entranced by Barbados, writing that of all the places he had seen, ‘not any pleaseth me soe well’. He was amazed at the exotic fruit, the luxuriance of the tropical vegetation, how everything grew so fast, and wrote highly approvingly of the taste of the fish and turtle, ‘between fish and fleshe of veale’. Best of all was the pineapple, tasting ‘unto a great white
ripe strawberry’. He would not be the last to praise this favourite fruit of Englishmen in the Caribbean. An account from a few years later described it in delighted tones as ‘an Aromaticall compound of wine and strawberries’. Nor would he be the last to look around and wonder how on earth shortages of food had come about in a land whose air and soil produced with such ‘marvellous swiftness’.

  For Colt, as for many others, the fault was with the inhabitants, who were squandering the advantages they had been given by the paradise island. ‘Slowth & negligence must only cause this people to want’, he wrote. Furthermore, as well as being idle, the settlers he met – almost all men, and mostly very young – were argumentative and usually drunk. Colt says that in their company he went from drinking two drams of spirits with a meal to 30, and reckoned that had he spent more time on the island, he would have increased his intake to 60. All this stoked what Colt called ‘ye quarrelsome conditions of your fyery spirits’. During the two weeks of his stay he witnessed numerous quarrels, most arising out of very slight disagreements. ‘Suerly ye Deuill ye spirit of discord haue great power in America’, he wrote. No one could ‘liue long in quiett’ in Barbados.

  Colt also reports that his ship, anchored in the bay opposite ‘the Bridge’, was constantly having to expel ‘servants’ who had sneaked on board hoping to escape the island. From the first days of the colony, and for its first 20 years, the majority of the labour force was indentured workers from the British islands. Henry Powell, when leaving for Guiana to collect seeds and plants, wrote that the 40 or so men he left behind were ‘servants’; as early as August 1627, Henry Winthrop wrote home asking for two or three servants to be sent out, bound to him for three to five years.