The Sugar Barons (36 page)

Marches and counter-marches by both sides followed, as the English soldiery extensively burned and looted the plantations of much of the island. Soon the French would abandon their redoubt and take refuge in the hills, but not before Codrington had fallen out with his naval commander, Walker, and become seriously ill again. It might have been malaria, which is recurring and often leads to depression, or a form of rheumatic fever. Codrington reported that he was ‘afflicted with terrible pains’, lost the use of his limbs, and was blinded from the huge quantities of laudanum he took to relieve the agony. As he was invalided off the battlefield, the French managed to bypass Walker’s cumbersome armada and land reinforcements from Martinique. On 5 May, the English, suffering widespread sickness, decided that they did not have the provisions to stay on the island any longer, and abandoned the conquest.

For Codrington, reporting to London some time later, the fault for the failure could be attributed to the lack of light frigates to prevent French reinforcements being landed, the paucity of artillery and siege equipment and the poor standard of the troops and their leadership – ‘no one to take care of them … save one drunken Major who soon dispatcht himself’. Also at fault, yet again, was the divided leadership. Walker had cut and run, Codrington alleged, ‘just when we were to reap the fruit of our hazards & fatigues’. Walker, for his part, blamed the Creole contingent for a lack of fighting spirit.

After Guadeloupe, both sides in the war relegated the West Indies to a low priority compared to Europe, although privateers continued to wreck trade in the region. In one month the following year, out of 108 ships that left Barbados and the Leewards for England, only 61 arrived at their destination, with 43 taken as prizes into French ports. During the summer of 1703, Codrington remained desperately ill, disappointed and depressed, writing to his superiors in August that ‘I still continue so wretchedly weak and my head so dizzey that I can scarce read your Lordships’ letters, much less answer them as I should … I expected a Furlow by this ordinary, but find myself abandon’d by all my friends. Never man who liv’d was ever reduc’t to so low a condition as I have been; having lost every drop of blood in my veins, my eyesight and the use of my limbs. I believe I cannot perfectly recover without a voyage to Europe.’

Hearing nothing more from Codrington, and receiving no replies to their further letters, the authorities in London agreed in October that he should be allowed to return home. However, for the ‘security of those Islands’, they appointed a new governor, Sir William Mathew. As soon as Codrington discovered that he had, in effect, been dismissed, he was mortified, and
found his considerable pride severely affronted. In February 1704, with this health seemingly restored, he wrote to London that if a deputy governor was deemed inadequate to hold the fort during his ‘furlow’, then he was happy to stay on in his post. But the decision had been made; the new governor arrived soon after. Writing to London at this time, Codrington struck a heroic but aggrieved pose, while stressing that his earlier physical weakness was a thing of the past: ‘Thank God I have perfectly recovered my limbs & strength’, he said, ‘and will serve the Queen somewhere or other during the War, tho it be with a Muskett on my shoulder.’

As it turned out, Sir William Mathew would join the crowded ranks of those swiftly undone by the mortal dangers of the tropics. In November he wrote to London that he, his wife and his secretary, as well as most of his family, were seriously ill. The following month, on 4 December, he died. Codrington saw his chance, and two days later wrote to the Council of Trade begging to be reinstated to his old position, one that he seems to have considered his by right of birth and merit: ‘Since I am upon the place and now season’d’, he said, ‘I shall be willing to serve her [the Queen] here during the war, and beleive I may serve Her better than an another at present.’

But ‘an another’ was about to be appointed, leading to a tragic and bloody series of events. The Lords of Trade supported Codrington’s application, but to the former governor’s bitter disappointment, it was not to be. After the Battle of Blenheim, the news of Marlborough’s great victory had been carried to London and delivered to the Queen by Daniel Parke, a 35-year-old lieutenant-colonel, described as of ‘fine appearance and handsome bearing’. Parke’s reward for being the bearer of such good tidings was 1,000 guineas, a miniature portrait of the Queen and, in due course, the governorship of the Leeward Islands.

Parke was a Virginian; he had sat on the colony’s assembly and council in the 1690s before relocating to England, where he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. Joining Marlborough’s army, he caught the eye of the Duke and served as his aide-de-camp.

