The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  The development of sugar production in Jamaica was slow because about half of the male white population was involved not in planting but in buccaneering. Modyford himself encouraged this, and personally benefited to the tune of several thousand pounds. After the end of the war in 1667, during which the buccaneers had proved themselves a more than useful auxiliary force, Modyford argued that these ‘freebooters’ of Port Royal were essential for the defence of the island against French and Dutch privateers, and the continued threat of the Spanish, who, he wrote, ‘look on us as intruders and trespassers wheresoever they find us in the Indies and use us accordingly’.

  Led by Henry Morgan, the 1,400-strong Port Royal buccaneering force attacked Porto Bello in 1668 (reportedly using monks and nuns as human shields), and, most spectacularly of all, fought their way across the thickly jungled isthmus to plunder and burn the city of Panama in 1671.

  This last feat, accompanied by ‘divers barbarous acts’, proved to be a step too far, and a severe embarrassment in Europe, where England the year before had signed a treaty with Spain recognising English occupation of Jamaica and the right of English vessels to be in the Caribbean (though not to trade with Spanish colonies) in return for an ending of the destructive buccaneering raids. A new governor, Sir Thomas Lynch, was sent to Jamaica with orders to arrest Modyford and suppress the buccaneers. Lynch lured Modyford on to his ship, and then sent him home under heavy guard. Morgan was also arrested and returned to England, as Lynch then attempted to convert the buccaneers to planting. A few took him up on his offer, but attacks on Spanish towns and shipping continued, and a number of the buccaneers removed to Bermuda and became out-and-out pirates, preying on ships of all nationalities. It was the beginning of what has become known as ‘the Golden Age of Piracy’.

  Lynch continued the policy of handing out large grants of land, and encouraged the nascent sugar industry. But there remained two Jamaicas: one of planters, and one of buccaneers and (largely contraband) traders. Five years later, Morgan’s faction was back in favour, and he returned, having been knighted for his services to his country’s interest, to be deputy governor. Although he sanctimoniously betrayed and sentenced to death a number of his former shipmates, his drinking and carousing reached new epic levels.

  Meanwhile, however, a pattern emerged of planters building themselves up to sugar production in stages. Land would be cleared, then planted with pea crops while the tree stumps rotted, then potatoes and yams, and perhaps indigo and ginger, with the land ready for canes by the third year, and, all being well, profits from these minor crops sufficient to invest in capital- and labour-intensive sugar production.

  Among the first to start making serious money from sugar was Peter Beckford, who in 1676 took over the 1,000 acres in St Elizabeth granted to his kinsman Richard three years earlier. At the age of 33, Peter Beckford had 2,238 acres in sugar and cattle, while at the same time continuing to work as a merchant. He had also married well, to Bridget, the daughter of one of Jamaica’s richest planters – she was probably the daughter of Sir William Beeston, or possibly a Lynch. Their first son, another Peter, was born around 1674, and was one of the first Jamaicans to be sent to school in England. Peter was followed a year later by a daughter, Priscilla. Another son, Charles, was born in 1677, but died in infancy. The following year a further daughter, Elizabeth, was born, then, in 1682, another son, Thomas. At the same time, although reportedly unpopular – described as ‘a great incendiary’ and as ‘ruthless, unscrupulous and violent’ – Peter Beckford became renowned for his ‘great opulance’, which ‘gained him a superiority over most of the other Planters’ and made him a leading light in the politics of the island. He was the first Custos of Kingston, a member of the assembly for St Catherine’s, and from 1675, Secretary of the Island, the last a lucrative sinecure he purchased for £6,000. By then, it was reported, a personality trait had set in that would become an inherited characteristic of the Beckfords – violent megalomania. Apparently he thought ‘himself the greatest man in the world’, and took to ‘carrying and using, too, a large stick on very trivial provocations’. Political opponents would find themselves physically assaulted and knocked to the ground.

  During the 1670s, some 700 white immigrants arrived in Jamaica each year, with a large number coming from Barbados (by 1673, the population of Jamaica consisted of about 4,000 white males, 2,000 white females, 1,700 white children and about 9,500 Africans, almost all enslaved). They were not all the poor whites who had found the small island of Barbados unable to provide them with land of their own. Among them was William Drax, son of Sir James’s brother, who had died in London in 1669. Through land patents and a number of small purchases, William Drax the younger put together a large plantation in St Ann’s on Jamaica’s northern coast. Thus, the second Drax Hall estate came into existence.

