The Sugar Barons (3 page)

As soon as Drax’s first competent Barbados sugar arrived on the London market, it yielded a far higher profit than any other American commodity, fetching as much as £5 per hundredweight. Drax reckoned it increased his income per acre fourfold over any other crop.

The stunning success of his experiment would see James Drax and his heirs – as well as other families – accrue fortunes beyond their wildest dreams. More than that, it would decisively affect the course of history, the fate of empires and the lives of millions. Most immediately, however, it would radically alter the nature of the 15-year-old colony in Barbados.

2
THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS, 1605–41

‘I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and give it his son for an apple.’

Shakespeare,
The Tempest,
II: 1

The father of the British West Indian sugar empire was a second son of undistinguished, though not impoverished, Midlands stock. James Drax’s father William was the Anglican vicar of the village of Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. James had five siblings who survived into adulthood; three of his sisters married middling artisans in London – two joiners and a goldsmith.

It has been suggested that Drax’s unusual name indicates some foreign connection, most likely Dutch. Although this is possible, what seems more certain is that someone in his family had links with the Courteens. William and Philip Courteen were the sons of a Dutch emigrant to England, who had fled Holland during the tyrannous reign of the Spanish Duke of Alba. His trading company, with links to Holland (his son William married the daughter of a powerful Dutch trader), had been expanded by his sons to take in almost all of Europe, Greenland, the East Indies and the Caribbean. Recently, a director of the Dutch West India Company with experience in the Americas had been taken on board as a partner.

The Courteen Company was of the new model of trading businesses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In a very short time, the ancient overland trade routes, bestridden all the way with middlemen after their percentage, had been bypassed by the newly discovered ocean highways, a short cut to undreamt-of profit margins. Suddenly there was a new breed of businessman in London – the transnational merchant prince, with connections across the globe and the merchant fleet to link them all together under his control.

The Courteen brothers employed people of many nationalities and had fingers in many pies. One of their mariners was an Englishman, John Powell, a veteran Caribbean trader and pirate, who in 1625 found himself blown off course on a regular return trip from supplying one of the infant English colonies on the northern part of mainland South America. He steered his vessel, the
Olive
, to the leeward, west coast of Barbados, where he dropped anchor. His men briefly explored the heavily wooded interior, and then erected a cross, claiming the uninhabited island for their monarch by inscribing ‘James, King of England’ on a tree.

On his return, Powell told the Courteens of the ‘goodness of the island’, and through the efforts of the Earl of Pembroke, an enthusiastic promoter of colonial ventures, the brothers soon afterwards obtained a patent from the crown to establish a new settlement. The first vessel dispatched to Barbados was the
William and John
, commanded by John Powell’s brother Henry, and carrying some 50 settlers, along with arms, ammunition and provisions. At some point on the voyage, they came across a Portuguese vessel, no doubt on the way from Africa to Brazil. The ship was overpowered, and 10 black enslaved Africans were taken on to the
William and John
– the English sugar empire’s very first slaves. In mid-February 1627, they came in sight of Barbados, and could make out ‘a great ridge of white sand’ fringed by palms, above which could be seen a land ‘full of woods’.

On board the
William and John
, a later report affirms, were all three of the later sugar pioneers – Holdip, Hilliard and James Drax. According to the available evidence, Drax was 18 years old.

Henry Powell took his men ashore on 17 February at a point, now known as Holetown, about halfway up the west coast, where a small stream flows into the sea. Huge trees, many 200 feet tall, clustered thickly right up to the edge of the beach, the outer screen of a jungle of such fantastic tangled thickness as to be virtually impenetrable. As before, there was no sign of human habitation, no footprints on the beach. In fact, Barbados had once supported an Amerindian population as high as 10,000, but a combination of raids by the Spanish and by the warlike Carib Indians, together with lack of water,
¹
had meant that by soon after 1500 it was deserted. For the arrivals in 1627, then, it was an empty, virgin new world.

Mastering the strange new land would, however, require urgent hard work. The first priority was to build shelter – from the sun, the tropical rains and hurricane storms, and the insects and rats. Holdip later told the story of how he and Drax lived at first ‘in a cave in the rocks’. Soon,
primitive shelters had been built, each consisting of little more than a frame of forked sticks stuck into the ground, with palm leaves and reeds for walls and roof.

