Indeed, the biggest killers were malaria and yellow fever, both carried by mosquitoes that now thrived as never before. Forest clearances to grow sugar had reduced the bird population that ate the insects; discarded clay pots needed for the sugar industry provided an ideal breeding ground for the yellow-fever-carrying mosquito Aëdes aegypti, which, with its sweet tooth, gorged itself on sugar. Both Port Royal and Kingston had nearby swamps, which provided breeding grounds for the Anopheles, malaria-carrying mosquito.
As in Barbados a generation earlier, the yellow fever virus thrived because it found in Jamaica a European population with no immunity. This was exacerbated by the arrival during the war – in the form of soldiers and sailors – of large numbers of fresh un-immune victims.* A report to London in 1702 confirmed that ‘the mortality reigns chiefly over the new-comers’. In addition, the white population was hemmed in by the effective maroon control of the island’s hinterland. Thus some 3,000 whites died during the epidemic, reducing Jamaica’s white population to 7,000 by 1700, where it remained for the next decade, further worsening the proportion of whites to black slaves, whose population continued to grow sharply, reaching 42,000 by 1700. In fact, it was only the arrival of so many Africans, most of whom had some immunity to yellow fever, that eventually checked the disease. The only consolation for Jamaicans was that in 1701–2, their enemies in the nearby islands were suffering just as much, as war with France loomed again.
17
CODRINGTON THE YOUNGER IN THE WEST INDIES
‘A British Muse disdains
Lo! Torture racks, whips, famine, gibbets, chains,
Rise on my mind, appall my tear-stain’d eye,
Attract my rage, and draw a soul-felt sigh:
I blush, I shudder at the bloody theme.’
Anon, ‘Jamaica: A Poem in Three Parts’
Amongst the many accusations levelled against Christopher Codrington senior had been that he was uneducated and inexperienced as a military commander. Neither of these could be said of his son Christopher the Younger, appointed as Lieutenant-General of the Leeward Islands in February 1699, in recognition of his service in Flanders during the war. On paper he was an ideal man to govern this part of the empire: at 31, old enough to be able to manage his appetites, but young enough to be uncynical and energetic; of independent means, so not under the power of any assembly for his income; knowledgeable about the West Indies and born there, but not corrupted by long residence in the tropics; highly educated, trained in the law and multilingual, but also a battle-proven soldier.
Codrington also had ambitions to reform what had shocked him so much on his brief visit to the islands seven years earlier – the brutal treatment of the black slaves. (Like all other seventeenth-century Englishmen, the idea that slavery itself was wrong did not occur to him). He aimed, he wrote while still in England, ‘to endeavour to get a law restraining inhuman severities and punishing the wilful killing of Indians and Negroes with death’. But at the same time, he knew enough about the West Indies to be realistic about what would actually be possible, that he would ‘certainly be opposed by all the planters,’ if he tried to pass a law protecting the slaves’ ‘limbs and lives’. Nonetheless, he wrote, ‘I will certainly recommend something of the kind’, and failing that, at least make sure his own slaves were properly fed. He was also determined to promote the baptising of the slaves, but again was realistic enough to point out that the necessary education was not achievable with the islands’ ‘few and ill-qualified clergymen’, but would require a large influx of clergy from England ‘under vows of poverty and obedience’. Although he knew that this, too, would be fiercely opposed by the planters, he wrote: ‘Nothing will hinder me from promoting boldly and impartially a design so pleasing to God and truly beneficial to my fellow-creatures.’
The issue of slavery aside, it is easy with hindsight to detect from the beginning weaknesses that would be his undoing. Codrington flatly refused to travel out to take up his new position until the Treasury paid up the wages owed to his father. He was well within his rights, of course, but this does betray a certain hauteur and sense of entitlement; more practically, he wrote to the Lords of Plantations in February 1700 that he had suffered ‘a long fit of sickness’ (he had been seriously ill since the previous November). As we have seen, survival in the West Indies required almost supernatural physical hardiness. If Codrington was poorly in England, it did not bode well for his sojourn in the deadly tropics.
For a year and a half Codrington wrangled with the Treasury, and in the meantime he continued to mix with the wits of Drury Lane, writing verses for the theatre and engaging in entertaining literary feuds. Having inherited his father’s fortune, he also took the opportunity to purchase Dodington Hall in Gloucestershire from Samuel Codrington, a distant cousin, thereby acquiring amongst his London circle the nickname ‘the dapper squire’.
At last he set sail for the West Indies, leaving Gravesend on 17 August 1700. His hopes were to put the family plantations in order, bring good government to the islands, win glory against the French, and then return as quickly as possible to England to divide his time between his glittering London circle and his new estate at Dodington.
He arrived at the Leewards in September 1700 to be met by a scene of confusion. Everyone, it seemed, was engaged in illegal trade in defiance of the Navigation Acts. The French, re-established on St Kitts, were a constant source of worry and threat. Everywhere there was demoralisation and corruption.
