Bittersweet

by Peter Macinnis

  Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, 1604

  5

  FIGHTING OVER

  SUGAR

  Bryan Edwards, a planter and early historian of the West Indies, explained war in his neighbourhood like this:

  Whenever the nations of Europe are engaged, from whatever cause, in war with each other, these unhappy countries are constantly made the theatre of its operations. Thither the combatants repair, as to the arena, to decide their differences.

  According to Edwards, this was because the combatants who survived could make themselves rich. In the late eighteenth century, foreign navies plundered British merchant ships and kept the profits while Britain’s navy made a treasure trove of the foreign trading vessels. But did the navies compensate the planters for their losses? Indeed they did not, the planters complained. The arena for their grudge matches was inevitably the lucrative Caribbean, but paying compensation to the planters would have eaten into their profits.

  The warring navies chose the Caribbean, far from their home waters, for the rich cargoes carried in the area, and because of the way that prize money works in times of war, especially

  The West Indies.

  benefiting frigate captains whose ships were large enough to sail independently, and fast enough to run down almost any ship on the ocean. Edwards conceded that sometimes the British planters would gain, since Britain usually held the upper hand in privateering and blockading. This meant the French sugar trade was often badly affected, allowing English sugar interests a greater slice of the European market. At the same time, Royal Navy ships provided a ready market for rum, but the planters were not happy—it was not in their nature to be happy.

  Prize money was paid for all ships and cargoes captured. It was divided in a complex manner, with larger sums going to the more senior officers, and many captains—if they survived long enough—became landed gentry in their later years. Frigates did best of all, because if a capture was out of the sight of the commanding admiral, the admiral’s portion was also divided among the officers and crew.

  Sometimes the naval officers were a bit greedy. Tradition has it that Josias Rogers, captain of the Quebec, was so impressed by the sight of a bullion-laden Spanish treasure ship, brought into Portsmouth during the Seven Years’ War, that he determined to enter the navy and have a share in such riches. He did quite well from the War of American Independence, and settled on an estate in Hampshire, but when his banker failed and he lost half his fortune, Rogers just went back to sea to get some more. In the first five weeks of 1794 he took nine prizes, and estimated that his share of the proceeds would be £10 000.

  The Royal Navy had taken more than 300 merchant ships in 1794, mainly American neutrals, in this legalised form of plunder. The prize courts later rejected half the claims on the ground that these neutral ships were sailing between neutral ports and not subject to seizure, but Captain Rogers and his crew still gained from three of their nine prizes. He later spent £3000 in contesting the lost cases, but Rogers did not enjoy his restored wealth for long, however—he saw both his younger brother and nephew die of yellow fever before he succumbed to the same disease in 1795. There were rich pickings for those who survived, but many more lost their lives to disease.

  The naval physician, Sir Gilbert Blane, found that in one year alone, 1779, England’s West Indies fleet lost an eighth of its 12 019 seamen to disease—a total of 1518 dead, with another 350 ‘rendered unserviceable’. In 1794, the then Vice-Admiral Jervis’ West Indies squadron lost about a fifth of its men to disease in just six months. The 89 000 soldiers of all ranks serving in the West Indies between 1793 and 1801 suffered 45 000 deaths, 14 000 discharged and 3000 desertions. Small wonder that British troops being sent to the West Indies were usually sent first to the Isle of Wight or Spike Island in the Cove of Cork, to prevent them deserting en masse. German and French mercenary units particularly objected to being sent to what they saw as certain death, and either deserted or mutinied at the prospect. While soldiers could also earn prize money, there was generally less to be had on land than on sea, and a much better chance of falling to disease.

  This was why the army and the navy had different views of war in the islands. On land, yellow fever was almost a certainty, and too many of the soldiers died of disease, trying to win from France sugar islands Britain did not need. Henry Addington, arguably Britain’s worst Prime Minister, was not exaggerating when he later told the House of Commons that the West Indies had destroyed the British army. Still, the navy was happy, because of the rich pickings, while the government could only see the French losing sugar and sugar income.

  The rich pickings included vast quantities of molasses, rum and raw sugar. But while sugar was undoubtedly the most valuable booty, there were other riches to be had from the Caribbean—coffee, cocoa, cotton, indigo and ginger. While most of these products came also from other places, and Britain was never much of a market for coffee (because the East India Company’s tea was more popular), these cargoes were all of value in the European markets. That raises a question: why did people grow so many of these things in one place, concentrating the riches and increasing the risks?

