The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  But we do know the outcome. The Consetts died in 1669, within weeks of each other, and Christopher Codrington took possession of the estate. Shortly afterwards, Henry Willoughby was invited to supper by Codrington. When he left that night he was fine, but when he got to his lodging he ‘fell into a violent burning of the stomach’ and died the next morning at seven o’clock. Many believed that Henry, as a rival claimant, had been deliberately poisoned.

  Barbados was always a place of vicious rumour and counter-rumour, and it is impossible to be sure that Henry Willoughby was murdered by Christopher Codrington. But a judge who confirmed Codrington’s ownership of Consetts was later accused of ‘fraudulent proceedings’, and an anonymous assessment of Barbados’s councillors in 1670 describes Codrington as being ‘accused of terrible crimes’.

  Certainly Governor William Willoughby, Henry’s father, previously a great friend and supporter of Codrington, turned sharply against him when he returned to Barbados in 1672. Having praised Codrington’s stewardship of the island in his absence, Willoughby now criticised him for putting ‘needless impositions’ on the planters, and threw him off the council. Codrington was also stripped of his command of one of the island’s militia regiments. According to a 1672 letter from Henry Drax, Willoughby now had ‘a great prejudice against Codrington … and has the power … and the will to ruin him’. When Codrington (in an episode that shows his growing lack of judgement and general greed and megalomania) tried to develop a reputed silver mine in Dominica, Willoughby attempted to take the patent from under his nose.

  Willoughby died shortly afterwards, but Codrington never sat on the Barbados council again, nor won the trust of the island’s subsequent governors. An attempt in 1674 to regain his place was slapped down with the comment that Codrington ‘was no fit man to be councilor’. Instead, he concentrated on the assembly, where he became everything he had fought against while deputy governor: a classic creature of faction and self-interest.

  Soon after taking possession of Consetts, the Codrington brothers exchanged plantations so that John took over Christopher’s land in St Michael in return for the estate next to Consetts on the St John’s coast. Thus, in 1673, Christopher is recorded as owning 600 acres in the parish. By 1678 he had a very profitable plantation in operation, with 250 slaves, three stone-built windmills, a large boiling house with 17 coppers and a still-house containing four large rum stills. To celebrate his wealth, he commissioned from a silversmith in London the largest covered punch bowl ever recorded – 18 inches high, with a diameter of 17½ inches. Engraved on its side was the Codrington of Dodington arms, belonging to what was then the senior branch of the family (soon to be bought out and superseded by the West Indian Codringtons).

  Having as deputy governor battled to enforce the Navigation Acts and the rule of law, Codrington now threw himself with abandon into illegal trading. A wharf and warehouse were constructed in Consett’s Bay, where ‘interlopers’ could land slaves direct from Africa, in defiance of the Royal African Company’s monopoly. It became a small entrepôt, engaging in some very profitable smuggling, and even in the taking of prizes. The RAC’s factors complained several times about Codrington’s operation, on one occasion in December 1678 writing to London that ‘Christopher Codrington of this Island … is a great Favourer of Interlopers … [he], recd. The Gold, Teeth and Wax also the Negroes out of this last Interloper as wee are told and secured them in his dwelling house, cureing house and boyling house, using this expression also as wee are told that he would warrant and secure them ag’st the Compa’s Factors or any [one] else lett them come with what Authoritie or force they could.’

  It may be that some events in his family life altered or soured the outlook of Christopher Codrington. He buried a daughter, Mary, almost certainly an infant, in St Michael’s church in mid-1670. His second son, John, was, as his father later wrote, ‘inflicted with an infirmity’, elsewhere less charitably described as a ‘lunatic’. It is very possible that his wife Gertrude also died around this time. Did these tragedies wear him down? Or was it what a visitor to Jamaica at this time described as one of the curses of slavery – the giving of ‘unlimited power’ to the slave-owner, and the corrupting influence of that ‘absolute power over all the rest as slaves’ that saw men such as Codrington ‘guided only by his owne will’, masters of everything but themselves?

