The Sugar Barons (44 page)

In contrast with the War of Spanish Succession 20 years earlier, these were not irresponsible wandering sea captains, vulnerable to accusations of piracy. This time the privateers were owned by the wealthiest and most respected citizens of Newport, such as the Malbones and the Wantons. Much of the colony’s small arms, pistols and cutlasses were lent to the ships, and about a third of the colony’s male workforce, enslaved and free, were now on the seas.

The news of the declaration of war by France was greeted with similar glee. A French spy in Newport suggested, ‘Perhaps we had better burn it, as a pernicious hole, from the number of privateers there fitted out.’ Soon there were 21 Rhode Island privateers at sea. A visitor to Newport in 1744 attended a meeting of the Philosophical Club. ‘But I was surprised to find that no matters of philosophy were brought upon the carpet. They talked of privateering and building of vessels’, he wrote.

With the fitting-out of the
Reprisal
in the same year, Providence entered the field of privateering. The 90-ton
Reprisal
had 12 carriage guns and 16 swivel guns. It was captained by John Hopkins, brother of Stephen, who was a part-owner. Stephen Hopkins was then Speaker of the Assembly, and would later be Governor of Rhode Island and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. The vessel’s first success was in capturing a small
French merchantman carrying sugar, cocoa, cotton and coffee to France, although in the skirmish it lost one of its 90-man crew. A second ship was taken soon afterwards, then, with another privateer, the
Reprisal
took on a Spanish ship of 36 guns. Hopkins was killed and the Spaniard escaped.

Captain James Brown of Providence had died suddenly in 1739, having injured himself, with typical machismo, in a weightlifting contest. His more pragmatic younger brother Obadiah took over the family business, and the raising of his five sons, James, Nicholas, Joseph, John and Moses. From 1747, this business included privateering – most noticably with the brigantine
Providence
– sometimes in partnership with Stephen Hopkins.

But there were other, even more dubious ways that the Americans could make fortunes in the West Indies, particularly in times of war. During the previous conflict, there had been extensive trade with the enemy. Colonel Peter Beckford, while briefly governor of Jamaica, had complained about ships from ‘our Northern Plantations’ supplying the Spanish. In the intervening peacetime, Rhode Islanders had profited from illegally supplying their tobacco (an enumerated commodity, according to the Navigation Acts) to Surinam and elsewhere. Obadiah Brown in the
Rainbow
had been seized by a British warship and prosecuted in 1738 for landing tobacco at St Eustatius. But the coming of war meant boomtime for smugglers, as supplies to Spanish and then French colonies were disrupted and demand and prices soared.

Trade with the enemy was conducted directly and indirectly. Direct trade sometimes involved French or Spanish governors issuing licences, but more frequently it was carried out under a huge scam known as ‘flags of truce’. Passes were issued by colonial governors, allowing vessels to sail to enemy colonies for the ostensible purpose of exchanging prisoners. Obadiah Brown ran several of these ‘flags of truce’ out of Providence, Rhode Island, during the war, as did the Newport grandees. Alternatively, there was indirect trade, carried out through the neutral islands, particularly the Dutch enclave of St Eustatius, which acted as a ‘middle man’ between the New England traders and the French colonies who needed their plantation supplies – particularly horses and lumber – and in return sold cheap sugar products they could not ship home to Europe.

As the war progressed, this trade became ever more extensive, shameless and, according to the British, detrimental to the wider imperial interest. The British sugar islands suffered as New Englanders started demanding cash rather than sugar products in return for their supplies of lumber. This money was then taken to St Eustatius or the French islands, where it was used to purchase cheaper sugar or molasses. Thus islands like
Barbados were stripped of specie as well as losing out to the French in selling their sugar products.

Charles Knowles, later a governor of Jamaica, but during the war a navy admiral, reported at an inquiry after the end of the conflict in 1748 that at the beginning of the war he had seen 16 or 17 vessels from the North American colonies brazenly loading and unloading at St Eustatius. The inquiry also heard how a practice had developed of taking on hogsheads in Barbados, which were filled with water, cleared out of port as English rum, and then refilled with cheaper French rum direct from Martinique or through one of the neutral entrepôts. Asked how to deal with this, the witness at the inquiry suggested that ‘one or two men-of-war stationed at Rhode Island would be sufficient’.

