The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  After a further delay, the Spanish Governor, Juan Ramirez, at last arrived in the city to sign the articles of surrender. Ramirez, an onlooker wrote, was ‘a uery sad creater’ ‘soe much eaten out with the pox’ that he had to be carried in a hammock; ‘the ennimie woas ashamed that wee should see him’. Apparently, Ramirez was afflicted with the ‘French-disease’.

  The articles deliberately echoed those imposed on the English inhabitants of Providence Island back in 1641: the Spaniards were to be shipped off the island within 10 days and forfeit all their property. In the meantime, they were ordered to supply the huge English army with cassava bread and 200 head of cattle a day. The Governor and two of his officers remained in English hands as hostages.

  News of the terms came as a severe shock to the Spaniards sheltering in the hinterland behind St Jago. Most had been born in Jamaica and had never left the island; it was their home. While they debated what to do, they sent provisions as requested to the English in the town, but at the same time preparations were started for a guerrilla war in the interior. Indeed, the Spaniards had quickly decided that ‘if they complied, they were utterly ruined, and desired rather to expose their lives to the hazzard of warr then to condescend to such termes’.

  Four days passed before Venables realised he had been tricked. Suddenly the supplies of provisions ceased. Shortly afterwards, men started disappearing while out foraging for food or loot. It was soon apparent that rather than turning against their masters as the English had hoped, the island’s slaves, together with the runaway maroons, had sided against the invaders, who, they were told, would treat them harshly. Small bands were formed under the leadership of Spanish officers. These lurked just outside the small sphere of English control, and preyed on those who ventured beyond the lines. Bodies of dead English soldiers started being discovered, stripped naked and horribly mutilated.

  Efforts were made to pursue the Spanish into the hills, but the enemy melted away, only reappearing to pick off stragglers. It was, wrote one of Venables’ officers, ‘an impossible thing for an army, except well acquainted with the country, to follow or find them out … The excessive heat of the sun, the want of water in many places … did more weaken and disable them in ten miles march there, than forty in their own country.’

  Even more serious for the fate of the English army was the lack of food. The island’s planted acreage had supported a population of some 2,500; now there were an extra 7,000 mouths to feed. During the first days of occupation there had been no planning for managing food supply and the English soldiery had slaughtered cattle and hogs with abandon, but now, suddenly, there were none left who had not been killed or driven away by the Spaniards. Provision grounds were likewise sabotaged, and the army found itself on starvation rations of half a biscuit per man a day.

  Thus the ‘victory’ in Jamaica became, for the men of the army, even worse than the calamitous defeat in Hispaniola. Henry Whistler reckoned that within 12 days of the landing, lack of food and water had halved the strengths of the companies.

  Dysentery now swept though the malnourished ranks, so that soon ‘they looked like dead men, just crept abroad from their graves’. By 14 June, there were ‘not more than five field officers in health … two thousand privates were sick; and the rest grew very unruly and mutinous’. The day before, Venables had written home that ‘our Men die daily … Fresh flesh and roots put them into Fluxes, which sweep them away by Ten and twenty per diem frequently.’ Many of the dead remained unburied, ‘others buried so shallow underground that they already scent through’, wrote a senior officer the following month. Together with the garbage of the army, carelessly strewn about, ‘the scents are here so noisome that in some parts of this town a man is not able to walk’.

  As the strength of the English force steadily diminished, guerrilla attacks by the Spanish and their maroon allies grew ever more daring and destructive. ‘The enemie lye still on the mountains, expecting our deserting this country’, wrote an English soldier on 15 June in a letter home. At one point, maroon guerillas entered Spanish Town itself, burning several buildings. In all, it is estimated that as many as 1,000 men were killed by ambushes, usually when hunting for food. Within a short time, Venables was forced to ban his troops from venturing beyond the narrow confines of the city and the harbour. The men were forced to eat snakes, lizards and rats, and ‘Neither’, we are told by a Spanish source, ‘did the English spare any of the dogs, cats, colts or donkeys which their bullets reached, so exceedingly hungry were they’.