  Codrington’s son, Christopher the third, remained all his life a defender of his father, whom he regarded with awe. He was probably educated as a young boy at Consetts by the Reverend Benjamin Cryer, the rector of St John’s. But in 1680, aged 12, he was sent to England to be educated, and any companionship that he might have given his father was gone. In the same year, the elder Codrington made a concerted effort to be appointed to the vacant post of Barbados’s governor, recruiting influential courtiers in London to push his case. But it seems that his reputation was beyond repair, and he lost out to Sir Richard Dutton, who immediately brought proceedings against Codrington, accusing him of embezzlement while deputy governor. Dutton was a crook of the first order, himself making a fortune out of his position, but he forced Codrington to pay back nearly £600 of allegedly stolen money. For a couple of years Codrington led the opposition to the new governor, but soon he had had enough. In 1683, he decided to move to new pastures.

  In 1668, before the Consetts affair, Codrington had been granted through the influence of his then friend William Willoughby a 500-acre plantation in Antigua’s Old North Sound division, known as Betty’s Hope. This was just after the destruction of the French invasion and occupation, and its previous tenant, one Dame Joan Hall, had fled the island (she would later unsuccessfully try to retrieve her property). Codrington was then still concentrating on developing his Barbados interests, and although he ordered the planting of sugar on his new Antigua property, it was only ticking over 10 years later, with just two whites and 10 black slaves registered as living on the property in 1678. But as his reputation in Barbados soured, Christopher Codrington began quietly increasing his interests in Antigua, taking out a patent with his brother John for a further 400 acres in 1681. In 1684, the brothers obtained a lease for the nearby, largely deserted 60-square-mile island of Barbuda, previously granted to James Winthrop in 1668.28

  Thus when Christopher decided to quit Barbados in the early 1680s, he had the nucleus in Antigua for what would soon become the most substantial estate on the island (eventually covering more than 1,000 acres and employing 800 slaves). In February 1683, he leased his Barbados plantations, now spanning some 750 acres on the St John’s coast, to a Captain Higginbothan. The following year, to secure capital for development in Antigua, he raised a mortgage on the Barbados properties of just over £4,000, and another £7,000 the next year. While John concentrated on Barbuda, building a castle and developing the island mainly as a supplier of provisions and livestock, Christopher’s priority was Antigua, where he joined the council in the mid-1680s, and was soon wielding great power and influence.

  Codrington seems to have found the frontier society of Antigua liberating. Barbados was far from strait-laced, but there Codrington had old friends and relatives who had known him all his life. In Antigua, he seems to have dramatically loosened the shackles on his own behaviour, particularly when it came to sex. (Around this time, his brother John, a solid and reliable character, died.) According to an anonymous complaint sent to London, Christopher ‘Keeps Continually about him a Seraglio of mula-toes and negro women and has by them no less than 4 or 5 bastards.’ His will contains a list of his lovers and illegitimate children – ‘Mary Codrington, daughter of Margaret who formerly waited on me, £300 at 21 … to my mulatta Cateen & her daughter Meliour their freedom, & £200 to the latter at 21’ – all of whom seem to have been conceived after he left Barbados.

  By this time, according to a detailed census compiled by Governor Stapleton, Antigua had a population of some 1,200 white men, 500 each of white women and children and just over 2,000 black slaves, of whom 800 were ad
ult males. Montserrat had similar numbers, although comparatively more slaves; St Kitts had fewer whites and blacks, although a more equal gender mix; Nevis, which had escaped French depredation, slightly more of all categories, although still two males to each female. In total, the Leeward Islands had about half the white population of Barbados at that time, and about a quarter of the slave force. The islands were still some way behind Barbados on the road to the intensive sugar-and-slaves model. Nevis was the most developed, with the Governor’s residence, nearly half the churches of the islands and the only well-built port, at Charlestown. But in 1680 Nevis councillors averaged fewer than 70 slaves per man, while in Barbados the island’s councillors had nearly 200 each. In Antigua, the greatest planters, such as the Langfords, Byams and Winthrops, had even smaller households.

