The Sugar Barons (57 page)

After a certain amount of debate in London, a decision was made in 1786 to definitively shut out American ships. Canada and Ireland, it was hoped, would fill the gap. As compensation, the Admiralty sent an expedition under Lieutenant William Bligh to the Pacific to bring back breadfruit trees to feed the slaves. This effort came to grief with a mutiny on the
Bounty
, but a second expedition successfully introduced the tree to the islands. Unfortunately few slaves would eat the resulting fruit.

In the face of the new embargo, there was large-scale smuggling and
Canada massively increased its exports to the West Indies of lumber and fish, but it was not enough. Costs for essential supplies rose considerably for the planters. At the same time, the price of sugar was falling, and duties set during the war were not removed, as the increased Sugar Tax had become one of the most productive sources of national income. Further problems were now crowding in on the sugar barons, some from no fault of their own, others of their own making. Worst of all, pehaps, were the disastrous effects of absentee ownership of the sugar estates.

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THE WEST INDIAN ‘NABOBS’: ABSENTEEISM, DECADENCE AND DECLINE

‘Despair … has cut off more people in the West-Indies than plagues or famine.’

William Beckford of Somerly

In increasing numbers during the last decades of the eighteenth century, sugar planters, unable to feel that the West Indies was home, and scared of the constant war and frightening mortality rate, returned to Britain to become absentee proprietors. Their plantations almost always suffered.

The estates of absentee proprietors were managed for them by locally based ‘attorneys’. Some ran 15 to 20 plantations and were ‘nabobs’ in their own right, but most looked after about five or six. The managers were paid a commission out of the crop, in return for running the planting, harvesting, processing and shipping of the sugar, although most of the hands-on work was organised by an overseer.

The system was wide open to abuse, and few attorneys could resist the temptation to steal from the absent planter. The Codringtons, once they had left Antigua, were repeatedly forced to fire their managers there for dishonesty. In general, short-termism dominated: improvements were seldom made because they temporarily reduced net returns; buildings and equipment were allowed to become dilapidated; fields were tilled until exhausted and then left to grow up in weeds. New lands were seldom opened up to cultivation because of the large initial outlay and great amount of supervision required. There was no incentive to experiment or improvise.

In most cases, life and conditions for the enslaved workers were even worse on absentee estates. At Drax Hall in Jamaica, the number of live births on the plantation was five times higher when locally owned than when it passed into the hands of the absentee Alderman William Beckford.

Alderman Beckford’s brother Richard had died in 1756, leaving an estate worth about £120,000, which included nearly 1,000 slaves, two cattle pens and three contiguous sugar estates in Westmoreland parish, about seven miles north-east of Savannah-la-Mar, called Roaring River, Fort William and Williamsfield.

In 1765, when he was 21, his son William Beckford of Somerly graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, and came into possession of his inheritance of about 7,000 acres of prime Jamaican land. Although sugar output had declined since 1756, the estates seemed to be profitable, and Somerly was in no hurry to sail to Jamaica. Instead, with two friends, he embarked on an extensive Grand Tour of the sights of Europe.

His father had wanted him to become a politician, but having returned from Europe and married an ‘uncommon beauty’, his cousin Charlotte Hay, he lived the life of the gentry squire at Somerly Hall in Suffolk, giving a large dinner for locals each Sunday after church.

But when the profits from the Jamaican plantations began to fall, he made a decision to go to Jamaica ‘to view the romantic wonders of his estates, and to witness the resources that might render them more valuable’, as a friend later wrote of him. It was a very different manifesto to those of his Beckford forebears, who had been so hungry for political and financial dominance. Somerly had a plan to write a book, complete with illustrations, about these ‘romantic wonders’, and for that purpose took with him an artist he had met in Rome, Philip Wickstead, to serve as secretary and illustrator. Another artist, George Robertson, was also invited to be part of this vision of a tropical salon, and followed soon afterwards.

Charlotte, Somerly and Wickstead sailed to Jamaica in February 1774. The promise of ‘romantic wonders’ did not disappoint. Somerly was awestruck by the mysterious beauty of the Blue Mountains, ‘covered with a sapphire haze’. He saw everything through the prism of his Grand Tour. Jamaica, he wrote, was no ‘less romantic than, the most wild and beautiful situations of Frescati, Tivoli, and Albano’. His new home in Westmoreland parish was ‘as agreeable as any spots in Italy, that have had the advantage of a Salvatore Rosa, or a Poussin to perpetuate their beauties’.

