At the same time, Quakers were making a determined appearance in Rhode Island. In 1656 a party arrived from Boston, hoping that Rhode Island would provide them with the religious freedom they had been denied in Massachusetts. In the summer of the following year, more appeared, having been turned away from New Amsterdam. Two senior Dutch clerics living there wrote to Holland that in all probability the Friends had sailed to Rhode Island, ‘for that is the receptacle for all sorts of riff-raff people, and is nothing else than the sewer of New England. All the cranks of New England retire thither.’ An Anglican noticed that the Rhode Island settlement was ‘a chaos of all Religions’. It was now uncharitably called ‘Rogue Island’ by the Bostoners. The island’s 1663 charter from Charles II would end up giving unprecedented religious freedom to the colony.
The sanctuary given to the Quakers created strong links with Barbados that were crucial in driving the trading growth of Newport and of Rhode Island in general. More widely, by the late 1650s, the enterprising New Englanders were becoming known as the ‘Dutch’ of England’s empire, trading whatever they could with whomsoever they wanted. Not even war would stop them – during the conflict between England and Holland in 1652–4, merchants from Newport, as well as commissioning the town’s first three privateering vessels, brazenly traded with the enemy, setting a precedent that would later lead to major ructions in the empire. By the 1670s, English merchants were complaining that New Englanders were importing European goods and then selling them on in the West Indies at prices that severely undercut their own efforts, then selling the tropical products they got in return directly to Europe. ‘New England is become the great mart and staple’, the English merchants protested, ‘by which means the navigation of the kingdom is greatly prejudiced, the king’s revenue lessened, trade decreased, and the king’s subjects most impoverished.’ It wasn’t the fault of the New Englanders that their economy was simply not complementary to England’s (then self-sufficient in foodstuffs and timber), but if the likes of Boston and Newport were to emerge as rival metropoles to the mother country, there could only be conflict ahead.
While offering the hope of trading wealth to New Englanders, Barbados was also providing investment for the English economy at home, as well as newer settlements in the West Indies and, indeed, the Northern American colonies. Perhaps even more important was the flow of settlers from the island, many of them experienced sugar planters or merchants, with bodies seasoned to the dangers of local diseases. Barbados remained a favourite destination for poor white emigrants from England, but losses to sickness, and, increasingly, onward migration, meant that the white population fell from a high of some 30,000 in 1650 to just over 25,000 a decade later.
So Barbados now became the ‘mother’ colony or ‘hearth’ of the English American empire. Some islanders moved on to the promising colony in Surinam. As in the 1640s, repeated efforts were made by Barbadians to settle other parts of northern South America, as well as Trinidad and Tobago. Between 1650 and 1662, nearly 2,000 spread themselves over Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie Galante, Grenada and Curaçao. Others headed for the established, but comparatively undeveloped English settlements in Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat. Some 2,000 ended up in Virginia, bringing with them experience of the plantation system and of extensive black slavery.
The biggest single exodus was in 1655. On 29 January of that year, a powerful English fleet arrived at Barbados. Soon, Carlisle Bay was crowded with as many as 60 new vessels. On board were some 3,000 English troops. Their aim was grandiose: the ending of Spanish power in the Caribbean, and recruits were called for from Barbados to join the great design. More than 3,000 came forward, making this the most powerful expeditionary force the Caribbean had ever seen. They sailed at the end of March. Only a handful would ever see Barbados again.
8
CROMWELL’S ‘WESTERN DESIGN’: DISASTER IN HISPANIOLA
‘Why did I go with such a rascally rabble of raw and unexperienced men?’
General Venables, 2 November 1655, Tower of London, on the men under his command in the West Indies
The fleet had left England on 26 December 1654. A naval officer on the expedition, Henry Whistler, described the doleful scene on the wharf: ‘This wose a sad day with our maryed men’, he wrote. Husbands were ‘hanging doune thaier heads, loath to depart’. Couples were embracing, ‘sume of them profesing more love the one to the other in one halfe our then they had performed in all the time of thayer being together’. At two o’clock the fleet sailed, the wind blowing freshly at ENE. Whistler’s ship briefly ran aground, but then got under way again. In the evening, light rain began to fall, and at midnight the wind veered SSE, ‘a faier galle’.
