Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  Being indentured was so bad that when Generals Penn and Venables were in Barbados in 1654 to outfit for their attack on Hispaniola and Jamaica, many servants ran away to the ships— while those on the ships, knowing what life at sea was like, fled ashore. In the end, Cromwell’s great Western Design to undo Catholic Spain meant 2000 servants from Barbados perished on Jamaica, so in February 1656 Cromwell sent troops into London to find 1200 women of ‘loose life’ and send them to Barbados. Within days another 400 were sent off.

  The planters always complained about the servants. Even though Scotland was under the same king, it was still a different country, and the planters asked in 1667 to be allowed free trade in servants with Scotland, and to transport 1000 to 2000 English servants to the colony. Still nobody wanted the Irish, because it was believed that, being Roman Catholic, they were likely to help the French or the Spanish if they could. The proportion of servants to slaves was a bigger worry, however, so the planters still took what servants they could get.

  By 1680 there were only 3000 indentured servants on Barbados, down from 13 000 in the 1650s. By that time there were so many slaves that the masters used all sorts of legal tricks to hold their indentured servants, but those who were out of indenture could pick and choose where and how they worked.

  When the Monmouth rebellion broke out in 1685, the planters got a break. The bastard Duke of Monmouth tried to seize the British throne but failed, and his followers were either put to death or, more often, Barbadoed. The Spirits had a fine old time, snatching extra bodies and sending them off with papers showing their victims as convicted rebels.

  Most of the former servants had skills that were badly needed, and they could set their own price. Many of the advances in sugar preparation (like the Jamaica Train discussed in Chapter 6) must have come from servants who had reached sugar master status. They had got their training thanks to the Spanish Inquisition and the way the inquisitors had treated the Portuguese Jews, who had been happy and safe in Portugal until a few years before the Great Armada, when Spain took over Portugal and the Inquisition moved in on the Jews.

  Most of the Jews in Portugal had fled Spain and its Inquisition a generation or two earlier, and now they shifted again, to Holland, where they were welcomed for their skills. Some of them moved to South America when the Dutch took over Per-nambuco in the north of Brazil. The Jews, seen as an under-class, managed the daily operations of the plantations, and more importantly, the mills. When the Dutch were forced out of Pernambuco, many of the Jews went with them to Amsterdam, but others went to Barbados, where they provided the skills base that the English sugar planters desperately needed.

  THE ROYALIST REFUGEE

  During the turmoil of the English Civil War of the 1640s, the royalist Richard Ligon felt it would be safer to be out of England than to stay there. So he took himself off to the peace and calm of the plantation of Barbados in 1647, not returning home until 1650, by which time life in England was a little more stable.

  He spent a pleasant enough three years, learning the art of sugar making among other things, and set down what he saw in A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados. Because he was there long enough to observe closely, but not long enough to become part of the community, Ligon’s account gives us the truth, hopefully unvarnished by any desire to censor the facts. For example, he explains that:

  The slaves and their posterity, being subject to their Masters for ever, are preserv’d and kept with greater care than the servants, who are theirs but for five years, according to the law of the island. So that for the time, the servants have the worser lives, for they are put to very hard labour, ill lodging, and their dyet very slight. Most of them are Irish and a sullen bunch, but that may be on account of the treatment meted out to them, I know not. The usage of the Servants, is much as the Master is, merciful or cruel. Those that are merciful, treat their Servants well, but if the Masters be cruel, the Servants have very wearisome lives.

  Before his time in the island, he tells us,

  . . . the first people in Barbados, made tryal first of tobacco, cotton, indigo, and only then turned to sugar canes. The planters made tryal of them and finding them to grow, they planted more and more, as they grew and multiplyed on the place, till they had such a considerable number, as they were worth the while to set up a very small Ingenio, as we call the place where crushing and boiling down to make the sugar takes place.

  At the Ingenio, he reports, the cut cane is placed on a platform called a Barbycu, a raised stand with a double rail to stop the cane falling out, about 9 metres long and 3 metres wide (in spite of the size, this was a close relation to our modern barbecue).

