Sugar in the Blood (2 page)

The completion of
Sugar in the Blood
would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of a great number of people. My first debt is to my editor, Laura Barber, whose passion for the book, unfailing encouragement and editorial prowess have made this the book it is; and then to everyone else at Portobello for producing and publicizing it with such enthusiasm and energy. In America I am grateful to Sonny Mehta’s team at Knopf, with a special mention to Diana Coglianese, for taking this project to their hearts and backing it so unequivocally. My wonderful agent, Clare Alexander, “got” this project immediately and went in to bat for it with panache and passion. My profound gratitude also goes to the Wingate Foundation, without whose financial support this book could not have been written.

My research has taken me on interesting journeys. In Barbados, where much of my primary research was undertaken, I was met with great kindness. My dear friend Alissandra Cummins, director of the Barbados Museum, has been invaluable: introducing me to the right people, tracking down useful sources, recommending useful texts. Huge thanks are due to Robert Morris and my newly discovered cousin John Knox, who have guided me through the maze of Ashby-related sources, and whose unstinting generosity with their research, time and superior local knowledge have been invaluable. Thanks are also due to Sir Hilary Beckles, Dr. Pedro Welch, Dr. Karl Watson and Dr. Tara Iniss, who in different ways have contributed to this project. Cynthia Cummerbatch and Patricia Stafford both shared their precious work with me. The library staff at the Barbados Museum and the Barbados Archives were always patient and helpful. In England I particularly wish to thank Bill Schwarz at Queen Mary, University of London, for his vital input in thinking through the research process. Staff at the London Library were always willing to help me source material, and I would like to thank the Athenaeum for granting access to their collection of pamphlets on the slave trade.

My special gratitude goes to Tara Kaufmann, who has walked the entire way with me, helping with research and reading and editing sections; and to my daughters Ava and Georgie, whose cries of “Is it finished yet?” have spurred me to the finishing line. My siblings, Lynda and Steven, have been unstinting in their support, while my parents, Kenneth and Barbara Stuart, have been wonderful in every way: finding material, reading samples and providing feedback. My wider family—especially my uncle John and aunts Muriel and Dottie—have provided me with pictures and other family material. And, to end, I offer a special salute to all the new relatives whom I have uncovered in researching this book, especially Andrea Ramsey, Diana Miller and Robert Wulf. To them and all the other Ashbys I have spoken to or heard about, from Australia to America, Canada to Trinidad, France to Holland, this book belongs to you.

AS
FEBRUARY 2012

I HAPPENED UPON
the name of my earliest known ancestor while sitting in a brutally air-conditioned library at the Barbados Museum, poring over a seventeenth-century census. There he was: George Ashby, my maternal grandfather eight times removed. I knew how unusual it was for family research to reach back that far and I felt utterly exhilarated: my stomach lurched and my eyes filled with tears. This sense of elation lingered for a long time and my previously vague interest in genealogy suddenly sharpened. I decided to find out more.

The journey that followed wasn’t always joyful. There were unpleasant shocks as well as happy surprises, perhaps the most painful being the discovery of one of my ancestors on a slave return (a register of slaves held on an individual plantation): just another commodity, listed like pigs and cows and farm machinery. My sorrow and fury were tempered only by my gratitude that I had found him, as if somehow he could draw comfort—as I did—from having his life noticed and honoured by a free descendant.

Eventually I built up an unbroken family tree reaching back to 1620. I was initially triumphant, but as time went on a sense of anticlimax overwhelmed me. What did my neatly formatted family tree really mean? It was, after all, just names on a page. Genealogical research has its limitations: it yields the skeleton, not the body. But between the bones I had, nonetheless, glimpsed something intriguing: a story of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Atlantic world. I realized that there was a book here, struggling to emerge. I continued investigating, but now focusing on secondary sources that brought to
life the context and detail of the period. Over time, my maternal line began to gain both shape and colour. I followed George Ashby from seventeenth-century England, where he, alongside thousands of others, turned his back on his homeland and migrated to the Caribbean island of Barbados in search of a new life. I tracked the lives of his descendants as they became enmeshed in the sugar industry and the Atlantic slave system. And I followed the offspring of those descendants, myself included, as they migrated back to the cold winters of England, the U.S. and Canada.

Although this book is not about me, the story is of course my own. It forced me to revisit my own Caribbean childhood: the holidays spent at the family plantation, Plumgrove, where we could look out of the bedroom windows and watch the fields of waving sugar cane being harvested by other, poorer Barbadians. At the time, I had no idea how privileged this life was; that understanding came later, after I had grown up and made my home in England and had come to see that the cane fields in which I played had once been drenched in exploitation, grief and death. And I had recognized something else: that my family’s story is at once very specific, very particular, but also wholly typical and representative. It is a story that belongs not just to me but to many, many others.

My family, like the families of those others, is the product of sugar and of its siblings, settlement and slavery. This book is the story of how those forces shaped the minutiae of the Ashby family’s intimate relationships—and how, in turn, those family relationships rippled outwards, transforming the societies in which they lived. It is, then, more than a family history: it is a global story, too—one that fixes its gaze on the connections between continents, between black and white, men and women, the free and the enslaved—demonstrating that the individual is not just a victim of global history, but an author of it as well.

GEORGE ASHBY
’
S STORY
began as all migrants’ stories do: with a journey.

