by Ben Hughes
The fleet stayed at Madeira for five days. While the sailors filled the ships’ water casks and cut wood under the watchful eyes of armed sentries, the masters of the merchantmen loaded their holds with Madeira’s most famous export. Both the rarer white and the longer-lasting red varietal fetched a good price in Jamaica: profits of 50 percent were commonplace. Its hold already packed with dry goods, the Antelope only had room for thirty pipes, each containing roughly one hundred and twelve gallons; Master Robinson of the George purchased sixty; while the smallest of the merchantmen bound for Jamaica, the eighty-ton pinks Adventure and Bertue, found space to load two hundred pipes apiece. Meanwhile, the officers and passengers went ashore to stretch their legs. Madeira had a pleasant climate and its hills were richly cultivated. There were abundant vineyards; apple, pear, fig, orange, walnut, apricot, peach, pomegranate, and lemon trees; and rambling plantations of banana, sugarcane, and plantain. The town of Funchal boasted five hundred whitewashed houses, a nunnery of the Order of Saint Clara, and two churches, as well as the governor’s house at which Kendall and Inchiquin were received with “extreme civility.” Confined to their ships, the soldiers of the Duke of Bolton’s Regiment continued to suffer. “We are still . . . sickly,” Governor Kendall wrote on April 4, “and have buried twelve [more] men since we left Plymouth.” Six days later HMS Mary completed its watering and set sail for Barbados. In company were most of the merchantmen and all of the men of war that had left Plymouth with the exception of the fifth-rate HMS Guernsey. With his ship badly damaged in the storm, Captain Edward Oakely had called in at Cadiz for repairs before sailing on to Madeira. By the time Oakley arrived at Funchal, Admiral Wright had already sailed.17
The remainder of the voyage to Barbados was uneventful. As the ships cut their way westward, the temperature and humidity climbed and the sun straightened in the sky. The sailors caught the dolphins that played about the ships’ wakes with ten-foot-long harpoons tipped with barbed arrowheads; flying fish and small whales were spotted. On April 11, the Coronation Day of William and Mary was celebrated, and the fleet reached the doldrums six days later. The wind fell away and the temperature soared. Occasional showers did little to ease the men’s torment. Their sails limp, the ships averaged less than twenty miles a day. Several sharks were spotted. Hoisting heavy hooks overboard baited with salt beef, the sailors waited for them to bite, allowed them to run until exhausted, then hauled them aboard to add variety to the mundane fare doled out by the cooks. By April 24 the winds returned, on April 30 the Mary covered one hundred and twenty miles, and at 1 P.M. on May 10, the rocky east coast of Barbados was spotted. The following afternoon, passing between numerous “boats plying to and fro,” the fleet dropped anchor in Carlisle Bay in twenty-two fathoms.18
SETTLED IN 1627 by a syndicate headed by Sir William Courteen, a wealthy Anglo-Dutch merchant, Barbados is a tiny island of a little over one hundred and sixty square miles. The colony had suffered from mismanagement in its early years. When Courteen’s right to colonize the island was challenged by the Earl of Carlisle, a rival for Courteen’s position as de facto governor, civil war erupted: agents on both sides were banished and one governor was executed before Carlisle’s men gained the upper hand. The earl proved to be the first of a long line of disinterested absentee landlords. Real power rested in the hands of the governor, Henry Hawley, a petty despot who scraped together a living by levying a poll tax. The overwhelming majority of the initial settlers were single, young, and male. Many were indentured servants. Lured by the thrill and adventure of a new beginning, they were bound into servitude for five years in exchange for their passage out and the promise of a ten-acre plot on the expiration of their indenture. Most of the land was distributed in smallholdings of between thirty and fifty acres, although a few sizable estates of up to six hundred acres were acquired. Tobacco, planted in the rich tropical soils cleared of the cloying vegetation and “massive” trees which originally covered the island, was the principal crop. The work was labor intensive. Disease took a heavy toll and the tobacco was “earthy and worthless.” Exports “could give them little or no return from England, or elsewhere.”19
The island’s fortunes improved in mid-century. After a failed experiment growing cotton and some success with the dye woods indigo and fustic, in 1640 a wave of Dutch settlers forced out of Brazil by the Portuguese arrived at Barbados and taught the English how to raise and process sugarcane. The new crop caught on, and although progress was retarded by the Civil War, by 1660 Barbados was dominated by “White Gold.” Black slaves replaced white servants; smallholdings were amalgamated into large estates by a rising plantocracy of two hundred individuals. The climate and soil proved perfect and the new product flooded into the European market. What had previously been a luxury item farmed on a small scale in the Mediterranean became a staple used to sweeten tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages and to make a dizzying array of cakes and pastries. From the trading hubs of London and Amsterdam the craze spread and the Barbadian economy boomed. Land prices soared from ten shillings per acre in 1640 to twenty pounds per acre after the Restoration. Soon the entire island was deforested. With sugar monoculture supreme, food had to be imported from the North American colonies while demand for labor fueled dealings in West African slaves. The era of triangular trade had begun.