This expedition represented an important new departure. It was no corsair raid, it was ‘take-and-hold’. For the first time, England was to attempt to conquer colonial territory of one of its European rivals. For the first time, imperialism was to be directed by the centre; colonies were to be acquired by order of London, rather than by the actions of merchant syndicates, entrepreneurs or adventurers on the ground.
The fate of the men leaving Portsmouth set an unhappy precedent for further imperial wars in the West Indies. A year and a half later, both the expedition’s commanders were prisoners in the Tower of London, and almost all of the men were dead.
Flushed with the success of conquering the Scots and Irish, and from the recent victory over the Dutch (who had agreed, however falsely, to observe the Navigation Act), Oliver Cromwell was looking for a new war to bolster his domestic position. The French seemed to fit the bill; indeed, an undeclared naval war had been continuing for some months. But in the end Cromwell decided that the Spanish provided the best target for his desire to fulfil what he saw as England’s destiny of leading the opposition to the Church of Rome, of chastising the Antichrist. Since June 1654, a plan had been germinating for an attack on Spain’s American empire, the source of its wealth, and therefore of the financial means to make mischief in Europe. At the same time, fighting Spain had a happy resonance with the exploits of the Elizabethan corsairs such as Raleigh and Drake, whose stories were being busily reprinted in the 1650s – safe patriotic fare after years of divisive civil war. Furthermore, while leading the Protestant cause, Cromwell also claimed to be revenging the cruelties of the Spanish in the Americas, and releasing the region’s indigenous peoples from the ‘Miserable Thraldome and bondage both Spirituall and Civill’ of the King of Spain.
Oliver Cromwell undoubtedly saw the launching of this, his ‘Western Design’, in religious terms. But the mission also represents a moment when religious zeal as the basis of political action was beginning to fade away. In its place was emerging a steely pragmatism allied to a more modern commercial spirit. Cromwell saw England’s destiny as the head of a navigation and mercantile system and looked to dominate trade in the West Indies. In the shorter term, he hoped for an instant profit from the overrunning of Spain’s rich American cities. At the very least, the mission should be self-financing – the navy was by now over a million and a half pounds in debt.
There was no detailed plan of attack. Cromwell had consulted Thomas Gage, the country’s leading expert on Spanish America and on all things anti-Papist. Gage had been born into a fiercely Roman Catholic family in Surrey in around 1600. First a Jesuit, then a Dominican, he lived and worked in Central America for some 15 years before returning to England in the early 1640s and renouncing his Catholicism in favour of a Puritan Anglicanism. (He confirmed his new loyalty by denouncing a number of former friends, including his brother’s ex-chaplain, who was executed.) In 1648 he had published a book about the Americas full of tales of the corruption, decadence and strategic weakness of the Spanish American empire, as well as useful information for any invading army about fortifications, topography and infrastructure. The Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Thomas Fairfax, then the leading power in the land, urged him to ‘employ the soldiery of this kingdom upon such just and honourable designs in those parts of America�
�. ‘To your Excellency, therefore’, he concluded, ‘I offer a New World.’
‘The Spaniards cannot oppose much’, Gage told Cromwell, ‘being a lazy, sinful people, feeding like beasts upon their lusts.’ If Cuba and Hispaniola were taken, he said, Spanish Central America would fall to England within two years (Gage would join the expedition as chaplain to the General’s regiment).
