Sugar in the Blood (19 page)

A couple of months after Fortuna’s revelation of the original plot, on 31 August 1675, the most devastating hurricane since the beginning of colonization battered the island. In an age before meteorological reports provided storm warnings and government agencies provided advice and shelters, the arrival of one of these great tempests was a truly apocalyptic event. On that terrible day, the island was enveloped by black clouds and lashed by rain. The wind rose sharply and blustered with such ferocity that it seemed to be coming from all points of the compass. The air, usually so fragrant, stank of sulphur and bitumen produced by the combination of electricity and moisture in the atmosphere. That night the storm grew even more violent and continued to blow till the morning. The Ashby family must have been terrified. When they emerged from their shelter it was to scenes of complete devastation. Over 200 Barbadians were killed, as were many more slaves who did not count in the official numbers. The leeward side of the island was the most affected—only a few buildings there were left standing—while on the windward side many of the houses and sugar works were also obliterated, and the canes uprooted and flattened. The strength of the hurricane winds washed ashore the ships on the coast and all the houses in the bay were blown down, along with most of the churches; and across the island many planters were forced to live in temporary huts. The hurricane induced such terror in the heart of the colonists that for some time no one would invest any capital in land and building, fearing a similar catastrophe.

Not long after this terrible hurricane, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather died. We do not know if his passing was directly connected to the tempest, but many islanders did perish during these months, traumatized by the calamity (and perhaps rendered more vulnerable by the other shocks that had preceded it), weakened by injuries, malnourished by lack of food or despairing at the loss of all they had built.

George Ashby’s will was entered on 13 July 1676, a few days after his death. It provides such a fascinating insight into the Ashby clan at this time, their social standing, their relationships, and their attitudes towards their property, including slaves, that it is worth quoting in full:

The will paints a picture of a humble family that, despite its challenges, had managed not just to secure a decent life but to expand its wealth
in trying circumstances, and to maintain strong ties of affection and loyalty.

It also reveals a great deal about George Ashby himself. The devout tone of the will implies that George Ashby had always been or had become a religious man. More specifically there are tantalizing indications that he had become a Quaker. Not only did his will make reference to his “friends” Rowland Hutton and John Taylor, the term used by the Quakers to describe themselves and their brethren; his wife, Deborah, would later remarry the aforementioned Hutton, a planter who had also converted to the religion. In Hutton’s own will, lodged a few years later, he mentions his wife Deborah Hutton, “formerly the wife of George Ashby, & her son William Ashby; poor people called Quakers.” As an inhabitant of St. Philip, George was particularly susceptible to the movement, because the parish was an exceptionally active Quaker hub, with two vibrant meeting houses. Indeed, one of their “large burying places” can still be seen across from St. Philip’s parish church.

The first Quakers had arrived in Barbados in the middle of the 1650s. Some had arrived willingly, in flight from religious persecution, but a substantial number of this “malignant source” were forcibly expelled from Britain on the orders of the Crown. Some of these new arrivals planned to settle on the island permanently, but many others came for a few months to promulgate their philosophy, and then left for other colonies in the region. As a result Barbados became the cradle of the Quaker religion in the region. By 1671 there was a flourishing community of Quakers on the island. It was so significant that George Fox, the founder of the sect, visited the island for three months that year to rally his American troops. By 1676 there were more Quakers in Barbados than in any other colony in the English Americas.