Continual war, or threat of war, had meant that there was little point in building smart houses like those now seen in Barbados. In 1650 the churches in St Kitts had been ‘very fair … well furnish’d within with Pulpits, and Seats, or excellent Joyners work, of precious wood’. But the colonists had tired of rebuilding them after every war and so by Codrington the Younger’s time, they were primitive and cheap, valued at only £250. Even the richest man in St Kitts lived in a house only 90 by 16 feet, with four rooms. Many smaller farmers lived in flimsy huts built of little more than cane trash. There were few luxuries and almost no books. It was a long way from All Souls, Oxford.
Codrington established his headquarters at Antigua and then toured the islands, everywhere receiving flattering, what he called ‘too fulsome’, addresses. At once, he set about reforming the chaotic judicial system. At Nevis, for example, it was said he had ‘dispatcht more business and done more justice in three weeks than had been done in thirty years before’. According to a contemporary, justice on the islands was characterised by ‘universal corruption’; ‘if a man goes over never so honest to the Plantations, yet the very air does change him in a short time’. As well as corrupt, the system was inefficient: each tiny island had its own peculiar mode of procedure, and there was a chronic shortage of competent personnel. Codrington made standardising the islands’ laws one of his first priorities.
He also quickly noticed the great weakness caused by the disappearance of poor whites from the islands, and introduced measures to distribute land in parcels of 10 acres ‘for the Encouragement of poor settlers’. This included a tax on the great swathes of land that had been bought up through ‘the Avarice of some Men’ and left undeveloped. (Ironically this included his own inheritance: his father had purchased more than 500 acres in St Mary, Antigua and done nothing with it.) ‘I have refused all presents, public and private’, Codrington wrote to London, ‘I have defended the poor against ye rich, and done justice to servants against their masters.’38
Codrington also attempted to take on the endemic illegal trading, in reality an impossible task, and one that only won him enemies. As Codrington pointed out to his superiors, in nine out of ten cases local officials, poorly paid if paid at all, supplemented their income by ‘winking’ at clandestine trade. To be an honest governor, he calculated, was costing him £1,500 a year. Indeed, soon the first signs of discouragement become evident. ‘I’m sure if your Lordships knew all the folly and Knavery I have to struggle with, you would pity me’, he r
eported back to his superiors in May 1701. ‘There is so much Ignorance, laziness and Corruption.’39 Soldiers that he had settled with land in Antigua quickly proved to be ‘idle and vagrant fellows’. Efforts at persuading the islands to cooperate with each other on defence or justice were getting nowhere. And to his great fury, a serious accusation from an old enemy of his father about his behaviour – that he had improperly interfered in a criminal trial for his own gain – had been put before the Council of Trade back home. (This charge, of which, after much delay, Codrington would be entirely cleared, baffled George Larkin, a commissioner for the Board of Trade visiting the West Indies, who wrote that Codrington was ‘the only Governor that I have met withall since my coming into America that can be called a Good Governor’.)
There was an element in Codrington that we would probably now call manic depression. Just as he had two contrasting sides to his character – the reflective man of learning and the man of action – so he seemed to have veered between energetic enthusiasm and despondent lethargy. In many ways his father had been the same. A later perceptive witness of the West Indian ‘planter type’ would notice this trait as a characteristic of the typical sugar baron: ‘his spirits will sometimes lead him to the highest flights of extravagance, yet will reflection often sink him to the lowest despair. His disposition is, in some instances, not unlike that of a Frenchman, who is as easily elevated, as soon depressed.’
Furthermore, the task to which, Codrington had written, he was ‘most inclined’, the improvement of justice for the slaves, also seems to have run into trouble. On 27 December 1701 occurred the lurid murder of a planter, a Major Martin, who owned 500 acres and 114 slaves, and, like the Byams, had come to Antigua from Surinam in 1667. At about eight o’clock in the morning, some 15 of his slaves entered his bedroom and fell on him with knives and bills in the presence of his wife. Despite his wife’s gallant intervention, Martin was killed, the assailants cutting off his head, ‘which we afterwards took up in the grass, where they had washed it with rum and triumphed over it’. Codrington’s explanation to London of the event is extraordinary: although he wrote that ‘we have lost a very useful man in Maj. Martin’, in effect he blamed the planter for his own murder, for Martin, he wrote, was ‘guilty of some unusual act of severity or rather some indignity towards ye Corramantees’.
Thus it is surprising that the ‘Act for the better Government of Slaves and free Negroes’, passed in Antigua on Codrington’s watch the following June, did not reflect this sympathy, nor did it include measures, as per the Governor’s stated earlier ambition, for ‘restraining inhuman severities and punishing the wilful killing of Indians and Negroes’. Rather, the Act followed almost exactly the brutal rules and punishments of the Barbados code of 1661, including the latitude for just two Justices of Peace to sentence a slave to death. It was also clearly stated that ‘if a slave lose life or Limb by Punishment for a crime, no person shall be liable to the law’. The only hint of amelioration came with the revoking of an earlier Act that stipulated the death sentence for a runaway of more than three months, which was ‘sometimes found too severe, by reason of new ignorant slaves’. (Nonetheless a capital punishment could still be imposed ‘at the Discretion of two Justices of the Peace’.)
