Sugar in the Blood (6 page)

When the ship arrived at the entrance to Carlisle Bay, it fired its guns to salute the fort and manoeuvred gingerly to accommodate its tricky entrance. On that morning it would have taken George Ashby some time to appreciate what was around him. Now that the ship was becalmed in the bay, the sun reflected off the sea and the deck would have made him squint. Shading his eyes with his hand, he would have taken in the body of blue glittering water and the curves of land coated with the green forest that embraced the bay.

He must have felt that all the stories and letters home had understated the awe-inspiring freshness of this new world with its vivid brushstrokes of greens, blues and gold. Directly surrounding him were the azure waters of the bay, which despite the youth of the colony, were busy with vessels of various kinds. These small and large craft—sloops, ketches, barques and brigantines—decorated the bay with their rigging, casting fantastic shapes against the iridescent sky. And beyond, he would have seen the wharves, crowded with men rolling and handling hogsheads of merchandise.

Aboard ship, the travellers would have been busy packing up their belongings and queuing to be ferried to the port by watermen, whose job it was to ply backwards and forwards moving goods and passengers between the ship and the shore. Stepping onto the wharf, George would have staggered and swayed as his feet, so long accustomed to the motion of the ship, adjusted to this new stillness. And, from the wharf, he would have been able to take in the town. George may not have realized it, but he was lucky. In contrast with New England, where the Puritans had disembarked to be confronted with nothing but rough country, Bridgetown was bustling with many of the amenities
the traveller needed to refresh his weary body and supplement his waning stores.

Founded the year after Barbados was settled in 1627, Bridgetown was then more commonly known as “The Bridge,” “The Indian Bridge” or “Indian Bridge Town.” It had emerged as the island’s major port because of certain natural advantages: an abundant water supply and a convenient harbour. But the site also had its drawbacks. “
Their main oversight,” according to Richard Ligon, “was to build their Towne upon so unwholesome a place where there remains a kind of Bog or Morass, which vents out so loathsome a savour, as cannot but breed ill-blood and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.” Ligon was correct: the town’s position resulted in terrible smells, and outbreaks of fever were a constant problem for its inhabitants.

A fetid, scrambling sort of place, Bridgetown had developed in a rather chaotic manner. It was both a residential and a mercantile district, so houses great and small were interspersed with brothels and taverns. It even had its own cage for containing riotous sailors as well as a ducking stool, situated in the horse pond, to cool the ardour of ladies condemned as common scolds. The town swiftly built up its reputation as the island’s economic centre because of its role of provisionary and supplier to the streams of immigrants who arrived to plant the land. Its importance grew when Governor Henry Hawley established his Courts of Law and built the Session Houses there in the early 1630s. As a result, “The Bridge” became not just the administrative but the political centre of the island; it emerged as the pivotal port in the entire region, positioned alongside Boston to dominate the commerce of the British West Indies in the Western Atlantic colonies.

The population was incredibly cosmopolitan. It was a stopping-off point for Portuguese and Dutch traders, Virginia merchants and French planters, sailors, employees of the Crown, scholars, pirates, priests and other travellers, who gathered here to carry out their business or indulge their leisure under the sweltering heat of the tropical sun. Some of the town’s populace would have been startling to George: he had certainly never seen any Amerindians in the flesh before, and probably no Africans. Both groups had been brought here as slaves, even though the slave trade was not yet a significant part of the Barbadian
economy. But still, in these early days of settlement, white faces were in the majority and the planters saw themselves simply as “Englishman transplanted.”

George Ashby’s first task would have been finding somewhere to stay. He would probably have been directed to the taverns on Cheapside like the Rose or Three Tunns or Cook’s Arms. These places were the commodity, financial and information exchanges of the period where visitors could not only take up lodging and enjoy a bite to eat but also find out more about the new society they had come to join. Here, George would have been given advice about the best places to obtain any goods he needed such as machetes and axes.

But the most significant purchase was, of course, the land, which required George to make an appointment with the island’s “fire-eating” governor, Captain Henry Hawley. Hawley had been appointed governor of the island in 1630 with the power invested in him by the Earl of Carlisle to establish a council and depose Sir William Tufton, his mild-mannered predecessor, by force if need be. Hawley proceeded to do just that, arresting Tufton for “mutiny” and putting him to death. Most of the islanders felt that Hawley had been too harsh, concluding that “
Sir William Tufton had Severe Measure.” Hawley’s belligerence continued; he fell out with the son of the Earl of Carlisle, who had inherited the colony from his father, and then arbitrarily imposed a poll tax upon the unwilling islanders. It was widely believed that he had men locked up merely because “they would not submit to his yoke.”

Hawley’s fearsome reputation was such that George must have felt some trepidation at the thought of meeting him but, if he wanted land, there was no alternative. Hawley, who had received a grant from the first Earl of Carlisle for 1,000 acres, was busy making a fortune by selling on plots in variable sizes to aspiring planters. The encounter between George and Hawley probably took place at the Session House, where Hawley did most of his official business. I can just picture my ancestor being presented to him there, his hat twisting in his hands and his hair limp with sweat and plastered to his skull, while Hawley sat resplendent in his coat and stockings, intermittently scratching his periwig as his scalp itched in the heat. After the customary exchange
of pleasantries, a certain amount of haggling inevitably ensued, and Hawley—for a consideration (that little something extra that eased the bureaucratic wheels and made the relevant documents appear more swiftly)—eventually agreed to sell George Ashby a nine-acre plot in the parish of St. Philip. My first known ancestor had finally acquired his longed-for property, later to become known as “Ashby Land.”

AT SOME POINT
on the journey to his new plot of land, George Ashby must have cursed the duplicity of this small island. The tangerine sunsets, the cooing doves, which had seduced him as they did all newcomers, had deceived him into believing in the island’s benign felicity. But now as he moved inland, the orderly vistas of Bridgetown gave way to a nightmarish jungle.

During a brief stay in 1634, Father Andrew White found the island “
growne over with trees and undershrubs without passage, except where planters have cleared.” There were only a few roads outside the capital and those that did exist were poor: muddy and slippery in rainy weather and full of the stumps of recently felled trees. Early settlers relied on the narrow tracks made by stock such as sheep, donkeys and even camels that had been specially imported to cope with the island’s terrain. In many places there were no tracks at all, so for some of the thirteen-mile trip to St. Philip, George, his guide and their pack-mule had to fight their way through dense undergrowth, slashing their path with machetes. As they slogged their way up and down gullies, their shirts sticking to their bodies, dazed by humidity and heat and weighed down by supplies, the pair would have fought for every yard of progress.

I wonder how my ancestor felt when he finally arrived at his acreage, the blank canvas onto which he was going to paint his new life. Was he elated, as only someone who had never had the chance to own anything substantial would be on becoming a man of property? Or was he overwhelmed and dismayed, as so many early settlers were, when first confronted by the untamed wilderness that was to be their new home? To many it seemed impossible that they could make an impression on the unruliness of this place; a world older than Genesis, labyrinthine, virtually untouched by the hand of man.

The nine acres that George Ashby had purchased are cradled in a gorgeous valley in St. Philip, the easternmost parish on the island, where it borders neighbouring St. George. (The island only had six parishes until 1645, so the boundaries are different from today.) Three centuries on, the area, which is verdant and green with breathtaking views, still has a preternaturally peaceful feel to it. To the east lies one of the most beautiful beaches on the island, the Crane, with wide expanses of talcum-fine white sand; to the west the vista is dominated by rustling cane fields bordered by huge palms. Just visible in the distance are the Jacobean walls of Drax Hall, the oldest and most famous plantation on the island. Built in the early 1650s, several years after George’s arrival, it is a place that came to encapsulate the dreams of the later generations of immigrants: the legacy of a humble man, like them, who built one of the greatest sugar fortunes ever made.