  But like Barbados, there was increasingly concern about the lack of white settlers to police the growing black slave populations. In March 1687, a slave revolt saw some 40 or 50 slaves ‘armed with guns’ flee to the interior of Antigua, which, unlike Barbados, still provided the shelter of virgin forest. Mounted patrols were sent in pursuit; the first runaway captured had ‘his leg cut off’, and two weeks later a ‘collision’ between the blacks and the pursuing troops saw half the former killed and a ringleader, ‘Negroe George’, captured and sentenced to ‘be burned to ashes’. In response to the rebellion, the Antigua legislature ordered that each plantation have a quota of white servants, and appeals were posted to London to send out ‘the spawne of Newgate and Bridewell’ to make up the numbers of the whites, but with little success. Thus the slave population rose steadily.

  As the Leeward Islanders increased their sugar production – collectively up to about a third of the total of Barbados by 1680 – they found themselves heading inexorably towards the unhappy and unstable model of Barbados, with small farmers and freeholders dwindling to be replaced by a plantocracy of consolidated estates manned by black slaves. In addition, the insecurity of the Leewards was increased by the internal rivalries between the Irish and the rest, their lack of unity between the islands (refusing to cooperate on defence or even standardise their laws), and the ever-present and growing threat of their French neighbours, who throughout the late 1670s and 1680s were better supported from home with troops and ships, and looked ever more likely to descend once more on the vulnerable English colonies.

  14

  GOD’S VENGEANCE

  ‘If thou didst see those great persons that are now dead upon the water thou couldst never forget it. Great men who were so swallowed up with pride, that a man could not be admitted to speak with them, and women whose top-knots seemed to reach the clouds, now lie stinking upon the water, and are made meat for fish and fowls of the air.’

  Quaker John Pike, Jamaica, 19 June 1692

  Jamaica’s much greater proximity to the centres of Spanish power in the Caribbean meant that the old enemy was still a threat, notwithstanding the treaty made in Europe in 1670 and efforts by Jamaica’s governors to improve relations with Spain by suppressing English privateering. Most dangerous was the Spaniards’ inconsistency. A majority of the Spanish governors were corrupt and, when it suited or, more exactly, benefited them, would allow illegal trading by English vessels from Port Royal, whence they also came openly to buy much-needed slaves. But traders welcomed on one visit to a Spanish port would often find themselves seized on the next occasion, and ‘made slaves … and there used with the utmost of Rigor and severity’. ‘We treat them on all occasions with all imaginable respect and kindness,’ wrote Sir Henry Morgan to London during one of the three periods he was acting governor, ‘and in return receive only ingratitude.’ In December 1675, Peter Beckford, in his capacity as Secretary of the Island, wrote home that the Spaniards ‘are daily taking all ships they can master, and are very high’. When the governor ‘sent to demand satisfaction they answered they would look upon us as enemies’.

  But in the same letter Beckford confidently asserted that if it came once more to war, then the Spanish, thinly stretched over vast areas, could be defeated. A far greater threat, he wrote, was presented by the French, who ‘would prove very ill neighbours in war, and much more dangerous than the Spaniards’. The French had a powerful fleet in the theatre in 1677, causing invasion fears in Jamaica; and two years later martial law was declared on the island for the same reason. In the meantime, French privateers were a constant menace both on the high seas and for isolated coastal plantations. On one occasion privateers attacked the north-coast estate of a Widow Barrow, ‘plundered all her Negroes, household goods and all she had, Tortured her to confess if she had money and then took away with him her maiden daughter, Rachel Barrow of about 14 years’.

  Jamaica was still a wild and dangerous frontier. Its inhabitants were boisterous and unruly, even at the top, where the leadership was characterised by constant battles between the assembly and the Governor, and between factions made up of planters, merchants and buccaneers. A map drawn in 1677 shows a duel with pistols in motion. A few years before, an assembly meeting had ended with a drunken murder: a Captain Rutter was killed by a Major Joy, who ‘had always been his friend, but the drink and other men’s quarrels made them fall out’. The interior remained trackless, undeveloped, and infested with runaway slaves and servants. Jamaica in the mid-1670s had only four priests for the entire island, and the 2,000 white children had only one schoolmaster between them.

