The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  The wrecking of Port Royal destroyed forever the playground of the buccaneers, contributing to their final eclipse by the planter interest.32 Most immediately, the destruction of the strongest defensive position on the island, as well as some 2,000 inhabitants, left the entire island in a chronically vulnerable condition. ‘Our first Fears’, wrote a Jamaican to London at the end of June, ‘are concerning our Slaves, those Irreconcilable and yet Intestine Enemies of ours, who are no otherwise our Subjects than as the Whip makes them; who seeing our strongest Houses demolisht, our Arms broken … might be stirred up to rise in Rebellion against us.’ Almost as bad was what now seemed like an inevitable ‘forcible Invasion of the Barbarous French’. For by now, Britain and France were once again at war.

  15

  THE PLANTER AT WAR: CODRINGTON IN THE LEEWARD ISLANDS

  ‘[These colonies’] whole past history … presents only a succession of wars, usurpations, crimes, misery, and vice … all is one revolting scene of infamy, bloodshed, and unmitigated woe, of insecure peace and open disturbance, of the abuse of power, and of the reaction of misery against oppression.’

  James Phillippo, a Baptist minister who worked in Jamaica, 1843

  News of William of Orange’s invasion of England and dethroning of James II, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’, reached England’s American colonies in January 1689. The Jacobite Governor of the Leewards, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, told the new King, William III, in May that he could not accept the revolution. The uncertainty allowed the long-bubbling tensions on St Kitts to explode into war and destruction. The following month, 130 armed Irish servants rose up in the name of the deposed King James and sacked the English plantations on the windward side of St Kitts, carrying their loot over the border to the French parts of the island, where they were given sanctuary in the name of their shared Roman Catholic religion. Although disowned by their governor, a number of French inhabitants joined in the ‘burning and ravaging’. Unwilling to provoke the numerically superior French into open war, the English evacuated their women and children to nearby Nevis and, some 450-strong, sheltered behind the walls of their redoubt, Fort Charles, having sent a small boat to Barbados to plead for reinforcements.

  But open war was not long in coming. To help check the ambitions of Louis XIV, which included returning James II to the throne, England joined the ‘Grand Alliance’, declaring war on France in May 1689.33 On 18 July, before news of the declaration had reached the English American colonists, an 18-ship French fleet was spotted heading for St Kitts. Soon a 3,000-strong, well-armed force was marching on Fort Charles. Shortly afterwards, Sir Nathaniel Johnson voluntarily resigned and boarded a vessel for South Carolina,34 but not before nominating a new commander, Christopher Codrington, a man, he wrote to London from Antigua (now the seat of government of the English Leewards), ‘of great estate here and in Barbados’.

  The appointment, quickly confirmed by London, would last nine years and show Codrington at his very best, and his very worst. Then nearly 50, his extraordinary energy and skilful leadership would save the English Leewards and gain him a reputation as the most effective English military commander of the seventeenth century in the West Indies; his tactlessness and shameless greed would see him disgraced and his most progressive aims come to nothing.

  Whatever his private opinions, Codrington radiated confidence, writing to London on 31 July that the defences of Fort Charles were ‘so strongly built and backed by so vast a thickness of earth that there is no danger of a breach from their guns’. There was no way in for the French, he said, ‘so good is the spirit of the garrison’. Straight away he moved to disarm the Irish in Antigua, some 300 of them, lest they repeat the depredations of their countrymen in St Kitts; and in Nevis and Montserrat, too, potential troublemakers were imprisoned or deported. Then Codrington, using mainly his own vessels, rushed with all the men he could muster to Nevis in an attempt to draw the French away from the besieged fort on St Kitts. At the same time he sent off pleading letters to London for help: ‘We are not unprofitable appendages to the Crown’, he wrote. ‘We contribute as much and as heartily to enrich the royal coffers as any English subjects … these things entitle us to protection …’

  The spirit of the English defenders of Fort Charles was, in fact, far from good. The men were in dire need of food, clothing and arms, and the soldiers had not been properly paid for six years, while the planters were distracted by internal treachery and dissension. After holding out for three weeks, they surrendered on 5 August.

