The Sugar Barons (33 page)

In December 1695, Codrington wrote to London from Antigua that his islands had enjoyed a bumper sugar crop, but had not the ships to carry it home securely. He also repeated his requests for settlers from the northern colonies for St Kitts, but it appears that few were forthcoming. At last, in 1696, pay and clothing arrived for the soldiers, and a fleet was sent out under the command of Rear Admiral John Nevill. There were grand plans for him to join with Spanish naval forces, but such was the local mistrust between the two countries – in theory allied against France – that this
came to nothing. The French in the meantime, who had been fighting the Spanish in Hispaniola, had attacked and looted Cartagena. Nevill attempted to intercept the French fleet as it returned home laden with plunder, but only succeeded in capturing the enemy’s hospital ship, from which his men promptly caught yellow fever.

At last, more through mutual exhaustion and bankruptcy than because anything had been resolved, peace was made between France and England at the Treaty of Ryswick in September 1697, thus ending the War of the Grand Alliance. For many Leeward Islanders, the coming of peace removed any qualms they might have had about criticising the Governor, and the following year a torrent of allegations about Codrington reached London. His plantation in St Kitts had been illegally seized, complained its former owner. Codrington had promoted the worst sort on the island – Jacobites, Papists and Irish. He had traded illegally with the French and Dutch, even during the war, and this had continued since, it was said. In fact, the failures at Guadeloupe and Martinique were Codrington’s fault, as he ‘minded nothing but plunder’. He had also, it was alleged, taken for himself or his cronies estates of those who had died intestate or with complicated wills; on one occasion he ‘threatened to break ye head of any one that should offer to prove ye will’. Those who opposed him found themselves arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned; letters of complaint were intercepted and opened. The story of Consetts reared its head again: ‘In Barbadoes’, an anonymous letter that reached London accused, ‘he raised himself above ye Levells of ordinary planters by most wicked practice well known to every Barbadoes Gentleman.’ ‘Extremly Coveteous and wicked’, ‘He is hated beyond Imagination’, the letter continued. ‘From a Governour, planter, trader without breeding, word, honour, and religion, good Lord deliver us.’

Governor Codrington had clearly provoked violent passions. During his term, two lieutenant-governors were murdered, one in Nevis and one in St Kitts. Both the killings seem to have been provoked by trouble arising out of the allegation that Codrington had been trying to get hold of someone else’s estate. According to the largely admiring Codrington family historian, by the end of his life, ‘the exercise of almost unlimited authority over a turbulent community turned his head’.

Codrington did get his friends to write to London in his defence: ‘we are not sensible of any mismanagement or irregularities’, they said, pleading ignorance, but such was the weight of complaints that the Board of Trade in London, usually careful to take into account the fractious and feud-riven nature of the islands, was moved to publicly chastise Codrington.
Just before what seemed like his inevitable recall and disgrace, Codrington died, aged 58, on 30 July 1698.

Codrington’s greatest regret at the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick had been the return of the formerly French parts of St Kitts. This inevitably caused friction and ongoing arguments, and it left the English on the island vulnerable to yet another destructive attack (the French were also ceded by Spain the western part of Hispaniola, which they quickly converted into the world’s most productive sugar factory). So within only a couple of years, war threatened again. This time, the ‘dapper’, scholarly Christopher Codrington the Younger would be in charge.

16
THE FRENCH INVASION OF JAMAICA

‘War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.’

Karl Krauss

Fortunately for Jamaica, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake of June 1692, the French were distracted by their struggle against the Spanish on Hispaniola. Nonetheless, a small French force had to be expelled from the north coast later in the year. The arrival of Wheeler’s fleet in the theatre in early 1693 deterred any major attack on Jamaica, but with his departure, raids became more frequent. In October 1693, the Governor, Sir William Beeston, reported that ‘the enemy daily infests our coasts’. Many abandoned their plantations on the north coast, as raids by French privateers from nearby Hispaniola increased relentlessly in size and frequency. English settlers were carried away, sometimes to be ransomed, often tortured, and always robbed of all they had. Governor Beeston even took the extraordinary step of sending a protest to the French governor in Hispaniola in a ship under a flag of truce, but his envoys were imprisoned and their vessel seized.

