The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  Drax, however, had not left Barbados for the last time without the razzmatazz due to a man of his pre-eminent status on the island. ‘[On] the day of his departure’, an eye-witness account reads, ‘he came to visit the Governor who entertained him and many others. Then, after dinner, he was accompanied to the place where the ship was to embark 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 the Governor and Colonel Drax.’ As Drax arrived at the embarkation place, his ship fired a volley of all its cannons, and as he was conveyed to the vessel in a launch, his retinue left on the dock all fired their pistols in salute. Having watched Drax embark, the company marched back with the Governor in the same order in which they had come. The ceremony has an air of finality as well as demonstrating genuine gratitude and admiration for Drax’s achievements from those who had benefited most.

  Barbados was now generating enormous profits. This was its golden period. By the end of the 1650s it would be the most densely populated and intensively cultivated agricultural area in the English-speaking world. A visitor in 1655 called it one of the richest spots of ground in the world, and commented that the gentry on the island lived ‘far better here … than ours do in England’. Indeed, there were few, like Drax, who were wise enough to move their profits to low-risk investment in England; most lived fast and spent recklessly.

  In early February 1654, a vessel had arrived from the South American mainland carrying a party of refugees from a failed French colony in Cayenne. Among their number were ‘gentlemen’, servants and a young French priest called Father Antoine Biet. Biet stayed for three months on the island and left a detailed and articulate account of life in Barbados at this time. He was both impressed and at the same time shocked at what he found. ‘They came here in order to become wealthy’, he wrote of the English he met, and happiness seemed to be defined for them by conspicuous consumption. They lived ‘like little princes’; gold watches were everywhere; and the most extravagant luxuries from England and elsewhere were all to be found in the island’s well-stocked shops. The houses were sumptuously furnished, and men and women rode handsome horses, ‘covered with very rich saddlecloths’. Neither was expense spared on clothing. Biet found the ‘ladies and young women as well dressed as in Europe’. Unhappily for the ladies, it was a time when the fashion in England was for heavy, richly decorated fabrics worn over an intricate architecture of corsets, other wired supports and layers of petticoats. It was all vastly impractical, uncomfortable and even unhygienic, but strikingly, those who could afford it insisted on dressing for the climate at home, rather than for the heat of the tropics. If anything, the men were worse. To be wildly overdressed was a key indicator of status. One concerned doctor wrote that he had seen ‘many men loaded, and almost half melting, under a thick rich Coat and Waistcoat, daubed and loaded with Gold, on a hot Day, scarce able to bear them’. Importers of fancy handkerchiefs, gold rings, gloves and ornate hats were now making a fortune.

  Father Biet was quite clear about where the money was coming from: ‘The wealth of the island consists of sugar’, he wrote. Cane was planted in the countryside ‘as far as the eye can see’. By the early 1650s, England was importing 5,000 tons of Barbadian sugar annually, a figure that rose to 8,000 tons by 1655. Nonetheless, the pioneer sugar barons now had a new challenge. From 1650, the return they secured for their crop started falling steadily as supply increased. The price of sugar in 1652 was less than half that of 1646, and it would continue to drop. The astronomical profit margins of the 1640s, as described by Richard Ligon, were now a thing of the past. But the planters responded quickly, upping output and efficiency, and thus the island continued to get richer throughout the decade.

  Part of the vastly improved efficiency was down to labour. Although white indentured servants were still much sought after, the 1650s saw a steady increase in the proportion of the sugar workforce made up of enslaved Africans, up to about half, some 20,000, by 1655. After only a short period, it had been confirmed that these alien and alienated workers could be driven harder and fed and clothed much more cheaply than the fractious whites – especially after the practice was adopted of encouraging the slaves to grow a proportion of their own food. In addition, black women, unlike whites, were sent to the field gangs, and in general the price paid for new slaves fell as the trade became more efficient and extensive.

