Sugar in the Blood (17 page)

There was a new pace to island life and a new intensity to its commerce. Taverns sprang up to provide lodging and libation for those who came to work in the industry, make deals, or visit relatives. Warehouses started up in Bridgetown to sell harvesting equipment and the merchants pitched up to sell them. Physicians arrived to care for their health; lawyers came to litigate their business affairs. Some of the new arrivals had been dispatched by relatives who wanted rid of them; and so the sugar colonies became a repository for footloose second sons, delinquent debtors, legally compromised uncles and unwanted orphans. All came on the chance that they might become rich men. That many of these hopefuls would eventually leave the island disappointed and disillusioned did not at this point matter one jot; they were gamblers all, each convinced that he would be the one to beat the odds and strike it rich.

George Ashby must have been swept up in this frenzy and shared the belief held by almost all the islanders that sugar could transform their fortunes and make
everyone
wealthy. Certainly his plot of land was now a great deal more valuable than it had previously been. For a man like him, it must have felt like such a vindication; at a stroke, his decision to migrate to Barbados and his years of struggle were justified: he was finally in the right place at the right time.

But the “white gold” created unrest as well as wealth across Barbadian society. Men who had previously been content to be tobacco or cotton farmers could no longer countenance such a humble fate. Their beloved plots of land were no longer just “competences,” places that would provide them with sustenance and independence; instead, through the alchemy of sugar, they were transformed into potential gold mines that owed them riches.

In fact, the leisurely and lavish lifestyles of the plantocracy were miles away from those of “
the more inconsiderable of the Inhabitants,” like George Ashby, who were still “forced to earn their bread with the labour of their hands and the sweat of their brows.” For many of these men sugar had improved their finances somewhat but had not radically changed their day-to-day lives. They still rose at dawn and spent their days labouring alongside their bedraggled servants in an effort to make sure their property was yielding as much as it could and therefore provide the best possible future for their families.

Barbados was no longer a society of peasant farmers like George Ashby, struggling alongside one another to stay solvent; it was now a rigidly hierarchical society. At the top were the elite planters, who were reinventing themselves according to an aristocratic model derived from the feudal culture that they remembered from back home, and which shaped their attitudes and behaviour. They dominated the political, military and financial infrastructure of the island, where they held high ranks in the government, militia and Vestry. Beneath them was a middling group of planters and merchants who acted as something of a buffer between the elites and the poorer planters who were struggling to keep their heads above water. The sugar industry was creating extremes of wealth and poverty that would eventually produce a yawning gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, with disastrous consequences. Already, the most successful Barbadians were aware that their new-found riches were increasing the threat from the enemy within their own plantations: that toxic brew of resentful labour made up of disgruntled indentured servants who realized that they would never be able to afford land on the island, and the huge number of exploited and abused slaves, many of them freshly transported from Africa, who carried rebellion in their hearts.

Meanwhile, the rise of sugar not only attracted a flood of migrants into the island; it also prompted another, substantial stream of people to leave it. Some of these were second and third sons with no chance of inheriting the family plantation, but most were ex-indentured servants, without land or prospects, or struggling smallholders who had sold out to bigger planters when they realized that their plots of land simply
weren’t big enough to make a fortune from sugar. It was no surprise then that Barbados became known as “
the nursery for planting other places.” The islanders sometimes moved to other less populous territories, but most frequently they went to North America; indeed many areas, such as the Carolinas, were largely settled by Barbadians. These migrants took with them knowledge of the plantation system and the blueprint of how to organize and manage a large number of slaves. Thus it could be said that Barbados was “the laboratory” for the slave and plantation system in many parts of America where cotton, tobacco and rice were later grown.

Not everyone was impressed with the quality of these new arrivals. A Carolinian parish priest wrote: “
They are a perfect medley or hotch potch, made up of bankrupt pirates, decayed libertines, sectaries and enthusiasts of all sorts who have transported themselves hither and are the most factious and seditious people in the whole world.” But these questionable, rather unsavoury migrants kept on coming. By the final decades of the century almost half the whites and considerably more than half of the blacks (slaves brought over by their masters) in the Carolina colony had come from Barbados. A 1685 map of Berkeley County shows that of thirty-three prominent landholders, twenty-four had connections with Barbados. Their economic and political dominance of the Carolinas was such that contemporaries complained that “the Barbadians endeavour to rule all.”

The Barbadians’ attraction to the mainland was easy to understand. For the small man, according to the historian Richard Dunn, migration to “
Carolina opened possibilities undreamed of in Barbados.” John Collins, for example, found that the sale of his modest plot of land in Barbados allowed him to stake out 290 acres in the Carolinas. He ascended the social ladder swiftly, served on a Carolina grand jury in 1692 and became a captain of the Charleston militia in 1700. John Ladson, another arrival in 1679 of undistinguished Barbados lineage, rose to be a leading figure in the House of Assembly in the 1690s. The descendants of substantial Barbados planters did even better, according to Richard Dunn. All in all, six Barbadians were governors of South Carolina between 1670 and 1730.

The island’s imprint on the Carolinas is evident in numerous areas. Some argue that Barbadian derived linguistic influences were taken
to South Carolina and are evident in the Gullah dialect. If that idea is contentious, there is no doubt about the Barbadian influence on place names in the region, from Hilton Head, named after the explorer William Hilton, to Colleton County, named after the Barbadian grandee of that name, and Barbados House in Charleston. And when the first slave laws of Carolina were enacted on 16 March 1696, it was clear that they were modelled on those ratified in Barbados in 1688.

