The Sugar Barons (28 page)

It is not recorded who betrayed the plot, but apparently two slaves, Ben and Sambo, had been ‘fully overheard … talking of … their wicked design’ only ten days before the uprising was scheduled to take place. They were arrested and gaoled, and soon afterwards, a third slave, Hammon, broke into the prison to attempt to dissuade the two captives from divulging anything. But Hammon was caught and, in return for his life, implicated both Ben and Sambo, and another slave, Samson. What happened to the latter is unclear, although he was certainly killed. Ben and Sambo were sentenced to be ‘hung in chains on a gibbet until you have starved to death, after which your head to be severed from your body and put on a pole on said gibbet, your body cut in quarters and burned to ashes under said gibbet’. The two slaves are reported to have heard this sentence ‘patiently … without being in any ways moved’. They survived for four days before, their hopes for rescue fading and in an agony of thirst, they named names, in return for their lives, ‘frankly confess[ing] (when it could not be help’d) what their design was’. Sambo, it seems, did not live long enough to enjoy the ‘Governor’s mercy’.

Ultimately, between 200 and 300 were arrested, although only about 30 were identified as ringleaders. ‘Many were hang’d, and a great many burn’d’, a contemporary noted. ‘And (for a terror to the others) there are now seven hanging in chains, alive, and so starving to death.’ One Alice Mills was ultimately paid ten guineas ‘for castrating forty-two Negroes, according to the sentence of the commissioners for trial of rebellious negroes’.

Everyone among the white elite was deeply shaken. Governor James Kendall reported to London that: ‘The conspiracy of our most dangerous
enemies, our black slaves … put the inhabitants into so strong a consternation.’ Appealing to London to send a permanent regiment to garrison the island, he wrote that ‘these villains are but too sensible of … our extreme weakness’.

13
THE COUSINS HENRY DRAX AND CHRISTOPHER CODRINGTON

‘All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud.’

Sir Walter Raleigh

Barbados, comparatively long-established and by far the most heavily settled of the English colonies in the West Indies, remained radically precarious and unstable. Yet another war with the Dutch from 1672 to 1674 saw the loss of many valuable cargoes, a hike in shipping costs, and a worrying increase in the public debt. Shortly after the uncovering of the first major slave plot, the island was hit by the worst hurricane in its history. On 31 August 1675, the sky darkened, and strong winds started swirling round, seemingly from all directions. Heavy rain, howling winds and lightning continued through the night. By morning, hardly a building or tree was left standing on the leeward side of the island. Two hundred people were killed, crops torn out of the ground or flattened, and two years’ sugar production lost. The Governor reckoned the damage at more than £200,000 and with the destruction of food crops and shipping, famine was soon widespread. A year later, in 1676, a ferocious smallpox epidemic carried off thousands, particularly from amongst the enslaved Africans and children of all races.

Henry Drax’s workforce seems to have been unaffected by the slave plot of 1675, in spite of the preponderance of Coromantees amongst his African slaves. Clearly, he also remained a very rich man, despite hurricane destruction and the sugar planters’ shrinking margins. But his wealth proved to provide no protection for his own family, who had at least their fair share of Barbados’s appalling mortality from disease. During an 18-month period
up to the beginning of 1680, more than twice as many white people were buried than baptised in Barbados. A comparative analysis of households in Bridgetown and a town in Massachusetts from this time shows a mean number of children per family at just under one for Barbados, and more than three for Massachusetts. Furthermore, very few children who survived into adulthood in Barbados still had both parents alive. Sometime in the late 1660s, Henry Drax’s first wife, Frances, died (his younger brother John, still in his twenties, also died in Bridgetown soon after). Desperate to produce an heir to carry the Drax name forward, Henry quickly remarried, while on council business in England in July 1671. It was another good match: his new, 21-year-old wife Dorothy was the daughter of John, second Lord Lovelace. Dorothy produced four children, but all were, as an inscription on her tomb reads, ‘snatched away (alas!) too quickly’. None survived infancy; it is highly likely that at least one succumbed to the smallpox epidemic attacking Barbados at this time.