  The leaders of the ill-fated expeditionary force responded by scuttling back to England. Venables, to be fair, was seriously ill, with what he called a combination of ‘flux’ and ‘fever’, although the naval commander, William Penn, was the first to leave, setting sail from Jamaica on 25 June, with about three quarters of the fleet (leaving Vice-Admiral Goodson in charge of a force of 12 frigates). Penn, it appears, was keen to have his version of events in Hispaniola heard before that of Venables. At this time, it was rumoured in the army that the General had died, but instead, he was ‘Convey’d on board in a distracted Condition’, and arrived back in Portsmouth, still alive, on 31 August. Major-General Richard Fortescue was left in command of the army.

  Cromwell was devastated by the Hispaniola disaster, which he saw as the Lord’s punishment for his own iniquity. On hearing of the shock defeat there, he had shut himself in his room and become ill. When Penn and Venables showed up back in England, he was furious, and both were imprisoned in the Tower of London as punishment for deserting their men. A precariously held Jamaica was seen as totally inadequate return for the grandiose ambitions of the Western Design.

  According to soldiers’ accounts, the men of the army were, indeed, ‘full sore’ about the departure of their leaders. Furthermore, no one had been paid. Fortescue, Venables’ replacement, wrote to Cromwell that the men of the army, who had come for plunder, now ‘fret, fume, grow impatient’. The island had huge potential, he went on, but there was a desperate need for some more upstanding, ‘Godlike’ immigrants and servants who, unlike the vast majority of the army, might be willing to get down to the hard work of planting. Tools were also required, he wrote, along with well-equipped, experienced and disciplined reinforcements for the army to deal with the continued threat of reconquest by the Spanish and their maroon allies.

  Fortescue was soon dead from sickness, leaving Lieutenant-General Edward D’Oyley in command, but Cromwell, wishing to make the most of the meagre prize of Jamaica, responded vigorously. Every male immigrant, he announced, would receive 20 acres, with 10 allocated per woman and child. A thousand each of Irish boys and girls under 14 were to be sent out and sold as indentured servants, and he ordered the sheriffs of the counties of Scotland to round up ‘all known, idle, masterless robbers and vagabonds, male and female, and transport them to that island’. At the same time, appeals went out to other English colonies in America to provide the means to people the newly conquered territory. A number of Quakers from Barbados, who had made themselves unpopular by refusing to bear arms in the militia, were welcomed to Jamaica, along with Bermudans, as well as Jews expelled from Brazil by the Portuguese after the final defeat there of the Dutch.

  Cromwell’s great hope, however, was that the doughty Puritan North Americans, scratching a meagre living out of the stony New England fields – ‘driven from the land of their nativity into that desert and barren wilderness, for conscience’ sake’ – would welcome a move to the warm and wildly fertile climes of the West Indies. In September 1655, an envoy was sent to New England to try to persuade them to move on to Jamaica. In his instructions Cromwell outlined his vision: ‘Our desire is that this place [Jamaica], if the Lord so please, be inhabited by people who know the Lord and walk in his fear, and by their light they may enlighten the parts about them (a chief end of our undertaking and design).’ In the meantime, 2,000 Bibles were sent to Jamaica for the edification of the troops there.

  The New Englanders may have been
supportive of Cromwell’s aims, but with a few exceptions, they resolutely refused to migrate to this supposed ‘land of plenty’. They were actually doing rather well, a large part through the ever-growing trade with Barbados and the other islands; and they had had enough contact with Jamaica to have heard of the ‘prophaneness of the soldiery, the great mortality in the island; and the continual hazard to the lives of any peaceable settlers there, from the skulking Negroes and Spaniards’. In New England, in contrast, there might not have been such a hope of instant riches, but ‘they lived more comfortably like Englishmen than any of the rest of the Plantations’.