  A large influx of Dutch and Sephardic Jews, after their expulsion from Brazil in 1654, brought to the island fresh expertise in sugar processing and trading, and from the early 1650s increasing numbers of planters used wind power for their mills, saving on lifestock costs. In all, the decade saw the widespread emergence of the integrated plantation, as pioneered by James Drax, and the full flowering of the new agri-industry. Indeed, a model was established that would survive almost unchanged for the next 150 years and would shortly be exported around the region.

  The average size of a Barbados sugar estate rapidly increased from the late 1640s, and had more than doubled by 1657, with less efficient growers eliminated. With canefields and processing plants under single ownership, the supply of cane to the mill could be tightly controlled by carefully staggered planting in 10-acre ‘pieces’. Father Biet, who visited the Drax estate and several others, described these integrated plantations as ‘like villages’, with a cluster of buildings around the plantation master’s house, ‘ordinarily handsome [with] many rooms’. Along with the sugar works, usually situated downwind of the main house, there would be dwellings for the servants and the slaves, with those of the latter made up of ‘very inferior wood, look[ing] almost like dog-houses’, according to another contemporary account.8

  For the slaves and servants, work usually started at six. There was half an hour for breakfast between nine and ten, a noonday rest of between one and two hours, and work ceased at sunset. Most plantations had a ‘Great Gang’, consisting of the ablest men and women; on the largest plantations, such as Drax Hall, this could number as many as 100. The Great Gang did the heavy work of planting: digging trenches into which two-foot-long cane cuttings were placed, before being covered with a light layer of soil. Increasingly, as the earth wilted from the voraciously nutrient-hungry cane plant, manure would be collected and applied to the cane holes. A head driver, with a polished staff to lean on, and a short-handled whip, would be constantly on hand to increase the labourers’ work rate.

  The new plants sprouted within two weeks. A lesser gang of children or weaker adults, equipped with small hoes, would laboriously weed and further manure the young shoots until the plants were tall enough to suppress weeds themselves. The gruelling work of harvesting the canes would see the return of the Great Gang.

  If this was the most back-breaking of the labours on a sugar estate, the processing was the most dangerous and stressful. Piling the cut canes into the three-roller mill was particularly perilous. ‘If a Mill-feeder be catch’t by the finger’, wrote an observer of the first ‘factories’, ‘his whole body is drawn in, and he is squeez’d to pieces.’ An axe was always kept to hand to chop off, before it was too late, any limb caught in the crusher.

  Sometimes the boiling houses got so hot that water had to be poured on to the roofs to prevent the shingles catching fire. As well as enduring the heat and stench, the workers were frequently burnt by the sugar. ‘If a Boyler get any part into the scalding sugar,’ said a contemporary, ‘it sticks like Glew, or Birdlime, and ‘tis hard to save either Limb or Life.’

  Increasingly, plantations had other processing buildings as well. Many planters found it advantageous to further refine their muscovado sugar by ‘claying’. The coarse, sticky brown sugar was set in a sugar mould smeared with moist clay. Water percolated through the mould, carrying away more of the impurities and molasses. This could be repeated up to six times, with the sugar on the top becoming progressively whiter. Clayed sugar brought a higher price in England, and was less bulky, reducing shipping costs. This further contributed to t
he efficiency of the sugar plantation, and concurrent falls in the costs of freight, commission charges and insurance rates also helped keep the money flowing in even as the price of sugar dropped.

  At the same time, the slide in price had long-lasting and important consequences. Back home in England, consumption rocketed. For most of history, the English palate had made do for its sweetness with honey and fruit. The Crusaders brought cane sugar back from the Levant, and Italian merchants from Venice and Genoa brought cargoes of Egyptian sugar to London and Bristol from the fourteenth century onwards, but these were tiny quantities at very high prices. The lavish production of Madeira and then Brazil in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries increased the supply to England, and thus lowered the price, but the market remained the super-rich, who used sugar as a medicine – it was prescribed for everything from fever to stomach ailments – or a preservative, and for the status its price and rarity conveyed. It was made into elaborate moulded displays, which signified wealth and distinction, and to have sugar-blackened teeth became a status symbol.

