Sugar in the Blood (21 page)

Over the decades the status of their island too had shifted. Barbados was no longer the economic star of the anglophone Caribbean: that position had been relinquished to Jamaica, more than thirty times the size and with the ability to harvest much greater quantities of sugar. But “little England” had repositioned itself cleverly; it was “the civilized isle” which took on the role of “elder statesman” of the region, guiding Britain’s Caribbean interests with a considered and moderate hand. It was also one of the most heavily cultivated spots in the region, with a population of around 85,000 people, four-fifths of whom were slaves. Haunted by the consciousness of how outnumbered they were, how vulnerable they were to the possibility of violent revenge, the islanders ratcheted up their control of, and distance from, the people they enslaved, imposing a system of savage discipline. But it was a terrible paradox: the more they isolated and victimized their slaves, the more fearful they became of rebellion.

The island’s productivity was dazzling to visitors: the hills that rimmed Bridgetown were dotted with dozens of circulating windmills powering the processing of the sugar crop and creating an impression of an island in perpetual motion. The tropical wilderness that George Ashby and his contemporaries had conquered was long forgotten: Barbados was now, according to an observer, one giant cane plantation,
divided by the exigencies of sugar production into grids and squares as neat and orderly as a chessboard.

A singular portrait of Barbados in the middle of the eighteenth century was provided by the man who was to become America’s first president, George Washington, who visited the island as a nineteen-year-old when accompanying his ailing brother there to recover his health. On arrival in 1751 the young man declared himself “
perfectly ravished” by the beauty of the island. He was particularly awed by the capital, Bridgetown, where his ship anchored. One of the busiest ports in the Americas, with an estimated 1,200 buildings, it was the largest city that he had ever seen.

During his four-month stay, Washington was quickly taken up by the island’s gentry and introduced to their vibrant social life, and entertained by a round of balls, card parties and invitations to drink tea. He dined at the “Beefsteak and Tripe Club,” where the island’s leading gentlemen met to discuss colonial affairs. And it was in Barbados that he experienced his first visit to the theatre, prompting a lifelong interest in the stage.

Slavery in Barbados differed from the model Washington was accustomed to on the American mainland, but he had little to say about these dissimilarities since the institution was as natural as birdsong to him, and probably taken as much for granted. He was, however, impressed by the island’s natural fertility, in particular its soil. “
The Earth in parts is extremely rich,” the young surveyor wrote, and as “black as our richest Marsh Mould.” The Barbadians’ sophisticated farming methods, designed to wring out the maximum benefit from their overworked soil, also had a profound impact on Washington, who became one of the most innovative farmers in the U.S. and a prominent advocate for scientific crop rotation and other cultivation techniques. Washington’s visit to Barbados was the only trip he ever made outside America, and it left an indelible imprint on him because of the island’s urbane social scene and its advanced approach to agricultural science.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the Caribbean sugar islands were more than valuable to their colonial masters: they were priceless. According to one contemporary observer, the French writer Abbé Raynal, their riches “
were the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the universe.” In 1763, negotiating a treaty with the British,
the French were forced to choose between holding on to Canada (dismissed by Voltaire as “a few acres of snow”) or the sugar islands. They chose the latter. It was no wonder that this cluster of small islands had become a magnet for fortune hunters; or that their capacity to generate obscene profits led many to describe them as “the best of the west.” Sugar was the commodity that drove the geopolitics of the era, just as oil does today.

In the years since the Ashby family had first become involved in the industry, sugar consumption had grown exponentially, filtering down from the upper classes to those below. The middle classes used sugar in a vast range of foodstuffs: cakes and candies, jams and jellies, pastries and petits fours, trifles and tansies. As production grew to meet this new demand, so the commodity dropped in price, which allowed the British proletariat to purchase it, thereby creating a further explosion in demand. They used it to sweeten other colonial imports such as coffee and cocoa, but primarily tea. Sugared tea assuaged hunger, provided a vital shot of energy in arduous working days, and added variety to a bland and starchy diet. Sugar was also an aspirational product: an affordable treat that allowed the poor access to a foodstuff that was still associated with their “betters.”