  Cromwell had more success with his appeal to the English settlers of the Leeward Islands. Governor Luke Stokes of Nevis responded enthusiastically, raising at least 1,000 men, together with women and slaves, to make the leap to the new colony. They were fetched by Goodson in three frigates and sent to the long-deserted eastern tip of the island near what is now known as Port Morant. This was an important part to occupy, for the good harbour there could easily have been taken over by the Spanish. It was also one of the most fertile parts of the country. However, it was long deserted for a reason: it was bordered by mangrove swamps that provided a home to countless malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Within two months, Stokes and his wife were dead, along with two thirds of the other immigrants. Soldiers sent to guard them from the ever-present threat of Spanish attack also died in droves.

  But Cromwell’s vision for his ‘Western Design’ had not been just about planting and settlement. Any foothold gained in the central Caribbean was to be exploited to harass, weaken and plunder the local interests of the Spanish (or of any other rival European powers). So at the same time as appealing for new settlers, the Protector sent orders to Jamaica for the creation of Courts of Admiralty (which dealt with the disbursement of ‘prize’ enemy cargoes and vessels, the proceeds being shared between the crew, the officers and the state) and for the commissioning of ‘private Men of War to annoy and infest the Enemies of our Nation’. Admiral Blake’s fleet was doing a good job of besting the Spanish navy in European waters, and this gave the energetic Goodson free rein to exploit Jamaica’s strategic position, and to carry out his instructions to capture any foreign vessels he could at the same time as taking the fight to the Spanish Main. During the latter half of 1655, he brought in a number of prizes, as well as attacking Santa Marta near Cartagena, demolishing forts and burning the town. The big hope, though, remained the capture of the annual Spanish treasure fleet.

  Cromwell also dispatched to Jamaica a new commissioner and military chief, Major General Robert Sedgwick, who arrived with some 700 reinforcements in October 1655. Sedgwick was a pious Puritan soldier with an honourable military record in the Massachusetts colony. He had mixed feelings about the operations now being undertaken by Goodson: ‘This kind of marooning cruising West India trade of plundering and burning of towns’, he wrote home, ‘is not honorable for a princely navy … though perhaps it may be tolerated at present.’ He was concerned that unless towns like Santa Marta were taken and held, there would be little hope of carrying out their ‘intentions in dispensing anything of the true knowledge of God to the inhabitants’. Such ‘naked plundering missions’ also ran the risk, he warned, of making the English appear ‘to the Indians and blacks’ ‘a cruel, bloody, and ruinating people … worse than the Spanish’.

  Such delicate sentiments, of course, had no place in the West Indies of the seventeenth century, and to do him justice, Sedgwick did have a more pragmatic side. Realising the importance of naval superiority, he started work on what would become the British navy’s key West Indian base for the next 200 years and more.

  Kingston harbour was protected by a sand spit, in places as narrow as 100 yards, just beyond the end of which lay a small island of just under 60 acres. This had been used by the Spaniards for careening ships but, a few shacks aside, it was empty. On the landward side was deep, well-sheltered water, a perfect harbour and anchorage. Sedgwick ordered the construction of a fort on the island, which would command the harbour. Heavy guns were mounted, 21 by March 1656. A small stone tower was then built, mainly by men from the navy, the army being too debilitated. Traders came to sell to the garrison and labourers to work on the fort. The following year there was the ‘fair beginnings of a town’. It was the start of what would very shortly become the dazzling and infamous city of Port Royal. As events would dramatically demonstrate, it was a wildly unsuitable place for a new city, only a few feet above sea level, consisting of unstable sands and in the midst of a zone battered by natural disasters. In addition, the island was small, lacking any fresh water, and only reachable by boat. Nevertheless, its advantages as a harbour seemed to outweigh everything, and soon the army’s stores and headquarters were moved to the island.

  Although the navy now enjoyed increasing success and relative good health, on land, the nightmare for the army continued unabated. Weakened by hunger, more than 100 men were dying each week from dysentery or fevers. Provisions grudgingly sent out from England – Cromwell complained about the expense of sending food to ‘a place which abounds in all things’ – were pilfered, purloined by corrupt officers or perished from careless storage.

