by Ben Hughes
ON INCHIQUIN’S ARRIVAL, Port Royal had a population of 6,500. A little over half were white: 1,500 men, 1,400 women and 1,000 children.28 Although the majority of the remainder were enslaved Africans, there was also a smattering of free mulattoes and blacks. The former were largely the manumitted offspring of white fathers, the latter were all that remained of the community of Spanish-speaking maroons who had allied themselves to the English in the aftermath of the invasion of 1655.29 Port Royal’s slaves were mainly domestics. As such they were relatively better off than their peers on the plantations. Most were from Africa, but a growing minority were Jamaican-born creoles. There were also a small number of mulattoes and several Indians from the Mosquito Coast, the wilds of Florida, or the North American colonies, who had been enslaved after being captured in war. Although notorious for their propensity to commit suicide when faced with the monotonous hard work of the plantations, male Indian slaves were sought after for their expertise at hunting and fishing, while the women were valued for their ability to turn the ubiquitous yet highly poisonous cassava root into a nourishing flour with which to make bread.30 Among the Indians resident in Port Royal on Inchiquin’s arrival was a boy named Jack Straw, who was valued at £12 and owned by William Turner; Cupid, a boy worth £20 belonging to Thomas Gunn, a Quaker cooper who had been fined five shillings for his refusal to bear arms with the militia in 1687; and Andrew, an Indian man valued at £20 who was owned by John Griffin, a former pirate turned wreck salvager and legally sanctioned privateer.31
Port Royal’s female slaves were cooks, cleaners, and concubines. Many of the men were liveried personal servants. Decked up in garish regalia, their chief task was to boost their master’s prestige. Other Port Royal slaves worked as artisans in cottage industries, served in shops or taverns, or worked as merchants’ assistants.32 It seems likely that some of the fifty-four slaves belonging to John Willmaott, a Quaker shoemaker, helped their master with his trade. John Pike, another of the town’s resident Quakers and a joiner by profession, owned fourteen. The most skilled slaves were of considerable value and may even have commanded some respect from their masters. While £20 to £26 was typically paid for a healthy male slave straight off the ships from Africa, Mino, “a negroe cooper” belonging to John Phillips, a Port Royal merchant, was valued at £50 “with his tooles,” and Pompey, another slave belonging to Phillips, was worth £60.33
Port Royal’s white population was diverse. At the bottom of the social standings were the indentured servants. In exchange for their passage to Jamaica and board, clothing, and lodging, they were bonded to their masters for a period of between four and ten years. Though unpaid and frequently punished, they were often awarded, on the expiration of their contracts, a small plot of land, a cash bonus, or a parcel of colonial trade goods. It has been estimated that in the 1670s indentured servants were arriving in Jamaica at the rate of three hundred per year. Most merely hoped to improve their economic prospects, the more adventurous sought to escape a lack of opportunity at home; others were running from tiresome or abusive apprenticeships or the law. The majority were young single males from ten to twenty-four years of age. About a third came from agricultural backgrounds. Others were artisans, tradesmen, or unskilled laborers. There was also a smattering of professionals and young gentlemen fallen on hard times. Many, especially the children, had been tricked into signing on by unscrupulous “spiriters” who worked the poorer districts of London and the other large cities of England, Ireland, and Scotland, preying on “all the idle, lazie, simple people they . . . [could] entice.” Once lured into holding houses near the docks with sweets or alcohol, they were detained for up to a month, before being bundled aboard ships bound for the Americas.34
Details of the lives of Jamaica’s indentured servants are sparse. Most were employed in the plantations of the interior where they worked as overseers and served as a white counterbalance to the preponderance of potentially rebellious black slaves. Those who resided in Port Royal worked as domestic servants, housekeepers, and cooks.35 Some female indentured servants were employed in “low class drinking establishments.” Others worked as prostitutes.36 A census conducted in Port Royal in 1680 revealed that a certain John Starr lived with twenty-one white women and two blacks, making it likely that he owned the largest whorehouse in town.37 Some of Port Royal’s prostitutes even earned considerable notoriety, none more so than Mary Carleton, known as “the German Princess.” Born in Canterbury around 1634, Carleton was charged yet acquitted of bigamy in 1663, then briefly took to the stage before being arrested for theft and sentenced to transportation for life to Jamaica in 1671. There she wrote News from Jamaica in a letter from Port Royal, to her fellow collegiates and friends in Newgate. “A Stout frigate she was,” recorded one contemporary, “or else she would never have endured so many batteries and assaults . . . but as common as a barber’s chair: no sooner was one out, but another was in. [She was] cunning, crafty, subtle, and hot in pursuit of her intended designs.” Carleton’s tale ended in tragedy. Arrested for theft on her return to London, she swung from the hangman’s noose at Tyburn in 1673.38
Port Royal’s male indentured servants were sometimes apprenticed to craftsmen and manufacturers. Andrew Orgill, a planter turned Council member who owned properties in St. Mary’s Parish on the north coast as well as in Port Royal, had six white servants in 1685. Most were men whose terms would expire before 1690, but one, a “Boy” named Christopher Gibbons, whose indenture had cost Orgill £8, still had nine years and two months left to serve when the record was taken. If he had not succumbed to disease, signed up on board a passing merchantman, or been pressed onto one of their Majesties’ ships, it is possible that Gibbons was among the crowd on the quayside who witnessed Inchiquin’s arrival on May 31.39
Some of Jamaica’s indentured servants were convicted criminals, political prisoners, and religious dissidents. With no means to hold them in England, transportation to the colonies was an attractive alternative: as well as ridding England of undesirables, it also provided a source of cheap labor for the plantations while acting as a counterbalance to the ever-increasing number of African slaves. In the 1660s and 1670s about one hundred Quakers were forcibly transported to the Americas and eight hundred Scottish Covenanters were sent between 1660 and 1688, the majority in the aftermaths of the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679 and the ill-fated Argyll Rising of 1685. Many were shipped to Jamaica by John Ewing, an Edinburgh merchant.40 Among them was William Marshall, an Edinburgh smith, who wrote a letter explaining that the voyage from Leith to Port Royal had taken twelve weeks and that he and his fellow transportees were sold on arrival for £15 each. Several ended up working as overseers in the plantations. Others remained in town.41
Another group transported to Jamaica en masse were the Monmouth rebels. Seeking to place Charles II’s illegitimate son on the throne in 1685 in lieu of the Catholic James II, they had been defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor. The Duke of Monmouth was executed along with one hundred and fifty of his followers. Eight hundred and fifty others were sentenced to ten years’ indenture in the Americas, of which two hundred and thirty arrived at Port Royal.42 Among them was a Somerset carpenter and dissenting preacher named John Coad, who later published an account of his experiences. Taken to London in October 1685, Coad was bundled aboard the Jamaica Merchant along with one hundred others. Conditions aboard were comparable to those on the slave ships running the Middle Passage. Locked “under deck in a very small room where . . . [they] could not lay . . . down without lying upon one upon another,” twenty-two died in transit. At Port Royal, the rest were auctioned and distributed around the island. Those who survived the initial seasoning period found good work in the plantations. Coad was sold to Colonel Samuel Bach, a leading planter. Freed after four years’ service, Coad eventually made his way back to England along with half of the men he had been sent into exile with.43 The rest were still in Jamaica when Inchiquin arrived carrying a missive from James II’s successor, King Wil
liam, ordering their immediate pardon.44
Above the indentured servants of Port Royal was a “middle class” of professionals, artisans, shopkeepers, and tradesmen. The lower rank, semi-skilled workers such as porters, watermen, blacksmiths, bricklayers, carpenters, tailors, and glove makers, typically acquired estates worth £50 to £150 by the time they died. More specialized and skilled craftsmen such as cabinetmakers, pewterers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, and glaziers and those who produced goods in bulk, such as the tanners and coopers, stood to amass goods worth between £250 and £500. The wealthiest of the middle rank were those who sold food and drink. Port Royal’s bakers, butchers, tavern keepers, victuallers, and vintners were often worth in excess of £700. Among the individuals plying such trades on Inchiquin’s arrival were a tanner named Thomas Buckley who owned two slaves; Robert Howard, a butcher with a nine-room property and twelve white servants; and Moses Watkins, a carpenter turned innkeeper who presided over the Catt and Fiddle. There were also several gold and silversmiths, masons, sailmakers, pipe makers, and a handful of craftsmen who used the turtle shells they purchased from the fish market to make intricately decorated combs, snuff boxes, and mirror backs.45