So, with a heavy heart, Henry Drax wrote his ‘Instructions’ for the running of his Barbados estates, and prepared to leave the island. His reluctance, and attachment to his Barbados home, is shown in his request for regular supplies to be sent to England of his favourite West Indian foods: ‘Jamaca peper welle pickled in good wineger … green ginger and yams’ (export was to be handled ‘with the adwice and Asistnce of my Cozn Ltt. Colonel John Codrington’). On 22 April 1679, a ticket was granted for Henry Drax Esquire to sail for London on the ship ‘
Honor
, Thomas Warner commander’.

Ironically, the move to healthier climes backfired. No more children were forthcoming, and three years later Henry himself died, aged 41. His will was written only shortly before his death: in it, in an exceedingly rare example of planter philanthropy, he left £2,000 for the establishment of a ‘free school and college’ in St Michael. He had always deplored the practice, since the Restoration, of the rich planters sending their children back to England at the age of 12 to be educated there. Few ever returned, he complained, and those that did were ‘utterly debauched both in Principallls and Morals’. Rich and far from home, it appears that the young Barbadians became loose-living and extravagant, and famous for ‘the gaiety of their dress and equipage’.

Two thousand pounds was a very sizeable amount of money at the time, but nothing came of the school. The bequest was ‘borrowed’ by the hard-pressed assembly, and disappeared.

Henry’s will requested that his funeral be ‘not costly, only decent’ and that he was to be buried with his father in St John of Zachary. Four hundred
pounds was allocated to memorials to his mother and father, and a small sum for the poor of the parish. As well as his extended family, his godson Christopher Codrington the third was a beneficiary, as was his cousin William Drax. His wife found herself richer to the tune of a massive £8,000, as well as inheriting valuable property in London.

In the absence of an heir in his line of the family, the Barbados estates were to go to his sister Elizabeth’s son, Thomas Shetterden, but with an important caveat: he had to change his name, ‘and his posterity after him’, to Drax. Should he be reluctant to do this, Henry stipulated, the plantations would go to his younger brother, with the same caveat that he change his name. (This young man already carried the first name ‘Drax’, so would have become Drax Drax.)

Henry’s nephew Thomas duly changed his last name to Drax and lived for a time in Barbados until his death in 1702. His eldest son, Henry Drax, also spent some of his life inhabiting Drax Hall, but passed most of his time in England, where he became an MP for Lyme Regis and Wareham in 1719, in more than slightly dubious circumstances (both his sons would also represent the constituency). Nonetheless, the death of the first Henry, or, more exactly, his quitting Barbados in 1679, marked the end of the family’s direct influence on the affairs of the island, once so crucial to its development.

Henry’s cousin Christopher Codrington would also leave Barbados, but under very different circumstances. Sometime before 1671, when he was 31 years of age, Christopher abandoned his ‘liberal, debonaire humour’ and started gaining a very different reputation. The turning point seems to have been Codrington’s takeover of a plantation called Consetts, situated in a beautiful spot on the east coast of the island in St John’s parish.

This was one of the island’s oldest plantations, established in 1635 by William Consett. It was also one of the most valuable: it had its own freshwater spring and also contained rare clay deposits – essential for making the pots for ‘claying’ sugar. In addition, it boasted a fine sheltered harbour. This allowed the products of the plantation to be carried away by boat, avoiding the difficult 14-mile trek across the island to Bridgetown. By the late 1660s, the next-door plantation was owned by Christopher’s brother John Codrington, and both William Consett and his wife Elizabeth were elderly and frail.

What happened next has been argued over ever since. It has been said that Christopher Codrington won the plantation in a game of cards. In a
different, more convincing version of the story, the elderly Consetts made over part or all of their plantation to their friend and next-door neighbour John Codrington and his brother Christopher, to be theirs on their death, in return for a one-off payment to see them to their end of their lives. In another version, the deal was done with Henry Willoughby, son of the governor, or even with a third character known only as Turner. Alternatively, it may have been a combination of Willoughby and the Codring-tons, with the estate lined up to pay Willoughby a large annuity while being inherited by Christopher Codrington. The facts are murky to say the least.