  For the likes of William Drax, the reason for emigration was clear. As a 1675 report boasted, a sugar works with 60 slaves in Jamaica could make more profit than one with 100 ‘in any of the Caribbee Islands, by reason the soil is new’. As early as 1652, concerns had been expressed in Barbados that the soil was wearing out under pressure from the voraciously nutrient-hungry cane plant. In 1668, the Governor of Barbados complained that the island ‘renders not by two-thirds its former production by the acre; the land is almost worn out’. While an exaggeration, the yield per acre was undeniably falling, from 1.35 tons an acre in 1649 to less than a ton per acre by 1690. One result was that the planters were no longer able to leave the cut canes to regrow (or ‘ratoon’); instead they were forced to replant at least every second year. In addition, it became necessary endlessly to manure the fields. William Drax’s cousin Henry, in his ‘Instructions’, written at the end of the 1670s, was obsessed by the need for manure, ordering that his overseer’s ‘Cheifest Care’ should be to ensure the availability of a ‘greatt Qwantaty of Dung Every year’ and encouraging him to burn lime or collect human urine to create additional mineral fertiliser. ‘Now is theire No Producing good Canes withoutt dunging Every holle’, he stipulated. Naturally, this significantly increased the required labour – one estimate was that virgin soils such as in Jamaica needed one slave per acre, but Barbados needed two – because of the extra work that dunging and frequent replanting entailed.

  The cost of the manure – some £10 sterling a year per acre – also ate into profits. Another planter decreed that 150 cows, 25 horses and 50 sheep were needed to produce the dung for 100 acres of cane. The Barbados planters had become more efficient by switching to wind power for grinding their canes – there were some 400 windmills in operation by the 1670s – but this also reduced the livestock on the island and therefore the available manure; by the end of the century there were many small operations producing nothing but dung.

  The relentless march to sugar monoculture had also increased the prevalence of crop diseases, and the wholesale clearance of the island’s forests had brought about a severe shortage of wood for construction and for fuel to heat the coppers in the boiling houses. Lumber had to come all the way from New England, and Barbados planters were even importing coal from England. Henry Drax ordered that cane trash be burnt and that trees be planted on his estates. The clearances had also led to serious soil erosion – an issue also addressed by Henry Drax in his ‘Instructions’ – to the extent that Bridgetown harbour was rapidly silting up as the wealth of the island – its soil – was washed from the hillsides. Slaves laboured, ‘like Ants or Bees’, collecting soil in baskets and carrying it back up the hill. It all led to more labour costs, and in spite of these efforts, by the end of the century something like a third of the island had abandoned sugar cultivation because of soil deterioration and sheet erosion.

  In important other ways, too, the island looked back fondly to the earlier days of the colony. Royal geographer John Scott, who visited the island around 1667, and who wrote so admiringly of the planters’ smart houses and expensive silver and jewels, ended his report with a curious note: although
Barbados was 40 times richer than before the Sugar Revolution, he said, it was ‘not halfe so strong as in the year 1645’.

  What he meant by this was that the real strength of the island was its small white proprietors – ‘interested men’ with property to protect – who would ‘defend the place’, that is, man the militia, something at the front of everyone’s mind after the terrible fate of the Leeward Islands during the war with France. But this ‘middling’ class of inhabitant was dwindling fast.

  There was an anonymous report written on the island at this time, which took the same line: ‘In 1643, [the] value [of Barbados], sugar plantations being but in their infancy, [was] not one seventeenth part so considerable as in the year 1666, but the real strength [was] treble what it is at this time.’ The author of the report reckoned that before sugar there were 8,300 proprietors, and 18,600 effective men for the militia; but now there were not more than ‘760 considerable proprietors and 8000 effective men and the one half of these dissolute English, Scotch and Irish’, who ‘are fit to betray rather than defend so valuable a country’. Since 1643, the report estimated, at least 12,000 ‘good men … formerly proprietors are gone off’ to New England, Virginia, Surinam and the other islands, and some 2,000 had perished in the recent war. At the same time, tropical fevers took a steady toll.