And their appetite for it was insatiable. In 1700, Britain imported 10,000 tons of sugar; by 1800, consumption had increased to 150,000 tons—a rise of 1,500 per cent. In this period the saying “as wealthy as a West Indian” became proverbial. Hence the tale of George III, who was driving one day outside London when he encountered a Jamaican planter whose carriage and liveried outriders were even more astounding than his own, and is said to have exclaimed: “
Sugar, sugar, eh! … All that sugar!”

The member of the Ashby clan who would really transform the family’s fortunes was born in 1776. Robert Cooper Ashby was part of the fifth generation of the family to be born on the island, and was George Ashby’s great-great-great-grandson. He was the son of the recently relocated Robert Moore Ashby and Mary Arthur, and was born two years into their union. Robert Cooper’s earliest years would coincide with a watershed period in the evolution of the West Indian colonies
when a backdrop of persistent turmoil, dubbed by historians “The Age of Revolution,” caused the fate of the sugar islands to darken.

The first of these clashes, the American War of Independence (1775–83), began the year before Robert Cooper was born. It had been brewing for some time. The Americans, like many of the other British colonies in the region, had long resented the controls imposed on them by the mother country. And in that year the Thirteen States explicitly rejected the British Parliament’s right to govern them without representation. The following year they claimed sovereignty over their own affairs and declared themselves a new nation with the name of the United States of America. The British government inevitably rejected this development and a state of war was declared. France, which had been supplying arms and ammunition to the rebels surreptitiously since the beginning of the conflict, eventually declared war on Britain, and was swiftly joined by Spain and the Dutch Republic.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. The West Indians were already jittery. In the years immediately preceding the conflict, slave revolts had ignited across the region like fireworks: in 1768 there was one in Montserrat, in Tobago there were three between 1771 and 1774, while in 1776 there were eruptions in Jamaica, Nevis and Montserrat. Now they had to contend with a war on the American mainland, with all the disruption, bloodshed and anxiety that entailed. What they feared most was the impact that the American rebellion and the rebels’ rhetoric of freedom would have on their already unsettled slaves, especially when the British began in 1775 and 1776 to aggressively recruit enslaved Americans to fight on the side of the Crown. Enticed by promises of liberty and land, tens of thousands fled the plantations; even George Washington’s own slave, Henry, crossed over to British lines. The initiative, courage and judgement shown by these black warriors dismayed the Caribbean planters, who felt that they might inspire their own captives to take up arms.

The American struggle put the islanders in an awkward position in other ways. On the one hand, Britain was the mother country to which the Barbadians still felt strong ties of loyalty. More pragmatically, they did not feel confident in their ability to stand alone, either economically or militarily. On the other hand, the Barbadians were not without sympathy for the “Americans”: they too had chafed under Britain’s heavy
hand. Indeed, the American rebels’ slogan, “No taxation without representation,” was one that the Barbadians could easily have espoused themselves. In addition, the North American states were important trading partners for the island: not only would millions of pounds’ worth of trade be endangered, the island would be deprived of essential goods.

So the Barbadians attempted to tack an uneasy furrow in these churning waters. And soon they found themselves cut off from crucial supplies, both foodstuffs and material for the sugar industry, which traditionally came from the American colonies. The situation was exacerbated by the reappearance of pirates in the region, a reminder that war could break out at any time. By the middle of 1776, the year that my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Cooper, was born, the island was in severe distress. Food shortages were so acute that contemporaries referred to the poor, both black and white, “dropping down in the streets, or silently pining and expiring in their cottages.” The pervasive deprivation heightened the colonists’ perennial fear of slave revolt, and by the latter part of 1777 the Barbadians had no choice but to approach Britain for assistance. But the response was slow; large consignments of flour, beans, peas and fish arrived only in early 1778. By this time the colonists, wrote one observer, “
seemed to be much in a desponding way,” and the overall state of the island was “decayed and impoverished.”