The French-controlled part of Hispaniola was under the command of Captain Jean-Baptiste Du Casse, a notorious former privateer. According to Beeston, he had spies everywhere in Jamaica, particularly among its Irish inhabitants, and they now reported to Du Casse that the ‘island was easily taken; the fortifications at Port Royal were out of order and few men there, so that two hundred men would take that place, and two hundred more would march in any part of the country the people were so thin and so little used to arms’. Then, on the evening of 31 May 1694, Beeston was sitting in his house with a small group of friends when they were disturbed
by the entrance of an Englishman, ‘in a very mean habit, and with a meagre weather-beaten countenance’. The man identified himself as a Captain Stephen Elliot. Some months before, he had been taken prisoner by a French privateer and had been held in prison at Petit Goave on the west coast of Hispaniola. But he had escaped from captivity, and with two companions in a small canoe had succeeded in crossing the 300-mile stretch of water between Hispaniola and Jamaica. He now carried an urgent warning: the French had assembled a force of 20 ships and more than 3,000 men, mostly buccaneers; an attack on Jamaica was imminent.

Beeston immediately declared martial law and quickly weighed up his tactical options. Although he had command of some 4,000 men in seven militia regiments, they were currently strung out over more than 100 miles of coast and thus would be unable to stop a determined landing force. He had faith, however, in the defences of Fort Charles. During the chaotic governorship of the second Duke of Albemarle, Colonel Peter Beckford had lost his position as commander of the fort. Along with other ousted and disgruntled planters, Beckford had withdrawn to England, but after the Duke’s death, he had returned and resumed his position. According to his friend Beeston, Beckford had got the fort ‘into excellent order’. Using pressed labour, he had rebuilt the bastion, laid a gun platform, and mounted powerful cannon. He now prepared a fire ship to defend the harbour, and built barricades to protect the fort from the landward side.

Beeston decided that the only way to save Jamaica was to concentrate his forces. He thus ordered the abandonment of the eastern part of the island, where, given the prevailing wind, the landing was likely to take place. A system of beacons was established to warn of an approaching fleet, and Beeston announced that any slave who killed a Frenchman would earn his freedom. Free inhabitants, provisions and slaves were now withdrawn into the area around Spanish Town, Kingston and Port Royal.

On Sunday morning, 17 June, lookouts reported the French fleet ‘coming into sight with a fresh gale’. They landed unopposed in the easternmost parish of the island, and marched inland, plundering, burning and destroying all in their path. Cattle and sheep were killed, crops burnt, fruit trees hacked down. ‘Some of the straggling people that were left behind they tortured’, Beeston later reported, ‘particularly Charles Barber; and James Newcastle they murdered in cold blood after a day’s quarter: Some women they suffered the negroes to violate, and dug some out of their graves.’ After a month or so, the French re-embarked and cruised westwards, before landing at Carlisle Bay, about 35 miles west of Port Royal, with a view to attacking Spanish Town from the south. The English forces
were quickly on the defensive. Reinforcements were sent from the Port Royal area, and after a forced march of 36 miles, they arrived just in time to hold a number of fortified estate houses. The buccaneers among the French force, happier looting than taking casualties, withdrew, and on 3 August 1764, the French re-embarked and sailed back to Hispaniola. Slaves, pressed into service, fought for the English, and at least 14 were subsequently freed for their bravery.

The French had caused immense damage, destroying more than 50 sugar works, and carrying off nearly 2,000 slaves.
³⁶
In the process, however, they had lost something like half their number to sickness. Learning nothing from this experience, or, indeed from that of previous military adventures in the islands, within a year the English were preparing a revenge attack. Led by an 1,800-strong force from home, the English linked up with the Spanish to attack the French in Hispaniola. In charge of a corps of volunteers from Jamaica – and paying for them out of his own pocket – was Peter Beckford, now a colonel in the Jamaica militia. The French were heavily outnumbered, and soon several of their towns had fallen. But as Colonel Beckford reported, ‘here I reckon that our misfortunes began’. Naval personnel had been the first into a captured town, and had laid their hands on everything worth taking. ‘As soon as the land forces came in’, wrote Beckford, ‘they were for taking all from the seamen and threatening to shoot all of them that carried off anything.’ A full-scale battle was narrowly avoided, but soon the Spanish fell out with their English allies, and on all sides disease began to take a heavy toll. Once again, the English naval and army commanders squabbled with each other, no decisive victory was obtained, and the port of Petit Goave, whence all the troublesome privateers had emanated, was left undisturbed. By the time the English left the island, they had achieved nothing and had lost more than half their number to sickness. Colonel Beckford himself was ill as well, though he recovered within a few months.

