Sugar in the Blood (16 page)

It is impossible to know whether George Ashby was a severe or considerate master, but the island’s planters had a poor reputation in this respect. As enthusiastic entrepreneurs they were ever eager to maximize profits and minimize costs. So they were perpetually torn between the need to protect the well-being of their slaves, who represented a sizeable capital investment, and the desire to cut costs for short-term profit. In the end, the latter imperative usually won out, and this, combined with a goodly dash of racial hostility, meant the slaves were fed and housed poorly, and provided with inadequate medical treatment. They were malnourished and vulnerable to disease; their health was so degraded that in these early years of slavery they were largely infertile and their lifespan in captivity was a mere seven to ten years. This inability of most slave populations in the region to reproduce in turn prompted the shipment of even more slaves to take their place.

Father Labat, a French priest seconded to the Antilles who wrote extensively about his travels around the islands, including a stay in Barbados, wrote:

He continued: “They are rigorously punished for the least disobedience and more so if they rebel, which does not prevent this happening very often because of the behaviour of their drunken, unreasonable and savage overseers.” On these occasions, “Those who are captured and sent to prison are condemned to be passed through the mill, burned alive or exposed in iron cages in which they are packed and … attached to the branch of a tree, or, are left to die of hunger and thirst.” Though Labat admitted that “these torments were cruel,” he nonetheless cautioned against

The growth of the slave population had not only changed the face of Barbados, it had also altered the atmosphere of the colony. With so many different groups struggling to carve out new identities for themselves—or adjust to the ones that had been forced upon them—the tension on the island had been ratcheted up considerably. Barbados had become a place riven by inequality and teetering permanently on the brink of violence.

WITHIN A DECADE
or so of arriving, George Ashby and his fellow settlers found their island not just dominated by sugar, but utterly transformed by it. Across the length and breadth of Barbados, field after field that had once cultivated tobacco was now covered in a sea of rustling green cane. Sugar was now the economic engine of the island, the basis on which deals were made and on which goods and services were valued. So when George Ashby traded with his friends or purchased supplies in Bridgetown, he was expected to pay with this new commodity. Most importantly, it permeated the minds of the people who surrounded him, influencing their choices and inflaming their hopes for a more prosperous future. In trading depots and tippling houses, even at church, they debated the relative merits of the crop. They gossiped about who had “gone over” to sugar and who was going to; above all they speculated about how much money their fellows were making. They could think about little else.

The first to convert had been the big planters. The economies of scale associated with sugar production meant that those with a large acreage and an established workforce were inevitably in a stronger position than small men like George Ashby. Starting up such a venture required at least a thousand pounds (a huge sum at that time) to pay for the mill and its equipment, which included the coppers in the boiling house and the boosts and drips in the cooling house, as well as the carts, hoes, pickaxes and machetes. If they did not have the ready cash personally, the elite planters had the collateral and the contacts to raise it, and sugar soon enriched them beyond their wildest imaginings. Small men could only look on in wonder at the lifestyles of these new
sugar magnates as they built beautiful new homes that dominated the vistas of the island. From his modest acreage, George Ashby would have watched as Drax Hall, the first and most enduring paean to sugar, was constructed.

Colonel James Drax was a man who epitomized the aspirations of the neophyte planters. He was the emblematic planter of the age, his meteoric rise fuelling the dreams of more recent arrivals. According to legend, Drax arrived, impoverished and desperate, among the first generation of colonists in the late 1620s. He and a handful of his fellows sheltered in a cave and supplemented their scant provisions by hunting and fishing. They cleared a piece of land on which they planted tobacco, shipping the crop back home and making a healthy profit because the commodity was at that time scarce. It was a large enough sum for Drax to buy forty or fifty indentured servants who worked the land for him. Aware that Barbadian tobacco was not the best on the market, and that the North American mainland was producing a superior product, Drax experimented with a number of other crops until he plumped for sugar.

His was one of the plantations on which the new crop had first been trialled. After numerous expensive errors, Drax finally got it right. Soon Colonel Drax began to boast that he would not think of returning home to England until he was worth £10,000 a year. He swiftly exceeded even this exalted total. The French priest Antoine Biet noted that Drax was held in such esteem on the island that when he did leave to visit England in the 1650s, he “
was accompanied to his ship by more than two hundred of the island’s most important people … all well mounted and marching two by two in a column headed by Drax and the island’s Governor.”

According to Biet, the elite sugar planters “all lived like little princes,” driving around in grand coaches and wearing the finest clothes. Since they were able to delegate most of the estate’s labour to their servants and slaves, these men led pleasant lives, with ample time to enjoy pursuits like hunting, fishing and paying calls. They were the Russian oligarchs of their day, ludicrously rich and determined to show it.

Their hospitality was legendary. In a feast thrown by Colonel Drax for Richard Ligon (who despite his financial travails was sufficiently the gentleman that he was much feted by the planters), the guests were presented with a menu that included beef—a rarity on the island—served
in fourteen different ways. Some cuts were roasted, breaded or boiled, while the tongue and tripe were made into pies “
seasoned with sweet Herbs finely minc’d, Suet, Spice and Currans.” After this course was completed, another was brought in, which featured among its delights a “shoulder of a young Goat,” “A Kid with a pudding in its belly,” as well as “a loin of veal and eight turtle doves.” The next course included Spanish bacon, pickled oysters, caviar, anchovies and olives. To finish there were desserts such as cheesecakes, tansies and custards, as well as fruit platters that included bananas, guavas, custard apples and prickly pears. All of this was washed down by a dizzying array of beverages: local tipples like mobbie and rum, as well as “all the drinks available in a privileged home in England” such as brandy, white and Rhenish wine and sherry or “red sack.” As opulent as these spreads were, the decoration of these planters’ homes was often a bit patchy, with touches of great ostentation in the form of Smyrna carpets and rich hangings set in vast but rather neglected rooms. This reflected the rather contingent nature of settlement in the colonies during these years; many planters were loath to spend too much on possessions that were not portable, since they planned to return home once they had made their fortune.