George Ashby’s own son, also called George, tried settling in Pennsylvania during this period, probably for the same reasons as other small planters. That he ultimately returned to Barbados does not undermine the allure of migration to the mainland for white settlers from the island. As the historian John Camden Hotten concluded: “
Barbados played a unique role in the settlement of colonial America. Thousands upon thousands of Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and Irishmen sailed first to that small West Indian Island before immigrating to the mainland colonies.” Whether these immigrants were rich or poor, Quakers or Jews, had lived in Barbados only briefly or came from an established family there, they would later plant deep and lasting roots right across the American mainland, from New England to New Jersey and from Virginia to Georgia.

WITH NO SMALL HELP
from his hard-worked slaves, George Ashby was beginning to forge a relatively prosperous life. But he couldn’t help feeling somewhat frustrated: the island kept betraying him. In seventeenth-century Barbados, it seemed as if some unexpected drama, eruption of violence or natural disaster was always occurring. And he was not alone in his dismay. George Ashby and his contemporaries had done their best to create an orderly and organized society—taming a wilderness, commissioning imposing public buildings, establishing a well-run Assembly and Senate, as well as drafting law after law designed to control everything from fornication to slave behaviour. And yet, Barbados continued to remain a dangerous and unpredictable place, threatened perpetually from without and within.

During this, the first phase of the sugar industry, Barbados was repeatedly struck by “Acts of God.” Tropical storms were an almost yearly occurrence, assaulting the islands in 1657, 1658, 1660, 1665 and 1667. And there were plagues, too. As a hub of trade, with so many people passing through from such disparate places, Barbados was, according to one historian, “
a notably lethal crossroads of contagion, where the velocity of infection was swift.” Then were the follies of man. Barbados would endure three major fires in the second half of the seventeenth century. The first, in 1658, destroyed 200 dwellings and storehouses in Bridgetown, together with the colony’s records. The next, in 1670, was the worst the capital would ever suffer. Purportedly caused by a heedless boy with a candle, the fire would eventually consume between 800 and 1,000 buildings at a value of £400,000. The slow rebuilding of Bridgetown was further impeded when another conflagration broke out
in January 1672, consuming more than thirty buildings and much of the island’s provisions from North America.

But the most disruptive element was war, which was particularly devastating in a Caribbean context. As one historian explained:

In addition, the island’s produce could be seized or destroyed at great financial cost, while the crucial supplies that sustained the island’s population could be delayed or lost. Hence the incredible sense of alarm that was provoked when even a single enemy squadron was rumoured to be on its way to the Caribbean.

Conflict returned to Barbados in the early part of 1665; this time the antagonist was Holland, which in the early part of that year had dispatched an expedition against the English colonies. It was led by the most famous military figure of the age, Admiral De Ruyter, whose force was made up of twelve battleships, two fire ships and 2,500 troops. He began his offensive by battering the English settlements on the coast of Africa and then moved on to Barbados at the end of April. On the 30th De Ruyter’s squadron entered Carlisle Bay. His fleet immediately came under fire, and his own ship, the
Spiegel
, was disabled. After a futile attempt at landing, De Ruyter, who had lost ten men, was forced to withdraw.

But this was not the end of hostilities. At the beginning of the following year the governor of Barbados, Lord Willoughby, dispatched his nephew Francis with a force of 800 men to reinforce the settlers on St. Christopher, only to discover that the island had already surrendered. Furious at “the outrages committed by the French in conjunction with the Dutch upon the British Caribbee islands,” Lord Willoughby
decided to raise his own expedition to punish the invaders. After gaining Charles II’s support, he set sail on 28 July 1666 with seventeen ships and 2,000 men, initially taking St. Lucia and then later Guadeloupe.

The progress of Willoughby’s fleet was impeded by a hurricane that started to blow on 4 August. By the time it was over only two of his ships survived. According to one historian, “the whole coast of Guadeloupe was covered with the wrecks of masts and yards, and a figure from the stern of Lord Willoughby’s ship was recognised in the water.” The governor, it seemed, had gone down with his vessel. His brother, Lord William Willoughby, took his place as governor of the islands, and to everyone’s relief the English, French and Dutch signed a peace treaty at Breda a year later on 21 July 1667.

The volatility of the Caribbean had its roots in the region’s collective history of settlement. Many of the islands were founded during the war against Spain, and were intended, in part, to act as bases for privateering. Some islands had first been stumbled upon by pirates or adventurers, who would pass the news of their discoveries on to their patrons or to wealthy merchants who could raise the money to finance a settlement or petition for a patent. These rogues may have been essential to the process of colonization; but they were rogues nonetheless. Indeed, the first trickle of European arrivals could be divided roughly into two categories: the desperate and the damned—people fleeing from justice, vagabonds or sailors who had jumped ship. Unsurprisingly, these first settlers continued to operate on the wrong side of the law, frequently supplementing their meagre income from planting with a bit of buccaneering on the side. And their new home rapidly became a centre of misadventure, smuggling and vice.

If the islands were lawless, the waters that encircled them were even more so. Comparable in size to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean Sea is part of the tumultuous waters of the Atlantic Ocean. It extends in an arc that spans from the chain of islands known as the Greater Antilles—which include Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica—south through to the Lesser Antilles, which extend from the Virgin Islands down to the coast of Venezuela. It was the Caribbean Sea that was the great connector between these 7,000 islands, islets and cays; it transported its variegated population—Amerindians, black slaves, white planters
and indentured servants—as they moved, ceaselessly, in all manner of crafts carrying people and supplies.