The Sugar Barons (7 page)

Inevitably some of the traders settled to establish themselves as local merchants, or even to start out as planters. Samuel Winthrop, as a four-year-old infant, had been with his father on the
Arbella
sailing to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. In 1647, aged 19, he had carried wine from Madeira to Barbados, made a handsome profit, and then moved on to St Kitts to set himself up as a merchant. The following year, though, he wrote to his father that he had resolved on Barbados, ‘where in all probability I can live better than in other places’. Part of the attraction, it appears, was the ‘New England friends’ already operating there who might be able to give him an opening.

William Vassall was a founder member of the Massachusetts Bay Company and had been on the Winthrop fleet in 1630. Wealthy and highly educated, by the 1640s he had tired of the strictures of the ‘City on a Hill’, and in 1648 relocated to Barbados, where he straightaway started buying land and influence, while trading between New England and his brother Samuel, who had remained in England. By the time of his death 10 years later, William was a substantial merchant in servants and slaves, Commissioner of the Highways and owner of a plantation in St Michael, as well as extensive New England property. Other ambitious and adventurous families were also in the process of spreading themselves into networks around New England, the West Indies and England.

Clearly for some New Englanders, the West Indies held the same attraction as for their cousins back in England. John Winthrop complained that in spite of the ‘meagre, unhealthful countenances’ of those West Indians who had appeared in New England, many of his community were selling up and heading south, so taken were they with the supposed ‘great advantages’ and ‘ease and plenty of those countries’. But others saw the islands in a different light. In 1641, Governor Bell of Barbados had written to Winthrop asking that a number of God-fearing North Americans be sent down to inspire the island with some religious orthodoxy, but ‘understanding that these people were much infected with familism, etc., the elders did nothing about it’, wrote Winthrop. Bell tried again in a letter received by Winthrop in August 1643, ‘earnestly desiring us to send them some godly ministers and other good people … but none of our ministers would go thither’. Eventually, though, some New England ministers did make the journey, and the letters back home of one have survived. The island abounded with heresies, complained the Reverend James Parker in a letter of April 1646. Everywhere was to be found profanity, ‘divisions’,
argumentativeness, drinking. ‘How oft have I thought in my hearte, oh howe happie are New England people!’ he exclaimed.

But certain parts of Barbados society were changing. Christopher Codrington, the founder of a West Indian family of huge importance, had arrived in Barbados some time in the late 1630s. The middle son of three, he stood out from the other planters on the island: his family were long-established Gloucestershire magnates who traced their lineage back to a standard-bearer for Henry V at Agincourt; his elder brother was High Sheriff of Gloucester. This had made him the exception on the island, as no other planter had such aristocratic blood. Codrington also appears to have had Royalist sympathies, in contrast to the likes of Drax, Middleton and the other earliest planters, who instinctively took against Charles I’s ‘personal rule’ and pro-Catholic leanings. Nevertheless, sometime in the late 1630s, Codrington married Frances Drax, sister of James and William, creating an important alliance between the two families. In 1640 their first son was born, also called Christopher. This son was destined to be at one time the most important Englishman in the Americas. Soon afterwards, Codrington the first, his father, started acquiring land and took up a place on the island’s council. A second son, John Codrington, followed a few years later.

The bitter and bloody Civil War in England brought many more families of the ilk of the Codringtons to Barbados, particularly after the defeats of the Royalists at Naseby and Langport in the summer of 1645. Leadership of the ‘Cavalier expatriates’ was quickly assumed by Humphrey Walrond and his brother Edward from a wealthy landed West Country family. Humphrey, at this time in his mid-forties, had been given up as a hostage at the surrender of the Royalist enclave of Bridgwater in July 1645. He was imprisoned, but then released on agreement that he pay a huge fine. Instead, Walrond sold up his estates and, together with this brother Edward and son George, who had lost an arm fighting for Charles I, fled to Barbados.

