The Sugar Barons (22 page)

Anything that hurt sugar production was potentially fatal for the planters’ finances. Transforming Barbados into a giant sugar plantation had been extremely expensive. Planters had spent more than £1 million sterling just on slaves in the 20 years after 1640, as well as half again on servants, equipment, land and livestock. A visitor in 1671, while writing that ‘The island appears very flourishing, and the people … live splendidly’, added, rather ominously, ‘what they owe in London does not appear here’. In fact, many a planter had ‘spent’ the proceeds of the sugar crop long before it came to harvest, and as it could take two and a half years – time for growing, processing, shipping and marketing – between planting and payment, the indebted planter was exposed to the risk of a change in the sugar price. With supply increasing, this was almost always adjusting itself downwards, by as much as half between 1652 and the end of the century.

But by improving efficiency and increasing the amount of land in sugar, the Barbados planters still made a very healthy return of about 20 per cent on their capital for the rest of the century, even after sugar from other
English islands had belatedly come on to the market. Part of this improved efficiency came, of course, from the ever-increasing use of slave labour. Two thousand enslaved Africans were imported into Barbados every year, and they continued to outperform the white indentured servants. Henry Drax, for one, had no time for white workers; ‘the fewer the better’, he wrote. By 1680 he had dispensed with their services on his plantations almost completely, with a labour force of 327 black slaves and only seven white servants.

With the Dutch officially excluded from the trade, most of these slaves were provided by a new company, the Royal Adventurers into Africa. Launched at the Restoration, its president was the King’s brother James, and the King’s sister had a share along with many prominent Cavalier politicians and grandees. When it was given a new charter in 1663, the King himself was an investor, along with, amongst others, the philosopher John Locke
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and the diarist Samuel Pepys.

The Royal Adventurers company was emblematic of the new intrusive approach of the Restoration Stuart administration, and its official monopoly on supplying labour was disliked in the English West Indies almost as much as the Navigation Acts and the 4½ per cent. Care was taken to bring the most influential locals on board: the irrepressible Thomas Modyford was appointed the Company’s agent in Barbados; in Surinam, William Byam was recruited. Nonetheless, the planters continued to lobby to be allowed to trade in slaves themselves, as well as to run interloping slave carriers. The Company shipped 3,075 slaves to Barbados in the seven months after August 1663, but struggled to get the planters to settle their bills. Soon the Royal Adventurers were in deep financial trouble, and in 1672 the business had to be relaunched as the Royal African Company.

The work of these new slaves went some way to making up for the falling sugar price. But of greatest importance was the effect this cheaper sugar had on consumption back in England. With the retail price slipping from 1.25 shillings a pound in the 1650s to 0.8 shillings by the 1680s, new consumers were created by the thousands. Annual per capita consumption in 1650 was barely a pound; by the end of the century it was five pounds. Thus what the planters lost in margin, they made up for in volume; by the 1690s, England was importing 23,000 tons of sugar a year, making it by far the most important commodity in the empire.

The unloading, storing and selling of all this sugar, which was worth
more than half of all imports from the colonies by the end of the century, was in the hands of a relatively small number of English factors. In 1686, 28 London merchants imported nearly half of all products from the West Indies by value. But the benefits from sugar’s success were spread much more widely. The Crown, for one, made £300,000 a year from sugar duties by the mid-1670s.
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A host of small-time merchants, some 700 by 1686, sent cargoes of foodstuffs, and, increasingly, luxury items, to the islands, where the whites, on average, consumed three times more by value than their cousins in the mainland North American colonies. All the sugar processing machinery – the coppers, the mills, the stills – were manufactured in England and shipped out. The tonnage of ships on the American trade doubled in the 20 years after 1660; all the vessels needed constructing, manning and victualling. In all, some 10,000 men were employed directly in the transoceanic trade.

In London, particularly, banks, insurance companies and brokers all participated in and benefited from the trade, while the number of refineries grew to more than 30 by 1695. Thus by the end of the seventeenth century, most English investors and merchants were in some way implicated in the economy fuelled by sugar and slaves.