  Part of the answer lies in the wind patterns of the Atlantic, because all the produce had to be carried to distant markets in sailing ships. Part lies in the climate of the islands, and part lies in the fact that the plantations were close to the sea, allowing ready transport to the ocean-going ships that carried the cargo away. Wind patterns established the two main triangular trades: dried cod from North America to Africa, slaves from Africa to

  The triangular trade.

  the Caribbean and molasses or rum from the Caribbean to New England; and cheap manufactured goods from England, mainly textiles from Lancashire and hardware and toys from Birmingham, to Africa, where these were converted into gold dust, ivory and pepper, and slaves for the Caribbean leg, where the proceeds were used to buy sugar, molasses and rum for the homeward journey.

  New England ships sometimes sailed an even tighter loop, taking rum to Africa, slaves to the West Indies, and then molasses back to New England to repeat the cycle when the molasses was turned into rum. French, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese ships did similar circuits, with variations—for example, cod to the Canary Islands, and wine from the Canaries to Africa, where it was exchanged for slaves. All of these trades depended on the fact that the quickest way north from Africa involved travelling to the Caribbean first, whether the voyage was to England or New England. Yet through all of this, with so many people benefiting from the trade, the planters were the only ones blamed for all the evil people said was being done.

  The planters survived the wars—unlike the soldiers. Well, some of the planters did—some of them fell victim to their own slaves.

  FREEDOM FIGHTERS

  The white people on the islands believed that coloured nurses could kill young children without trace by using a scarf pin pushed into the head, and whether this was true or not, it was enough to feed the fear. Macandal was a slave who probably lost his arm in a roller accident, but rather than work at clearing drains he ran away into the hills of Saint Domingue. The one-armed runaway started a campaign of poisoning in 1750, slipping quietly into plantations and providing poison to unsuspected accomplices, until he was apprehended and burned alive in 1758.

  There were others, less well known but equally effective, because the planters used slaves in their houses as servants, as cooks, as minders of their children, and as mistresses. In a time when the whites showed no mercy to the slaves, the slaves showed no mercy in return.

  The planters were right to fear their slaves. The first slave revolt occurred on São Tomé in 1517, and others over the next hundred years caused much damage to that island’s economy. In 1522, black slaves on Hispaniola rose up in the first revolt in the New World, but the first sugar-colony black revolt did not take place until 1656, when two slaves from Angola, Jean and Pedro Leblanc, led a revolt on the French island of Guadeloupe.

&nb
sp; There might have been a successful uprising in the British colony of Antigua in 1736 but that one conspirator was arrested for a minor offence. Thinking that he was under arrest for helping plan the coming revolt, he told all. In the end, five slaves were broken on the wheel, five were gibbeted, and another 77 burnt alive. While the loss of human life was no great matter in those days, the loss of property was, and the waste of so many workers shows the fear the white planters were in. And they knew there were always others to try once more.

  The Bastille was stormed in Paris in July 1789, but there was no Liberty, Fraternity and Equality for the slaves in the French colonies. On 20 March 1790 the National Assembly stated that the declaration of the rights of man was not to apply to the colonies. Saint Domingue at that time had three classes of citizens: 30 000 white planters and officials, 24 000 sangs mêlés (people of colour) and half a million slaves, along with a few freed blacks. Until 1777, the sangs mêlés had been allowed to go to France for their education and, unlike the slaves, they were well off, with hopes and aspirations.

  The French Revolution had divided the colony’s white population, with its leaders remaining royalist while the masses took up the revolutionary cause. It was against this background that the slaves sought their freedom. The three Ogé brothers, Jacques, Victor and Vincent, together with a sang mêlé called Chavane, failed in an insurrection. Jacques and Chavane were broken on the wheel and Vincent was hanged. Victor escaped and was never seen again.

  Back in France, a nervous National Assembly passed a decree allowing people of colour the right to sit in parochial and colonial assemblies. When the planters in Saint Domingue ignored this, their slaves rose up in some areas. The sangs mêlés rebelled in the south, but with no support from the slaves there they reached a peace a short time later, which included an amnesty and acceptance of the decree giving them equal rights. Soon, though, the decree was repealed.

  Three commissioners arrived from France to take control in January 1792. They brought 6000 troops with them, but the commissioners were advanced revolutionaries. Finding themselves opposed by the planters, who were largely royalists and supporters of the ancien régime, the commissioners called on the slaves for support. This was just the opportunity the slaves needed, and those whites who did not escape to the ships in the harbour were killed. When war broke out between France and Britain in August 1793, the British invaded Saint Domingue, but in the end the slaves won—with the help of disease. Disease won most of the wars when people came to fight in the West Indies, and there were many wars fought over the sugar islands.

  As we have seen, one sugar island was shared. The French founded their colony of Saint Domingue on the western side of Hispaniola in 1697, while the Spanish claimed the eastern side of the island as San Domingo. By the end of the eighteenth century, the French colony was the most profitable sugar producer in the New World, and it was sacrificed by mismanagement and misunderstanding. The freedom the revolutionary Jacobins gave themselves in France was not extended to the slaves of Saint Domingue, and the planters found themselves facing a revolution led by a very clever general.