In the energy-sapping heat and humidity, clearing land for planting proved extremely difficult. The subtropical forest was immensely thick: ‘growne over with trees and undershrubs, without passage’. Ponds and wells had to be dug. Tools were in short supply and rusted rapidly in the warm damp climate. Few of the settlers had performed this sort of work before, many of the trees had wood ‘as hard to cut as stone’, and most were lashed together by prodigious vines. There was a ‘multitude’ of black ants, which would drop on to the men’s heads as they worked. Eventually, though, a small plot of land was cleared and sown with wheat, with the felled trees used to build log cabins near the beach.

The earliest accounts from the island give us a feel of what life was like for the first settlers. It was above all a battle against nature and the elements, the ‘dayly showres of raine, windes’, and the ‘cloudy sultry heat’ that made the air as thick as jelly. ‘With this great heat’, wrote another earlier settler, ‘there is such a moisture, as must of necessity cause the air to be very unwholesome.’ On the seashore, there was an ‘aboundance of smale knatts … yt bite’, which at sunset would descend on the men. The settlers slept in hammocks with their ropes plastered with sticky tar to protect them from cockroaches, ants and rats, and a fire lit underneath to drive away noxious flying insects. Night-time brought a cacophony of unfamiliar noises: the sawing, ticking and trilling of insects, the ‘squeakinge of Lisards & other cryinge creatures’.

To supplement the by now elderly and unpleasant provisions from the ship, the settlers hunted for turtle and hogs. Almost a hundred years earlier, a Portuguese ship’s captain had left some pigs on the island, and their numerous descendants, gorged on the tropical fruits and sweet-tasting roots of the island, were now set about with abandon by the English. In the meantime, however, Henry Powell, having left his nephew John Powell Junior behind as the island’s governor, had taken a small group of men and set sail from Barbados to a Dutch settlement on the Essequibo river in Guiana. The governor there, Amos van Groenenwegen, was a friend of Henry Powell; they had been shipmates working for the Courteens. It is likely that Powell’s visit was long planned, as the Courteens were amongst the backers of the Dutch settlement. In return for trade goods from England, Powell acquired seeds and plants – tobacco, Indian corn, cassava, sweet potatoes, plantains, bananas, citrus fruits and melons. He also brought back from Guiana to Barbados some 30 or so Arawak Indians to instruct
the settlers in the growing of these new and unfamiliar crops. In return, the Arawaks were allowed a piece of land and promised that if they wished, they would be returned home after two years, with £50 sterling in axes, bills, hoes, knives, looking-glasses and beads.

It would be some time before many of the plants were properly established. A visitor seven years later reported a wide range of fruits, ‘but not in any great plentie as yet’. Nonetheless, as more land was cleared, the English settlers, increased by another 80 after the arrival of John Powell Sr in the
Peter
in May 1627, concentrated on growing tobacco. This was why the Courteens had invested in the settlement, inspired by the success of the Virginia colony established 20 years previously.

The initial results were encouraging. The tobacco plants ‘grew so well that they produced an abundance’, which was carried back to London (in one account by Henry Powell, in another by James Drax), where it arrived on the market at a time of scarcity. The considerable profit was invested in another 50 men to help work the island.

But there was a problem. Barbados tobacco, it turned out, was of a very inferior quality. One of the first settlers, Henry Winthrop, sent his initial crop back to his father John in England in early 1628. John Winthrop (who two years later would found the Massachusetts Bay settlement) wrote to his son that the rolls of tobacco were so ‘very ill conditioned, fowle, full of stalkes and evil coloured’ that he couldn’t sell them even for five shillings a pound.

But although the more enterprising settlers like Drax started to look around for another staple, most of the white settlers, swollen to 1,800 by 1629, persisted with tobacco, which remained quick and easy to cultivate. In the meantime, the growing population, even those at the top of the hierarchy, often went hungry – ‘much misery they have endured’, reads an account from 1629. Then, in late 1630/early 1631, a combination of factors put the very survival of the colony in doubt. First, the price of tobacco fell sharply to a tenth of its previous value. Barbados’s inferior product was now almost worthless. The island’s hog population, hunted with reckless abandon, had dwindled almost to extinction. At the same time, a severe drought blasted the wheat crop. The result was what would soon be known as ‘the Starving Time’.