By the time of Inchiquin and Kendall’s arrival, Barbados had entered a third phase. With no more land available, the once-rich soil was becoming exhausted. Sugar prices had fallen in Europe due to competition from the Portuguese in Brazil; the newly founded English colonies of Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, and Jamaica; and the French sugar islands of Martinique, St. Lucia, and Guadeloupe. Although the profits of the 1660s had dwindled, the crop remained lucrative: the plantocracy was well established and its members among the wealthiest citizens in the empire. The island had a population of seventy thousand: twenty thousand whites, fifty thousand African slaves, and a handful of their mulatto progeny. No forest remained aside from a few clumps clinging to the cliffs of the east coast, exposed to occasional storms which howled in from the Atlantic. Row upon row of eight-foot-high sugarcane covered the hills broken only by the sugar mills, boiling houses, and ostentatious great houses of the elite. The capital, Bridgetown, stood in the sheltered southwest corner of the island, on the shore of Carlisle Bay. Over a league across, the bay was capable of harboring five hundred sail and was dominated by the cannon of the capital’s twin forts and accompanying batteries. Bridgetown’s streets ran parallel to the sea and were lined with fine houses, a string of shops, and “divers storehouses.” The town played host to the offices of the Royal African Company, whose principal agent, Colonel Edwin Stede, also served as deputy governor. In the low ground beyond the town limits was a pestilent bog. Fed by annual spring tides, it was home to swarms of malarial mosquitoes. As Richard Ligon, a visitor to Barbados in 1673, remarked, “‘[it] vent[ed] out so loathsome a savour, as cannot but breed ill blood, and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.”20
Admiral Wright and Governors Kendall and Inchiquin went ashore at 10 A.M. on the morning of May 11, 1690. It was a beautiful day. The trades blew in from the east and the sun hung in an azure blue sky. As the boats departed, HMS Mary fired a 22-gun salute, answered by the guns of forts James and Willoughby. Kendall found Bridgetown “in a lamentable condition.” With no men of war to protect it, the town had suffered the indignity of blockade by a single French ship. As well as taking all in-bound merchantmen at its leisure, the vessel, which had since departed on the approach of the English fleet, had ensured that no provisions had been landed for some time. While the rich had barely tightened their belts, the poor had struggled and the island’s slaves were on the verge of starvation. To make matters worse, “a terrible earthquake” had struck on April 5. As well as destroying several buildings and killing a number of the inhabitants of the nearby English colony of Antigua, the reverberations had caused panic throughout the region. “For
a month afterwards,” Sir Christopher Coddrington, the English commander in chief in the Caribbean, noted, there were “almost daily shakes, and even now there passes not a week without some tremblings.”21
In contrast to their English opponents, who lacked uniforms, arms, ammunition, training, and discipline, the French had reacted swiftly to the outbreak of war in the Caribbean. After capturing the Dutch island of St. Eustatius in early April 1689, the governor general of French possessions in the Caribbean, the Comte de Blénac, had turned his attention to the English colony of St. Kitts. With the aid of the Irish residents, who turned against their English overlords, and bolstered by the presence of the much-feared privateer, Jean-Baptiste du Casse, the French took the island swiftly. The surrender was signed on August 15, 1689. In the first months of 1690 the situation stabilized. Sir Christopher Coddrington patched together an impromptu fleet of armed merchantmen and managed to quell the threat of further Irish rebellion on the islands of Montserrat and Nevis, as well as driving off a would-be invasion fleet hovering off the tiny colony of Barbuda. Coddrington then took the offensive. A force of eight hundred Barbadian volunteers under Sir Thomas Thorngill seized the undefended French possession of St. Bartholomew, but were then blockaded by du Casse when they attacked the nearby island of St. Martin. On the verge of surrender, Thorngill was rescued in February 1690 by a ragged gang of privateers led by Captain Thomas Hewetson, “a brutal scoundrel” who would make a considerable fortune in the Caribbean over the next two years by hiring out his services to the highest bidder. Since then, the French had failed to press their advantage. With the arrival of Admiral Wright’s fleet and the five hundred or so soldiers of the Duke of Bolton’s Regiment well enough to fight, Coddrington hoped to turn the tide against them.22