  But the Sugar Revolution in Barbados changed all this. As production increased, and the price fell, consumption rose as much as fourfold in the 40 years after 1640. Much of the new demand was the result of other new tropical products coming onto the English market. London’s first coffee house opened in 1652. Tea imported from China by the East India Company started gaining popularity at around the same time, and for the rich, chocolate from cacao became fashionable. All three needed, in most people’s opinion, sugar to make them drinkable (tea, in particular, was drunk very sweet).

  Alongside sugar in various states of refinement, a new product was also being marketed by Barbados – rum. From the Portuguese, the English planters had learnt to take some of sugar processing’s by-products, skimmings and molasses, and having let them ferment, distil them into ‘a hott hellish and terrible liquor’, as a 1650 account describes it. Eventually called rumbullion, its first name, as reported by Richard Ligon, was ‘Kill Devil’. Ligon records that it cost only half a crown for a gallon. He didn’t like it, finding it ‘infinitely strong, but not very pleasant to taste’. But others were less squeamish. Some was exported to Virginia, the Bermudas and New England, and as far as England, but an awful quantity was consumed on the island, particularly, we are told, by the ‘meaner sort’.

  The effect such cheap and strong liquor had on the health of an already heavy-drinking population can easily be imagined. Thomas Modyford commented that Spanish traders ‘at their first coming wondered much at the sickness of our people until they knew of the strength of their drinks, but then wondered more that they were not all dead’. In the 1650s, Governor Daniel Searle tried to restrict the growth of unlicensed taverns, as he was concerned about ‘the disableing and overthrow of divers manuall trade labourers or workemen and the impoverishing (if not ruine) of many families’ due to drunkenness, but 10 years later a traveller reported that there were more than 100 taverns in Bridgetown alone.9

  Visitors continued to marvel, as they had done from the first settlement, at the ‘debaucht’ inhabitants of the island. ‘Drunknes is great, especially among the lower classes’, commented Father Biet, going on to detail the frequent fist fights that this led to. But from his own account, it is clear that drunkenness was by no means limited to the poorer classes. The Frenchman described as typical a visit to a rich plantation, probably that of James Drax. As in Ligon’s account from a few years earlier, the food was spectacular: ‘nothing lacking in the way of meats … suckling pigs, turkey hens, capons, chickens … very good mutton … excellent stews’. He also carefully, and disapprovingly, noted the copious drinking – ‘wines from Spain, Madeira, the Canaries; French wines …’

  If, after Ligon’s description of a feast at Drax Hall, we might have been wondering how they actually did anything for the rest of the day after such a huge consumption of food and alcohol, Biet provided the answer: those rich enough to have underlings managing their business didn’t try. Instead, they subsided into a sybaritic torpor. ‘After one has dined, and the table has been cleared’, the French priest continued, ‘a trencher full of pipes and another of tobacco is put on the table along with a bowl full of brandy, into which is put plenty of sugar.’ Eggs were added, and ‘the host takes a little silver cup, fills it with this liqueur and drinks to the health of whoever is in front of him. After he has drunk, he refills the cup and gives it to the person whose health he has just drunk; this person does the same thing to another, and this procedure is continued until there is nothing left in the bowl.’ All the time, ‘well built young slaves’ refilled the pipes, which they then presented on their knees. ‘The afternoon passes thus in drinking and smoking, but quite often one is so drunk that he cannot return home’, the priest continued. ‘Our gentlemen found this life extremely pleasant.’

  Another visitor a few years earlier described the typical planter as ‘A German for his drinking, and a Welshman for his welcome … if it raines he toapes [drinks] securely under his roofe … hee takes it ill, if you pass by his doore, and do not tast of Liquor.’ Others confirm that Barbadians took it as a severe insult if ‘the trafeller dose denie to stay to drinke’. Soon, Father Biet found it too much: ‘Sometimes I went along’, he said of trips around the island, ‘but, not taking pleasure in this visiting because one has to drink in a extraordinary way, I did not always go.’

