The Sugar Barons (23 page)

By the same time, sugar production was under way in the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, helped by Dutch expertise and equipment.
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The sugar pioneers of Barbados had stolen a march on the French, but the latter were now catching up quickly. A French settlement was also growing on the western end of Hispaniola, ‘the most beautiful and fertile part of the West Indies and perhaps of the world’, which became St Domingue, and is now known as Haiti. The French, driven by Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s belief in the importance of colonies and commerce, were set on aggressive expansion. A number of very small islands abandoned by the Spanish came under their control, as well as territory taken from the Dutch. An effort was launched to drive the Caribs out of Grenada, the most southerly of the Windward Islands.

For the English Leeward islanders the Caribs were still considered the gravest threat, but the islands’ overall governor, Francis Lord Willoughby, warned in 1664 that: ‘The king of France pursues his interest in the Indies very high, and backs it with power of shipping and men.’ Spanish power was fading, he wrote; ‘the dispute will be whether the King of England or of France shall be monarch of the West Indies’. By the end of the following year, Willoughby was convinced that war with France was imminent. In fact, the young West Indian colonies of the English were about to face all of their potential enemies at the same time.

11
EXPANSION, WAR AND THE RISE OF THE BECKFORDS

‘Next day, when the march began, those lamentable cries and shrieks were renewed, so as it would have caused compassion in the hardest heart: but captain Morgan, as a man little given to mercy, was not moved in the least.’

Prisoners taken at Panama, described in
The Bucaniers of America
by John Esquemeling, 1684

On 5 January 1661, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary: ‘The great Tom Fuller come to me to desire a kindness for a friend of his, who hath a mind to go to Jamaica with these two ships that are going, which I promised to do.’ The friend was 18-year-old Peter Beckford, son of an illiterate cloth-worker from Maidenhead.

Although Peter’s line would come to dominate, there were already other Beckford family members involved with Jamaica, trading in cocoa, provisions and clothing. A Richard Beckford, who may have been a close kinsman of Peter, had substantial land by the end of the 1660s (and took on another 1,000 acres in St Elizabeth in 1673), but remained as an absentee proprietor in London. Peter, later described as ‘singularly fit’, started out at the bottom, working as a seaman, then a cattle-hunter and horse-catcher, then as a buccaneer, then a wine trader.

Edward D’Oyley, who would remain as governor for a short time after the Restoration, successfully urged the retention of Jamaica in the face of the embarrassing fact that it was the principal conquest of the Cromwellian era, which everyone was desperately trying to forget. But he was forthright about the difficulties the infant colony faced; after all, in the six years since its conquest, 12,000 Englishmen had come to the island, but the population in 1661 was less than 3,500. Furthermore, the transition to
planting remained severely hindered by a lack of shipping to take away the crops, and a lack of labour to harvest it. Planters were forced, he reported, to ‘burn their Canes for want of hands’. The tiny number of sugar works – about 18 by 1663 – produced a lighter and finer-grained sugar than those of Barbados, but the principal export remained hides from cow-hunters like Peter Beckford, and the main crops cotton, indigo and, above all, cacao from the trees established by the Spaniards.

But few, D’Oyley complained, were interested in the ‘dull tedious way of planting’. Most preferred to play the ‘Lottery’ of joining one of the privateer or pirate expeditions setting off from Port Royal. Many such adventures failed, leading those who had invested in them to flee the country to escape their debts; just sufficient, though, were successful enough to keep the hope of riches alive. Captain Myngs was back in Jamaica in late 1662, leading a force of more than 1,000 bucanneers (including Peter Beck-ford) against the important town of Santiago de Cuba. Four months later he brought back £100,000 from Campeche.
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D’Oyley, who had been responsible for recruiting the buccaneers in the first place, believed that official sanction for these raids, and the involvement of the Royal Navy, was not worth the ‘plenty of money’ they sometimes brought in. Each time a prize was captured, others were ‘inflamed’ to ‘leave planting and try their fortunes. And no body is at all the better for that sume but the Alehouses where it is immediately spent’ and the traders like Peter Beckford, who, D’Oyley complained, were importing for every £100 of ‘necessary Comodities’ ‘£500 of drink … which deboches and impoverishes the people [and] causes frequent Mutinies & disorders’.