  Then there is a set of three rollers, with perhaps five horses or oxen driving the middle roller, ‘which is cog’d to the other two, at both ends’:

  A Negre puts in the canes of one side, and the rollers draw them through to the other side, where another Negre stands and receives them and returns them back on the other side of the middle roller which draws the other way. So that having past twice through, that is forth and back, it is conceived that all the juice is prest out; yet the Spaniards have a press, after both the former grindings, to press out the remainder of the liquor . . .

  But that, he explains in a bluff patriotic manner, is because the Spaniards’ cane is poorer. The crushed cane is set aside, some six-score paces away, and the juice:

  . . . runs under ground in a Pipe or gutter of lead, cover’d over close, which pipe or gutter, carries it into the Cistern, which is fixt neer the staires, as you go down from the Mill-house to the boyling house. But it must not remain in the Cisterne above one day, lest it grow sowr; from thence it is to passe through a gutter, (fixt to the wall) to the Clarifying Copper . . . As the skumme rises, it is conveyed away, as also the skumme from the second Copper, both which skimmings, are not esteem’d worth the labour of stilling; because the skum is dirtie and gross: But the skimmings of the other three Coppers, are conveyed down to the Still-house, there to remain in the Cisterns, till it be a little sowr, for till then it will not come over the helme and make good rum.

  . . . there is thrown into the four last Coppers, a liquor made of water and ashes which they call Temper, without which, the Sugar would continue a clammy substance and never kerne. Once the sugar master has determined that the sugar in the last copper is ready, two teaspoonfuls of Sallet Oyle [salad oil], such as we put on raw vegetables to make a sallet, are added and then the syrup is ladled out. Above all, it is important to throw in some cold water, in order that the last of the syrup should not burn, for the copper is fixed in place over an open fire, and as soon as the copper is empty, syrup from the penultimate copper must be added.

  . . . And so the work goes on, from Munday morning at one a clock, till Saturday night, (at which time the fires in the Furnaces are put out) all houres of the day and night, with fresh supplies of men, Horses and Cattle. The liquor being come to such a coolness, as it is fit to be put in the Pots, they bring them neer the Cooler, and stopping first the sharp end of the Pot (which is the bottom) with Plantine leaves, (and the passage there no bigger than a man’s finger will go in at) they fill the Pot and set it between the stantions in the filling room, where it staies till it be thorough cold, which will be in two days and two nights; and then if the Sugar be good, to be removed into the Cureing house, but first the stopples are to be pulled out of the bottom of the pots, that the Molosses may vent itself at that hole.

  . . . The Molosses, in a well-run Ingenio, is converted into Peneles, a kind of Sugar somewhat inferiour to the Muscovado. . . . And this is the whole process of making the Muscovado Sugar, whereof some is better, and some worse, as the Canes are; for, ill Canes can never make good Sugar.

  I call those ill, that are gathered either before or after the time of such ripeness, or are eaten by Rats and so consequently rotten, or pulled down by the vines men call Withes, or lodged by foule weather and ill winds, either or which, will serve to spoil such Sugar as
is made of them.

  A major improvement in the lot of the planters came when rum became part of the sugar industry. It made marginal operations profitable, loss-making plantations became profitable, and planters still losing money found a new comfort. Almost nothing was too poor to go into the fermentation vats, other than the first couple of skimmings from the coppers. Richard Ligon is once again one of our best witnesses:

  After it has remained in the Cisterns . . . till it be a little soure, (for till then, the Spirits will not rise in the Still) the first Spirit that comes off, is a small Liquor, which we call low-wines, which Liquor we put into the Still, and draw it off again; and of that comes so strong a Spirit, as a candle being brought to a near distance, to the bung of a Hogshead or But, where it is kept, the Spirits will flie to it, and . . . set all afire.