  The survivors were allowed to leave for Nevis, which was now becoming crowded, hungry and fractious with so many extra mouths to feed. Soon an epidemic broke out – likely to have been smallpox – which killed 500 whites and 200 enslaved Africans. The English in the Leewards started to panic. Attempted raids on Antigua by Caribs added to the sense of crisis. There was still no sign of an English fleet, even though Codrington assured everyone that it was expected daily, to ‘turn our mourning into joy’.

  Faced by a desperate situation, Codrington opted for bluff, carrying out a series of raids against the smaller French islands, largely financed out of his own pocket, while waiting for a force to arrive from England. St Martin, St Barts and Marie Galante were attacked, and Barbuda successfully defended after another joint attempt at takeover by its Irish inhabitants and a French force. To Codrington’s fury, Barbados – comparatively safe in its windward, isolated location – was proving very slow in providing help; but he knew enough about the self-interest of planters to surmise that many on the populous island would welcome the ruin of the Leewards and the consequent hike in the value of their own sugar crop.

  When at last a troop of soldiers came from Barbados, Codrington was compelled to use them to keep order in Nevis, whose people, he complained, were ‘most turbulent and ungovernable’, although he seems to have talked the Irish contingent into professing loyalty.35 Codrington was also losing patience with London. ‘We are greatly discouraged by the long neglect of us at home’, he complained, ‘it being seven months since one of these Islands was lost.’ ‘Had we a fleet to make us masters of the sea’, he went on, ‘two thousand soldiers from England would amply suffice to make us so on land in all the French Islands.’

  At last on Saturday 31 May 1690, the long-awaited fleet, with 13 warships as well as transports, dropped anchor at Antigua with military stores and a British regiment on board. Without delay Codrington prepared to take the offensive on a large scale, determined to drive the French out of the Caribbean for ever. Only the wretched state of the stores and personnel dampened his enthusiasm. ‘I have inspected the muskets and think them as bad as ever came to these parts’, he commented. He also preferred local, seasoned men, ‘fittest for marching and accustomed to rugged paths’, to the sickly soldiers from England, and used all of his charisma and energy to raise a force from Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat that soon numbered 2,300. Willoughby Byam, son of William, the former governor of Surinam and then Antigua, commanded 200 men from Antigua to be Codrington’s personal guard.

  On 19 June, the fleet set out for the recapture of St Kitts. They anchored in Frigate Bay. The French were ready, with more than 1,000 men in well-prepared trenches, but Codrington deployed his ships as a decoy while sending a force of 500 or so of his best men, ‘mostly natives’, to land at between two and three in the morning at an unguarded part of the coast below ‘an almost inaccessible hill’.

  There was, however, a path, according to one of the soldiers on the spot, ‘frequented by none but wild Goats’, and the men clambered forward in the darkness, ‘forced to use our Hands as well as our Feet in climbing up’, ‘pulling themselves forward by the bushes’. At the top they were met with a ‘Volly of about seven or eight Shot, from some Scouts there placed, (who immediately upon their firing retreated) which wounded our two brisk Commanders [including Byam, who was hit in the neck], one of which died of his Wounds soon after’. But the approach allowed the attackers to charge the French trenche
s from the rear, and as the defenders retreated, Codrington landed 600 men to attack from the front. After two hours’ fighting, the French were in full retreat as the English marched in a pincer movement on the French capital of Basseterre. A mile outside the town, there was another engagement, but soon the French ‘made all the heels they could’, some into the mountains, others to a fort in what had been the English part of the island. Having first ordered that all ‘Liquors’ be ‘secured in a convenient storehouse’, Codrington released his men to plunder the French town, while artillery was landed to reduce the fort into which the enemy had retreated.