  Such heavy drinking was, of course, disastrous for the health of the islanders, as well as for their society and families. Furthermore, the rum was actually poisonous. From the time that rum was first distilled on the island, visitors had noticed the prevalence of what came to be known as ‘Dry Belly-ache’. The symptoms were ‘Tortions in the Bowells’ – agonising stomach cramps. Sometimes the victim lost the use of his limbs, and for many the disease was fatal. Only in 1676 was the condition identified as lead poisoning, and it was not until 1745 that the pipes used in rum distilling were recognised as the cause.

  Propagandists for the island, who could not deny the appalling attrition from disease, claimed that Barbados was healthy; it was the debauched habits of its people that explained the frightening death rate. But temperance was no guarantee of good health. A Swiss doctor who visited the island in 1661 commented that ‘Most persons who come here from Europe will have to overcome an illness which the inhabitants call Contry Disease.’ This, he wrote, made victims ‘turn quite yellow, their stomachs and legs swell, and sometimes their legs burst and remain open’. The doctor blamed unfamiliar food, too much liquid and sleeping in hammocks in the open air, but the term was probably used to refer to a variety of diseases: gastro-intestinal complaints such as dysentery or dropsy, caused by bad hygiene or the consumption of contaminated food or water – or the fevers that struck particularly hard during the wet season.

  Life expectancy at birth during the seventeenth century in England was about 35. In the West Indies it was as low as 10. While in New England transplanted English folk could expect to live longer, and parent more surviving offspring than in England, in the West Indies the reverse was the case. In St Michael parish, which admittedly included Bridgetown, the unhealthiest place on the island, the register records four times as many deaths as marriages during the 1650s and three times as many deaths as baptisms. In London, the unhealthiest place in England by far, sickness was concentrated among the poor. Colonists, then, expected that rank would protect them, as it did to a large extent at home. But in Barbados, the great and the good were struck down as well.

  For many, sugar was worth the risks presented by this extraordinary death rate. And sugar was now benefiting many more than just the Barbadians. The ever-growing new trade began to swell the customs revenue back in England, while raising demand for insurance and finance services, as well as sugar refineries. Some two thirds of the Barbados sugar production was profitably re-exported to the Continent. New fleets of merchantmen were now needed to bring out equipment and supplies and return with the produce. Demand for processing e
quipment, packaging, building materials and vessels created new workshops, factories, saw mills and shipyards, both in England and in the North American colonies.

  In the 1650s, the New England–Barbados trade really took off, helped by the partial removal from the scene of the Dutch, as well as other factors. The experience gained by North American mariners since the first trading voyages made the long journey, if not hazard-free, then certainly less dangerous. Barbados consumed more and more of New England’s surplus foodstuffs and livestock. In return, the New Englanders not only brought back specie – vital for discharging their debts to England for manufactured goods – but also, increasingly, tropical products, particularly sugar, molasses and rum, were now finding a market in New England.

  Much of the new trade was oiled by family and new religious connections. In 1655, Barbados was visited by the Quakers Mary Fisher and Anne Austin. Henry Fell followed the next year. Together, they found a small but influential constituency of spiritually starved Puritans ripe for conversion, including the important planter Thomas Rous. In 1656, Rous, with the unshakeable conviction of the rescued sinner, penned a diatribe entitled: ‘A warning to the Inhabitants of Barbodoes who live in Pride, Drunkennesse, Covetousnesse, Oppression and deceitful dealings’. Castigating his fellow Barbadians, who ‘Excel[led] in wickedness … cheating and cozening’, he railed against the local propensity for violent greed, whore-mongering, ‘vanity, and folly, and madness’, predicting that ‘the wrath of God shall be revealed in flames of fire against you, ye Earth-worms’.