The success of the sugar trade, then, helped shape a new direction for England. While in Europe the power of land still held sway, in England commerce and industry were becoming of central importance. There was growing urbanity: coffee shops and retail outlets proliferated; manufacturing boomed. And while trade with continental Europe stagnated, Atlantic commerce flourished above all. England was becoming, a pamphleteer of 1695 wrote, ‘the centre of trade … standing like the sun in the midst of its plantations’. These, the country would ‘refresh’, ‘but also draw profits from them’.

Yet it was not only the mother country that drew profits from the sugar islands. From the end of the 1660s, between 35 and 65 vessels entered Bridgetown annually carrying lumber and provisions from Boston, Salem or Newport. A street near the wharf in Bridgetown was renamed New England Street. Boston predominated, but shipping from Newport grew ever more substantial. Much of Newport’s trade grew from an important link forged in the early 1660s, when Peleg Sanford, aged 22, arrived in Barbados from Rhode Island. Peleg was the son of the founder of the Portsmouth colony, John Sanford, who was also Governor of Newport and Portsmouth in the early 1650s. Peleg spent two
years in Barbados, acting as an agent for a Rhode Island contact, as well as learning about the island – and the wider region – in terms of what it could provide, and what it needed to buy. In 1666 he returned to Newport, leaving behind two of his brothers, William and Elisha, to act as his agents.

His letter book from the subsequent five or so years gives a detailed picture of his business dealings, which were typical of the time for Rhode Island. From England, via Boston, Sanford received dry goods – nails, knives, kettles, pistols and hardware, as well as more luxury items – which he retailed in Newport. The money from this was invested in horses and provisions such as pork, beef, pease and butter, which he then shipped to Barbados. Often he would pay for the goods bought in London by transporting sugar direct to London from Barbados, but he also imported sugar, rum, molasses and cotton from Barbados to Rhode Island.

The letter book paints a picture of a thriving trade that was still opportunistic, highly risky and slightly chaotic. At one point he wrote of the ‘afatting of the swine’ to take alive to Barbados; at another he ordered fine hatboxes and hats from his London agent, ‘Mr William Pate at the Princes Arms in Market Lane’. (‘Let them be Fashonable’, he insisted, but ‘not be very Beeg in the head’.) His business was also full of crises: debtors disappearing; friends or contacts being killed by tropical diseases; valuable cargoes lost though poor storage or fires on the ships, or arriving tampered with (‘Ronged onboard’) and worthless. There was a constant juggling act required to balance credit and exposure to risk. Sometimes the balls were dropped, and on at least one occasion Sanford found himself in gaol for debt.

Nonetheless, the profit margins were such that the operation prospered, and Sanford widened his scope to some of the other islands. In the early 1680s he became the Governor of Rhode Island, by which time the West India trade had become the cornerstone and most vibrant sector of New England’s overseas commerce. In the same decade, the port facilities in Newport were much improved and extended, while in nearby Providence, the town’s first wharf was built. By this time, more than half of the ships entering and clearing Boston were involved with the Caribbean trade, of which the New Englanders had a share coming up to 50 per cent, thereby playing an important role in nurturing and maintaining the plantation system in the islands. The fortunes generated by the West Indian trade were concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of individuals, and such earnings underpinned the creation of New England’s first mercantile elite.

By 1690, a fifth of all Barbados exports went to New England, where rum distillation was starting to become big business. Unfortunately for the English islands, and for the unity of the Western Empire as a whole, enterprising
New Englanders had made an important discovery: trading with the French made for even better margins. The French did not make rum, due to protection measures in place for their home brandy industry. Thus their molasses were sold at only 30 or 40 per cent of the price charged in the British islands. In general, the French sold their tropical products cheaper and paid more for imports. Already there had been complaints back in London that New England, rather than Old, was reaping the benefit of the tropical colonies; trading with the French was an even more serious matter.

The New England traders were also increasingly serving the other English islands in the Leewards, which, a generation after Barbados, were now in the process of their own transformations.