  This volatility of the rum made it quite risky, and Ligon describes how they ‘lost an excellent Negro’ to a rum explosion when a candle was used for illumination while a jar of spirit was being added to a butt of rum:

  . . . the Spirit being stirr’d by that motion, flew out, and got hold of the flame of the Candle, and so set all on fire and burnt the poor Negro to death, who was an excellent servant. And if he had in the instant of firing, clapt his hand on the bung, all had been saved; but he that knew not that cure, lost the whole vessel of Spirits, and his life to boot . . .

  This drink, though it had the ill hap to kill one Negro, yet it has had the vertue to cure many; for when they are ill, with taking cold, (which they often are) . . . they complain to the Apothecary of the Plantation, which we call the Doctor, and he gives to every one a dram cup of this Spirit, and that is a present cure. And as this drink is of great use, to cure and refresh the poor Negroes, whom we ought to have a special care of, by the labour of whose hands, our profit is brought in; so it is helpful to our Christian servants too . . .

  The distinction they made between their servants may seem an odd one, but Ligon explains even this:

  Once I encountered a slave who wished to be a Christian, but on interceding with the slave’s master, I was told that the people of the Island were governed by the Lawes of England, and by those Lawes, we could not make a Christian a Slave. I told him, my request was far different from that, for I desired him to make a Slave a Christian. His answer was, That it was true, there was a great difference in that: But, being once a Christian, he could no more account him a Slave, and so lose the hold they had of them as Slaves, by making them Christians; and by that means should open such a gap, as all the Planters in the Island would curse him.

  To read the testimony of the planters, nothing was ever easy for them. That is one point at which Ligon was in complete agreement with later writers with the mindset of the plantation owner.

  DERBY’S DOSE

  The planter could make a good profit, but there was always the risk of bad weather, insurrection or war, not to mention death from disease (or taxes from a home government). The planter had to buy, clear and plant the land, buy Guinea grass for the animals, set up gardens for the slaves, and general working and living space. Purchases included tools, nails, hoops and staves for barrels, lime, cooking pots, building material, food for the slaves, equipment for the mill and boiling house, and then there were the skilled staff: even if these were slaves, they could still command extra allowances—and many of them were free men, former indentured servants now out of their indentures.

  The overseer, distiller, carpenter, drivers and wainmen, cooper, foreman sawyer, fireman, watchman, field-children’s nurse, potter and ‘black doctor’ had all to be paid, as well as domestic servants. But above all, the slaves had to be fed, and while bought food was expensive, the food crops perversely needed the most cultivation just when the sugar needed harvesting!

  The slaves were fed well enough at times, though for the most part planters tried to keep costs down by using local resources. The areas between cane plots could be planted with food crops, including such crops as yams, eddoes and bananas, brought from Africa by the slave ships. William Bligh’s ill-fated breadfruit was one of the few failures; the slaves did not like the taste, and it was only well into the nineteenth century that people in the Caribbean began to eat it.

  Hard physical labour requires protein, and sweaty work requires salt. It did not take long for the canny cod fishermen of New England to identify a new and not particularly fussy market. Their rejects, the badly split fish and fish with too much salt or not enough, could all be disposed of as ‘West India cure’, destined to feed the slaves. During the eighteenth century, in times of unrestricted trade, on average a ship would leave Boston every day for the West Indies, laden with reject fish. Around 1650, Richard Ligon saw that fish could be found closer to home, and he wrote in his Exact History:

  As for the Indians, we have but few, and those fetcht from other Countries; some from the neighbouring Islands, some from the Main, which we make slaves: the women who are better vers’d in ordering the Cassavie and making bread, than the Negroes, we imploy for that purpose and also for making Mobbie; the men we use for footmen and killing of fish, which they are good at; with their own bowes and arrows they will go out; and in a dayes time, kill as much fish as will serve a family of a dozen persons, two or three dayes if you can keep the fish so long.

  Other foods for the slaves varied from island to island. Jamaica had more free land than Barbados, enabling the slaves there to tend gardens where they grew food. Barbados was necessarily more dependent on outside sources, importing maize and rice from America and horse beans from Britain. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but one record exists of newly purchased slaves with no planted ground getting one fish and either nine plantains, two pints of rice or three pints of maize, each day. The food rations, it would seem, were minimal and monotonous, and might have accounted for the short working lives of most slaves.