  Some of these figures are dubious, but the trend they identify is undeniable. From a high of 30,000 in 1650, the white population had shrunk to 25,000 in 1660, 22,000 in 1670, then 20,000 in 1680 and 18,000 by 1690. And with each departure of a small freeholder, the island’s white population became ever more polarised and unequal, divided between a small number at the top – 7 per cent owned more than half the land by 1680 – and an increasingly desperate and impoverished rump, many of whom stayed only because they lacked the ‘courage to leave the island, or are in debt and cannot go’.

  The same handful of planters who owned most of the land ran the government, judiciary and military, and continued to live in sumptuous style. A visitor at the end of the 1660s was shocked by the ‘Intemperance’ and ‘Gluttony’ of the planters. At one feast, he reported, more than 1,000 bottles of wine were consumed. In contrast, the poor whites never had enough to eat. After the Restoration, few indentured servants from England chose Barbados over the other islands, where there was still land to be had. But those who had worked out their time and remained on the island found life as a wage-labourer almost impossible. In the 1690s, the council fixed wages for whites at between 3d and 5d a day, but pork was 7d per pound, mutton 8d and beef 9d. ‘There are hundreds of white servants in the Island who have been out of their time for many years, and who have never a bit of fresh meat bestowed on them’, reported one of the Barbados governors in the 1690s. ‘They are domineered over and used like dogs, and this in time will undoubtedly drive away all the commonalty of the white people and leave the island in a deplorable condition.’ Few planters wanted to employ the poor whites, seen as idle, drunken and useless – black slaves were cheaper and better workers. ‘Since people have found out the convenience and cheapness of slave-labour they no longer keep white men, who used to do all the work on the plantations’, wrote Governor Atkins to London in the late 1670s. And increasingly blacks were being trained for skilled tasks that previously had been reserved for whites. As early as the late 1660s, Scott reported that he saw ‘30 sometimes, 40, Christians – English, Scotch and Irish – at work in the parching sun, without shirt, shoe, or stocking’, while black slaves were at work ‘in their respective trades in a good condition’.

  Thus, while Barbados was in one way still fantastically rich – its 100,000 acres and 358 sugar works produced in the 1680s exports more valuable than those of all of North America combined – for the majority white poor it was ‘a miserable place of torment’, a ‘land of Misery and Beggary’, the worst place in the Americas to be a poor man. The only people who now came here to work, according to the Mayor of Bristol, were ‘rogues, whores, vagabonds, cheats, and rabble of all descriptions, raked from the gutter’.

  Some of the rich planters knew that their colony had taken a wrong turn. Christopher Codrington left the Council of Barbados on the death of Francis Lord Willoughby, but was reinstated by his brother William in June 1667. Then, when William returned on business to London at the beginning of 1669, Christopher, aged only 29, was appointed Deputy Governor, in charge of the island in Willoughby’s absence.

  As the King’s representative, Codrington often found himself in the firing line. The assembly, dominated by the planters, was furious that they were being asked to pay for the upkeep of fortifications and the garrisoning of troops when they had been under the impression that this should be covered by the export duty of 4½ per cent (most of which disappeared into the hands of the collectors). He was also responsible for enforcing the deeply unpopular Navigation Acts, which meant seizing vessels trading illegally.22 Nevertheless, he skilfully managed to carry out a delicate balancing act, keeping London happy while remaining popular with the assembly thanks to lavish dinners and by pushing for the money raised in Barbados to be spent there, as well as working for representation of the island in Parliament.

  Above all, he demonstrated that he understood the serious challenges that the island faced if it was to be any sort of functioning society. Raising money by taxing the importation of liquor, he improved the island’s fortifications against the threat of the French, built schools and hospitals, and all the time looked out for the interest of the ‘poorer sort of this Island’ – the men on whom Barbados depended for its security. Among 60 Bills he introduced were measures against cartels on provisions, ‘An Act to Prevent Depopulations’, ‘An Act for the Encouragement of the Manufacture of this Island’, and several Bills to ‘prevent Abuse of Lawyers, and Multiplicity of Law-Suits’. (There were also purely practical measures, such as the building of a new public wharf, rules for ‘the better hanging of coppers’, and laws to prevent accidental cane fires.)