The English Leeward islands of St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat and Antigua would become sugar powerhouses, but for a variety of reasons their adoption of the cane monoculture lagged behind Barbados. Their environment was less easy to master: the volcanic Leewards have richer soils, but they are mountainous, or, in the case of Antigua, water-starved. In addition, the tobacco grown there was markedly superior to the Barbados weed, and so the incentive to abandon it was less urgent. It remained the dominant crop into the 1650s. Furthermore, the Leewards, though a more popular destination for poor whites, somehow failed to attract the richer expatriates like the exiled Cavaliers whose capital and credit had done so much to establish expensive sugar operations in Barbados.

Thus by the time of the Restoration, the Leewards were still like Barbados 15 years earlier, with substantial parts of the population involved in subsistence farming. There were also far fewer enslaved blacks, not that this made for harmonious societies. Like early Barbados, the social scene was crude, rough and lawless. In St Kitts, the cohabitation with the French, with the borders under constant guard, was a permanent source of negotiation and worry, and in Nevis and Montserrat, thanks to Cromwell’s mass deportations in the 1650s, Irish Roman Catholics, whose loyalty to the English Crown was, to say the least, unreliable, made up the majority of the population. Throughout the West Indies, the relationship between the English and the Irish consisted of mutual loathing. All of this hampered development along the Barbados model.

The most unsettling factor of all, though, was the persistent danger from the Caribs.
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Armed with clubs and fish-bone-tipped spears dipped in poison, the Caribs had been raiding European settlements since the time
of Columbus, and were feared and mistrusted by all nationalities. A story in circulation held that ‘The Caribbeans have tasted of all the nations that frequented them, and affirm that the French are the most delicate, and the Spaniards are hardest of digestion.’ But having been driven out of the English Leeward Islands, and from Martinique and Guadeloupe by the French, the Caribs congregated at Dominica and raids intensified, particularly against thinly populated Antigua.

Sir Thomas Warner’s son Edward was Antigua’s first governor. In 1640, raiding Caribs abducted his young wife and two small children. In the process of making their getaway, the story goes, the Caribs killed one of the infants, who was crying, by dashing its head against a rock. Edward Warner set off in pursuit, later succeeding in rescuing his wife and surviving child.
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Thereafter, Carib raids on Antigua became an almost annual affair, with melancholy records surviving of those carried away: ‘Mrs Cardin and children, Mrs Taylor and children, Mrs Chrew and children, Mrs Lynch and children, Mrs Lee, wife of Captain Lee, and many other females.’

St Kitts, the mother colony of the English Leewards, was home by 1640 to some 15,000 inhabitants in its English sector (against fewer than 1,000 each in Antigua and Montserrat), and therefore had the manpower to defend itself against the Caribs. Nonetheless, raids continued. Then, in 1654, the St Kitts militia inflicted a sound defeat on a large Carib force, and for a while at least they were left alone.

The respite allowed the flowering of the sugar industry in the English parts of the island and in nearby Nevis, and a consequent rise in wealth. Unlike Barbados, though, the work stayed largely in the hands of the still plentiful white indentured servant population.

In Antigua, times remained desperately hard, with land uncleared and not enough men to do the work. In 1655 the Governor wrote to London that unless they were sent some servants, they would have to abandon the colony. But soon after, the first sugar estates were in operation on the island. By 1657 at the latest, Samuel Winthrop, who also had interests in St Kitts and Barbados, had established a small sugar works in Antigua at Groaton Hall, in the Wold North Sound region, manned by about 25 slaves. (Samuel would be described by a New England visitor as ‘a reall Winthrop and truely noble to all’.)
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In July 1660, a young Quaker, Jonas
Langford, landed in Antigua from Bristol. Langford’s sugar fortune, one of the first to be made on the island, would later end up in the hands of a resident of Rhode Island. By the mid-1660s the Leewards together were sending about 1,000 tons of sugar to London, a significant amount, even if dwarfed by the production of Barbados.