Several doctors, chemists, and surgeons resided in Port Royal. John Taylor, the visitor quoted above, considered many no better than “a parcell of pittyfull quacks, empericks, and illiterat pretendors,” while conceding that others, including the druggist William Matthews, and doctor Christopher Love Morley, a forty-four-year-old graduate of Leiden University—the oldest such institution in the Netherlands—were “honest . . . learn’d, skillful and men of known integrity.”46 Undoubtedly the best-known doctor to visit Jamaica in the period was Hans Sloane. An Irish Protestant born into a family of influence in County Down in 1660, young Sloane had studied medicine, chemistry, and botany in Paris and Montpellier before returning to London, where he was admitted into the Royal College of Physicians on April 13, 1687. In the same year he became the personal physician to Christopher Monck, the second Duke of Albemarle, who had recently been appointed governor of Jamaica. Sloane would spend over two years on the island. As well as treating both white and black residents for a variety of ailments, principally those related to excessive alcohol consumption, the doctor collected over eight hundred plant samples and compiled detailed notes on the island’s flora, fauna, and natural phenomena before his return to England in March 1689.47
Another of Jamaica’s doctors was Thomas Trapham. Arriving in 1673, Trapham lived with his wife, Susannah Coxe, and several children in a house near the quayside, whilst also co-owning the Hermitage, a 1,500-acre plantation in St. Mary’s Parish where the doctor’s slaves were branded “with TsT on ye right shoulder.” Trapham had served as personal physician to Lord Vaughn, governor of Jamaica from 1675 to 1678, and as a member of the island Assembly in 1677. Two years later Trapham’s Discourse of the State of Health in the island of Jamaica was published. According to the accepted theory of the day, the book maintained that good health was a matter of keeping the body’s four humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, in a state of balance—a juggling act only possible through the judicious use of bleeding, purging, and scarification and the administration of various medicines which included infusions made with rare and costly herbs, roots, and spices. In 1688, Trapham was called upon to treat the ailing Lord Albemarle in consultation with the governor’s personal physician, the aforementioned Hans Sloane. Despite their best efforts, the duke, a hopeless alcoholic, died on October 6, 1688. When a rumor spread that Albemarle had been badly treated, “Dr. Trapham and the rest of his Grace’s physicians . . . desired that . . . [the Council] appoint someone to view his Grace’s corps[e], which they are now going to Embalme” in an attempt to clear their names. Two days later, “Coll Freeman and Coll Ballard,” the dignitaries appointed by the Council for the purpose, “made their Report, that they went to view his Grace’s Body, which being opened by the doctors and Chirurgeons present: they saw that his Vitals were very defective except his Heart and it was the opinion of all those present that he could not longer subsist.” Trapham and Sloane had been exonerated. While the latter returned to England shortly afterward, Trapham remained resident in Port Royal on Inchiquin’s arrival.48
A significant minority of Port Royal’s middling set were Quakers. A few were former servants forced into indenture as a punishment for their nonconformity, but the majority had chosen to immigrate to Jamaica, an unusually tolerant society for the age, to escape persecution at home.49 One such was Thomas Hillyard, a Friend who owned a shop at the junction of New Street and Common Street. Another was John Pike, the enterprising joiner mentioned above who shared his home with his wife, Ann, his son, an apprentice, a white maid, and six of his fourteen slaves. It seems Pike’s business was a roaring success. He owned two empty lots of land, a rare commodity in chronically overcrowded Port Royal, on which he intended to build ten houses. Another Quaker tradesman resident in Port Royal was Thomas Gunn, the cooper who owned the Indian boy named Cupid. Gunn also kept £100 worth of wooden hoops and iron bindings in his shop, which he and his slaves made into barrels to sell to the masters of the merchantmen anchored in the roads.50
