The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  If everything went to plan, the planter now had a raw brown sugar called muscovado, combined with a liquid by-product, molasses. To cure the sugar, it needed to be packed into earthenware pots, the molasses drained for up to a month, and the remaining golden-brown sugar spread in the sun to dry before being sent in leather bags to Bridgetown, where it was packed into hogsheads, large barrels that held about 1,500 pounds of sugar. For an inland plantation like that of Drax, everything had to be carried to the coast by hand or on the backs of mules ‘up and down the Gullies’, ‘for the ways are such, as no Carts can pass’. It seems that Drax, for one, had his own packing and warehouse premises in Bridgetown. The hogsheads were then carried away, usually in Dutch ships, which took them to Amsterdam, Hamburg or London, where the sugar commanded consistently high prices.

  The whole process required very careful supervision, and a carefully laidout and well-equipped works for which machinery had to be imported, assembled, maintained, and sometimes modified. To ensure exactly the right supply of cane to the mill during the harvest months, great care had to be taken with the timing of the original planting. The sugar plantation, then, was an integrated combination of agriculture and industry, with every part depending on the others, ‘as wheels in a Clock’.

  This was an immensely sophisticated production unit for the seventeenth century, at a time when agriculture at home in England remained hidebound and moribund. It says a great deal for the energy, hard work, and fierce, big-thinking ambition of the sugar pioneers that they mastered a process that has more in common with modern assembly lines than any sort of farming carried out in Europe at that time, and required a labour force much more complex than, for example, an English estate. And all far from home, in the enervating heat of the Caribbean. They must, indeed, have been as a contemporary described them, ‘men of great abilities, and parts’.

  In 1644, only Drax and his partner Hilliard, growing cane at the next-door estate, are on record as using sugar as currency, others still paying bills with tobacco or cotton. It appears that Drax was the first to build a ‘factory in the field’, and it is likely that, initially, Hilliard’s sugar was processed there as well (although three years later, he would have his own ingenio, or factory). In addition, Drax persuaded a number of smallholders nearby to grow canes for his mill. But this was not a great success – they made a mess of it, and Drax began to come round to the idea of creating a self-contained unit, with all growing, processing and labour under his direct control. At the same time, he started rapidly increasing his slave holding: his first use of sugar as currency was to purchase 34 of the 254 slaves on the Mary Bonaventure. For payment he engaged with three London merchants to ship them ‘so much Suger or other merchantable commodities as shall amount to £726 sterling’. In the same year, Drax erected the island’s first windmill for grinding the cane. Built to a Dutch design, its heavy rollers could crush eight tons of cane a day.

  Drax’s secret experiment did not stay secret for long. Soon, more and more land was planted in sugar. By 1645, cane covered 40 per cent of the island’s agricultural acreage. For those who made the switch, it was a shrewd move. The following year, the returns would be spectacular.

  In 1645, a war of liberation broke out in Brazil as the Portuguese attempted to expel the Dutch. There was widespread destruction of cane-fields and mills, and a mass escape of the enslaved workforce. Effectively, sugar production was stopped for a year, sending the price of the commodity soaring. At the same time, the Barbados canefields, with much of the planting into virgin land and enjoying perfect weather conditions, produced a tremendous crop. Barbados sugar growers were suddenly rich.

  Puritan minister James Parker, who had come to Barbados from Piscataqua, informed Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop in June 1646 that Barbados ‘is now and like to be very wealthy … some have made this yeare off one acre off canes about 4000 weight of sugar, ordinarily 3000’. The immediate local result was a sharp rise in the price of land. According to one study, land that sold at 10s. an acre in 1640 sold at £5 in 1646, a tenfold increase. Certainly by 1647, land was selling for an average of well above £5 an acre, and more for the best situated. For this to make economic sense, as much of Barbados’s small space as possible had to be planted in sugar. Indeed, all over the island the forests were now destroyed with renewed vigour and land previously given over to provisions was put to cane. ‘Men are so intent upon planting sugar that they would rather buy foode at very deare rates than produce it by labour, soe infinite is the profitt of sugar’, reads a letter of July 1647 to John Winthrop from Richard Vines, a doctor from New England practising in Barbados. Indeed, the rapid sugar ‘rush’ meant that suddenly Barbados could no longer feed itself, even if the harvest was good. Suppliers of provisions from Europe benefited, of course, but most important was the lifeline this now threw to the North American colonies.

