Sugar in the Blood (20 page)

The lifestyle of the elite planters reflected their social status. Not only were there more of these sugar magnates than in the early days, their fortunes were much more noticeable, since they competed with one another to display their wealth. As Father Labat noted when he visited the island in 1700:

Labat was not alone in his admiration for the Barbadians. Another contemporary marvelled at these “
splendid Planters, who for Sumptuous Houses, Cloaths and Liberal Entertainment cannot be exceeded by their peers in the Mother Kingdome itself.”

Virtually the entire society had been transformed by sugar. From the rather rustic town that George Ashby encountered when he first arrived, Bridgetown had expanded and flourished. It now had long, straight and well-planned streets and beautiful houses that were built in the English style, with glass windows and magnificent furnishings. Its warehouses were filled with goods from all parts of the world and its shopkeepers, including numerous goldsmiths, jewellers and clockmakers, did brisk business. One visitor claimed that “
the largest trade in the New World (
l’Amerique
) is carried on here.” And what was true for the capital was true for the rest of the island, which was equally prosperous and well developed.

Its racial make-up had also shifted. A world that had been largely European in origin was now predominantly African. Thousands of whites had fled the country in search of new opportunities, while many more blacks were forcibly transported to the island to cultivate sugar cane. According to K. G. Davies, the chief authority on the seventeenth-century English slave trade,
Barbados received between 2,000 and 3,000 negroes per annum between 1676 and 1680 to keep the plantations adequately supplied. The total slave population, according to estimates, rose from 32,473 in 1676 to 46,602 in 1684. This huge increase occurred despite the slaves’ fearful mortality rate.

The topography of the island had also been transformed by the exigencies of sugar. When George Ashby arrived the plantations were largely confined to the western and southern coasts of the island, leaving the interior, where he made his home, virtually untouched. In those days, amenities such as road networks were rudimentary. But nearly forty years later, at the time of George Ashby’s death, the landscape was completely altered. Barbados now had a high population density as well as a sophisticated infrastructure. The rampant wilderness that had dominated the island had been completely tamed, and 90 per cent of its surface area was utilized for agriculture. It did not concern the colonists overmuch that hundreds of animal and fauna species had disappeared in the process.

In 1676 Governor Atkins reported gleefully that the whole island looked like a beautifully cultivated green garden: a sentiment that many other observers echoed. Indeed, the metaphor of the garden was one embraced by the colonists. They had overcome the exuberant explosion
of tropical vegetation and imposed instead a vista that represented to them progress, order, achievement and prosperity.

Barbados may have been a flourishing society, but it was a deeply unequal one, and despite its wealth, the quality of life in Barbados was poor. The census demonstrates that the Barbadians still had lonelier, less family-centred lives than the colonists who had chosen New England. Their island was overcrowded, had poor sanitation and suffered a perpetual shortage of food. Small men still laboured in the fields to keep food on the table, while the rich retreated to their manorial-style plantations, gorging and drinking themselves to death. The mortality rate was also very high; the island’s populace still succumbed to disease, drink and depression at an alarming rate. And if the islanders’ lifestyles didn’t kill them, strange tropical illnesses and natural disasters did. The plight of the planters was eclipsed, of course, by that of the slaves on the island. One of the big Barbados planters, Edward Littleton, who owned 120 Negroes in 1680, argued in an influential pamphlet that the planter with a hundred slaves had to buy six new ones a year in order to maintain his stock. In other words, he could expect to kill off all his original labour force within seventeen years. Littleton complained bitterly at having to pay £20 for each new slave: “
One of the great Burdens of our Lives is going to buy Negroes,” he wrote. “But we must have them; we cannot be without them, and the best Men in those Countries must in their own Persons submit to the Indignity.”

Most significantly, both planters and slaves lived in a permanent state of mutual fear and resentment, as their relationship grew ever more toxic. “
Thus sunny Barbados,” according to the historian Richard Dunn, “was a land of paradox in 1680, both parvenu and traditional, both complacent and insecure, the richest and yet in human terms the least successful colony in English America.”

And, for George Ashby, how did his life in Barbados measure up to what he had dreamt of when he set sail from England? The Ashbys’ home parish was now one of the more populous on the island, with 407 planters, 115 white servants and 4,702 Negroes living within its boundaries. It had a thriving sugar cane industry that had seduced most of its inhabitants, including my ancestors. The Ashby family had also managed to
clamber a step up the economic ladder. Instead of the paltry nine acres that George had initially acquired when he arrived on the island, the family holdings had expanded to twenty-one. And their labour force had expanded from one indentured servant to nine slaves and one white worker. George Ashby’s son and primary heir, George Jr., was now worthy of the appellation “planter” with all the privileges—the right to vote, to stand for election—that this term implied.

But if George Ashby had dreamt of any great social transformation for his family, he must have been disappointed. In the Old Country, his class identity was, like that of all of his countrymen, the product of a complex interaction of factors including heritage, education, accent and property. Once that place was assigned, usually by birth, it was a straitjacket that was virtually impossible to escape. (Even those with money were legally proscribed from mimicking the dress and lifestyle of the upper classes in the seventeenth century.) In Barbados things were different, but not profoundly so. Those who had dreams of social mobility were also largely frustrated: the island was almost as hidebound and hierarchical as the homeland they had left behind. Only great wealth allowed a man to escape the taint of humble roots. So George fraternized with men of his “degree,” and this was still the case when his eldest son came to maturity. In a document drawn up towards the end of the century when George the younger was about to take a sea voyage, he gives power of attorney to his wife and dearest friends: a blacksmith, a miller and a carpenter.