  During the sugar harvest there was cane to chew and syrup to drink, but by the end of the harvest the provision grounds were least productive. Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer in Jamaica in the middle of the eighteenth century, recorded signs of poor nutrition among the slaves in August and September, over a number of years. His diary for 25 May 1756, as quoted by Ward, reveals that a slave called Derby was caught eating the young canes—a definite offence, since it meant a reduced crop later on: ‘Derby catched by Port Royal eating canes. Had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in his mouth.’ This treatment, referred to thereafter as ‘Derby’s Dose’, did not seem to deter the offender, who appears in Thistlewood’s diary again in August:

  Last night Derby attempting to steal corn out of Long Pond corn pieces, was catched by the watchman, and resisting, received many great wounds with a mascheat [machete], in the head etc. Particularly his right ear, cheek and jaw, almost cut off.

  There is no record of what happened to Derby after that. It seems unlikely he survived, though. The excerpts from Thistlewood’s journal quoted by Ward clearly reveal his care and consideration for those under his charge— when they weren’t stealing food, that is. All sorts of odd punishments, including lockable masks of tinplate, were used to stop slaves eating the young cane. Wearing the mask was probably preferable to what happened to Derby. In some areas, the masks were also worn by kitchen slaves to stop them tasting the food they were preparing.

  Forced to labour in the sugar mills from sunrise to late at night, it was inevitable that weary slaves would lose concentration and risk injury. The greatest danger came at the height of the season, when they were toiling away close to huge pans of sticky, scalding sugar juice, working for up to eighteen hours a day in fierce heat in the rush to deal with the huge masses of ripe cane that came in. Outside, the slaves who fed the cane into the rollers worked in cooler conditions, but they were just as much at risk of injury through being trapped by the rollers.

  The three-roller mill was standard, and while some early ones were powered by humans, most were under animal, wind, water or steam power and slower to react
to a human scream. A hatchet or cutlass was kept in a convenient place, ready to chop off the arm of any slave who was trapped—in order to save the slave’s life. It made better economic sense to keep alive a slave with one arm, because that slave could still act as a watchman, clear blocked drains or guide the animals that did the heavy haulage.

  While there is probably a degree of exaggeration in the tales the emancipists told later of slavery, it would be unwise to assume that the life of a slave was a pleasant one. The way slaves took advantage of unrest made this very clear—in fact, slaves were one reason not to fight wars in the Caribbean.

  The territorial claims made by Spain and Portugal under the Treaty of Tordesillas could not be defended against the combined forces of the English, Dutch and French, and in the end Spain was forced during the seventeenth century to accept the presence of other powers in the Caribbean islands, just as Portugal had to accept the British and French in India and Africa, and the Dutch in the East Indies. In one case, the Spaniards shared the island of Hispaniola with the French.

  Aside from anything else, whatever armed forces the Europeans had in the West Indies were needed there to maintain order in their own colonies. When the home nations went to war, extra forces would be sent in to attack and pillage the colonies and the shipping of the enemy, even though this caused unrest among the slaves.

  TO DRIE APRICOCKS, PEACHES, PIPPINS OR PEARPLUMS

  Take your apricocks or pearplums, & let them boile one walme in as much clarified sugar as will cover them, so let them lie infused in an earthen pan three days, then take out your fruits, & boile your syrupe againe, when you have thus used them three times then put half a pound of drie sugar into your syrupe, & so let it boile till it comes to a very thick syrup, wherein let your fruits boile leysurelie 3 or 4 walmes, then take them foorth of the syrup, then plant them on a lettice of rods or wyer, & so put them into yor stewe, & every second day turne them & when they be through dry you may box them & keep them all the year; before you set them to drying you must wash them in a little warme water, when they are half drie you must dust a little sugar upon them throw a fine Lawne.