It appears that the Rhode Islanders were the worst offenders. ‘Smuggling is practiced over all the Northern colonies particularly at Rhode Island’, another witness reported. ‘Goods are landed and exported again as English.’ Indeed, rum made from French molasses was even imported into Ireland and England. Rhode Island was also a leader, along with Philadelphia, in the ‘flag of truce’ trick. According to Knowles, by the end of the war the Governor of Rhode Island was sending 40 or 50 ‘flags of truce’ every year to enemy ports in the Caribbean. Many had only one or two actual French prisoners on board. Indeed, a market grew up in which such valuable prisoners were actually traded for large prices between the northern colonies. Each time, the ‘flag of truce’ would sail ‘laden with provisions and Naval Stores, who bring back French Rum and Molasses’. At one time, there were at Hispaniola no fewer than 42 British colonial vessels ‘with fictitious flags of truce’.

For the Lords of Trade and Plantations, hearing evidence back in London, this was more than just illegality – it was treasonous disloyalty during a time of war. Knowles reckoned that without the provisions and plantation supplies received from New Englanders, ‘he should certainly have taken Martinique’. These practices, said another witness, meant ‘the prosperity of the French Islands and the ruin of our own’.

Sometimes the New Englanders were caught. The proceedings in the Court of Admiralty at Boston tell the story of the
Victory
brigantine, which sailed as a flag of truce from Newport on 12 January 1747 with five French prisoners to Cap François in Hispaniola; she carried, it turned out, ‘a cargo of 300 quintals of codfish, some onions’, and other goods. With the profits from these she ‘bought 174 casks of molasses of different sizes which were to have been delivered to Joseph Whipple, Esquire, of Newport, her owner’. The
Victory
was taken by the Royal Navy off Lock Island, and her cargo
confiscated. Whipple, a substantial Newport merchant, was Abraham Redwood’s brother-in-law.

Each case caused uproar in England, where the public saw the Americans as guilty of breaking a blockade that would have meant the capitulation of all the enemy islands in the West Indies. In terms of the ‘imperial family’, the New Englanders were increasingly seen as ungrateful children of a parent whose tolerance was fast running out. Just as ominously, the New Englanders, in turn, had demonstrated that allegiance to the interests of the mother country counted for next to nothing compared to the lure of molasses, rum and sugar-fuelled profits.

Not all Newport interests were entirely served by the war. Abraham Redwood’s Antigua agent John Tomlinson complained in 1744 that he was having difficulties getting his sugar crop harvested and processed because so much of his labour force had been pressed into ‘building Batteries & throwing up entrenchments’. Two years later, Tomlinson reported that ‘We are now in the utmost distress for want of provisions & Lumber of all sorts.’ He had 60 hogsheads of sugar to ship, ‘& no vessel to take them in’.

Nonetheless, Redwood was clearly enjoying immense profits from Cassada Gardens, helped by a rise in the sugar price from the beginning of the war onwards. Soon after his return from Antigua, he had imported from England a coach and horses (and tried without success to import an English coachman as well). An agent in Madeira now sent him his own special pipes of wine. It had become the practice of Newport grandees to establish elegant country estates outside the town: in 1641, Godfrey Malbone built a country seat that was declared ‘the largest and most magnificent dwelling’ in America. Redwood seems to have been piqued by this, as he was richer even than Malbone, and two years later he spent £6,500 on a 140-acre estate in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Here he built a house and, with the help of an expert gardener imported from Britain, laid out lavish grounds. These included a huge greenhouse and various hothouses. A visitor in the 1760s described it as ‘one of the finest gardens I ever saw in my life. In it grows all sorts of West Indian fruits, viz: Orange, Lemons, Limes, Pineapples and Tamarinds and other sorts. It has also West India flowers – very pretty ones.’

Elected to the assembly in 1746 and 1747, Redwood had now also become Newport’s leading philanthropist. He gave £500 towards the founding of a Quaker school, and offered another £500 if the mooted Rhode Island university be situated at Newport (he would lose this battle to the Browns
of Providence). In 1747 he began the process of establishing what would open in 1750 as the Redwood Library, the oldest lending library in North America, and the continent’s first classical-style building, chartered to promote ‘virtue, knowledge and learning … having nothing in view but the good of mankind …’
⁴⁷
He had his agent in London send over hundreds of pounds’ worth of books, paid for from the proceeds of his Antigua sugar.

By the 1750s, Newport rivalled New York, Boston and Philadelphia as a shipping centre. These ports now dominated the supply of provisions, lumber and other goods to the West Indian islands. A visitor to Antigua in 1756 commented that ‘almost every thing’ was brought ‘in the lumber vessels from America’.

This vibrant sector fuelled a wider trade throughout the Atlantic, as well as providing capital and markets for new industries in the colony. By the mid-century there were 30 distilleries in Newport alone. In Providence, Obadiah Brown and his nephews had established a distillery, and also chocolate and candle factories. An iron furnace would follow soon after. The family was now trading directly with London (bypassing Newport and Boston), and owned outright or jointly more than 60 vessels. In 1759, they dabbled again in the slave trade, although the vessel, the
Wheel of Fortune
, was ‘taken’ by privateers off the African coast. By this time, however, they were once more making wild profits in privateering and illegal trade in the West Indies, thanks to the mother country’s new war with France.

22
BARBADOS, THE ‘CIVILISED ISLE’

‘In the slave society, where self-fulfilment came so easily, this liveliness began to be perverted and then to fade, and the English saw their pre-eminence, more simply, as a type of racial magic.’

V. S. Naipaul,
The Loss of El Dorado

Barbados, for so long the leading sugar colony and the jewel in the crown of England’s western empire, had by the 1720s been surpassed in sugar production by Jamaica and the Leewards and thereafter acquired the reputation of a place in slow but irreversible decline. Naval surgeon John Atkins was briefly there in the 1720s on his way to Jamaica. He found the white women in Bridgetown to be ‘most Scotch and Irish, very homely and great Swearers’, was impressed with the men’s ‘magnificent way of living’, but observed that ‘the Crops of late years have very much failed … The Soil fertile in the Age past, seems now growing old, and past its teeming time.’

The slump of the 1730s hit the island hard, not helped by a destructive hurricane in 1731 and a subsequent drought that left the soil ‘a dry crust, burnt up and gaping’. But even more seriously, after 60 years of intensive sugar monoculture, the soil of the island was stripped. This meant that ever more labour – manuring and replanting – was needed to produce the same amount of sugar. During the eighteenth century, then, production fell by some 20 per cent, even though the slave population increased by nearly a third. In the 1760s, soil exhaustion became such a problem that the desperate measure was undertaken of importing soil from Surinam. But this was not a success: wood ants made such ravages in the hull of the ship that the experiment was abandoned.

It was not just the soil: there was also a feeling that the energy and spirit of the planters were failing. ‘The industry & integrity of its first
founders is lost’, one Barbadian wrote of his island. The planters were now merely reaping the benefit of the ‘hardship, sweat, and toil of their forefathers’, reported another. Where the first generations of sugar barons had channelled their ‘fiery, restless tempers’ into the hard work of creating the first sugar plantations, their successors had degenerated into luxury, faction, decadence and drunkenness. ‘Vain and shewy’, many were living way beyond their reduced means, and falling into debt.

‘There is no Recreation out of Business, but in Drinking or Gaming’, reported Atkins. It was too hot for the English gentry pursuits of hunting or hawking, wrote a visitor in 1747; instead the Barbadians were ‘oblig’d, for the most part, to sedentary Diversions at Home; as Cards, Dice, Tables, Quoits, Bowling … There are some good Fellows here, who, ’tis said, will drink five or six Bottles of Madera Wine, to their share, every Day, for which they find sweating the best Relief.’

It was not entirely sedentary: riding in the cool of the morning was popular; there was some shooting of migratory birds from July to December. Towards the end of the century sea bathing at last became fashionable, and there were always visitors to be taken on trips round the island, and to the impressive limestone caves.