The sorry coda to the war in this part of the West Indies involved another English attack on Hispaniola in mid-1697, the year that peace was made at the Treaty of Ryswick. This time a squadron under Rear Admiral George Mees succeeded in surprising the defences of Petit Goave, and by 8 July the town was in English hands. But at that point the men of the landing party found a large quantity of liquor in a dockside warehouse. Within a short time, they were out of control, and were in no fit state to repel a French counter-attack led by Du Casse. After heavy losses, they set fire to the town and re-embarked.

***

For Jamaica, the fighting during the 1690s would have a side effect more devastating than any of the burning and looting of the French. When Du Casse’s men gave up their attempt to conquer the island, they left behind a deadly virus. Until this time Jamaica had been relatively free of yellow fever. Now it struck the island with such ferocity that the white population came close to demographic collapse.

Even before the French invasion, early mortality was common in Jamaica. In 1691 the Governor wrote to London that ‘people die here very fast and suddenly, I know not how soon it may be my turn’. In the same year, Peter Beckford’s wife Bridget died, presumably of disease (he remarried the following year to Anne Ballard, from another wealthy planter family). The aftermath of the invasion, however, saw the death rate at its worst in Jamaican history. In Kingston, a quarter of the population perished, and it has been estimated that as many as 200 per thousand of the town’s population died every year during the first decades of the eighteenth century. (Comparable rates for England and New England respectively were 25 to 30 and 15 to 20 per thousand.) While on active service in Hispaniola, Colonel Peter Beckford received a letter from his friend Governor Beeston: ‘Mrs Beck-ford has been ill but is recovered, and pretty well again and longs to see you.’ But soon she was ill again, and died in 1696. Thus Colonel Beck-ford had lost two wives and two daughters in the space of only five years. Beeston himself wrote to London that he had lost his entire family save his wife and one child, and of his servants, only his cook survived. By 1699, there had been no let-up in the epidemics: ‘the sickness is still there after nine to ten years’, wrote Beeston, ‘and the Country is soe reduced that it is difficult to fill posts. There are so many dead that it is hard to bury them.’ Beeston pleaded to be allowed home, ‘finding a great decay in his health’, a request eventually granted in January 1702. His replacement wrote on 30 March that year that the island was still ‘at present sickly.’ To blame was ‘that mortal distemper called the bleeding fever’ – yellow fever. The new governor was unable to finish the letter and was himself dead six days later.

Indeed, the biggest killers were malaria and yellow fever, both carried by mosquitoes that now thrived as never before. Forest clearances to grow sugar had reduced the bird population that ate the insects; discarded clay pots needed for the sugar industry provided an ideal breeding ground for the yellow-fever-carrying mosquito
Aëdes aegypti
, which, with its sweet tooth, gorged itself on sugar. Both Port Royal and Kingston had nearby swamps, which provided breeding grounds for the
Anopheles
, malaria-carrying mosquito.

As in Barbados a generation earlier, the yellow fever virus thrived because it found in Jamaica a European population with no immunity. This was exacerbated by the arrival during the war – in the form of soldiers and sailors – of large numbers of fresh un-immune victims.
*
A report to London in 1702 confirmed that ‘the mortality reigns chiefly over the new-comers’. In addition, the white population was hemmed in by the effective maroon control of the island’s hinterland. Thus some 3,000 whites died during the epidemic, reducing Jamaica’s white population to 7,000 by 1700, where it remained for the next decade, further worsening the proportion of whites to black slaves, whose population continued to grow sharply, reaching 42,000 by 1700. In fact, it was only the arrival of so many Africans, most of whom had some immunity to yellow fever, that eventually checked the disease. The only consolation for Jamaicans was that in 1701–2, their enemies in the nearby islands were suffering just as much, as war with France loomed again.