Somerly’s part of Westmoreland is, indeed, beautiful and dramatic. Water draining from the limestone ‘Cockpit Country’ to the east bubbles up in deep blue springs; there is a profusion of bird and animal life, and wildly rich and almost overpoweringly green vegetation everywhere. Most days, in the early afternoon, the temperature and humidity rise sharply, the skies darken, and suddenly, with a huge rushing round, the air seems almost completely full of water as rain spouts down.

Somerly also saw great potential in his lush tropical acreage: ‘the vegetation here, and the stamina of the land are of such a nature’, he wrote to a friend in England, ‘that it argues infatuation, or sloth in the inhabitants, that they are not in general more rich and independent’. The state of his own plantations, he wrote, ‘was sufficient to convince me of the negligence of my attornies; and had I delay’d my projected voyage a few years longer the consequences might have been fatal to my properties’. The managers, he said, were ‘vacant and inactive’, more concerned with eating and drinking the products of the plantations than with stopping the estates falling into ruin.

Taking up the reins of business himself, he set up home at Hertford Pen, in the low mountainous region of Westmoreland parish. This afforded him and his wife a more salubrious climate than his sugar plantations on the flat plains. ‘The situation of Hertford is one of the pleasantest in the country’, an English visitor wrote. ‘It is on very gently rising ground, nearly equally removed from the sea, and lofty mountains covered with wood, and at a short distance from a fine river.’

Somerly set about expanding the animal pens to raise cattle and horses for market (and to manure the canefields), and planted guinea grass for fodder with great success. Experiments planting English wheat, barley and oats fared less well. He also expanded the provision grounds available to the estates’ slaves for growing their own food. At the same time he set about repairing or replacing the estates’ sugar-processing machinery. He also built and lavishly furnished a new house for his family, costing nearly £10,000. By 1776, two years after his arrival, he was calling Jamaica ‘My native country’ and ‘paternal soil’.

Putting the estates in order had not come cheap, but for now, William of Somerly remained optimistic. ‘I have endeavor’d as far as was in my power to correct [the attorneys’] past abuses; and I shall expect to see my estates establish’d, in the course of a few years, upon an economical and an advantageous footing’, he wrote in a letter of 1776. He was concerned, he said, about the very considerable increase in the money he now owed in England, but, he wrote to a friend, ‘I hope to make an annual reduction of my DEBTS, and to see my properties increase as THEY diminish; and when this shall be in any degree effected, I shall carry Mrs Beckford back with tenfold satisfaction to her friends in England.’

Two months after landing in Jamaica, the Beckfords had been invited to dinner with the local Cope family, where they met Thomas Thistle-wood. Thereafter, Beckford would occasionally hire out some of the slaves owned by Thistlewood. Two men of such different rank would never have socialised in England, but in June 1778, Thistlewood spent the day at Hertford Pen. In the morning they played billiards, and ‘Looked over many
Folio Volumes of excellent plates of the Ruins of Rome’, as Thistlewood noted in his diary. After a ride around the Pen, they were joined for dinner by a handful of local worthies, with the men then playing a game of cricket. Thistlewood, a keen horticulturalist, was sent home with ‘some geranium slips, flower seeds, jonquil roots, &c’.

Beckford of Somerly was uneasy about ‘the levelling principle that obtains among the white people of Jamaica’, who, of course, stuck together for their mutual protection. He preferred the ‘chain of subordination’ prevalent in Europe, which, he wrote, ‘preserves the strength of the whole’. Somerly found the lower classes of white people in Jamaica ‘idle, drunken, worthless and immoral’. However, whatever else he was, Thistlewood was neither a drunk nor lazy, and he seems to have passed muster with Somerly, who was ‘very affable and free’ with him. A few days after his visit, Somerly sent Thistlewood six engravings made from George Robertson’s paintings of the Fort William estate, and would later return the visit and be treated to a lavish feast of the very best of Thistlewood’s produce and be lent some of his impressive collection of books.

Beckford had more in common, though, with Robert Charles Dallas, who arrived in Jamaica in 1779. Like Beckford, Dallas had been born in Jamaica, and his father, a Scottish doctor and plantation owner, had died while he was young. Robert was sent off the island at the age of 10 to be schooled first in Musselburgh, New Brunswick, and then at the Scottish school in Kensington run by James Elphinstone, a friend of Dr Samuel Johnson and outspoken opponent of slavery.

In his book on the island, Dallas described arriving in Jamaica as if for the first time – either for literary effect or because he had not returned since leaving as a young boy 15 years earlier. The lack of twilight, the insects and the extreme heat all seemed new to him. ‘The heat becomes intolerable’, he exclaimed on landing at Kingston. ‘Oh! for a glass of rasp-berry ice! – I am melting away – the sun is exhaling all my juices – I feel them passing through my pores … The slightest action throws one into a violent perspiration.’

Like Somerly, he arrived to find that his estate had been badly mismanaged by the attorneys. It was also mired in legal actions, and now ‘in the last stage of its disorder’. A small debt, less than a fifth of its value, had, since the death of his father, increased ‘to almost its whole value’. The aim of the managers or trustees – ‘really the locusts of the West Indies’ – was to supply the plantation from their own stores and, he wrote, ‘get a debt upon his estate, then, by management with the overseer, to keep down the annual produce till the debt encrease so much, that the proprietor is glad to take anything, or till a chancery suit foreclose a mortgage; and thus … make the property their own’.

Dallas was unimpressed with the white Jamaicans he met during his time on the island. The children were spoilt and the adults greedy and lazy, spending their time eating and drinking too much, and doing little else except playing cards and backgammon. ‘With some exceptions’, he concluded, ‘the country is generally inhabited by rapacious agents, inhuman overseers, ignorant and cruel negro-jobbers, and usurious traders.’

One such exception was Beckford of Somerly, whom Dallas seems to have found a kindred spirit. He spent some time at Hertford Pen, engaged in ‘Conversation, books, music, drawing, riding, bathing, fishing’. It was the most agreeable time he had on the island, and he described Beckford, who clearly had little in common with the Beckfords of old, as ‘accomplished mild and pleasing … as a friend, sincere; as a husband, delicate and affectionate; as a brother, warmly attached; as a master, tender and humane; as a man of business, alas!’

Indeed, Somerly’s aim to reduce his debts was not going to plan. Reading between the lines of his two books, written under very different and unfortunate circumstances, he made a series of bad mistakes, including experimenting with untried new theories about planting, and buying ‘superfluous coppers, stills and stores’.

Beckford had also learnt to his cost that sugar producing itself remained, as a Barbadian planter had lamented 100 years before, ‘a design full of accident’. He had endless problems with his water-powered mills: sometimes the flow was insufficient; other times it was so heavy that the dam on the mill pond was carried away. Machinery was always breaking down. The sugar cane itself, he wrote, ‘is so treacherous a plant’, often promising much but delivering little, so that ‘the life of a planter is a continual state of uncertainty and trouble’. In 1777, he was forced to take out a mortgage of £25,000; and no money had been repaid four years later.

Dallas and Beckford, both educated in England at a time when slavery was being questioned, no doubt discussed their views on the matter. Dallas described his shock on seeing, on his first day on the island, a slave given a severe punch on the face for allowing a fly to land on his master’s butter. ‘My blood rebelled against the blow’, he wrote. ‘I felt an affection for the poor negro, and an instant detestation for his master.’ Later, he detailed the callous treatment of slave women by the white overseers, and various cruel tortures inflicted on even the youngest slaves. Slavery, he concluded, was ‘tyranny, cruelty, murder’, and he started to worry that he was getting used to it. The mind, he wrote, underwent ‘a total change’ from the state in which it arrived in the West Indies. ‘There is a kind of intoxication’, he continued. ‘I have not lost my natural abhorrence to cruelty, yet I see it practised with
much less impatience than I did, and I have only to pray, that I may not feel an inclination to turn driver myself.’ Before this could happen, Dallas left the island, explaining later that he ‘daily sicken’d at the ills around me’.