It is impossible to say exactly why Codrington’s ambition to protect the slaves came to nothing. Perhaps the assembly dug its heels in; maybe the whites had taken fright at the murder of Major Martin. Or maybe Codrington, in a very short time, came to understand the brutal realities of the garrison society that slavery had created, where violence and fear were crucial weapons to protect the numerically inferior planters. Perhaps, like so many others, his journey from England to the West Indian empire involved entering a different moral universe.
To be fair, he also had his hands full preparing the woefully ill-equipped islands for what seemed like the inevitable resumption of war with imperial rival France. Codrington, who now held the rank of general, correctly identified St Kitts, still uneasily divided between English and French, as key: ‘The first blow must be struck here’, he wrote in late 1701. On his first visit he found the planters too busy quarrelling amongst themselves to have taken defensive measures, and not a single pound of gunpowder on the island, the little there had been having been fired by the Lieutenant-Governor, Colonel Norton, ‘When He and His Council and Assembly after falling out got drunk together and grew Friends agen’.
Codrington appealed to Barbados for help, but apart from a few barrels of gunpowder got nothing. As he reported to London, ‘Barbadoes has noe inclination to serve or save these Islands. Nor have one of these Ilands to help Another; because if a Sugar Iland is lost, So much ye les of ye Commodity is made, and consequently ye price is rais’d.’ Appeals to Nevis and Antigua were similarly unsuccessful, and Montserrat, containing mostly Irish Roman Catholics, also refused to help. In fact, the rumours were that the Irish were preparing to hand the island over to the French.
Undeterred, Codrington spent most of his time in St Kitts, drilling, organising, repairing forts and above all inspiring. ‘I have done all yt it wd. have been possible for any to have done in ye same circumstances’, he declared. ‘I can safely tell you I have been no onely General but Engineer, Serjt. and Corporall.’
Considering the circumstances, Codrington did a commendable job preparing for the war. As the French arrived in force, still in command of the sea, he rejected their offer of neutrality for the English at St Kitts, telling them that ‘the English would take care to meet their Enemys with their Eyes open and their Swords in their hands’. In late 1701, as both sides made preparations for the coming conflict, Codrington met Father Labat, the French priest-spy-military-engineer, at a dinner in St Kitts. Labat, who would distinguish himself in the battle to come, left a fascinating account of the encounter, which gives us a rare eye-witness glimpse of the younger Codrington at this time.
Codrington arrived at the home of an English planter with a large entourage, which included a number of trumpeters, who signalled his advent with a loud blast. Among those at the dinner party was a M. Lambert, a prominent French privateer. Lambert, who, according to Labat, ‘had very nearly captured the General one night in a raid’, during Codrington’s previous visit back in 1693, was treated to some good-natured ribbing by Codrington, who ‘was very pleased to have this opportunity to make his peace with him, as he had wished every possible ill to befall him in the last war for spoiling his sleep so often’.
The debonair banter continued. Codrington gave his opinion that war would soon be declared, and ‘that then he would see himself master of all St Kitts’, Labat wrote. ‘I smiled and told him that such a conquest was unworthy of him and I believed that he was really thinking of Martinique. “No, no,” he said, “that is too much of a mouthful to start with. I mean to seize the French quarters of St Kitts first, and then I will pay you a visit in Guadeloupe.”’
Labat was impressed that Codrington spoke fluent French throughout, and declared the general ‘far more sober than are most of his nation as a rule’. Beneath the bonhomie, both sides attempted to prise information from the other. ‘General Codrington asked a hundred questions about my voyage to San Domingo’, says Labat, ‘and about many other things. But he spoke so quickly that he asked two or three questions before I had time to answer.’ However charming Labat found Codrington, he added an interesting criticism: ‘I could not help observing how very vain are the English, and in what little esteem they hold other nations’.
Certainly Codrington’s entourage was revealing of a man with a very high opinion of his own grandeur and position. When he left, ‘two trumpeters rode in front of him and he was accompanied by eight persons who appeared to be servants’. He also had a chaplain and a soldier, a major general, in his party. ‘Nine or ten negroes ran in front of the trumpeters although their horses always travel at a canter’, says Labat. ‘I felt sorry for a small negro about fifteen years old who was being taught to be a runner. He only wore a pair of pa
nts without a seat, but was made to take off even this garment and run naked in front of everyone. He was followed by a negro with a whip which was applied every time he came within range.’
Not all of Codrington’s confidence was bravado. When he received orders to attack the French in St Kitts in the event of war, he replied to London with a scheme for capturing all of the French islands. And at last he managed to line up some militia fighters from Nevis and Antigua to be ready to reinforce the English on St Kitts. During the spring, everyone waited. Out at sea, warships stopped vessels from Europe to see if war had begun.
The Sugar Barons Page 26