  The fort was overlooked by high ground known as Brimstone Hill. On 4 July, Codrington reported to London that morale in his force was excellent and that he had managed to drag two guns of 2,400 lb up Brimstone Hill, and was now pouring fire into the fort, ‘riddling the houses like sieves’, while his fleet pounded the French from the sea, and sappers dug trenches to within pistol shot of the fort. ‘I have fully resolved’, he went on, ‘to find a grave in this Island or make it an entirely English Colony, which will be some reparation for lives lost and families ruined in the several wars.’

  On 14 July, the French surrendered. ‘The King and Queen’s healths were drank’, wrote an eye-witness, ‘and the great guns three times fired, three vollies being also made by the whole army.’ Codrington, in reporting the victory, urged London to press on with driving the French out of the West Indies, and started preparations for an attack on Martinique or Guadeloupe. He also warned against returning the formerly French part of St Kitts to its previous inhabitants. ‘No Englishmen will ever settle there again’, he wrote, ‘having been twice ruined by the French neighbours within twenty-two years’ and settlement on nearby Nevis would also be deterred. He also pointed out that he had ‘disbursed large sums for the public service and am ready still to do so cheerfully, not doubting of repayment from the King’.

  Codrington’s actions after the victory at St Kitts in part recall the best of his period of governorship of Barbados 20 years earlier. He was careful to control his troops, who were at one point set on pillaging everything, including the property of the dispossessed English settlers. Although many in the other islands would happily have seen St Kitts laid waste to raise the price of their own sugar, Codrington set about resettling the entire island. He urged the creation of a stable fiscal structure to pay for government, and the establishment of schools, churches and hospitals; furthermore, he reserved 15,000 acres for small farmers with 10 acres apiece so as to guarantee an adequate white militia and ‘middle class’. Invitations were sent to New York and New England for settlers to come.

  But there was another side to the story. Like so many victorious armies, the English quickly fell out over the division of the spoils, with Codrington himself earning the greatest criticism. Certainly, he was careful to lay out for himself a lavish St Kitts plantation of nearly 800 acres, manned by slaves taken from the French, as his ‘share’ of the plunder. For some, this was just reward for his vigorous and effective leadership during the campaign. But as Codrington pressed the islands to provide forces and provisions for his planned, and strategically sound, campaign to drive the French for ever from the Leewards, he encountered increasing resistance – no planter wanted the production of the French islands to swamp the English sugar market – and growing criticism of his own behaviour. As early as August 1690, he was referring in letters to ‘mutinous practices’ and ‘lies’ being told about him on Nevis. He had been too kind to the French, it was alleged, and had defrauded the army for his own profit.

  Codrington’s response was to write to London that he was being unjustly slandered. Rather than personally profiting, he said, the campaign had led to the neglect of his own interests, and great expense from his own pocket. He had found it impossible to please everyone, and his best efforts had been ‘repaid only by murmuring and discontent’.

  In spite of his fading popularity, Codrington did manage to raise a substantial force to attack the French in the spring of 1691. On 21 April, with Codrington himself in the vanguard, the English descended on Guadeloupe, supported by a naval force under Commodore Lawrence Wright. Carrying all before them, the English soon had the remnants of the French forces holed up in the island’s principal fort. Codrington called for reinforcements from Barbados to complete the conquest, but while waiting for their arrival, news came that a French fleet had appeared nearby. At this point the naval commander Wright took fright and withdrew his supporting fleet. Codrington was incensed, but had no option than to abandon the conquest of the island. Part of the failure was caused by the perennial problem of combined operations, that of mixed command of naval and land forces, but also to blame was the frank cowardice of Wright, for which he was arrested on his return to England.