Of course, colonies in the Americas had failed before, with disastrous, usually fatal consequences for the settlers. For a long time, the Caribbean had been a ‘Spanish lake’; by the Treaty of Tordesailles in 1494, the Pope had granted to Spain the whole of the Americas bar Brazil, but with the
fading of Spanish power after the long war of 1585–1604, a number of other European powers – France, England, Holland, Denmark, Prussia, Sweden – had scrambled for ‘a place in the sun’. The first were the Dutch; before the end of the century, they had established settlements in Guiana, and in 1600 they landed on the tiny island of St Eustatius near St Kitts. Emboldened by their success, French and English merchants also sponsored a number of attempted colonies.

The West Indies had always been ‘beyond the line’. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, the French and Spanish, unable to settle their disputes over the Americas, had agreed that there would be a line in the Atlantic beyond which accepted European treaties, and, in effect, accepted European codes of conduct, would not apply. The English, in treaties in 1604 and 1630, implicitly accepted the same agreement. Thus, from the earliest days of the Spanish empire, the Caribbean was a constant theatre of violence and war – declared or not – infested by privateers, pirates, corsairs, call them what you will. It was a lawless space, a paradise for thieves, smugglers and murderers.

French and Dutch privateers were in the vanguard. Indeed, on his third voyage, Columbus himself had had to take action to avoid French pirates. In 1523, a privateer squadron originating from Dieppe hit the jackpot, capturing the Spanish treasure fleet and a huge prize of gold bars, pearls, emeralds and sugar as well as the crown jewels and wardrobe of Montezuma. Generations of adventurers from a host of countries would be inspired to attempt to repeat the feat.

For the English, though, the Caribbean had a particular resonance (particularly for those, like Drax, of solid Anglican sensibility). After the lucky defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, English identity and self-esteem had become ever more closely tied to a new anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish nationalism. The heroes of this new mood were the Protestant ‘sea dogs’, such as Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh, and their stage was the Caribbean. Hawkins was the first, trading illegally in the West Indies in the 1560s. The next decade saw Sir Francis Drake rampaging around the Caribbean basin, sacking Nombre de Dios in Panama (and bringing home £40,000 in loot), and then, in the 1580s, capturing and ransacking Santo Domingo in Hispaniola and Cartegena on the Spanish Main. All was justified as revenging the terrible cruelties of the Spaniards.

Because the West Indies was ‘beyond the line’, it made little difference whether countries were at war or not; no quarter was given or expected. But the raw pursuit of Protestantism and profit, not necessarily in that
order, often had a wider strategic aim – to attack Spain at the source of its wealth. Thus during the struggles of the Counter-Reformation, the Caribbean basin became, not for the last time, the ‘cockpit of Europe, the arena of Europe’s wars, hot and cold’. The most effective way for the rival powers to sap Spain’s strength was to commission privateers to attack its trade and bullion lines in the West Indies. This also promised the chance of great dividends for those who fitted out and provisioned the privateers; for the first time, merchants in London started investing in faraway imperial schemes.
²

The exploits of the Elizabethan corsairs and adventurers were read about in England in the works of Hakluyt, Purchas and Raleigh as well as in translations from Spanish accounts. But it was soon apparent that the swashbuckling was only part of the story. Many ships’ captains found that it was almost as profitable and far less dangerous trading clandestinely with the Spanish rather than looting their settlements with fire and sword. Furthermore, the curiosity of these men about the new, exotic lands proved highly infectious. From the first shipwreck of Englishmen in Bermuda in 1609, the idea of the ‘paradise island’, untouched by time, gripped the English imagination even as strongly as that of pirates. For Andrew Marvell in his poem ‘Bermudas’, it was a Garden of Eden. For Shakespeare, or, more exactly, his Prospero, the emptiness of the island gave free rein. There was no barrier to Prospero’s self-assertion and his control over the lower orders of man and beast, and even nature itself. Raleigh described Guiana, where he disastrously ruined his life and reputation seeking a mythical ‘El Dorado’, as ‘a country that hath yet her Maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought’. The inhabitants of Guiana, told by Raleigh that he was there to free them from the Spanish yoke, were for him just part of the scenery, a chorus to sing the praises of the great new conquistador. So if the deserted paradise turned out to be occupied after all, that did not matter. For Defoe’s later Robinson Crusoe also, the ‘natives’ are part of the landscape, rather than the owners of it.