Also captured at Bridgwater was 22-year-old Major William Byam. Like Codrington, he would become the founder of a great West Indian dynasty, and he too claimed distinguished blood. One of his ancestors, an Earl of Hereford, was supposedly one of the Knights of the Round Table. His uncle was Charles II’s personal chaplain. Byam was imprisoned by the Parliamentarians in the Tower of London, but then given a pass ‘to go beyond the seas’. He, too, headed for Barbados, together with his wife Dorothy, who not only boasted royal connections, but was also, according to a French priest who met her some seven years later, ‘one of the most beautiful women ever seen’.

These new arrivals brought an aristocratic and metropolitan sophistication to the small island, as well as money and credit. Some bought up plantations, others acted as factors for the Dutch shippers who dominated Barbados’s trade. They also brought a new attitude to the top echelons of island society – a sumptuous, showy style of living, where their extravagance and taste were there for everyone else to see and admire.

In April 1646, the besieged city of Exeter surrendered to Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax. Amongst the captured Royalists was 27-year-old Thomas Modyford, a barrister, the son of a prosperous Exeter merchant and mayor of the city. Appointed by the King as a Commissioner for Devon, he was part of the Royalist delegation negotiating the surrender of the city. Fairfax remembered that Modyford ‘demeaned himself with much civility and mildness, expressed a more than ordinary care for easing the country, and for its preservation from oppression, and showed activity and forwardness to expedite the treaty for the surrender’. Such pragmatism and tact would serve Modyford extremely well during his subsequent spectacular career in the West Indies.

Modyford was fined £35 but escaped imprisonment. He decided that he was ‘now willing to shift’ and, like many of his fellow defeated Royalists, determined on a new start in the West Indies. But for Modyford, it was not the hopeful voyage of servants or the poor but a well-organised and determined act of colonisation. Modyford’s brother-in-law was Thomas Kendall, a wealthy and influential London merchant with experience of the Caribbean trade. The two men now formed a partnership, and in the summer of 1647 two ships were dispatched, one from Plymouth, carrying ‘men, victuals and all utensils fitted for a Plantation’, the second, the Kendall-owned
Achilles
, from London, carrying Modyford and his immediate retinue and further manpower. The plan was to ship English trade goods to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands, exchanging them there for horses and cattle. These would be sold in Barbados, then the party would proceed to Antigua to establish a sugar plantation on the plentiful empty acres there.

With Modyford at Exeter, and on his subsequent emigration to Barbados, was Richard Ligon, author of
A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados
, by far the most vivid, sophisticated and considered contemporary account we have of these crucial, transformatory early years of the Sugar Revolution. Ligon was from a Worcestershire family of respectable name but diluted fortune; he was the fourth son of a third son. He seems to have been university-educated, probably at Balliol College, Oxford, and at some point forged links at court through the wife of James I. From his
writing, we know he was well versed in architecture, horticulture, music and art. However, by mid-1647, when Ligon was coming up to 60 years old, he was in severe difficulties. Not only was he on the losing side in the Civil War, but he was also penniless and being pursued by his creditors. A large investment in a scheme to drain the Fens had backfired spectacularly, when a ‘Barbrous Riot’ had invaded and taken over his lands.

By the time of the fall of Exeter to the forces of Parliament, Ligon had attached himself to Modyford’s retinue, and in defeat was just as keen to get away. He was now, he wrote, ‘a stranger in my own Countrey’, and, ‘stript and rifled of all I had’, was resolved to ‘famish or fly’. With the approval of Thomas Kendall, for whom Ligon was useful as an understudy should Modyford ‘miscarry in the Voyage’, Ligon joined the party on the
Achilles
bound for Barbados.

Ligon wrote that he had travelled in his youth, and we know that his eldest brother Thomas migrated to Virginia, establishing the North American Ligon family, but it is very unlikely that Richard had been to the tropics before, as his account shares the sense of wonder and excitement shown by every first-time visitor to the West Indies.

Richard Ligon described himself as a man of ‘age and gravity’, but his boyish enthusiasm when, after a long voyage, the island of Barbados came into view, is plain to read: ‘Being now come in sight of this happy Island, the nearer we came, the more beautiful it appeared to our eyes.’ Soon they could make out ‘the high large and lofty trees, with their spreading branches and flourishing tops’. Ligon pleaded unsuccessfully with the captain to lower some of the sails that were impeding this view, but soon he could see on the rising ground behind the beach ‘the Plantations … one above another: like several stories in stately buildings, which afforded us a large proportion of delight’.