  Toussaint L’Ouverture was the son of an African chieftain, which gave him authority amongst his fellow slaves, and he had been given some education. More importantly, he was a leader, and in 1793 he put his leadership to the test, calling on his fellow slaves to join with him in bringing liberty and equality to Saint Domingue. He formed an alliance with the Spaniards on San Domingo until 1794, when the French ratified an act which set the slaves free. He then turned upon his Spanish allies and expelled them. As the whole island was now effectively French, the English decided to attack and make it English, and the freed slaves looked like becoming unfree once more.

  The English got a toehold in the south, but an outbreak of yellow fever defeated them. They withdrew in 1798 when Tous-saint promised that all remaining colonists would be spared, and that he would not invade Jamaica. By now the people of Saint Domingue were calling themselves the people of Haiti, and looking to free other slaves.

  This would have been disastrous for the English, who had quite recently made Jamaica more secure by transporting the majority of the maroons, the escaped slaves of Jamaica, first to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone. The English were terrified that the Haitians might inspire the Jamaican slaves to revolt. After all, they knew Toussaint to be a dangerous man, from a letter he wrote to the Directory, France’s ruling body before Napoleon seized power, seen here in James’ translation:

  We know that they seek to impose some of them on you by illusory and specious promises, in order to see renewed in this colony its former scenes of horror. Already perfidious emissaries have stepped in among us to ferment the destructive leaven prepared by the hands of liberti-cides. But they will not succeed. I swear it by all that liberty holds most sacred. My attachment to France, my knowledge of the blacks, make it my duty not to leave you ignorant either of the crimes which they meditate or the oath that we renew, to bury ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than suffer the return of slavery. . . . But if, to re-establish slavery in San Domingo [the Decree of 16 Pluviôse were revoked], then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it.

  Toussaint took much of the credit for the withdrawal of the English, and the French made him a general, with the titles of Lieutenant-Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Haitian forces. The standard wisdom, though, is that Toussaint did not make the revolution, it was the revolution that made Toussaint.

  Toussaint declared himself in 1801 to be Governor-General for life, showing little respect for Haiti’s official owner, Napoleon Bonaparte. French honour had to be satisfied—and French sugar and sugar incomes had to be restored. The French attacked, led by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Leclerc. The military response to the heat of the tropics was to confine the soldiers to their barracks during the hottest hours of the day—where the mosquito lurked, ready to spread yellow fever, and where troops all too easily succumbed to the temptation offered by cheap rum. If that was not bad enough, in an act of absolute stupidity the French reinstated slavery, which united all of Haiti against them.

  In spite of the skyrocketing death rate from disease, the French managed to capture Toussaint by treachery after an armistice, and he was hauled to a prison high in the French Alps where he died soon after. His unhappy end was reflected in a sonnet by Wordsworth:

  To Toussaint L’ouverture

  Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!

  Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

  Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

  Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;

  O miserable Chieftain! where and when

  Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou

  Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

  Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

  Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

  Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

  There’s not a breathing of the common wind

  That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

  Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

  And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

  The French might have taken Toussaint, but they had lost 50 000 men, and in the end they lost their most important sugar colony for good. Leclerc died of yellow fever in October 1802, and his replacement, General Rochambeau, was equally unable to overcome the destruction of his army by disease, and he capitulated in November 1803.

  Napoleon decided to sell his American colonies to the United States for $15 million. The grand plan he had conceived—to not only retain the sugar wealth of Saint Domingue, but to build a huge French empire in the Mississippi Valley to make up for the loss of Canada during the Seven Years’ War—had come to naught.

  With the gain of this new territory—the Louisiana Purcha
se—the United States was able send the explorers Lewis and Clark to reach the west coast. It would take most of the nineteenth century for the West to be won, but the foundations of modern North America were laid in the mismanaged French sugar colonies of the Caribbean, and in the French willingness to pass up on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, when those ideals stood between them and making sugar profits.

  All the same, the French did not lose out entirely. In November 1814 the island of Guadeloupe, which Napoleon’s France had also lost to England, was returned to newly royalist France. On duty there, Edward Codrington (later Admiral Sir Edward Codrington) noted sardonically in his Memoir that:

  The people of this island will, I suspect, have cause to regret the change in their government, for there are already sixty clerks come to do what eleven have done under us . . . and the whole of these . . . are to be paid by the islanders who will be taxed enormously, and be unable to profit by the permission to purchase negroes.

  Some of the people of the island had even more immediate regrets, for unlike the people of Haiti, those on Guadeloupe who had been slaves were to become slaves again, as Codrington noted in another letter:

  . . . the spot was pointed out to me as the last retreat of those who were struggling for liberty. A considerable number of people of colour who saw no hope left but a return to slavery, by joint consent blew themselves up together rather than ask life upon such degrading terms.