But we do know the outcome. The Consetts died in 1669, within weeks of each other, and Christopher Codrington took possession of the estate. Shortly afterwards, Henry Willoughby was invited to supper by Codrington. When he left that night he was fine, but when he got to his lodging he ‘fell into a violent burning of the stomach’ and died the next morning at seven o’clock. Many believed that Henry, as a rival claimant, had been deliberately poisoned.

Barbados was always a place of vicious rumour and counter-rumour, and it is impossible to be sure that Henry Willoughby was murdered by Christopher Codrington. But a judge who confirmed Codrington’s ownership of Consetts was later accused of ‘fraudulent proceedings’, and an anonymous assessment of Barbados’s councillors in 1670 describes Codrington as being ‘accused of terrible crimes’.

Certainly Governor William Willoughby, Henry’s father, previously a great friend and supporter of Codrington, turned sharply against him when he returned to Barbados in 1672. Having praised Codrington’s stewardship of the island in his absence, Willoughby now criticised him for putting ‘needless impositions’ on the planters, and threw him off the council. Codrington was also stripped of his command of one of the island’s militia regiments. According to a 1672 letter from Henry Drax, Willoughby now had ‘a great prejudice against Codrington … and has the power … and the will to ruin him’. When Codrington (in an episode that shows his growing lack of judgement and general greed and megalomania) tried to develop a reputed silver mine in Dominica, Willoughby attempted to take the patent from under his nose.

Willoughby died shortly afterwards, but Codrington never sat on the Barbados council again, nor won the trust of the island’s subsequent governors. An attempt in 1674 to regain his place was slapped down with the comment that Codrington ‘was no fit man to be councilor’. Instead, he concentrated on the assembly, where he became everything he had
fought against while deputy governor: a classic creature of faction and self-interest.

Soon after taking possession of Consetts, the Codrington brothers exchanged plantations so that John took over Christopher’s land in St Michael in return for the estate next to Consetts on the St John’s coast. Thus, in 1673, Christopher is recorded as owning 600 acres in the parish. By 1678 he had a very profitable plantation in operation, with 250 slaves, three stone-built windmills, a large boiling house with 17 coppers and a still-house containing four large rum stills. To celebrate his wealth, he commissioned from a silversmith in London the largest covered punch bowl ever recorded – 18 inches high, with a diameter of 17½ inches. Engraved on its side was the Codrington of Dodington arms, belonging to what was then the senior branch of the family (soon to be bought out and superseded by the West Indian Codringtons).

Having as deputy governor battled to enforce the Navigation Acts and the rule of law, Codrington now threw himself with abandon into illegal trading. A wharf and warehouse were constructed in Consett’s Bay, where ‘interlopers’ could land slaves direct from Africa, in defiance of the Royal African Company’s monopoly. It became a small entrepôt, engaging in some very profitable smuggling, and even in the taking of prizes. The RAC’s factors complained several times about Codrington’s operation, on one occasion in December 1678 writing to London that ‘Christopher Codrington of this Island … is a great Favourer of Interlopers … [he], recd. The Gold, Teeth and Wax also the Negroes out of this last Interloper as wee are told and secured them in his dwelling house, cureing house and boyling house, using this expression also as wee are told that he would warrant and secure them ag’st the Compa’s Factors or any [one] else lett them come with what Authoritie or force they could.’

It may be that some events in his family life altered or soured the outlook of Christopher Codrington. He buried a daughter, Mary, almost certainly an infant, in St Michael’s church in mid-1670. His second son, John, was, as his father later wrote, ‘inflicted with an infirmity’, elsewhere less charitably described as a ‘lunatic’. It is very possible that his wife Gertrude also died around this time. Did these tragedies wear him down? Or was it what a visitor to Jamaica at this time described as one of the curses of slavery – the giving of ‘unlimited power’ to the slave-owner, and the corrupting influence of that ‘absolute power over all the rest as slaves’ that saw men such as Codrington ‘guided only by his owne will’, masters of everything but themselves?