Also consulted was Thomas Modyford, in England at that time. He agreed with Gage that Spanish power was weak, and advised attacks on Guiana or Cuba. In the end, the official instructions were vague: ‘to gain an interest in that part of the West Indies in the possession of the Spaniard’. Puerto Rico and Hispaniola were suggested as first steps, to act as staging posts for attacks on the mainland. Alternatively, or in addition, the capture of Havana, ‘the back doore of the West Indies’, ‘wil obstruct the passing of the Spaniards Plate Fleete into Europe’. Cartagena should be taken as well, as this was where Cromwell wanted to situate the capital of his new empire.
With hindsight, these plans seem wildly hubristic, but on paper it looked easy. Cromwell planned a force of 3,600 regular troops from England together with the same number raised in Barbados and the English Leeward Islands. Drake had captured Santo Domingo on Hispaniola with only 1,000 men. The Spanish Antilles had seen a constant drain of settlers to the mainland, and few now had an entire population as big as the army about to descend on them. Spain had forced the English out of Providence Island in 1641, but this was something of a last gasp, and their power had become feebler since. Some fortifications had been recently repaired, but the confidence of the English naval gunners was high, having just proved their worth against the Dutch.
In the event, Spanish strength or weakness had much less to do with the dismal outcome of the ‘Western Design’ than did the quality of the English troops and of the expedition’s planning, command and logistics. Neither the naval nor the land forces commander was first rate (nor, it would turn out, truly committed Cromwellians): the sailors were under the orders of an unscrupulous careerist, Admiral William Penn, father of the founder of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. In charge of the army was General Robert Venables, a Parliamentary army veteran, but indecisive and incompetent. In theory Penn was subordinate to Venables; in reality it was a split command, with the inevitable risks of rivalry and confusion. Furthermore, the two military commanders also had to factor in the guidance of three civilian ‘commissioners’ who secretly reported to Cromwell on their performance and loyalty. One was Daniel Searle, the Governor of Barbados; another Edward Winslow, who had sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 and been Governor of the Plymouth Colony, and was now a highly trusted expert on colonial affairs. The third was Gregory Butler, seemingly an old West India hand, described by one of Venables’ officers as ‘the unfittest man for a commissioner I ever knew employed’. He features little in contemporary accounts of the expedition, except for when he was so drunk during a parade that he fell off his horse.
The more junior officers were a mixed bag: some good, some awful. The private soldiers, however, were almost universally poor. The ‘home’ contingent had been recruited from the invincible New Model Army, but few officers let any but their most troublesome and feeble men go. There was also a general shortfall in the numbers required, so further recruiting was carried out by drum beat in the poorer parts of London and other cities. As was always the case, only those with little to lose came forward. Thus the English ranks were made up of ‘slothful and thievish servants’, criminals and debtors on the run.
The men recruited in the West Indies were, by all accounts, even worse. Some were small-scale farmers who, having found the Barbados acreage all snapped up, took their families with them in the hope of finding land to plant. Most, though, were the desperate and greedy; of all the migrants from Barbados to different parts of the Americas, those who went with Venables were characterised as the worst: ‘the looser sort out of hopes of plunder’, ‘old beaten runaways’. Altogether, the men were described by Venables’ wife, who accompanied her husband on the expedition, as ‘the Devils instruments … A wicked army it was, and sent out without arms or provisions.’
The last complaint would prove perhaps most damning of all. The logistics of the expedition were a disaster. As the main fleet left Portsmouth, they were supposed to be joined by at least three further vessels from London. But the barque containing most of the army’s pikes was still sitting in Deptford, as were the transports carrying horses and cavalry equipment, and, most importantly, provisions and heavy weapons in the form of siege mortars.
Thus the main force was compelled to wait in Barbados, scanning the horizon for the arrival of the missing arms and supplies. Weeks passed, during which the Spanish had plenty of time to be warned of the force’s presence. Venables used the wait to drill his raw troops and attempt to replace the missing equipment: horses were requisitioned at huge cost; 2,500 half-pikes were constructed using cabbage palm shafts; and 1,500 mainly rusty matchlocks borrowed from the island’s militia, though little ammunition or powder was to be found. (James Drax, never one to miss a trick, was soon applying for permission to export from England to Barbados replacement horses and weapons.)