There were just enough tantalizing role models like Drax to sustain the fantasies of the hopefuls now flooding into the island. But in reality it was difficult to succeed in the sugar industry without a certain amount of capital. The great sugar magnates were generally not self-made; they arrived with some funds with which to seed their plantation venture. The most notable of these was the aristocratic Christopher Codrington (1649–98). The scion of feudal magnates of Gloucestershire, he built up one of the most profitable estates in these the earliest and most lucrative days of the island’s sugar conversion. His son, also called Christopher (1668–1710), followed in his father’s footsteps. Educated in Britain, he went on to become an Oxford scholar. On his return to Barbados he became a councillor at twenty-six and was made deputy governor at the youthful age of twenty-nine. He later moved to Antigua to exploit that island’s nascent sugar industry. At the time of his premature death in 1710 he was described as “
the richest and most splendid of all early West Indian Grandees.” More philanthropically inclined than his father, he left his two Barbadian plantations, including their slaves, to the Church of England to fund a theological and medical college for
young white Barbadian men. The product of this legacy, the immense and graceful Codrington College, remains the most noticeable artefact of the golden age of Barbadian sugar.

The success of the big planters inspired the middling and smaller planters to follow suit and by the 1660s nearly the whole island was covered with sugar cane estates. A sense of desperation bedevilled these men; they had come here to get rich, and now the opportunity to do so had finally presented itself. If they didn’t jump on the sugar train now they feared they might be left behind. George Ashby was no exception. How does one stand by a gold rush and not hunger for gold? But how could he finance this venture? Men like him who relied solely on their own physical toil to amass their fortunes were at a distinct disadvantage, so they had to plan their strategy carefully. George Ashby chose a gradual, rather stealthy entrée into the sugar industry, ploughing his profits back into further land acquisitions, thereby painstakingly extending his holdings, until he had acquired an impressive nineteen acres.

George also found other methods of getting his hands on land to cultivate. A deed registered on 23 May 1660 demonstrates that, in his modest way, he was becoming something of a sugar entrepreneur. It detailed an agreement with Ralph Kersey, “a tailor,” for the seven-year rental of eight and a half acres of Kersey’s land. At the end of the contractual period the land would revert to Kersey, but the profits that the land had yielded would go to George Ashby and his business partner. It was a wealth-generating strategy that was exploited by many of those who did not have enough capital to buy new land outright, or could not find properties adjacent to their holdings available for sale.

The success of the sugar crop over the following decade saw the island’s status transformed from a beautiful backwater colony to the star of Britain’s overseas possessions. The impact of sugar on the mother country was equally profound. According to the historian Larry Gragg, in 1634 only 5 per cent of London’s imports came from the Americas, but from the 1660s the transporting of sugar and tobacco dominated England’s overseas trade. Though most of this sugar was earmarked for domestic use, almost 40 per cent was re-exported. In turn this generated profits for shipping, ports and merchants in the form
of freight, commission, and handling charges. Ports in London and Bristol expanded to accommodate this new business. Jobs in shipbuilding boomed, with greater demand for crews as well as skilled tradesmen like shipwrights, carpenters, sail-makers and gun-makers. Sugar refineries opened up and by 1695 there were nearly thirty of them in England processing ten million pounds of muscovado annually. Other trades also expanded—from hat-makers to haberdashers—to meet the needs of the newly enriched planters and merchants.

Thomas Tryon, an Anabaptist who visited Barbados in 1663, summed up sugar’s importance to Britain enthusiastically: this “excellent Juice,” he wrote, “
is of much more importance than all other Fruits and Spices imported to us,” arguing that “No one could be insensible as to how sugar had enriched the Kings purse.” In addition, he claimed: “Sugar finds an Employment for many Thousands in England it self, [such] as … Sugar-Bakers or Distillers, Coopers, Grocers yea and many Ladies who had more sugar in their kitchen than Confectioner shops had in former days.” It was also extremely useful to apothecaries, “since more than half of their Medicines are mixed and compounded with Sugar.” In short, he concluded:

In Barbados, the transformation was not just economic and environmental, but social and cultural too. Bewitched by the financial potential of sugar, the atmosphere in the island became feverish. Prompted by news of what great profits there were to be made out of the crop, new colonists were flooding into the island. In a tumult of desire and expectation they arrived, hoping to cash in on the sugar boom. Blinded by their dreams of what they would do once they had made their fortune, they struggled to gain what toeholds they could in the new industry. It did not matter that sugar planting and its attendant exploitation of black
Africans was desperately hard work, full of drudgery and boredom and debasement; they came anyway. If they didn’t have the funds to finance a plantation they took jobs as managers; if they didn’t have the skills to be managers they became bookkeepers; and if not bookkeepers they became overseers. Others realized that there was a killing to be made in the innumerable businesses that functioned on the periphery of the sugar industry: slave trading, sugar processing and shipping.