  But even though much of the best land was still undeveloped (what would become, in the next generation, the island’s finest plantation, the Prices’ Worthy Park in Lluidas Vale, was still jungle and scrub), Jamaica was beginning to give up some of its extraordinary agricultural richness. Beckford wrote in 1675, ‘As to the present state of the Island, no place the King has is more like to thrive, for they increase in planting to a miracle.’ The increase in sugar production was, indeed, miraculous: by the 1680s, sugar had become the largest export by value, having increased tenfold since 1671. The number of sugar works had jumped from 57 in 1671 to 246 in 1684. Thirty years after Barbados, the Sugar Revolution had arrived in Jamaica.

  Compared with Barbados, the cradle of the British West Indian sugar empire, Jamaica always possessed, and still does, more space, variety, fertility, potential and danger. For while Barbados still had a white population of which half could be deemed ‘poor’, Jamaican free society was almost straight away dominated by the biggest planters. As in Barbados, only those at the top could afford to switch to sugar. For the duration of the empire, crops such as indigo, ginger, dye woods, provisions and, later, coffee, remained important, but from the 1680s onwards, the wild profits – and political and social power – were in the hands of the sugar planters.

  Many were from amongst the earliest arrivals: Fulke Rose, who earned a very good living as a doctor, also brought home some £4,000 a year from his sugar plantations; Francis Price, who had been part of the invasion force, now owned thousands of acres; Peter Beckford’s sugar operation was in full swing, while he enjoyed substantial income as a merchant and moneylender, much of which was reinvested in further acreage. All three served as members of the assembly and were senior militia officers.

  On the dangerously deserted north coast, those prepared to take the risk were also reaping the benefits of wonderful environmental conditions. For much of the coastline, steep hills border a two-mile-wide coastal strip. This flat and easily farmed land is watered by numerous streams that pour down from the higher ground and also bring down rich alluvial deposits. In addition, many of the streams were of sufficient strength to power mills to grind the sugar. One of the plantations enjoying these invaluable advantages was Drax Hall, established by Henry’s cousin William in the late 1660s. Such was the space enjoyed by the Jamaican planters, unlike their cousins in Barbados, that plantations could be large enough to have 200 acres in cane (considered the maximum amount processible by one factory) and still have the majority of the land in provisions, livestock, woodland or fallow. Such was the Jamaican Drax H
all estate, one of the most profitable on the island for the next 70 years.

  William Drax died in 1697, and the plantation went to his son, Charles Drax. Like Henry, both William and Charles served in the political establishment but largely kept their heads down and out of trouble. In addition, Charles seems to have been determined to create a new, physical Drax Hall in Jamaica, to rival the famous edifice in Barbados.

  None of the earliest Jamaican great houses has survived the climate, neglect, natural disasters and the periodic vengeance of slaves. But recent archaeological investigations, together with a small illustration and various inventories, show the Jamaican Drax Hall to have been a large structure with limestone foundation walls a metre thick, rising to three storeys – highly unusual for Jamaica at the time – and some 10 rooms. In fact, it had much in common with the surviving Drax Hall in Barbados, which is unlikely to have been a coincidence: it had a steep, side-gabled roof, with sets of three triangular gabled dormer windows. Unlike Drax Hall in Barbados, it boasted an extensive porch extending the length of the house front, which faced out over the ocean.

  The Drax Hall estate would soon have more than 300 slaves, a workforce that made the leap in sugar production possible. In 1676, Peter Beckford reported that ‘the People of this Island are much dissatisfied about the Royal Company’, which was selling at ‘Unreasonable Rates’. Jamaica was considerably further from the slave coast of West Africa than Barbados, and slaves that cost £17 in Barbados, Beckford complained, were priced at £24 in Jamaica. As elsewhere, interlopers filled the gap, finding Jamaica’s long coast and numerous bays convenient for secretly landing their miserable cargoes. But by the 1680s, the Governor of Jamaica was able to write that ‘The Royal Company now begin to supply us well, there being two Shipps with 700 Negroes in port.’ In mid-decade, in one year alone – 1686–7 – more than 6,000 slaves were imported by the Company. Already, by 1680, the black population of Jamaica had surpassed that of the white – at 15,000 still about 5,000 fewer than that of Barbados. Soon the slaves would be in the majority, with their numbers concentrated on the large sugar estates, and growing at an extraordinary rate, particularly after the ending of the Royal African Company’s monopoly at the end of the century and a consequent sharp fall in price.