INCHIQUIN SPENT a little over a week at Bridgetown. Having recovered from the ravages of the Atlantic crossing and discussed the future cooperation of Barbados and Jamaica in the struggle against the French, on May 20 he transferred his retinue to the Swan and set out for Port Royal to take up his new post. Accompanying the frigate were eleven of the merchantmen which had sailed from Plymouth with Wright’s fleet back in March. Each having lost at least one crew member to accident or disease on the outward voyage, all had recruited new hands at Barbados. The Swan had also lost several crewmen, including one Thomas Gee who had deserted on the very day of departure. Also absent was Alan Mullen, the colorful scientist whose tales of ill-fated love affairs and elephant autopsy had no doubt enlivened the voyage. Mullen had succumbed to the “effects of intoxication” soon after landing at Barbados, leaving James Harlow the sole representative of Sir James Rawdon’s scientific expedition to Jamaica.23
Joining the Jamaica fleet was the Lion, a privateer of 50 guns captained by Thomas Hewetson, the “brutal scoundrel” who had rescued Sir Thomas Thorngill’s men from the French at St. Martin. Having raised over £50,000 in England from several prominent backers, including the Earl of Clare and viscounts Longeirle and Falkland, in 1688 Hewetson had purchased four ships: the Lion, the Albemarle, the Palermatan, and the Hunter, which he had fitted out for a voyage of three years. Promising his investors a sound return, Hewetson left England in September 1688 for the Pacific, intending to make his fortune from trade and wreck salvage and with a vague idea of establishing a colony in southern Chile, home to the indigenous Mapuche and still unconquered by Spain. Willful and proud with a cruel streak in his nature, Hewetson proved an unsuitable commander and the expedition met with disaster. Unable to beat his way through the Straits of Magellan, in late 1688 Hewetson decided to cut his losses and turned back north for the Caribbean. The captains of the other three ships promptly lost faith in their commander and went their separate ways. The Albemarle broke convoy off the coast of Brazil and headed for the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean where it loaded with sugar and returned to London, the Hunter blew up in Bridgetown Roads, and the captain of the Palermatan hired his ship out to Governor Coddrington at Barbados. Left without a fleet to command, Hewetson also headed for Barbados after resupplying and refitting on the coast of Tobago. At Bridgetown he was awarded a privateer commission by Coddrington. After gathering a new fleet of three ships, two sloops, and more than four hundred men, among whom was the soon to be infamous William Kidd, Hewetson spent five days plundering the tiny French outpost of Marie Galante before sailing to Nevis and St. Martin. Hewetson then returned to Bridgetown and was at somewhat of a loose end until the arrival of Inchiquin’s fleet provided exactly the opportunity he had been looking for. With the outbreak of war against France, Santiago Castillo, the asiento agent who had boarded the fleet at Plymouth, needed a vessel to transship the slaves he intended to purchase from the Royal African Company’s agents at Port Royal. Heavily armed and with a capacious hold, the Lion was perfect. Castillo and Hewetson agreed to terms and the Lion joined the convoy for Jamaica.24