It was not only ‘extreamly beautiful’; it also, for Ligon, held out the promise of a more orderly society than the one he had left behind. Just as the lofty trees they could see from the boat were nourished by the soil and in turn gave it shade, so for ‘perfect Harmony’, he mused, the ‘Mighty men and Rulers of the earth by their prudent and careful protection, secure [the poor] from harms’, receiving, in return, ‘faithful obedience’. Thus, like for many other new arrivals, the island had already come to encapsulate Ligon’s hopes for a better world and a reversal in his fortunes.

At Bridgetown he was impressed to see a large number of storehouses and in Carlisle Bay more than 20 ‘good ships’ with ‘boats plying too and fro … So quick stirring and as numerous, as I have seen it below the bridge at London.’ But it was the strangeness and beauty of the island’s
‘infinite varieties’ of unfamiliar tropical vegetation that made the greatest first impression. Best of all was the royal palm, the most ‘magnificent tree growing on the earth, for beauty and largeness, not to be paralleled … if you had ever seen her, you could not but have fallen in love with her’.

The new arrivals were brought back down to earth by the news that their other vessel, which had set out before them, had ‘miscarried’. This meant that the Antigua plan had to be shelved: Modyford no longer had the labour force needed to start a plantation on uncleared land. He thus decided to remain in Barbados, ‘til the times became better, and fitter for our remove’. Consulting ‘the most knowing men of the Island’, Modyford was advised that if you had money or credit, you were better off taking on a fully stocked and operational plantation rather than starting from scratch, even if undeveloped land could be had far cheaper.

Governor Philip Bell introduced Modyford and Ligon to William Hilliard, who told them he was ‘desirous to suck in some of the sweet air of England’, and invited them to his 500-acre plantation in St Johns, which bordered that of James Drax. Clearly Hilliard had undertaken what Ligon called the ‘hardships … tedious expectation’ and ‘many years patience’ required to establish a working sugar plantation. He now had 200 acres in cane, which was considered the maximum that could be processed by a single factory. His operation consisted of a 400-square-foot mill, a boiling house and four other buildings for processing the sugar. There were also stables, a smithy, storage for provisions and houses for his workforce of ‘96 Negroes, and three Indian women, with their Children; 28 Christians’. The list of ‘stock’ continues with: ‘45 Cattle for work, 8 Milch Cows, a dozen Horses and Mares, 16 Assinigoes [asses]’. Apart from the sugar cane, 150 acres of the 500 was still wooded, the rest taken up with provisions and pasture, with very small plots still in cotton, tobacco and ginger.

Hilliard’s substantial investment turned out to be shrewd. After a month of negotiations, Modyford agreed to buy a half-share in the plantation, with the understanding that he would run the estate in Hilliard’s absence. Before cane had been planted and the sugar works built, the land had been worth £400. Modyford was happy to pay £7,000 for his half-share, £1,000 down and the remainder in three instalments over the next two years, paid for in sugar from the crop. It was a fabulous return for Hilliard, but with the sugar on stream, Modyford considered it a very good deal. He told Ligon that he had resolved not to return to England until he had made £100,000 sterling – a staggeringly large fortune – out of sugar.

For three years Richard Ligon lived on the plantation, now called Kendal. For some of the time he was employed in ‘publick works’ such as cutting
paths, but mostly he dabbled in his wide range of interests while working as a secretary and adviser to Modyford.

Like most newcomers to the tropics, he suffered in the heat. It was ‘scorching’, but above all suffocatingly humid, ‘sweaty and clammy’. The result, Ligon found, was a numbing lethargy, ‘a great failing in the vigour, and sprightliness we have in colder Climates’. He moaned about the biting cockroaches and mosquitoes, and, in particular, the chiggers that burrowed into his feet. But he was fascinated by the snakes, scorpions, ants and crabs and the melancholy-looking birds, as well as the vibrant night-time noise, which he described as resembling ‘a pack of small beagles at a distance’.