Sugar in the Blood (12 page)

This protracted conflict took its toll on all the islanders. Households like the Ashbys had lived in fear for many weeks, foodstuffs were scarce and their crops went uncultivated. More and more there were whispered discussions about abandoning the fight. After all, Cromwell was now the undisputed master of England, Scotland and Ireland; and nothing had been gained by the colonists, who felt that they had lost a fortune in trade and suffered continuous deprivation because of the blockade. Finally a prominent colonist, Colonel Modiford, declared for the Parliament. Although he was dubbed a traitor by the governor, it was the beginning of the end. Fearful that the island would be “utterly ruined,” the Barbadians submitted to the will of the Commonwealth. On 10 January peace talks took place at the Mermaid, a hostelry in Oistins. The following day “The Charter of Barbados” was signed. Its provisions included an act of indemnity that protected the islanders from prosecution for previous utterances or acts, and restored the property of those whose estates had been sequestered. The island’s civil war was over.

MORE SIGNIFICANT THAN
any political ramifications, the emergence of sugar and the prosperity it promised transformed the racial balance of the island, as African labour came to be regarded as essential for the successful cultivation of the new crop. Although the first black slaves in Barbados had arrived at the very beginning of the colony’s history—the eight men captured as bounty from another ship by Henry Powell’s colonizing expedition of 1627—their numbers remained small for the next few years. By 1629, it was believed that there were only about fifty enslaved Indians and Africans on the island. The Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles estimated that there were 800 blacks on the island in the 1630s, when George Ashby arrived, most of whom had been seized by Portuguese and Dutch traders; but some historians suggest that the number was more like 2,000.

These demographic changes would affect George Ashby in a very personal way. In the decade that he had settled on the island, he had been a European among Europeans. Even their workforce was overwhelmingly white. So in these early days of settlement black faces were an exotic minority, who were a source of ambivalence, even possible disdain, but were not considered a threat. But as time passed, and the island converted to sugar, the situation began to change. Moving around its byways, George Ashby and his contemporaries noticed that there were more and more black faces. In the years between 1641 and 1650 the DuBois Voyages Database—the most comprehensive index of slave voyages, named in honour of the African-American scholar W. E. B. DuBois—puts the number of slave arrivals on the island at
more than 4,500, though again the real figure was probably higher. Indeed, the historian J. H. Galloway says that there were already 6,000 slaves on the island in 1643. And in the tippling houses and taverns that George Ashby frequented, he noticed that his contemporaries were discussing the purchase of black slaves with almost the same avidity with which they debated the conversion to sugar. By 1655, when sugar reigned supreme and the commodity had become the currency with which goods were valued and exchanged, there were 20,000 slaves on the island.

The perceived threat of being outnumbered by blacks was heightened by the fluctuations in the white population of the island. Though Barbados was still an attractive destination for aspirational white migrants, many were also leaving the island in search of greater opportunities, as less and less land was available for purchase and what was available was inflated in value in comparison to the other colonies. In the 1640s Barbadians went to Surinam, Demerara and nearby Trinidad. In the 1650s they left for other English colonies like Antigua, Montserrat and Nevis, while others went to French islands such as Martinique and Guadeloupe. Then a couple of thousand set off for Virginia. But the biggest exodus was in 1655, when 3,000 islanders volunteered to join the ill-fated Penn–Venables expedition, initiated by Cromwell as part of his Western Design, to seize Spanish territories in the region.

While Barbados seemed to be perpetually haemorrhaging white settlers, the black population continued to grow relentlessly. Soon the African workers in Barbados were in danger of outnumbering the “white slaves” who had previously been relied upon to farm the land. And as the balance between black and white shifted inexorably against them, George Ashby and his contemporaries became increasingly paranoid and fearful; their home away from home was feeling very alien indeed. By the middle of the 1660s Governor Willoughby wrote to the mother country complaining that if the numbers of white colonists were not replenished, “
wee shall be soe thinned of Christian people … I fear our negroes will growe too hard for us.” But the flood would not be reversed—not while sugar was yielding such riches. So whether he liked it or not, George Ashby’s island was in transition from being a white world to a black one.

Of course, the New World colonists did not invent slavery; the institution was already thousands of years old and most societies have, at some time in their history, exploited slave labour. Slavery flourished in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Indeed the term “slave” comes from “Slav” because of the many Eastern Europeans who were enslaved in the early modern world. Some people were born into servitude, many others were subjugated later in their lives. Some sold themselves into bondage, others were sold by their families. Some were captured in warfare or kidnapped as they went about their ordinary lives, while others were enslaved as punishment for their crimes, or because of debt. Though most slaves were anonymous drones working unrewarded in households or labouring in fields, there were some who achieved considerable status and power, explains the historian Hugh Thomas. Roman emperors like Augustus frequently promoted his slaves to important offices, while a black eunuch named Kafur became master of both Egypt and Syria during the tenth century. Slaves were involved in the construction of some of the great wonders of the world, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Great Wall of China. It has been estimated that during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, one out of three persons living on the Italian peninsula was a slave: approximately two million people. But these slaves were of various cultures and colours, and enslavement was not a condition that was associated with a particular race or skin colour.