Another notable minority were Port Royal’s Huguenots. French Protestants who were persecuted for their beliefs by the Catholic majority in their homeland, the Huguenots had fled France in the thousands over the course of the sixteenth century, a trend which increased dramatically following Louis XIV’s 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a bill previously granting them a measure of religious toleration. With the full apparatus of the Sun King’s draconian regime operating against them, forty to fifty thousand emigrated to England in the late 1680s. They were welcomed by King William’s new regime: as well as being famed for their enterprise, industry, and aptitude for trade, the Huguenots were known for their military prowess, while England’s hatred of Papists, perhaps the strongest emotional force in the country in the post–Glorious Revolution period, ensured that the native population was largely sympathetic to their plight. Many emigrant Huguenots worked in the textile industry, a craft at which they were among the most skilled in Europe. Their move to London proved a boon for the trade. Others immigrated to England’s colonies in North America, or the West Indies.51
Among the Huguenots resident at Port Royal on Inchiquin’s arrival were two figures of note. Born in Montpellier in 1659, Lewis Galdy had immigrated to Jamaica in the late 1680s to set himself up as a merchant. Initially of modest means, Galdy was a wealthy man by 1690. As well as dealing in the sugar and slave trades, he dabbled in local politics and had become a figure of “Great Reputation” in Port Royal “beloved by all who knew him.”52 Peter Bratelier had fled France in 1685. Granted English citizenship two years later as part of James II’s amnesty to French refugees, Bratelier relocated to Jamaica where he worked as a sloop captain. Although not of Galdy’s stature, Bratelier was successful in his own way. Alternating between captaining the Newcastle sloop and the Mayflower brigantine, he traded for codfish with the Dutch at Curaçao as well as occasionally trying his hand as a wreck salvager when the opportunity arose.53
Of paramount importance to the economy of Port Royal were the town’s merchants. Between 1674 and 1701 at least twenty-three were resident. Their average estate was well over £1,000. Most had premises and storehouses along Thames Street bordering the wharfs to the north of town. From their garret windows they could keep an eye on the comings and goings of the two hundred or so merchant vessels that arrived annually from ports all across the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. As well as the large convoys, typically of between six and a dozen vessels, which arrived from England three or four times per year with dry goods, beer, cider, spirits, and Madeira wine, there were weekly arrivals from England’s North American colonies. These ships carried much-needed provisions. As the Jamaican plantations specialized in sugar monoculture, they were unable to supply their own needs. Barrels of salt pork and beef, beer, flour, frying oil,
mackerels, herrings, onions, apples, and bacon; bags of bread; bushels of pease; rundlets of hog’s lard; firkins of butter, and whole cheeses were shipped from Boston, Salem, and Marblehead in New England, as well as from New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Carolina. Another cargo commonly shipped from North America were the hoops and staves of red and white oak the Jamaican plantation owners used to make barrels in which to export their sugar and rum. Barrels of cod and salt fish caught off the Grand Banks were imported directly from Newfoundland; hundreds of chests of candles (both the inferior variety made of beeswax and the costlier variety made of spermaceti wax) were shipped to Jamaica from locations across the North American seaboard. Other goods arrived in Port Royal from a variety of Caribbean locales. Rosewater was shipped from Bermuda; mules and stock fish came from Rio de la Hachain in modern-day Colombia; logwood, a timber much sought after for the red dye which could be extracted, was shipped from the bays of Campeche or Honduras in Central America; and salt was imported from Curaçao.54
All these ships also required homebound cargoes. While sugar, either packed in barrels or measured by the hundredweight, was the principal Jamaican export, ships bound for England also took barrels of rum; bundles of logwood reexported from Campeche; indigo, a purple dye-wood grown in Jamaica; cacao; ginger; and small quantities of sarsparilla, the latter much prized for its medicinal properties. Other minor exports included bags of cotton and barrels packed with pimento, a fiery Jamaican spice. Fustic, a plant from which a yellow dye could be extracted, was also shipped to Europe to serve the clothing industries of northern England and Flanders.55