THE ROUTE FROM Barbados to Port Royal was a well-traveled one. In the days before longitude could be ascertained with any degree of accuracy, ships sailed within sight of land whenever possible. A day’s voyage from Bridgetown were the French possessions of St. Lucia and Martinique. Originally settled by Cardinal Richelieu’s short-lived Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique in 1635 and 1643, respectively, by 1690 both were dominated by sugar plantations worked with slave labor. A few days later, the ships skirted the shores of Dominica, the first of the Leewards, and one of just two islands in the Caribbean remaining under Carib control. Once spread over the majority of the region, the Caribs were a warlike people whose raiding parties had terrorized the other indigenous cultures, the Tainos and Arawaks, but had subsequently suffered at the hands of the Europeans. Disease and slave raiding had greatly reduced their numbers, and by the late seventeenth century the only other Carib stronghold remaining was St. Vincent, like Dominica a mountainous island whose inhospitable terrain had proved prohibitive to European settlement.
After skirting Dominica, the fleet passed Guadeloupe, another sugar-producing French colony, before sighting the diminutive island of Montserrat. A rocky atoll whose capital, Plymouth, was built at the foot of a volcano which rose abruptly out of the sea, Montserrat’s mostly Irish, Roman Catholic inhabitants were smallholders who grew tobacco, a crop of superior quality to that attempted at Barbados due to the island’s volcanic soils. As a consequence of their faith and history of persecution, the islanders were of doubtful loyalty to the English crown in the war against their French coreligionists. Soon after they left Montserrat, the island of Nevis was spotted. Another English possession, Nevis had 2,500 inhabitants, who were dedicated to sugar production. The island also served as the Royal African Company’s headquarters for the Leeward Islands. Leaving Nevis behind, the fleet navigated round the war torn island of St. Kitts, discernible by “a ridge of Hills run[ning] . . . through the middle, lying East and West,” before passing St. Eustatius, a colony governed by the Dutch West India Company whose chief business was the transshipment of African slaves and European goods to the neighboring French and English colonies. Next, St. Croix, another French sugar island, came into view, after which the Swan’s lookouts sighted Puerto Rico: a Spanish colony and the largest Caribbean island that Inchiquin and his fellow passengers had seen so far. Settled by Juan Ponce de León in 1508, Puerto Rico was one of the oldest colonial possessions of any nation in the region. The repartimiento and later the encomienda systems had seen the indigenous Tainos serve as chattels to their Spanish overlords in the gold mines of the interior. Added to the casualties endured in the reprisals which followed several failed uprisings, widespread suicide, and endemic disease, these toils decimated the population to such an extent that Taino culture had all but disappeared from the island just fifty years after the Spaniards’ arrival. From 1528 to 1655, the island had witnessed a series of French, English, and Dutch attempts at conquest. All had ended in failure and while Puerto Rico, in common with many of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean, remained economically backward compared to the colonies
of its European rivals, militarily the colony was relatively strong.
A day’s sail beyond Puerto Rico, the fleet reached the tiny island of Mona, then skirted Hispaniola, an island divided between French and Spanish rule. Founded in 1496, the Spanish capital of Santo Domingo was the oldest European settlement in the Caribbean. French colonization had only begun in 1665. Although resisted by the Spanish, by 1690 the French had established themselves in the western third of the island. The day after passing Santo Domingo, Inchiquin’s fleet passed the Ile de Vache. Known to the English as Cow Island, this tiny islet and the nearby settlement of Petit Guavos were notorious havens for pirates and privateers. Of various nationalities, these men paid token allegiance to the French, who would take advantage of the outbreak of the Nine Years’ War to entice the privateers to raid the poorly defended plantations of Jamaica, which lay just over one hundred miles to the west.25