But after eight weeks, with provisions on the island growing ever more scarce and expensive under the strain of so many extra mouths to feed, the commanders were forced to abandon the wait and set forth on 31 March 1655. Heading north-west, the armada stopped six days later at St Kitts, where a further 1,200 men were collected. Like the Barbadians, many brought their families with them. An officer from England commented that they looked ‘rather as a people that went to inhabit some country already conquered than to conquer’.
Venables now had as many as 9,000 men at his command. Unfortunately, he only had provisions (of a very low quality) for about half that number. By the time the fleet left St Kitts, the men were already on half-rations at best and weakening all the time.
Only on 9 April was Henry Whistler, a naval officer on Penn’s flagship, told that the target was Hispaniola. Two days later, with the island only 48 hours’ sailing away, a huge row broke out among the soldiers. Commissioner Winslow had solemnly announced that all plunder from the island was to be reserved for the Protector and the ‘Design’. Officers and men alike were put ‘into a Great pachon’. Thus the army had already fallen out over the spoils of a victory yet to be won. As Henry Whistler commented, ‘Wee … Ware asharing the skin before wee had Cached the foxx.’
On 12 April, the eastern end of Hispaniola was spotted by the vanguard. Alarmed reports soon came back that the shore was ‘rocky, and a great surf of sea against it … in many places we saw the beatings of the water appear afar off like the smoke of ordnance’. Suddenly the amphibious attack did not look so easy. As warning beacons appeared in sight on the coast, and the population readied themselves for the attack, the armada’s divided command squabbled about what to do next. Venables urged a direct assault on the city of Santo Domingo, the island’s capital (and the oldest Spanish city in the New World). Penn, for the navy, insisted that this was impossible, with the winds in the wrong direction and the approach treacherous. At last a landing a short way down the coast was decided upon, with the aim being to attack the city from the weaker, landward side.
On the morning of the 14th, the English force headed west of Santo Domingo, steering for the mouth of the River Jaina, a short distance west of the city. But with the wind astern, and lacking an experienced pilot, the mariners took fright at running aground, and sailed past the landing point, not making shore until a spur of land nearly 40 miles from the city. Nevertheless, they found the small defences there unmanned, and some 7,000 troops landed unopposed.
As the men only had two to three days’ short rations, there was no time to be lost. The large column moved off, along a rough road running to the east. Soon, enemy scouts were spotted, but no contact was made. Occasionally a small house would be encountered, but clearly all the inhabitants had fled, though not before takin
g everything they could carry, blocking wells and burning the savannah to drive away the island’s free-roaming cattle. Very soon a critical problem emerged: the men had no water bottles; the following day they found themselves crossing a wide treeless drought-stricken savannah; it was punishingly hot. ‘Our very feet scorched through our Shoes’, wrote Venables later. One of his soldiers reported: ‘Our horses and men (the sun being in our zenith) fell down for thirst.’
At one time, they found themselves in thick woods. Although the shade gave relief from the burning rays of the sun, the breeze was now gone, and the heat was more intense and oppressive than ever. No water was to be found. In desperation, men started drinking their own urine.
Then, suddenly, they found themselves in an orange grove in full fruit. The thirsty soldiers gorged themselves, and loaded up as many as they could carry. But for many, this was the final straw for their embattled constitutions. By the evening, many of the men had come down with diarrhoea.
The large force, it seems, lacked a guide with local knowledge. This caused unnecessary lengthy detours and made finding water largely a matter of chance. The column, unfamiliar with local topography, was also extremely vulnerable to ambush. During the first morning, enemy horsemen appeared, then disappeared in the distance. At last an officer of the scouts unwisely gave chase to one and was not seen again. After that, occasional surprise attacks – sometimes just a volley of fire followed by a swift disappearing act – kept everyone on their guard.
The Sugar Barons Page 12