Some time in
the late 1630s, when George Ashby was finally given notification that his ship was ready to sail, he must have been afraid. He was a blacksmith, a young man in his late teens, about to leave behind everything he had ever known. Though the voyage carried the seeds of his dreams he, like most of the population, had probably never undergone a long sea journey before and had no real idea of what to expect when he arrived in the Americas.

Those who chose to undertake the fearsome Atlantic crossing in search of a new life were generally tough—or else dangerously foolish. But what else can we know about George Ashby, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? Was he fleeing from a family or seeking a new one? Did he dream of religious freedom or of wealth? Was he ambivalent about leaving his homeland or were his life experiences so bitter that he believed nothing in the Americas could be worse? As he set sail for the adventuresome world of the Caribbean he would have had no idea how heavily the odds were stacked against
him. (According to one historian, men like him were “pursuing
a will-o’-the-wisp,” since very few of them ever achieved the better life they longed for.) He could not know that he would be one of the lucky ones: that he would not just survive but found a dynasty that endures to this day, built on sugar and forged by slavery.

The first sight of the ship would have done nothing to allay his trepidation. The typical merchant vessel that plied the route between the Caribbean and Britain was rated at around 200 tons (meaning that it could accommodate 200 casks or tuns of wine). Trussed against the stone walls of the dock, the ship looked like a gigantic gutted carcass afloat upon the water. The gaunt ribs of the wooden hull curved menacingly into the sky and the base was coated with a shaggy pelt of seaweed and barnacles. It would have been hard for George to countenance that he would be confined in the belly of this behemoth for almost two months, with the real possibility that his journey would end, like that of so many before him, in massacre by pirates or drowning at sea.

After unpacking and settling in, the passengers were summoned on deck to present their documents to the “searchers.” These officials administered the oath of allegiance to the king, stamped each traveller’s ticket with the crucial “Licences under their hands and seals to pass the seas,” and then cleared the vessel for departure. Since every passenger had to undergo this process, no matter what their individual circumstances or where they came from, it represented their first rite of passage, one that made their new status as migrants starkly real.

Still gathered on the bridge, the passengers chatted among themselves or waved to family and friends gathered portside to wish them bon voyage. Then, all of a sudden, a flurry of activity: the sailors scrambling across the deck, busying themselves with a series of tasks that were inexplicable to most of the passengers, the screeching of the anchor as it was winched aboard, the screaming of the hoisted sails, the shouting of the master and the sailors, all combined in a violent auditory assault. As the crew worked furiously in the bows, stern and dock, the passengers jostled to be as near the rails as possible.

Despite the noise and bustle of the ship, most of the migrants would have been as hushed as worshippers in a church, fearful of what the voyage might hold or trying to imagine what lay at the other end. They were aware that the journey was, in all probability, final. Some may
have dreamt of returning to their homeland enriched, perhaps even ennobled, but most rightly sensed that they would not be coming back.

To truly grasp what this sea journey meant, what bravery and audacity it required, one must understand how the world was seen and known at that time. Though George Ashby and his contemporaries had been born in the Age of Discovery (1500–1700), most of the world was still
terra incognita
for Europeans. Maps were often sketchy and inaccurate. Two continents, Australia and Antarctica, had not been traced at all, and vast areas were still blank. The interiors of South America, Africa and Asia had scarcely been explored. Beyond the eastern fringe of North America, which George’s fellow pioneers had begun to document, were millions of square miles of uncharted wilderness.

Like many other countries in the Old World, England was poised between the medieval and the modern, where most people’s lives played out within a narrow radius around their birthplace, and their beliefs were characterized by superstition and ignorance. It was an age in which magic still played a large part in the lives of ordinary people and many firmly believed in witches and fairies, that butterflies were the souls of the dearly departed, and that churchyards swarmed with souls and spirits. In the absence of real information about far-off lands, fantasies abounded: that the east was populated with dog-headed men and basilisks, that Africa had tribes with no heads at all—just eyes and mouths in their breasts—and that the Caribbean was peopled by cannibals, amazons and giants. Some believed that the oceans were full of strange creatures such as mermaids and sea dragons. In 1583 Sir Henry Gilbert professed to have encountered a lion-like sea monster on his return from claiming St. John’s, Newfoundland, for England. In a world that was as yet so immeasurable, frightening and inexplicable, George and his fellow travellers must have feared that they were not just crossing the map, but falling off the edge of it.

Yet by the seventeenth century, many thousands of Britons, beguiled by the much-vaunted possibilities of the “New World” (which they saw as a tabula rasa on which they could write, despite the long history and complex cultures long implanted there), were willing to take that leap into the unknown, and left their homeland to start a fresh life in
the Americas. The migration had begun as a trickle in 1607 with the settling of Jamestown, the first permanent colony in what is now the United States. It had increased to a recognizable stream by 1629 and became a veritable flood in the 1640s, when over 100,000 people left a country with a population of just under five million. (Between 1600 and 1700 over 700,000 people emigrated from England, about 17 per cent of the English population in 1600.) At the rate of one ship departing from England every day, these pioneers arrived to “settle the Americas,” fanning out from Newfoundland for three thousand miles, via Virginia and the Caribbean, to Guiana on the South American mainland. All the way they fought, worked and died to establish themselves in new and terrifying lands.