Today George Ashby’s land is part of a working sugar plantation called Edgecombe. His plot alternates between a functioning field covered with a sea of sugar cane and a piece of “resting” land waiting to be replanted later in the year. Perched atop the dark brown soil is a triumvirate of dilapidated but pretty wooden chattel houses, in sherbet shades of green, coral and purple. The land, which abuts a number of famous plantations, is still directly connected to the family. It is known as Peacocks, taken from George Ashby’s daughter’s married name. Here the loamy earth is good—not the best on the island, but good. George had been lucky.

On the day he arrived, his good fortune was covered in a vast swathe of forest populated with indigenous trees: fustic and redwood, cedar and ironwood. Everywhere he looked was the vivid green of tree canopies, the ornate drapery of moss, the tangle of vines climbing up to the sun and the thick carpet of fallen leaves that covered the ground. Small,
unidentifiable creatures scuttled through his woods, each crackling twig sharpening his awareness that he was out of his element, coping with an unaccustomed landscape.

That first night, when the sun had set and the light was fading from the sky, George Ashby would have pitched his tent and made a fire more for light than heat. Beyond the circle of illumination cast by the flames, the darkness was full of strange noises. The music of the Caribbean night—that orchestra of sounds made by cicadas, frogs and rustling leaves—which seemed so charming when accompanied by the bustle of Bridget own, now seemed menacing in the context of this great, dark, breathing wilderness, and George must have slept fitfully if he managed to sleep at all.

Dawn brought relief, and new challenges. The first task was to find water: not easy on an island with so few rivers. The second task was to create a makeshift shelter, probably some palm leaves propped up on saplings. Then on to the logistical problem of how to start clearing this promised land. Every square inch of the nine acres was covered in plants and thick undergrowth. In an age before diggers, cranes and power saws, it took enormous effort for a man to level one of these huge trees. And once they had been felled, they had to be hacked into pieces and carried away. It was truly formidable work. Richard Ligon learned from some of the early settlers that “
the woods were so thick, and most of the Trees so large and massive, as they were not to be fallen by the few available colonists.” When they did fell them, “the branches were so thick” only the “strong and active men” could “lop and remove them off the ground.” Many of the big planters resorted to clearing their land as the Indians did, by slashing and burning. Henry Colt was shocked to see charred tree trunks, weeds and brush and desolate stumps six feet high standing or lying in the fields.

Two decades after the first settlement, Ligon noted that many farmers still planted potatoes and corn “between the boughs, the Trees lying along on the ground; so far short was the ground of being cleared.” So the first few weeks of George Ashby’s time were devoted to digging up roots, grubbing out bushes, and hacking at saplings. Like most of the settlers, he was not a farmer by trade, so half an hour of bending and slashing with the machete or crouching with the hoe, in the unfamiliar heat, would have made his back ache and his face stream with sweat.
Still he persevered, working feverishly in the hope of clearing enough land to plant a crop and start a small vegetable patch.

There was so much to adjust to in this New World. As a northern European, George Ashby was used to a palette permanently tinged with grey; here, the world was suffused with light and brightness, bursting into vibrant greens, yellows, blues, reds and pinks, like a painting by Gauguin or the unruly splashes of a Jackson Pollock. The night was different here: the constellations disordered, the stars brighter and more prolific above him. The smell of the tropics was also novel: the intense perfume of flowers and spices mingled with the salty sea air and the warm fermenting smell of the earth.

For a man accustomed to winter’s shortening days—the turning of the leaves, the occasional flurry of white snow, cold nights spent huddled around heat-giving fires—this place would have been a revelation. Here the days were divided equally all year round and the change of seasons was punctuated by a shorter series of notes, hot and wet, cool and dry: the relative coolness of November till April, the torrid heat of summer from May to September, which overlapped with a wet season that began in July and culminated in the fearsome hurricane season of September and October.