  Links between the Caribbean and North America had existed from the earliest times of English settlement. Pioneer traders had sailed south from New England during the 1630s to exchange pipe staves, needed for making barrels, planks, fish or candle oil for cotton and salt. From Virginia they brought oxen and horses. But they were few in number and most of their vessels were small, seldom over 50 tons. This contributed to the dangers of the journey at a time when many of the sailors were inexperienced and little was known of routes and currents. A great number were lost to shipwreck and other disasters.

  But suddenly, in the 1640s, trade became much more important to the New Englanders. There was no market for North American products in England, so instead they had exchanged their agricultural surplus for the cash and metropolitan wares of the plentiful new immigrants. But at the end of the 1630s, the flow of newcomers came to a virtual halt, creating an economic crisis in New England. Credit dried up and the prices of land and cattle fell by more than a half. Leaders even considered relocating the colony.

  According to John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, ‘These straits set our people on work to provide fish, clapboards, planks etc…. and to look to the West Indies for a trade.’ In his journal, he wrote in February 1641 that ‘The general fear of want of foreign commodities, now [that] our money was gone … set us on to work to provide shipping of our own.’ Construction started at Salem on a vessel of 300 tons, and in Boston another of 150 tons was undertaken.

  In around September 1641, the 11-year-old Bay Colony dispatched two ships to the West Indies. They were gone nearly a year, ‘and were much feared to be lost’. Then one returned at last, carrying a good cargo of cotton as well as letters from Barbados.

  It remained a dangerous journey, and not just because of storms or treacherous seas. Winthrop described a voyage starting in November 1644, carrying pipe staves across to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands to be exchanged for wine and ‘Africoes’. Both were sold in Barbados for sugar, salt and tobacco. It is likely the enslaved Africans from the Atlantic islands would be familiar with sugar cultivation and processing, and therefore extra valuable. Six months after setting out, the vessel returned safely to New England, but also brought news of another ship from Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had been set upon by Royalist privateers working out of Irish ports. A fierce battle had taken place off the Canary Islands as the attackers boarded the New England ship. They were eventually driven off, but only after several deaths and massive damage to the ship and its cargo.

  By 1647, in spite of the risks, there was regular trade between the northern colonies and Barbados, much to the benefit of both sides. An ox that cost £5 in Virginia could be sold for £25 in Barbados, while Barbadians, increasingly dependent on imported food, could, with the right factor in New England or Virginia, obtain provisions much more cheaply than from Europe. New England now had a market for its surplus agricultural production, and to carry the trade, a shipbuilding industry was quickly established.

  Rhode Island, to the south of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, peopled with those who had chafed at the restri
ctions of Puritan society, was by the end of the 1640s breeding horses specifically for sale in Barbados. This would soon become a staple export. At Newport, the first large wharf was constructed at this time. The earliest major departure that has survived in the record is of the 40-ton ship the Beginningfirst, fitted out in 1649 by carpenter-turned-merchant William Withington to carry 12 Rhode Island cattle, together with ‘necessary Hay and corn for voyage to Barbados, and Guinney’. The return was via Antigua and Boston. In the same year a Dutch privateer, Captain Blaufeld, gave Newport the questionable honour of making it his base for disposing of prizes. In 1651, cultivated Royalist Francis Brinley moved to Newport from Barbados and established himself as the island’s agent.

  Inevitably some of the traders settled to establish themselves as local merchants, or even to start out as planters. Samuel Winthrop, as a four-year-old infant, had been with his father on the Arbella sailing to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. In 1647, aged 19, he had carried wine from Madeira to Barbados, made a handsome profit, and then moved on to St Kitts to set himself up as a merchant. The following year, though, he wrote to his father that he had resolved on Barbados, ‘where in all probability I can live better than in other places’. Part of the attraction, it appears, was the ‘New England friends’ already operating there who might be able to give him an opening.