  After the Guadeloupe debacle, the trickle of complaints against Codrington became a flood. Before the start of the war, Codrington was already the richest and most influential planter in the Leewards. Clearly this wealth and power, rather than satisfying him, instead increased his greed and his feeling that he was above the law of which he himself was now supposed to be the guardian. Even his right-hand man in the conquest of St Kitts now turned against him. In July 1691, Sir Timothy Thornhill, who had commanded the Barbados contingent of the army on St Kitts (and fought with great bravery), made a series of detailed charges against his commander-in-chief. ‘At the taking of St Christophers’, wrote Thorn-hill, Codrington had seized all stocks of sugar and promptly dispatched them for sale at the Dutch islands of St Thomas and Curaçao. Thornhill reminded him of the rules of the Navigation Acts and was told to ‘mind his own business’. The army was charged by Codrington for clothing that he then sold privately in Antigua. He also employed an agent (who subsequently denounced him) to round up runaway slaves, brand them with his mark, and secretly ship them, as well as further plunder, to his Antigua plantations. Even more shameless was the fact that all this was carried on in sloops for whose use in the national interest Codrington promptly charged the English government nearly £5,000. Anyone on the islands who stood up to him faced arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Now, wrote Thornhill, the soldiers of the Barbados regiment ‘would die sooner than serve under his command’. The failure at Guadeloupe, Thornhill alleged, was not just Wright’s fault; Codrington had ‘run off in distraction at midnight, leaving his mortar, shells and wounded men behind him’ and his ‘grasping and avaricious disposition [had] alienated officers and men’.

  Thornhill had his own agenda, of course. He wanted the post of governor for himself. And few of the most powerful Englishmen in the West Indies did not indulge in illegal trade. Thornhill accused Codrington also of ‘unseasonable devotion to the French ladies’. Certainly this licentiousness had become a great weakness of the Lieutenant-Governor, but, again, few restrained themselves who had the power to satisfy their appetites at will. Nonetheless, even disinterested English leaders in the Caribbean were now predicting that Codrington would have to go, ‘in consequence of the heavy complaint against him’. The 25-year-old conscientious idealist had, at 51, become utterly corrupted, crooked and tyrannical. But somehow he held on, bribing and bullying his way round his accusers (even, ironically, prosecuting people for violating the Navigation Acts), while writing self-congratulatory epistles to London.

  All the time, anxiety in the islands about the French threat was increasing. As Codrington himself wrote: ‘All turns on mastery of the sea.’ In January 1692, alarming reports were received in Antigua that a powerful French fleet had arrived at Martinique. In the same month an English fleet turned up at Barbados, and there was a brief skirmish between the two forces. Both then were forced to retreat from the Caribbean theatre, as was the pattern, when disease decimated their crews, who, fresh from Europe, had no immunity to yellow fever.

  For the rest of the year it was a stalemate, with the opposing naval forces effectively cancelling each other out. But in early 1693, what looked like a decisively superior Englis
h force of 13 men-of-war, three fire ships and 28 transports, capable of carrying 2,000 troops, dropped anchor at Barbados. In command was Sir Francis Wheeler. Using 1,500 English regulars and as many local men as could be raised, the orders were to conquer Martinique, Guadeloupe and the French settlements in Hispaniola – thereby wiping out the French in the Caribbean – before proceeding to New England to drive the enemy from Canada. With the fleet was a returner to the land of his birth for almost certainly the first time since leaving as a 12-year-old: Codrington’s son and heir, who would become the most famous of all the Codringtons, Christopher the third.

  Christopher Codrington the third was later described by Edmund Burke as ‘far the richest production and most shining ornament [Barbados] ever had’. An intelligent child, particularly in contrast to his unfortunate ‘idiot’ younger brother, he would from the moment he could speak have had the family’s slaves do his every bidding. ‘Children, in these West India Islands are, from their infancy, waited upon by Numbers of Slaves, who … are obliged to pay them unlimited Obedience’, reported a later writer on Barbados. Their ‘favourite Passions’, he went on, were ‘nourished with such indulgent Care’.

  There are hints, too, that he was indulged by his schoolmasters once he left Barbados to attend Dr Weadle’s private school at Enfield. (He was probably looked after in the holidays by the Gloucestershire Codringtons.) Nevertheless, he clearly had great academic ability, and finishing school, excelled himself at Christ Church, Oxford, at the time famous for its brilliant and exclusive circle of wits, into whose company Codrington was welcomed. At the university he studied the classics, philosophy, early Church history and contemporary European literature, while at the same time becoming an accomplished horseman and dancer and fluent in French, Spanish and Italian.