Jamaica staggered on in this fashion through a succession of short-lived governors until the arrival from Barbados in 1664 of the newly knighted Sir Thomas Modyford. Modyford, soon installed as governor, brought with him his enormous household, more than 1,000 slaves, and a new ambitious and positive attitude about the colony’s future. His term of office lasted seven years, during which the population tripled to 17,000 (of whom just over 9,000 were black).

Before the end of the year, he was writing to London about the excellent harbours, wonderfully ‘healthfull’ climate, and, in contrast to Barbados, the abundance of building materials and the fertility of the virgin soil. Most of the old soldiers, he conceded, had ‘turned Hunters’, but with the profits from this, ‘some of them buy Servants & Slaves and begin to settle brave Plantations’. Among them was Peter Beckford, cleverly investing
proceeds from hunting and buccaneering into planting. Some ‘idle fellows’ were still drinking everything they earned, but so many were now turning to farming that there was ‘scarse any Place neere the Sea but is settled and many are gone into the Mountaines & find it the most healthful & fruit-full land which qualities doe sufficiently repay the difficulties’.

Modyford’s experience as a planter in Barbados would be crucial to the development of Jamaica as England’s most important sugar plantation colony, but this would not happen overnight. In the meantime, Mody-ford would throw himself with gusto into supporting the activities of the buccaneers, described by him in a letter to the King as ‘no less than 1,500 lusty fellows’. England was not at war with Spain, but the West Indies remained ‘beyond the line’, and Spanish officials still aimed to exclude all foreign ships from the region. Modyford found himself, therefore, ‘unwillingly constrained to reduce them to a better understanding by the open and just practise of force’. In 1664, a small party sailed up the San Juan river in Nicaragua in canoes and looted the rich city of Grenada, getting away with 50,000 pieces of eight. Soon after, St Augustine in Florida was attacked and ransacked, and the following year buccaneer admiral Edward Mansfield led 12 ships and 700 men on a daring raid on a town in the interior of Cuba. His second in command was a young Henry Morgan. The town’s inhabitants were brutally tortured to reveal the hiding places of their treasures.

While in theory fighting against the monopolistic policies of Spain, the English were coming into increasing conflict with the Dutch, whose preeminent merchant marine was still threatening the Restoration government’s vigorously held mercantilist ideas. Tension rose from 1662 onwards, and in 1664, the English Crown seized New Netherland (comprising the present-day American states of New York, Delaware and New Jersey). The greatest conflict, though, centred on rivalries in West Africa, where the English Royal Adventurers company was competing with the Dutch for the lucrative and ever-growing slave trade. An English force sent to the area at the end of 1663 to protect the Royal company’s operations there took it upon itself to launch a series of devastating raids against Dutch outposts. In response, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter raced from the Mediterranean, and his fleet recaptured all that had been lost and more, as well as booty that included nearly 17,000 pounds of ivory. He then proceeded across the Atlantic, and in February 1665 a warning was received in Barbados that the island was de Ruyter’s most likely target.

On 20 April, at six in the morning, news came to Bridgetown that the
arrival of the Dutch fleet of 14 ships with 2,500 men was imminent. Just under three hours later, with the Admiral leading the way, the Dutch fleet sailed in battle order into Carlisle Bay.

De Ruyter’s force held its fire. Only when it was within a short distance of the fort did it shoot ‘a whole volley of small shott and his broade side’, according to an eye-witness, the master of the ketch
Hopewell
, which was in the harbour. The fort returned fire, along with other ships in the harbour, and the rapid exchange of cannon balls and other shot caused considerable damage to both sides. Although casualties were surprisingly light, shops and residences in Bridgetown were smashed as the Dutch fleet fired ‘500 great shot into the town’, some weighing as much as 30 pounds. De Ruyter, for his part, ‘lost his mayne yard and two others lost theyre Topsayles … Wee damnified theyre sayles very much’, reads the English eye-witness account.