  William Vassall was a founder member of the Massachusetts Bay Company and had been on the Winthrop fleet in 1630. Wealthy and highly educated, by the 1640s he had tired of the strictures of the ‘City on a Hill’, and in 1648 relocated to Barbados, where he straightaway started buying land and influence, while trading between New England and his brother Samuel, who had remained in England. By the time of his death 10 years later, William was a substantial merchant in servants and slaves, Commissioner of the Highways and owner of a plantation in St Michael, as well as extensive New England property. Other ambitious and adventurous families were also in the process of spreading themselves into networks around New England, the West Indies and England.

  Clearly for some New Englanders, the West Indies held the same attraction as for their cousins back in England. John Winthrop complained that in spite of the ‘meagre, unhealthful countenances’ of those West Indians who had appeared in New England, many of his community were selling up and heading south, so taken were they with the supposed ‘great advantages’ and ‘ease and plenty of those countries’. But others saw the islands in a different light. In 1641, Governor Bell of Barbados had written to Winthrop asking that a number of God-fearing North Americans be sent down to inspire the island with some religious orthodoxy, but ‘understanding that these people were much infected with familism, etc., the elders did nothing about it’, wrote Winthrop. Bell tried again in a letter received by Winthrop in August 1643, ‘earnestly desiring us to send them some godly ministers and other good people … but none of our ministers would go thither’. Eventually, though, some New England ministers did make the journey, and the letters back home of one have survived. The island abounded with heresies, complained the Reverend James Parker in a letter of April 1646. Everywhere was to be found profanity, ‘divisions’, argumentativeness, drinking. ‘How oft have I thought in my hearte, oh howe happie are New England people!’ he exclaimed.

  But certain parts of Barbados society were changing. Christopher Codrington, the founder of a West Indian family of huge importance, had arrived in Barbados some time in the late 1630s. The middle son of three, he stood out from the other planters on the island: his family were long-established Gloucestershire magnates who traced their lineage back to a standard-bearer for Henry V at Agincourt; his elder brother was High Sheriff of Gloucester. This had made him the exception on the island, as no other planter had such aristocratic blood. Codrington also appears to have had Royalist sympathies, in contrast to the likes of Drax, Middleton and the other earliest planters, who instinctively took against Charles I’s ‘personal rule’ and pro-Catholic leanings. Nevertheless, sometime in the late 1630s, Codrington married Frances Drax, sister of James and William, creating an important alliance between the two families. In 1640 their first son was born, also called Christopher. This son was destined to be at one time the most important Englishman in the Americas. Soon afterwards, Codrington the first, his father, started acquiring land and took up a place on the island’s council. A second son, John Codrington, followed a few years later.

  The bitter and bloody Civil War in England brought many more families of the ilk of the Codringtons to Barbados, particularly after the defeats of the Royalists at Naseby and Langport in the summer of 1645. Leadership of the ‘Cavalier expatriates’ was quickly assumed by Humphrey Walrond and his brother Edward from a wealthy landed West Country family. Humphrey, at this time in his mid-forties, had been given up as a hostage at the surrender of the Royalist enclave of Bridgwater in July 1645. He was imprisoned, but then released on agreement that he pay a huge fine. Instead, Walrond sold up his estates and, together with this brother Edward and son George, who had lost an arm fighting for Charles I, fled to Barbados.

  Also captured at Bridgwater was 22-year-old Major William Byam. Like Codrington, he would become the founder of a great West Indian dynasty, and he too claimed distinguished blood. One of his ancestors, an Earl of Hereford, was supposedly one of the Knights of the Round Table. His uncle was Charles II’s personal chaplain. Byam was imprisoned by the Parliamentarians in the Tower of London, but then given a pass ‘to go beyond the seas’. He, too, headed for Barbados, together with his wife Dorothy, who not only boasted royal connections, but was also, according to a French priest who met her some seven years later, ‘one of the most beautiful women ever seen’.

