Sugar in the Blood (5 page)

But perhaps the most unexpected annoyance was the noise: the tramping sounds of the sailors as they thudded across the decks, as well as their constant shouting, in particular that of the captain, whose ability to be heard for miles around seemed the primary requirement of the job. There was the creaking of the wood, the whining and sawing of the ropes and the whipping and flapping of the sails. And then there were the animals: the average seventeenth-century vessel was a cacophonous floating menagerie of dogs, pigs, horses and poultry.

Worse than these daily nuisances was the very real danger of pirates. Even while still in the English Channel, “Dunkirkers” often boarded ships. In one notorious case in 1637, the English ship
Elizabeth
was surprised by warships from the Spanish West India fleet while sailing the southern route to America. All 120 of her passengers were captured and transported to Spain, where they were still languishing in prison more than twenty years later. The waters around the Caribbean were also dangerous. The West Indies was “beyond the line”—that is, outside the jurisdiction of existing treaties—and so was effectively lawless. Therefore pirates, largely untroubled by the authorities, combed through the azure waters for bounty, while marauding fleets of all colours battled one another for gold and territory.

Describing a skirmish which “
had well nigh putt an end to this my Journall & to my whole voyage,” Henry Colt illustrated the constant peril of the tropical waters. While en route from Barbados to Dominica in 1631, the crew of his ship, the
Alexander
, noticed they were being pursued by two vessels. Recognizing that the ships were part of a larger Spanish fleet which had hidden itself away on the coast of Dominica, they took flight. (England was then officially at peace with Spain, but the Spaniards regarded the West Indies as their private preserve and therefore would attempt to punish any incursion into their territory.) