The Sugar Barons (6 page)

But one commodity seemed to be on the rise. During the 1630s, the price of sugar had remained low, as the Dutch shipped hundreds of thousands of tons from Brazil. But a combination of falling yields and political disturbance in Brazil had led to a sudden rise in its value. Drax saw his chance and took it.

At the same time, Barbados found itself freer than ever before to go its own way, to trade with whomever it wanted and make its own fortune. Governor Huncks was replaced in 1641 by the accommodating Philip Bell, an elderly and experienced Caribbean hand who was happy to leave the planters to their own devices; while in England, the beginning of the Civil War ushered in a decade of what turned out to be benign neglect from the metropolis.

Into the vacuum stepped the Dutch, who had by now established trading stations on small islands all over the West Indies. ‘The Hollanders that are great encouragers of our Plantacions, did at the first attempt of making sugar, give great Credit to the most sober Inhabitants, and upon the unhappie Civill warr, that brake out in England, they managed the whole trade in our Westerne Collonies’, reads an account from the 1660s. They also ‘furnished the island with Negroes, Coppers, Stills, and all other things appertaining to the … making of Sugar’.

The stage was thus set for the triumph of sugar and everything that would go with it. With hindsight, for all its backwardness, tumult and impoverishment, the settler society of Barbados of the 1630s had been more economically diversified, relatively healthier and less brutal than what would follow. With the vital help of the Dutch, and with the leadership of James Drax and a few others, a new, radically different society was about to be created.

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION: ‘SO NOBLE AN UNDERTAKING’

‘If you go to Barbados you shal see a flourishing Iland many able men.’

George Downing, 1645

At the beginning of the 1640s, a crucial decade in Barbadian history, and, indeed, in the history of all of British America, a small number of planters such as Drax and Hilliard were in possession of fairly large estates, even though we know they were still far from cleared of forest. They had benefited not only from their apparent closeness to the corrupt Governor Hawley, but also from their early arrival in the colony. The first years of the Carlisle administration had seen large grants given out, averaging over 300 acres in 1630. But for the rest of the 1630s, with a handful of exceptions, the grants had been smaller, in the region of 50 to 80 acres. So in the main, Barbados was an island of small farms, most owner-operated, usually by a single man with one or two indentured servants, or by a couple of farmers in partnership. A number were still struggling on with tobacco; others were now growing cotton, indigo or ginger for export. Most had some land in provisions and the odd pig or chicken scratching around the tiny board houses in which most of them lived. Much effort was still being expended in clearing land, and, short of tools, many had resorted to ring-barking and burning. Alongside the 10,000–12,000 whites were perhaps 1,000 black slaves and a handful of Arawak Indians. With the advent of sugar, all of this was about to change dramatically.

The Barbadians’ mastery of cotton cultivation had been highly impressive. But sugar was on a different level, far more demanding in terms of the amount of labour, capital and expertise required for success. Planting, weeding and harvesting the cane and protecting it from rats and other
pests was much more physically demanding work than producing cotton or tobacco crops, and that was only a part of the challenge. The canes had to be cut at exactly the right ripeness (during the dry months of January to June), and then, as they quickly spoil, the juice had to be extracted as fast as possible. This required the sugar planter to have a grinding mill of his own nearby, or at least access to one.

Once the canes had been fed through vertical rollers, powered at this time in the main by oxen, horses or men, the resulting juice (a green liquid, due to the innumerable tiny particles of cane in suspension within it) would, if left, quickly ferment. Thus the next stage of processing had to be immediate and on hand. The juice was then conveyed to a boiling house, where through a succession of operations, ever greater quantities of liquid were removed from the crystallising sugar. This was the most complicated process of all. Within the boiling house, usually situated adjacent to the mill, a series of four or five large copper kettles stood over a furnace. These were carefully scaled for size. The juice went in the largest first; the boiler, who needed to be highly skilled, skimmed impurities off the top of the liquid before ladling the contents into the next largest copper. As the receptacles got smaller, so they became hotter, until at last the sugar was thick, ropy, and dark brown in colour. Quicklime was added to aid granulation, and then the mixture was ‘struck’: at exactly the right moment, the boiler dampened the fire and ladled the sugar into a cooling cistern.

It was easy to get this wrong, as Drax had discovered with his first efforts. The head boiler, in order to determine how much lime temper the cane juice needed and the period of boiling, needed to know how the cane had been raised and treated, the type of soil it had grown in, how it had been harvested, and whether it had been attacked by insect pests or rats.

If everything went to plan, the planter now had a raw brown sugar called muscovado, combined with a liquid by-product, molasses. To cure the sugar, it needed to be packed into earthenware pots, the molasses drained for up to a month, and the remaining golden-brown sugar spread in the sun to dry before being sent in leather bags to Bridgetown, where it was packed into hogsheads, large barrels that held about 1,500 pounds of sugar. For an inland plantation like that of Drax, everything had to be carried to the coast by hand or on the backs of mules ‘up and down the Gullies’, ‘for the ways are such, as no Carts can pass’. It seems that Drax, for one, had his own packing and warehouse premises in Bridgetown. The hogsheads were then carried away, usually in Dutch ships, which took them to Amsterdam, Hamburg or London, where the sugar commanded consistently high prices.

The whole process required very careful supervision, and a carefully laidout
and well-equipped works for which machinery had to be imported, assembled, maintained, and sometimes modified. To ensure exactly the right supply of cane to the mill during the harvest months, great care had to be taken with the timing of the original planting. The sugar plantation, then, was an integrated combination of agriculture and industry, with every part depending on the others, ‘as wheels in a Clock’.

This was an immensely sophisticated production unit for the seventeenth century, at a time when agriculture at home in England remained hidebound and moribund. It says a great deal for the energy, hard work, and fierce, big-thinking ambition of the sugar pioneers that they mastered a process that has more in common with modern assembly lines than any sort of farming carried out in Europe at that time, and required a labour force much more complex than, for example, an English estate. And all far from home, in the enervating heat of the Caribbean. They must, indeed, have been as a contemporary described them, ‘men of great abilities, and parts’.

In 1644, only Drax and his partner Hilliard, growing cane at the next-door estate, are on record as using sugar as currency, others still paying bills with tobacco or cotton. It appears that Drax was the first to build a ‘factory in the field’, and it is likely that, initially, Hilliard’s sugar was processed there as well (although three years later, he would have his own
ingenio
, or factory). In addition, Drax persuaded a number of smallholders nearby to grow canes for his mill. But this was not a great success – they made a mess of it, and Drax began to come round to the idea of creating a self-contained unit, with all growing, processing and labour under his direct control. At the same time, he started rapidly increasing his slave holding: his first use of sugar as currency was to purchase 34 of the 254 slaves on the
Mary Bonaventure
. For payment he engaged with three London merchants to ship them ‘so much Suger or other merchantable commodities as shall amount to £726 sterling’. In the same year, Drax erected the island’s first windmill for grinding the cane. Built to a Dutch design, its heavy rollers could crush eight tons of cane a day.

Drax’s secret experiment did not stay secret for long. Soon, more and more land was planted in sugar. By 1645, cane covered 40 per cent of the island’s agricultural acreage. For those who made the switch, it was a shrewd move. The following year, the returns would be spectacular.

In 1645, a war of liberation broke out in Brazil as the Portuguese attempted to expel the Dutch. There was widespread destruction of cane-fields and mills, and a mass escape of the enslaved workforce. Effectively, sugar production was stopped for a year, sending the price of the commodity
soaring. At the same time, the Barbados canefields, with much of the planting into virgin land and enjoying perfect weather conditions, produced a tremendous crop. Barbados sugar growers were suddenly rich.

Puritan minister James Parker, who had come to Barbados from Piscataqua, informed Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop in June 1646 that Barbados ‘is now and like to be very wealthy … some have made this yeare off one acre off canes about 4000 weight of sugar, ordinarily 3000’. The immediate local result was a sharp rise in the price of land. According to one study, land that sold at 10s. an acre in 1640 sold at £5 in 1646, a tenfold increase. Certainly by 1647, land was selling for an average of well above £5 an acre, and more for the best situated. For this to make economic sense, as much of Barbados’s small space as possible had to be planted in sugar. Indeed, all over the island the forests were now destroyed with renewed vigour and land previously given over to provisions was put to cane. ‘Men are so intent upon planting sugar that they would rather buy foode at very deare rates than produce it by labour, soe infinite is the profitt of sugar’, reads a letter of July 1647 to John Winthrop from Richard Vines, a doctor from New England practising in Barbados. Indeed, the rapid sugar ‘rush’ meant that suddenly Barbados could no longer feed itself, even if the harvest was good. Suppliers of provisions from Europe benefited, of course, but most important was the lifeline this now threw to the North American colonies.

Links between the Caribbean and North America had existed from the earliest times of English settlement. Pioneer traders had sailed south from New England during the 1630s to exchange pipe staves, needed for making barrels, planks, fish or candle oil for cotton and salt. From Virginia they brought oxen and horses. But they were few in number and most of their vessels were small, seldom over 50 tons. This contributed to the dangers of the journey at a time when many of the sailors were inexperienced and little was known of routes and currents. A great number were lost to shipwreck and other disasters.

But suddenly, in the 1640s, trade became much more important to the New Englanders. There was no market for North American products in England, so instead they had exchanged their agricultural surplus for the cash and metropolitan wares of the plentiful new immigrants. But at the end of the 1630s, the flow of newcomers came to a virtual halt, creating an economic crisis in New England. Credit dried up and the prices of land and cattle fell by more than a half. Leaders even considered relocating the colony.

According to John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony,
‘These straits set our people on work to provide fish, clapboards, planks etc…. and to look to the West Indies for a trade.’ In his journal, he wrote in February 1641 that ‘The general fear of want of foreign commodities, now [that] our money was gone … set us on to work to provide shipping of our own.’ Construction started at Salem on a vessel of 300 tons, and in Boston another of 150 tons was undertaken.

In around September 1641, the 11-year-old Bay Colony dispatched two ships to the West Indies. They were gone nearly a year, ‘and were much feared to be lost’. Then one returned at last, carrying a good cargo of cotton as well as letters from Barbados.

It remained a dangerous journey, and not just because of storms or treacherous seas. Winthrop described a voyage starting in November 1644, carrying pipe staves across to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands to be exchanged for wine and ‘Africoes’. Both were sold in Barbados for sugar, salt and tobacco. It is likely the enslaved Africans from the Atlantic islands would be familiar with sugar cultivation and processing, and therefore extra valuable. Six months after setting out, the vessel returned safely to New England, but also brought news of another ship from Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had been set upon by Royalist privateers working out of Irish ports. A fierce battle had taken place off the Canary Islands as the attackers boarded the New England ship. They were eventually driven off, but only after several deaths and massive damage to the ship and its cargo.

By 1647, in spite of the risks, there was regular trade between the northern colonies and Barbados, much to the benefit of both sides. An ox that cost £5 in Virginia could be sold for £25 in Barbados, while Barbadians, increasingly dependent on imported food, could, with the right factor in New England or Virginia, obtain provisions much more cheaply than from Europe. New England now had a market for its surplus agricultural production, and to carry the trade, a shipbuilding industry was quickly established.

Rhode Island, to the south of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, peopled with those who had chafed at the restrictions of Puritan society, was by the end of the 1640s breeding horses specifically for sale in Barbados. This would soon become a staple export. At Newport, the first large wharf was constructed at this time. The earliest major departure that has survived in the record is of the 40-ton ship the
Beginningfirst
, fitted out in 1649 by carpenter-turned-merchant William Withington to carry 12 Rhode Island cattle, together with ‘necessary Hay and corn for voyage to Barbados, and Guinney’. The return was via Antigua and Boston. In the same year a Dutch privateer, Captain Blaufeld, gave Newport the questionable honour of making it his base for
disposing of prizes. In 1651, cultivated Royalist Francis Brinley moved to Newport from Barbados and established himself as the island’s agent.