Although he was appointed in March 1705, Parke took his time before taking up his new position. In the interim, the islands were run by John Johnson, previously Lieutenant-Governor of Nevis. Johnson, who was from humble origins, owed his promotion entirely to Codrington; one of his first acts was to give his former patron a further grant for Barbuda for 99 years at the rent of a fat sheep yearly. He also backed Codrington in a dispute over the highly contentious estate at Godwin in St Kitts. Johnson made a commendable attempt to improve the islands’ defences, but lacked
the authority to have his instructions carried out, particularly in St Kitts, where a dispute led to soldiers being turfed out of their indifferent quarters into open fields. ‘I heartily wish for Col. Park’s arrival’, wrote Johnson in July 1705, ‘for I have such ill-natured and troublesome people to deal with, that I am already weary of my Command.’

In early 1706, the French found themselves in a position to exact revenge for the depredations carried out in Guadeloupe. On 4 February, a fleet of 30 ships, including seven men-of-war, appeared off the Antiguan coast. A strong northerly gale prevented the French vessels from beating in close to shore, so they bore away to Nevis, anchoring in front of the main port of Charlestown. For five days the French exchanged fire with the forts of the town, before pulling away towards St Kitts. Here, as Johnson had warned in vain, the defences were much less potent. Three columns were landed in different parts of the island, with the English, outnumbered 2,300 to 700, retreating in panic to the redoubt at Brimstone Hill. The French lacked the heavy guns needed to reduce the fort, but for several days they devastated the island at will, wrecking every plantation and mill and carrying away 600 slaves and huge quantities of sugar-making equipment.

The following month, they tried again at Nevis, which up until now had escaped the regular depredations suffered by nearby St Kitts, and was for this reason the wealthiest of the English Leewards. Having tricked the English commander into posting his troops – only about 200 strong – in the north of the island, the French successfully landed 2,000 men in the south. After brief resistance in the island’s mountain stronghold, the planters surrendered. Half of the island’s slaves, just over 3,000, were taken away, and every building except 20 destroyed. The Nevis planters estimated the loss at more than a million pounds sterling. An epidemic of smallpox then ravaged the survivors of the attack.

The defeat at Nevis sent shock waves through English America. While the nearby islands of Montserrat and Antigua swirled with rumours of further attacks, as far away as Newport in Rhode Island, batteries were hastily constructed to improve the defences against the French threat.

18
THE MURDER OF DANIEL PARKE

‘It will be very hard with this Island for we have stain’d the Land with so much Blood … I fear a scurge is over our heads.’

Quaker Abraham Redwood, Antigua, February 1711

On 14 July 1705, Daniel Parke arrived at last in Antigua. The people of the Leewards, fearful of another French attack, gave the glamorous new governor – known as a favourite of the Queen – a warm welcome; the Antigua assembly ‘furnish’d his Cellars with Wine & liquors’. But Parke soon regretted his appointment. Of no independent wealth, he had hoped for the more lucrative governorship of Virginia, and found the Leewards, devastated by war and disease, a poor place to make his fortune. A fierce hurricane at the end of August and an ongoing drought further impoverished the islands. His salary of £1,100, which had not even been paid, would have been insufficient, Parke complained, had it been three times the amount.

Parke had a regiment of 928 men at his disposal, which he considered quite inadequate to defend the islands. When he visited recently ravaged Nevis, he took troops with him for his own protection, lest ‘I have my brains knock’t out, [and] the Queen must send some other unfortunate devil here to be roasted in the sun’. He begged London to send ‘some nimble frigots to protect us from the privateers’, who seemed to take every vessel headed to the islands. ‘We are so frighted, every two or three sloops, we believe is another French fleet’, he wrote. ‘I am deservedly punished for desiring to be a Governor.’

To make matters worse, soon he and his household were ill. Of the 26 who had come out with him, after a few months only four remained. Five had quickly returned to England, but the rest were dead. Parke himself
wrote that he had suffered ‘the plague, the pestilence and bloody flux, and have been out of my bed but four days of a malignant feavour; I am so weak I can hardly write to your lordships’.

To his credit, Parke quickly identified what needed to be done to improve the security and government of the islands, coming to the same conclusions reached by both the Codringtons. He first attempted to bring the four islands under one unitary government; he tried to force the colonists to provide quarters to the troops; and he stopped the big planters buying out the smallholders by fixing land auctions. Martinique had to be conquered, he argued, to vanquish the French threat; could 10,000 Scots soldiers be sent out to perform the task? He even suggested that Porto Rico be taken from the Spanish and the entire populations of the islands moved there. The problem of defence was the same as ever: about Nevis, Parke wrote that it was ‘a rich little Island, but here are but few people, the Island was divided amongst a few rich men that had a vast number of slaves, and hardly any common people’. Parke, according to his own accounts, also worked very hard at stopping the illegal trade, particularly the buying of European goods at the nearby Dutch islands, where they were considerably cheaper. But everywhere he turned he met resistance, lethargy and self-interest. He also quickly acquired a powerful enemy: ‘To the rest of my afflictions’, he wrote home, ‘I would have added Colonel Codrington.’

From the very start, the two men were bitter foes. Shortly after his arrival, Parke wrote to his superiors: ‘I think I have the good fortune to please the people, except Colonel Codrington. He has opposed everything and is just as much troublesome as I told you he would be.’ Parke was convinced that Codrington, whose hauteur he detested, was plotting to recover his governorship. According to a friend of Parke, Codrington was ‘enraged with Envy, at Colonel Parke’s being preferr’d before him’, and was ‘excited by the wild Starts of a crazy Brain, that much about that Time began to affect him’. This is, of course, a partisan account, but given the family’s history of mental illness and Codrington’s own manic depressive temperament, it might contain an element of truth. For his part, Codrington wrote to a friend in England in September 1706: ‘I continue my resolution of leaving the Indies ye beginning of January. It is impossible for me to live with our brute of a General – he is a perfect frenzy of avarice.’

Clearly Antigua was not big enough for both of them, and Parke was not the sort of man to back down. He quickly went after his rival, bringing a suit to recover prize money the Codrington family had accumulated
during the wars against the French. He confiscated the Codrington estate in St Kitts, and then questioned the family’s rights to Barbuda. In response, Codrington ‘infused Fears and jealousises into the Minds of the People, and stirr’d them up to Division’, according to a later defender of Parke.

If that was indeed Codrington’s aim, it was spectacularly successful. The initial glamour of Parke as confidant of the Queen quickly faded as he took on the planters used to getting their own way. He also won enemies by ‘attempting to debauch some of the Chief women of the Island’. This was, it seems, nothing unusual in Antigua: it was ‘not much taken notice of, but looked upon to be a frolick & passed over’, until Parke started a relationship with a Mrs Chester, wife of one of the richest men on the island and a member of the assembly.
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The cuckolded husband, admittedly a major smuggler, found himself locked up in prison.

There now developed a state of mutual loathing between Parke and his circle, called by a detractor his ‘vulgar associates’, and the majority of the white Leeward Islanders rallying around Codrington. Parke complained to London that the West Indians ‘expect the Queen should do everything for them, though they do not endeavour to help themselves’. The more Parke was criticised for being a ‘great debauch’, the more he reported to London of the Leeward Islanders’ own sexual depravity, ‘a mungrill race [of mulattoes] liveing witnesses of their unnaturall and monstrous lusts’. There were, Parke alleged, ‘a succession of Codringtons … among the slaveish sooty race [of mulattoes]’.
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Christopher Codrington himself, Parke reported, had an Irish ‘wench’, a Kate Sullivan, who ‘layd two bastards to him, but she giving him the pox, he turned her off’. To gain ammunition against his enemies, and intelligence about smuggling operations, Parke now took to patrolling around at night in disguise in St John’s, armed with ‘pocket-pistoles’. ‘You may easily imagine’, he reported to London, ‘that a sea-port town in the West Indies, full of punch-houses and taverns, cramm’d with soldiers and privateers to be very licentious.’ The islanders complained in reply that this sneaking about only brought ‘his person and authority in contempt’.