George Ashby had been successful in other ways, however. In his quest for profits he had proved to be wily, persistent and adaptable, learning quickly how to raise a variety of crops and market them. He was, in other words, typical of the kind of person who flourished as a planter in Barbados: “a good capitalist,” according to the Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles, forever “sensitive to changing market requirements.” But George Ashby had done well because he had been willing—like all his fellow planters—to violate certain norms of morality and certain values. He had subscribed to an ideology that dehumanized his fellow human beings; that allowed him, on the sole basis of their skin colour, to exploit their labour and abuse their well-being. He and his descendants were slave owners, with all the moral and spiritual compromises that implies. But this was unlikely to have concerned the Ashbys any
more than it did the rest of the white population of the island. George, like his contemporaries, had migrated to the New World with dreams of financially enhancing his family’s fortunes, and against all the odds he had succeeded. Though he hadn’t found untold riches, he had—thanks to sugar—established a stake in the island’s bounty. It would be another three generations, however, before the Ashby family truly found their El Dorado.

IF THE PROSPECT
of immense wealth that had attracted George Ashby to the colonies continued to elude his descendants, the Ashby family would over the coming decades nonetheless thrive. With the dogged perseverance demonstrated by their founding father they would extend their holdings, acre by acre, slave by slave. Meanwhile George Ashby’s surviving children would continue to beat the odds and produce thriving families of their own. Their offspring grew up and were wed in turn, and more babies were born, their parents continuing to use and reuse a handful of names—George and William, Edward and Robert, Deborah and Susannah, Mary and Pamela—assembling and reassembling them in each generation like fragments in a kaleidoscope. Whatever Quaker affiliations my branch of the Ashbys had once held had withered, just as the sect on the island had, and the family were absorbed into the wider Anglican community, which had won the battle for the islanders’ hearts and minds.

Some of George Ashby’s successors would migrate abroad, like Benjamin Ashby, who departed Barbados in the 1740s to try his luck in mainland America, where he joined many others with that surname settled there. But most remained on the island. In the middle of the eighteenth century my branch of the Ashby family relocated from St. Philip to the neighbouring parish of Christ Church, where my great-great-great-great-grandfather Robert Ashby and his wife, Mary, purchased part of a sugar estate called Kingsland. This property, which had been cultivating cane for over one hundred years, had once been owned by the prominent English planter family the Applethwaites, and
had passed by inheritance to their relatives the Freres. They in turn sold off parts of the estate in order to provide legacies for family members. Thus chunks of Kingsland ended up in the hands of people like the Ashbys, modest planters who were eager to move to bigger holdings.

Most of George Ashby’s descendants became entrenched in the same industry that had ensnared him so many years earlier. Their entire world, like his, was built upon an edifice of sugar: it put food on the table and clothes on their backs; it would dictate the rhythms of their days, months and years, as well as shaping their attitudes and beliefs. Had the technology existed to take photographs of subsequent generations of Ashbys in the eighteenth century, the images would have varied very little: skirts a little longer or shorter, hair arranged slightly differently, the jacket a marginally different cut; while in the background, beyond their homesteads, were the same vistas of green cane, the same black bodies labouring in the fields.

If the source of their livelihood did not change much over the years, the way that the Ashbys thought and conducted themselves did. Over the decades, the family’s behaviour was transformed by tropical conditions, proximity to an alien culture and the peculiarities of colonial society. So visitors from Britain noted that the local whites were somewhat of a “foreign character.” And certainly a life lived alongside black slaves had changed everything about them. The Ashbys now danced to different music, ate different food, had a different body language. They even spoke differently: one visitor noted in his diary what he considered to be the “Africanisms” adopted by Barbadian whites, while another visitor, George Pinckard, felt that the Barbadians pronounced their words with “a tedious langour.” Their indulgent upbringing frequently made them “indolent” and “lacking in ambition.” The benevolence of the climate, the beauty of the island, and the relaxed pace of life encouraged a languorous lifestyle and an attachment to pleasure.

On a collective level, the Barbadian identity too had transformed. The fiery, violent temperament of the first-generation pioneers had mellowed significantly and the islanders were now known for their easy-going and friendly attitudes. And where their sugar-generated prosperity had initially encouraged a tendency towards ostentation, this had dissipated somewhat and was now primarily expressed in their tradition of lavish hospitality. This process of adjustment which
migrants made to a new environment and the new cultural ethos they created became known as creolization; and according to the historian Karl Watson, the eighteenth century saw the formation of a distinct “
Barbadian character.”

Earlier distinctions based on the colonists’ country of origin, be it England, Scotland or Ireland, France, Holland or Spain, which had been so important when George arrived, were long forgotten. So if George Ashby had regarded himself as “an Englishman transplanted,” his descendants were Barbadians through and through. Like many of the white islanders, the Ashbys were Barbadian born, and could trace their ancestry back to the period 1627–60. The island was all they knew. Their relationship with this place had all the intensity of a love affair. Their ancestors had died to conquer and clear it, while subsequent generations had battled and bled to keep it. This dynamic of struggle and subjugation only cemented the islanders’ passionate attachment to their land: Barbados was home.