Meanwhile, the military conflict rolled on. Even before the official American Declaration of Independence, the French had made their sympathies with the rebels clear. Animated by the romance of the American cause and longing to avenge the humiliation they had suffered in the Seven Years War against Britain, French nobles like the Comte de Rochambeau, the hero of Saratoga, and the Marquis de Lafayette, who would achieve a generalship in Washington’s army, rallied to the cause. France’s enthusiasm for America’s ambitions was soon evident in their colonies, and Martinique, Barbados’s neighbour, was drawn into the conflict when it became an illegal hideout for American corsairs in between their maritime forays against the British troops. Thus in 1777 the governor of Barbados was forced to warn his Martinican counterpart not to harbour “the rebels, pirates or others who engaged themselves in the conflict.” But it was too late: nothing could turn back the tide of hostilities.

And so, early in 1778, confidential instructions were sent to the British governors in the region directing them to prepare “in every way possible for the defence of their colonies.” The official entry of France into the war on the side of the Americans, and the outbreak of hostilities between Spain and England the following year, only made the situation worse. Many of the Caribbean islands fell into enemy hands, including St. Vincent, Grenada and Tobago, while Britain took the island of St. Lucia in December 1778. Barbados inevitably became one of the centres of operation for British forces in the region, and a garrison was established there early in February 1780. Its neighbour Martinique took on the same role for the French and was garrisoned with an extra 2,000 troops. America’s War of Independence was the genesis of major change across the globe; indeed, the historian Simon Schama wrote that “
without any question, the [French] Revolution began in America.”

And, just as in George Ashby’s time, Barbados was also at the mercy of nature. On 10 October 1780, the most violent hurricane of the eighteenth century devastated the island. There was little indication on the night before that anything was amiss, except for an unusually red and fiery sky and a heavy shower of rain. But by ten o’clock the next morning the wind and rain had worsened and all the ships docked in Bridgetown’s harbour fled out to sea, hoping to escape the ferocity of the storm. By six o’clock that evening the velocity of the winds had increased so much that trees were uprooted and blown away. It was becoming clear that the colony was about to be battered by a truly appalling tempest.

Across the island, householders like the Ashbys took what precautions they could to guard against the force of the storm, barricading doors and windows, or fleeing to the sturdiest buildings on their lands. But there was no safety to be found. Even the most robust constructions, such as Government House, with its three-foot-thick walls, were overwhelmed. The morning brought little respite to the exhausted and bleary-eyed populace, and the storm continued, virtually uninterrupted, for nearly forty-eight hours. At its most powerful the strength of the gale was such that it carried a twelve-pound cannon a distance of 140 yards and levelled almost all of the island’s public buildings as well as its fortifications. It was difficult initially to make any accurate
calculation about how many people had perished in the catastrophe, but it was clear that the numbers were considerable. Many were buried in the ruins of their own homes and a large number were washed away by the sea. The British troops stationed on the island were also hard hit, with both the barracks and the hospital blown down early in the storm. The number of dead bodies that lay interred or washed up from the sea prompted public health concerns. The British Parliament immediately dispatched £80,000 to help the islanders, but it was just a drop in the ocean. This single hurricane was eventually estimated to have cost the region 22,000 souls, and killed at least 211 horses and 6,606 cattle.

Two army officers stationed on the island left their record of the storm. Major General Vaughan wrote in a dispatch: “
The strongest colours could not paint to your Lordship the miseries of the inhabitants; on the one hand the ground is covered with the mangled bodies of their friends and relations, and on the other, reputable families, wandering through the ruins, seeking for food and shelter; in short, imagination can form but a faint idea of the horrors of this dreadful scene.” Admiral Rodney was also stupefied by the extent of the destruction: “
The whole face of the country appears an entire ruin, and the most beautiful island in the world, has the appearance of a country laid waste by fire, and sword and appears to the imagination more dreadful than it is possible for me to find words to express.”