Even though slavery had all but disappeared from Western Europe by the end of the fifteenth century because of the new ideas of nationhood and more progressive attitudes to the labouring classes that had emerged from the Renaissance and the Reformation, in the New World slave labour was exploited virtually from the moment that Europeans arrived. Indeed, the beginnings of the slave trade are usually dated to 1502, when the first references to enslaved Africans appeared in Spanish colonial documents. And by 1514 the DuBois index indicates that the Portuguese were carrying out regular slave voyages. On arrival in the Americas, these Africans worked alongside indigenous populations, often cutting cane in the Iberian territories of South America. The Dutch and the Spanish were soon slave traders. Initially England
was hostile to the trade. On hearing of the first slave-running voyage by John Hawkins from Guinea to the Caribbean in 1563, Queen Elizabeth I remarked: “
If any Africans were carried away without his free consent it would be detestable and call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertaking.” But once the English became aware of the profits associated with the trade, they soon became involved; and, in time, Britain would become the greatest slaving nation in the world.

What explained this volte-face? After all, slavery had not been a feature of English life for more than a century, and by the early seventeenth century the English were more likely to be victims of slavery—purchased in the Mediterranean ports of North Africa—than they were to be slavers. It was particularly surprising for a nation that so valued its own freedom that it was enshrined in their most popular patriotic song. (Written at the high point of the slave trade in 1740, the lyrics to “Rule, Britannia!” defiantly declare: “Britons never will be slaves.”) Some have suggested that the reason was an implacable racism. But this explanation is somewhat simplistic. The settlers had been perfectly content with white workers in the early years of settlement; and in the Australian colonies a couple of centuries later, white convicts were considered appropriate to work in conditions similar to those of the Caribbean.

It was the arrival of sugar, however, that changed everything. Sugar demanded large amounts of capital, and a vast and steady stream of expendable labour to make the crop commercially viable. The flow of indentured servants to the island was finite, and was drying up as time went on, no doubt partly because people at home had begun to become aware of the terrible conditions under which they toiled. Thus it came down to a question of simple mathematics: in the late 1640s an indentured servant cost £10 for a five- to seven-year indenture, while an African could be bought for around £20 but served for life. As the trade in Africans grew more widespread, so the cost of shipping the slaves fell and the numbers available for purchase increased. In addition, the journey from Africa to the Caribbean, which became known as the Middle Passage (so named because of its position in the triangular trade from Britain to Africa, on to the Caribbean, and back to Britain), was somewhat easier than that from Britain. In the end, therefore, the introduction of mass slavery to Barbados was driven largely by economics:
acquiring an African labour force was more convenient and cost effective. It is important to remember that Barbados, like most of the American settlements, was set up as a commercial enterprise, financed by merchants and patrons who hoped, and expected, to make money from their investment; and it was settled by chancers intoxicated by dreams of prosperity, unsentimental men who had few scruples about how their fortunes were made. In this context the decision to exploit black people was both an explicable and predictable one.

But if it is clear that racism was not the catalyst for slavery and the slave trade, it is also true that the colonists’ attitude to race made it easier for them to justify the enslavement of Africans. Though Richard Ligon was both more educated and more sympathetic to the enslaved population than many of his planter contemporaries, his observations about Africans is nonetheless revelatory about how they were regarded in the period when the expansion of sugar took place. It is a contradictory account. Ligon clearly had many of the prejudices of his era, but was also fascinated and appreciative. He admired the slaves’ physiques: “
the men are very well timbered, that is broad between the shoulders, full breasted, well filleted and clean leg’d.” And he was entranced by the women, who “when young” had “large hard jutting breasts” that were so firm that “no leaning, jumping or stirring will cause them to shake,” even though he lamented that when “these women grow old their breasts do hang below their navels.” He was impressed by the athletic skills of both sexes in running, swimming and even fencing when well trained; and he enjoyed their singing and musicality. His opinions only reinforced the stereotypes that black males were designed for physical exploitation and the black female, as a result of her attractiveness, deserved her sexual exploitation.

Ligon was more ambivalent about black people when it came to their philosophies and behaviour. He was impressed by their “attachment to their wives and their beliefs” and noted that they measured time by the moon; but he also recorded with derision “that arithmetic fails them.” He presented the slaves sometimes as clever and resourceful and at other times stupid and without initiative. Slaves were “
intrinsically treacherous” but also loyal and “protective” of their master’s well-being, but he concluded that he and the other islanders regarded the slaves as “a bloody people … as near beasts as may be” and that there
“be a mark set upon these people, which will hardly ever be wip’d off, as of their cruelties when they have advantages and of their fearfulness and falseness.” He also went on to say that he had “strong motives” to make him believe “that there are as honest, faithful, and conscionable people amongst them, as amongst those of Europe or any other part of the world.” This was not a sentiment shared by most of his planter-hosts, as another of Ligon’s anecdotes unwittingly reveals.

In trying to explain the blacks’ religious beliefs and illustrate their superstitious nature, Ligon relates how, on an estate owned by Colonel Walrond, a number of slaves had committed suicide, believing they would be resurrected in their “own country.” After having lost three or four of his best blacks this way, Walrond organized for “one of their heads to be cut off, and set upon a pole of a dozen foot height.” Arguing that the body couldn’t “
go onto the next life without its head,” the remaining slaves became convinced that this would prevent them from being reincarnated and stopped committing suicide. Of course, the story tells us as much about the planters as it does about the slaves, and demonstrates how ruthless they were from the outset, in order to ensure maximum productivity in their cane fields, as well as how desperately enslaved Africans dreamt of escaping the abuse and toil of plantation life and finding a way back home.