  Henry Drax and others from the council were sent on trips to England to push the interests of the Barbadians. In London, the expatriate planters formed themselves into ‘the Committee for the Public Concern of Barbadoes’, meeting weekly at the Cardinal Cap tavern, in Cornhill, Friday afternoons at three. Drax was a junior member; he was far from pushy enough to be a politician – his greatest responsibility was the printing of literature – but his letters to Codrington show that he, too, understood the needs of Barbados, suggesting that people with land should be barred from buying any more, and that skilled trades should be reserved for whites, both measures designed to ‘uphold the number of freeholders’. At the same time, his committee pushed to be allowed to import servants from Scotland (at that time barred under the Navigation Acts).

  In all, Codrington showed himself for a time to be an immensely intelligent and capable governor, perhaps one of the best the colony ever had. But then he seems to have changed. In mid-1671, Barbados was visited by Sir Charles Wheeler, then Governor of the Leeward Islands. Wheeler wrote to London on 8 June 1671, and his letter contains the first hint of criticism of Codrington: ‘The Deputy Governor is not an ordinary man,’ he reported, ‘believes he is a worthy one, yet he lies under great temptations, as all do who seek their profit from those whom they are to govern.’ Clearly something happened around this time: from being described as ‘liberal’ and ‘debonaire’, in a short while Codrington would gain a reputation as a ruthless, money-obsessed tyrant, a bully and a philanderer. He was even, it would soon be rumoured, a murderer.

  12

  ‘ALL SLAVES ARE ENEMIES’

  ‘“You know,” observed Robert, “it appears to me that you are as much afraid of these people as they are of you.”

  “Of course we are,” said Rider; “it has been a case of fear on both sides. Fear is in the very texture of the mind of all the white people here; fear and boredom and sometimes disgust. That is why so many of us drink.”’

  Henry de Lisser, The White Witch of Rosehall

&
nbsp; The concern about the steady diminishing of the white population, and therefore the weakening of the militia, was not just about external threats to Barbados. As early as 1666, Governor Willoughby wrote to London that after the recent departures of whites to other islands and to Carolina, it was essential that they be replaced, or ‘wee shall be soe thinned of Christian people … I feare our negroes will growe too hard for us’.

  Because of the ‘want of white people’, a later report stated, Barbados faced dangers ‘from without [but] much greater from within’. Whites were urgently needed not really for their labour (carried out more efficiently by the slaves), but for policing the enslaved Africans, whose number on the island was increasing at a furious rate.23 This situation, of their own creation, was frankly terrifying for the white ‘masters’; their island was becoming Africanised. The precariousness of the situation and the constant threat that this posed to their survival brought on amongst the planters a sense of continual crisis.

  Perhaps the greatest fear of all was that the black slaves would unite with the poor, downtrodden whites and indentured servants to turn the whole system upside down. Indeed, the planter elite was torn between their contempt for the ‘other’ whites, who, increasingly, were transported felons rather than the hapless poor, and their need for them to control the slaves. In 1661, just as the balance of numbers tipped towards the blacks, the government in Barbados passed laws to govern treatment of indentured servants and slaves (both profoundly different from labour systems familiar in England). These codified what had already been established, while shaping the future for both categories.

  The aim was to persuade the poor whites to ally themselves with the planter class, in effect to choose race over class as their defining characteristic. In the ‘Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes’,24 the Africans were described as a ‘heathenish, brutish and an uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people’. The white servants, though still heavily policed in their behaviour, were carefully given better rights than the blacks – to food, clothing, general treatment and legal protection. Slaves who assaulted a white person of whatever status were to be whipped, then, on a second offence whipped some more and have their nose slit and forehead branded. While on paper the Act aimed to protect the slaves from ‘the Arbitrary, cruell and outrageous will of every evill disposed person’, masters could punish slaves in any way they liked, even to death, the only penalty being a fine, and this was easily evaded. Whites’ rights to trial by jury (a fundamental right of English law) were confirmed, while blacks faced a kangaroo court of the master’s local cronies. For whites, differences between men and women were legally recognised, but not for blacks. Black men were to be severely punished if they had sex with a white woman, even if it was consensual, although white men could rape black women with impunity.