  These new arrivals brought an aristocratic and metropolitan sophistication to the small island, as well as money and credit. Some bought up plantations, others acted as factors for the Dutch shippers who dominated Barbados’s trade. They also brought a new attitude to the top echelons of island society – a sumptuous, showy style of living, where their extravagance and taste were there for everyone else to see and admire.

  In April 1646, the besieged city of Exeter surrendered to Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax. Amongst the captured Royalists was 27-year-old Thomas Modyford, a barrister, the son of a prosperous Exeter merchant and mayor of the city. Appointed by the King as a Commissioner for Devon, he was part of the Royalist delegation negotiating the surrender of the city. Fairfax remembered that Modyford ‘demeaned himself with much civility and mildness, expressed a more than ordinary care for easing the country, and for its preservation from oppression, and showed activity and forwardness to expedite the treaty for the surrender’. Such pragmatism and tact would serve Modyford extremely well during his subsequent spectacular career in the West Indies.

  Modyford was fined £35 but escaped imprisonment. He decided that he was ‘now willing to shift’ and, like many of his fellow defeated Royalists, determined on a new start in the West Indies. But for Modyford, it was not the hopeful voyage of servants or the poor but a well-organised and determined act of colonisation. Modyford’s brother-in-law was Thomas Kendall, a wealthy and influential London merchant with experience of the Caribbean trade. The two men now formed a partnership, and in the summer of 1647 two ships were dispatched, one from Plymouth, carrying ‘men, victuals and all utensils fitted for a Plantation’, the second, the Kendall-owned Achilles, from London, carrying Modyford and his immediate retinue and further manpower. The plan was to ship English trade goods to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands, exchanging them there for horses and cattle. These would be sold in Barbados, then the party would proceed to Antigua to establish a sugar plantation on the plentiful empty acres there.

  With Modyford at Exeter, and on his subsequent emigration to Barbados, was Richard Ligon, author of A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, by far the most vivid, sophisticated and considered contemporary account we have of these crucial, transformatory early years of the Sugar Revolution. Ligon was
from a Worcestershire family of respectable name but diluted fortune; he was the fourth son of a third son. He seems to have been university-educated, probably at Balliol College, Oxford, and at some point forged links at court through the wife of James I. From his writing, we know he was well versed in architecture, horticulture, music and art. However, by mid-1647, when Ligon was coming up to 60 years old, he was in severe difficulties. Not only was he on the losing side in the Civil War, but he was also penniless and being pursued by his creditors. A large investment in a scheme to drain the Fens had backfired spectacularly, when a ‘Barbrous Riot’ had invaded and taken over his lands.

  By the time of the fall of Exeter to the forces of Parliament, Ligon had attached himself to Modyford’s retinue, and in defeat was just as keen to get away. He was now, he wrote, ‘a stranger in my own Countrey’, and, ‘stript and rifled of all I had’, was resolved to ‘famish or fly’. With the approval of Thomas Kendall, for whom Ligon was useful as an understudy should Modyford ‘miscarry in the Voyage’, Ligon joined the party on the Achilles bound for Barbados.

  Ligon wrote that he had travelled in his youth, and we know that his eldest brother Thomas migrated to Virginia, establishing the North American Ligon family, but it is very unlikely that Richard had been to the tropics before, as his account shares the sense of wonder and excitement shown by every first-time visitor to the West Indies.

  Richard Ligon described himself as a man of ‘age and gravity’, but his boyish enthusiasm when, after a long voyage, the island of Barbados came into view, is plain to read: ‘Being now come in sight of this happy Island, the nearer we came, the more beautiful it appeared to our eyes.’ Soon they could make out ‘the high large and lofty trees, with their spreading branches and flourishing tops’. Ligon pleaded unsuccessfully with the captain to lower some of the sails that were impeding this view, but soon he could see on the rising ground behind the beach ‘the Plantations … one above another: like several stories in stately buildings, which afforded us a large proportion of delight’.