  When Sedgwick arrived in October 1655, he found the army ‘idle … unworthy, slothful … in as sad, as deplorable, and distracted a condition, as can be thought of’. The bodies of dead soldiers lay in the streets and the bushes.

  Those men still fit were expecting and hoping to be ordered against some richer Spanish target, and therefore get the plunder they came for, and, unpaid, they considered their due; the officers, it appeared, just wanted to go home. Thus neither was inclined to undertake the long-haul task of planting, nor, indeed, wrote Sedgwick, to ‘do anything, however necessary, for their own benefit’.

  A muster held the following month found that of the 7,000 who had landed in May, 3,720 were still alive, besides 173 women and children. ‘Many that are alive’, Sedgwick reported, ‘appear as ghosts … out of a strange kind of spirit, desir[ing] rather to die than live.’

  At the beginning of November another 800 men arrived as reinforcements. Those already there just felt sorry for them. ‘Poore men I pitty them at the heart’, wrote a soldier of the original party, ‘all their imaginary mountains of gold are turned into dross.’ In the same letter of 5 November, he described how half the surviving men were sick and helpless and how he himself was getting thinner all the time, having had no provisions from the army for 10 weeks. He had by now suffered ‘with the bloody flux, rhume, ague, feavor’. In St Jago de la Vega, ‘There were soe many funerals, and graves … it is a very Golgotha.’ On the savannah outside the town, he reported, Spanish dogs were digging up the shallow graves of the perished English soldiers and eating the carcasses.

  All the time, maroon and Spanish guerrillas in the hills and woods of the interior kept up their campaign, setting ambushes for the English soldiers seeking game, provisions or water. Sedgwick reported to Cromwell in January 1656: ‘We now and then find one or two of our men killed, stripped, and naked.’ In March he wrote, ‘there scarce a week passeth without one or two slain’. The following month a mutiny had to be bloodily suppressed and its leaders hanged. Men started deserting to the Spanish, who rewarded most of them with instant execution.

  By now, more than 5,000 men who had come from England and the other islands had died in Jamaica in 10 months. Amongst them was the renegade priest Thomas Gage, who had urged the ‘Western Design’ on Cromwell, and who had accompanied the expedition as a chaplain. In June, the hard-working Sedgwick was killed by a fever. His replacement from England lasted less than a year before dying of malaria and exhaustion.

  This, then, was the less than glorious birth of what would become Britain’s richest and most important colony. The island was a giant morgue for one of the most disastrous military expeditions of British history. And it had left as the founding stock of the new colony a mutinous, disease-ravaged and demoralised rabble.

>   Edward Long, the grand eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica, ascribed the ‘disasters which befell the first race of settlers here’ to the want of ‘industry, unanimity, perseverance, and good order’. Although the death rate remained shocking, he wrote, ‘they were the wretched victims to their own debauchery, indolence, and perverseness’. No doubt, this is to a large degree true. One English officer called the men of the army the ‘very scum of scums, and mere dregs of corruption’. For its first adventure in aggressive, state-driven imperialism, England had put together a wretched army of the poorest-quality soldiers, moreover ill-equipped and ill-led. A large majority of the troops had paid with their lives.

  But among them were men who, having had the courage to embark on a new and dangerous opportunity, had enjoyed the luck, and possessed the resourcefulness and the hardy constitution required to survive when so many others had not. Several of these tough, determined survivors would go on to found families of huge wealth and power. We know that Hersey Barrett, great-great-great-great-grandfather of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was amongst the men from Barbados or the Leewards. He had brought his wife and five-year-old son with him on Venables’ invasion fleet. The family would come to own vast and productive sugar estates and a number of grandiose ‘great houses’. Another pioneer was Lieutenant Francis Price, probably recruited by Venables from among the less successful Barbadian smallholders, whose family would be within two generations the second-largest landowner on the island. The Beckfords, who became the grandest of all the sugar dynasties, may have had a family member or two on the expedition as well, and it has been suggested that Henry Morgan, who supposedly started out his spectacular West Indian career as an indentured servant on Barbados, was part of the force.10