The Quakers, otherwise known as the Religious Society of Friends or simply “the Friends,” held doctrines that attracted the colonists, and they gained many converts in the colony. In contrast to the Church of England, Quakers argued that everyone had “inward light” and that all were assured salvation. But these transgressive ideas, combined with a philosophy that stressed peace, simplicity and equality, were profoundly antithetical to the strife-ridden, materialistic and exploitative society that was early colonial Barbados. As a result the Quakers were
in constant conflict with the authorities. So it was unsurprising that George Fox felt compelled to write a letter to the island’s governor to contest the “scandalous lies and slanders that have been put upon us.” The Quaker stand on slavery only heightened the island government’s antipathy to the sect; they were the first group to include slaves in their religious worship. In 1676 the island’s Assembly passed a law that made it illegal for slaves to attend Quaker meetings. Hostility to the sect continued to grow, and in the 1680s there was a mass collective flight of Quakers from the island to settle Pennsylvania on the mainland. (That George Ashby’s eldest son, George Jr., also took flight for Pennsylvania during this period is another clue that the family were indeed Quakers.) Certainly my ancestor, George Ashby’s second son, William, my grandfather seven times removed, was a fervent Quaker. A mason by trade, William ended up in the stocks, spent a couple of months in jail and was fined 500 pounds of sugar for building a wall in a Quaker burial area on Christmas Day in 1676.

Other revelations provided by the will are concrete ones: it is signed by my forebear, so he was clearly a literate man. His decision to make his wife his executor was characteristic of many planters on the island, and suggests that he trusted her to carry out his wishes and respected her competence, for together they had carved companionship out of struggle and worked assiduously as a team for the betterment of their family. George Ashby was also typical of many of his contemporaries in other crucial ways. Clearly a loving and concerned parent, his overwhelming priority was the transfer of wealth to his children, and he sought to divide his holdings in a way that would enable them all to survive and thrive on the island.

In other ways George was unusual among his peers, in that he managed to father four children who survived to adulthood. (His eldest daughter Elizabeth predeceased him, dying at the age of twenty-two.) In Christ Church, the parish with the most complete surviving records, the average was a mere 1.8 children per family. Many of those who peopled the mainland colonies, particularly the New England Puritans, had six or seven offspring, but the islands were different. Barbados fared a little better than its neighbours, but across the Caribbean islands, the
quality of life tended to be lower than in their American counterparts as they lacked the structure provided by Christian principles and strong family units that anchored society back in Europe and on mainland America.

There are hints too of an intriguing family squabble when George Ashby decrees that if his daughter marries “one Edward Joloffe” she will receive only a paltry twelve pence, instead of the three acres, house and slave that she would otherwise be entitled to. Perhaps George’s hostility to Joloffe was because he was a backsliding Quaker or, even worse, an Anglican. Quaker marriages were serious affairs. The Quaker Meeting to which a man or woman belonged decided on whether the marriage was suitable or not, so to reject that choice had repercussions for the whole community. (For the record, Deborah, apparently a pragmatic girl, married a man called Peacock and duly inherited her rightful portion; this is the piece of land that is still planted with cane today.)

The will makes no mention of his country of origin, or any family or friends that he may have left behind there. Like many of those who came to “make” the New World, George seems to have effectively cut all ties with his old life on his departure. From the moment he took ship, he probably realized that his migration was an irreversible decision; after all, he had risked his money, his reputation, his very life in the undertaking.

In 1680 Barbados held a census, which demonstrated just how comprehensively sugar had reshaped the island. Its sugar planters were now the wealthiest men in English America. Their fortunes dwarfed those of the Chesapeake tobacco planters and those of the New York and Boston merchants, as well as their counterparts in Jamaica and the other Leeward Islands. Indeed, the Barbadians produced more sugar and employed more shipping than the other islands combined. As one historian concluded: “
Almost certainly the exports to England from this small island of less than 100,000 arable acres were more valuable in the 1680s than the total exports to England from all the North American colonies.”

During George Ashby’s time on the island, Barbados had been transformed
from an anarchic frontier settlement to a rigorously ordered and stratified society, which was completely dominated by the big planters. Despite making up only 6.9 per cent of the population, the planters owned 53.4 per cent of the island’s acreage, and had 53.9 per cent of its servants and 54.3 per cent of its slaves. These men dominated the island politically as well as economically, holding key government posts as well as important posts in the militia and the Vestry. As the historian Richard Dunn has said, the island had a distinctive hierarchy: