The Sugar Barons (2 page)

This is perhaps a bit rich coming from Ned Ward, a man who had drunk away his twenties and was now himself in Jamaica purely to mend his fortune. Moreover, his lifelong Tory beliefs inform his disgust at the society he encountered on the island. Jamaica, he wrote, had been somehow ‘neglected by the Omnipotence when he form’d the World into its admirable Order’. Proper rank and degree, the bedrock of English society, appeared to be absent. Instead, arrivals of whatever hue could be transformed by
the island: ‘A Broken Apothecary will make there a Topping Physician; a Barbers Prentice, a good Surgeon; a Balliffs Follower, a passable Lawyer; and an English Knave, a very Honest Fellow.’

The chance for such transformations, or new starts, was, of course, a primary motive for undergoing the dangerous adventure of emigration. The West Indies held out the promise of freedom, of opportunities for social mobility unknown in Europe. The apparent lack of ‘order’ was exactly what made it so appealing to those on the wrong side of the ancient hierarchy at home. Petty thieves or pirates could indeed become pillars of the colonial establishment. Second or third sons who might otherwise be destined for the priesthood or army could and did find themselves instead at the head of a newly dominant branch of the family. Women who were disgraced or ‘lost’, by their own fault or that of others, might indeed welcome Ward’s snide assertion that ‘A little Reputation among the Women goes a great way.’

Ward soon left Jamaica. Although, ironically, his career was transformed by the commercial success of his pamphlet, ‘A Trip to the West Indies’, published the following year, for him the island was a giant cesspit, inhabited by those beyond redemption: ‘The Dunghill of the Universe, the Refuse of the whole Creation … The Nursery of Heavens Judgments … The Receptacle of Vagabonds, the Sanctuary of Bankrupts, the Close-stool for the Purges of our Prisons, as Hot as Hell, and as wicked as the Devil.’

PART ONE
The Pioneers

1
WHITE GOLD, 1642

‘The great industry and more thriving genius of Sir James Drax.’

John Scott, 1667

On the Drax plantation on the small island of Barbados a secret experiment was taking place. It was some time in 1642 or soon after, by which point much of the land bordering the sea had been cleared and put to work in agriculture: tobacco, cotton, indigo, foodstuffs. But James Drax had established his own plantation away from the coast, in the uplands of St George’s, and into that parish’s rich red soil, far from prying eyes, he planted a new crop.

James Drax was later described by a contemporary as an ‘ingenious spirit’. Certainly, he was fiercely ambitious and fearless, but also well-connected and willing to learn. In around 1640, as every embryonic planter suffered from a collapse of the markets for their Barbadian products, he had set sail to Recife, on the westernmost tip of Brazil, to learn a new technology from the Dutch and Portuguese – sugar. It was not just the techniques of planting that needed acquiring, but also knowledge of the complicated and difficult processes of manufacturing. While taking this all on, James Drax forged invaluable links with local sugar traders and, through them, with Sephardic Jewish merchants and bankers based in Amsterdam, the sugar-refining capital of the world.

Barbados is tiny – 21 miles by 14, with an area close to that of the Isle of Wight. It seems bizarre that the island would prove to be the location for an agricultural revolution almost unrivalled in modern times for its ultimate economic, political and human consequences. Yet Barbados’s small size meant that everywhere was within fairly easy reach of the coast, crucial for transport, while its climate and distance from the equator are similar to those of the ancestral home of sugar cane – the islands of New Guinea. Both are hot, around 30°C, humid and wet.

It was in New Guinea that sugar cane, a giant member of the grass family, occurred naturally and was first domesticated. According to local folklore, two New Britain fishermen once found in their net a piece of cane. They threw it away, but recovered it the next day, and the day after that planted it in the earth. The cane burst into life and a woman came forth. She cooked food for the men and at night hid herself in the cane. At last she was captured, and became the wife of one of the men. From their union, the story concludes, sprang the entire human race.

Wild sugar cane had long been valued for the sweet pith that filled the inside of the otherwise bamboo-like reed. It is not hard to imagine a piece of cane, chopped for chewing, being discarded and then sprouting in the rich subtropical soil. From New Guinea, cane cultivation spread westwards, and in around 500 BC it was in India, where the cane also appears in numerous legends, that the juice obtained from crushing the plant was first processed into sugar through being boiled in a succession of ever smaller and hotter cauldrons.

By the sixth century AD, sugar cultivation and processing had reached Persia, from where it was carried into the Mediterranean by the Arab expansion (it was said that sugar followed the Koran). It was grown on Crete, Cyprus and Sicily, as well as the Mediterranean littoral, although the frosts of Europe and the aridity of North Africa made the yield low for the effort involved.

Spanish and Portuguese expansion in the fifteenth century carried the cane ever south-westwards, to warmer, wetter climes. In 1425, Henry the Navigator sent cane plants from Sicily to Madeira with the first Portuguese colonists. After a slow start, the island started producing huge yields. At the end of the century, Spanish colonists, after a long war against the indigenous inhabitants, took possession of the Canary Islands 200 miles further south, and also planted cane.

From the tiny island of Gomera in the Canaries, Christopher Columbus carried cane seedlings to the New World on his second voyage in 1493. Columbus knew sugar: he had traded it between Madeira and Genoa, and his first wife’s family had thrived in the business. Thus it was an experienced eye that declared Hispaniola in the West Indies the finest place in the world to grow the crop. In the rich Caribbean soil, the canes Columbus had brought from the Canaries had rooted in seven days and then shot up with astonishingly fast new growth.

The western part of Hispaniola would, 150 years later and under different ownership, become the world’s most productive sugar-producing hothouse. But strangely, the Spanish sugar industry on the island flourished only
briefly and then rapidly declined. Along with the favourable reports, Columbus noted that the men brought over to tend the first sugar seedlings had fared less well than their charges. Most were dead by the time the first crop came to harvest. But the wider story of the Spanish failure in the Caribbean to tap the ‘white gold’ of sugar is more about the particularities of Spanish imperialism, the weaknesses that would soon allow other, less major European powers to muscle in.

For one thing, the mainland colonies, awash with precious metals, proved a stronger short-term draw for adventurers risking their lives gambling against the frightening new diseases of the tropics. In addition, there were monopolies and government interference everywhere in the nascent industry: all produce had to be shipped through Seville; heavy excise duty was charged on imports, which were then only available for purchase to a closed ring of those buyers who had been wise enough to lend money to the profligate emperor of the time. The powerful Church took its chunk of profits in the form of tithes; a monopoly on imported labour did the rest. For a brief time there were 100 sugar factories at work in Spanish Hispaniola; by 1600 there were only 11. This pattern was duplicated around the Spanish Antilles.

Thus developing the industry (and expanding the market) fell to the other nation of great Atlantic explorers, the Portuguese. In the 1490s, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea were colonised by Portugal and put to cane. When combined with the supply from Madeira, this made Portugal the world’s leading sugar producer. The African islands, like Madeira, would for various reasons quickly fade from the picture, but not before they had acted as a nursery of cane technology for the next great expansion. In 1500, Portugal claimed Brazil, and within 20 years had created a huge industry in sugar, initially manned by the indigenous population, then, as it fled or died out, by imported African slaves. Numerous sugar factories were established by the 1520s, and from the 1530s the industry expanded rapidly, particularly around Pernambuco, Olinda and Bahia.

It was a golden period for Brazil. By the end of the sixteenth century, a narrow coastal strip boasted more than 120 sugar mills in what had now become the richest European colony anywhere in the world. James Drax, visiting in around 1640, would have seen all this: the fabulous opulence of the local planters, their tables laden with silver and fine china, their doors fitted with gold locks; the women wearing huge jewels from the East, precious fabrics everywhere and an army of prostitutes and slaves always hovering. A French visitor at the beginning of the seventeenth century has described his visit to a Portuguese sugar baron, who took his lavish meals to the sounds of an orchestra of 30 beautiful black slave girls, presided over by a bandmaster
imported from Europe. All was afloat on a sea of easy profit – the Dutch estimated that in 1620, the Brazilian sugar industry made the equivalent of more than half a million pounds sterling a year, an astonishing figure.

Unsurprisingly, the Dutch, who had emerged after a long struggle against Spanish rule into their Golden Age as Europe’s most extensive and successful international traders and bankers, wanted a piece of the action. When, for dynastic reasons, Portugal merged with Spain towards the end of the sixteenth century, her colonies became fair game.

The Dutch West India Company, licensed to make war in search of profits for its backers, was founded in 1621 to get its hands on some of this trade. Three years later, the Company, with a force of 3,300 men and 26 ships under the command of Admiral Piet Heyn, attacked a town on the coast of Bahia. The port’s two forts were quickly captured and the defenders dispersed. Driven out the following year, the Dutch returned in 1630, landing 7,000 soldiers at Recife. This time, the hinterland was secured, and soon the Dutch controlled a large area of north-east Brazil.

The conflict had been hugely damaging to the sugar industry, with dozens of factories destroyed in the fighting or to prevent them falling into enemy hands. But new leadership of the Dutch colony from 1636 brought the industry to another high, with hundreds of Dutch merchant ships carrying Brazilian sugar to the refineries of Holland. With the control of Brazil, the Dutch owned the sugar business.

The Dutch leadership successfully encouraged the Portuguese sugar-growers to re-establish their plantations and increase production. But the planters always bridled under the yoke of the hard-working, money-obsessed Calvinist Hollanders. By the early 1640s, cooperation was breaking down and there was agitation in the countryside. This, together with a string of poor harvests during 1642–4 (possibly caused by soil exhaustion in the coastal lands), led the Dutch to look for new sugar acres elsewhere to supply the cargoes for their giant merchant marine and hungry refineries at home. Thus when Drax came knocking in the early 1640s, he found a welcome audience happy to help expand sugar production in the Caribbean basin.

The earliest accounts of Barbados at this time are partial and contradictory. All agree, however, that Dutch influence was crucial in the establishment of the sugar industry on the island in the early 1640s. The actual technology was Portuguese, as the language of the sugar factory –
ingenio, muscovado
– demonstrates. But it was the Dutch, as a 1690 account has it, ‘being eternall Prolers about, and Searchers for moderate Gains by Trade’, who were the engine of its transfer, as well as offering to provide labour, tools, easy credit, and the ships to carry away the finished sugar. Most early Barbados narratives
also agree on the importance of James Drax, who was about 30 years old at the time. The same 1690 account suggests that ‘a Hollander happened to arrive in Barbados, and … was by one Mr Drax, and some other inhabitants there drawn in to make Discovery of the Art he had to make it’.

Drax’s was not the very first sugar to be planted in Barbados. That honour belongs to a Colonel James Holdip. But as an account from around 1667 has it, the colonel’s efforts ‘came to little till the great industry and more thriving genius of Sir James Drax engaged in that great work’.

According to a friend of Drax, bringing the business of sugar growing and processing ‘to perfection’ during the 1640s took ‘divers yeeres paines, care, patience and industry, with the disbersing of vast summes of money’. Drax, an early account maintains, imported from Holland ‘the Model of a Sugar Mill’ for crushing the canes to extract the juice, and some copper cauldrons for boiling the liquid until it was ready to crystallise.

Whatever advice he had received in Recife, along with the infant cane plants, it did not all go to plan at first. Drax, who may have been in partnership with a kinsman, William Hilliard, made several mistakes over the first year or two of his new enterprise. Unlike cotton and tobacco, sugar is difficult and time-consuming to grow, and very tricky to process. It appears that Drax cut his first crop too soon – after 12 months rather than the required 15 or more – and made a mess of the manufacture.

Drax’s first sugar was awful, ‘so moist, and full of molasses, and so ill cur’d, as they were hardly worth the bringing home for England’. But he and his men stuck at it, learning from trial and error, ‘and by new directions from Brazil’. Instead of planting the canes vertically into holes in the ground, they started laying them lengthways in trenches. This anchored the plant and prevented it being blown over on the exposed St George’s hillsides, as well as producing new shoots from each buried knot. The vertical rollers that crushed the cane were strengthened with plates of iron and brass, and the correct boiling sequence was established in copper cauldrons of varying sizes.