At four o’clock, by which time the island’s defenders had used up 33 barrels of gunpowder, almost their entire stock, de Ruyter raised red bunting to his masthead, calling a council of war. For an hour the fleet rode at anchor out of gunshot, the men busily repairing damaged sails while their officers debated what to do. Then the fleet withdrew from the bay, and stood away to Martinique ‘in the confusedest manner that possibly could be’.

This was to be the only major attack on Barbados in its modern history. But de Ruyter’s mission was not a total failure: having refitted at Martinique, he steered his force for Nevis, St Kitts and Montserrat, where he captured 16 English ships before being called back to Europe.

With the departure of de Ruyter’s fleet from the theatre, the English launched a broad offensive in the Caribbean, in Charles II’s words, ‘to root the Dutch out of all places in the West Indies’.

Almost all the English islands participated, and from Jamaica, Mody-ford unleashed his Port Royal buccaneers. By the end of the year, virtually all the Dutch settlements in the West Indies were in English hands, along with valuable booty in slaves, cannon, horses and other merchandise.

Then the tide turned. In January 1666, France entered the war on the side of the Dutch. Although the move was motivated by European ambitions, Louis XIV sent out to the West Indies a substantial force of ships and men. The first blow fell on the English part of St Kitts. The English and French, living cheek by jowl on the tiny island, had come to an agreement that they would not make war on each other without explicit command to do so from home, and even then they would give three days’ notice
before attacking. Neither side, it appears, took the deal seriously. The English governor, Colonel William Watts, called in reinforcements from Nevis, as well as a force of buccaneers, but before he could launch his offensive, on 10 April the French attacked from the south-west, led by a body of slaves who set fire to the canefields. The French soldiers following ‘fell upon the English on ye windward side of this Island … And Soe wasted, Slaughtered and burnt’ all the way up the island until they reached their own territory in the north.

The English, outnumbering their enemy four to one, counter-attacked on the leeward side of the island around Sandy Point, and in fierce fighting the leaders of both parties were killed or mortally wounded. But then the English force, a mixture of hard-fighting buccaneers and much less effective planters, fell out among themselves, and the next day, unaware that the French were almost out of ammunition, capitulated on humiliating terms: all arms and fortifications were to be surrendered, and anyone unwilling to swear allegiance to the King of France was to be expelled. Eight thousand English, with their slaves, left the island, a large number to Virginia. Few returned to St Kitts, which would never again have a white settler population anything like the size before the war.

From Barbados, Willoughby urged the King to send forces at least equal to those now being poured into the theatre by the French and Dutch. At the end of June, two English men-of-war arrived in Barbados with orders to retake St Kitts. Willoughby, fearing this force was inadequate, commandeered a fleet of merchant ships, and raised 1,000 men from Barbados, as well as assembling 2,000 spare sets of arms for Leeward Islands recruits. On 18 July, they set sail.

The timing was highly risky, as Willoughby must have known – the hurricane season was almost upon them. Nevertheless, with the Governor on board, the armada headed north-west, capturing prizes at Martinique before coming to anchor off Guadeloupe on 26 July. That day, without warning, a massive hurricane struck. Almost the entire fleet, together with the men on board, was destroyed, driven ashore at Guadeloupe, with wreckage washed up on Martinique as well. Of Francis Lord Willoughby there would be no trace, except a couch, recognised as his own, ‘and some peeses of a ship’ washed ashore at Montserrat.

This devastating loss handed the French command of the seas, and doomed the English Leeward Islands to disaster. While the victors of the battle for St Kitts busily removed all the remaining sugar equipment and slaves from the English part of the island, a force of seven French men-of-war (the
largest carrying 40 guns) assembled in Martinique, and at the beginning of November descended on Antigua.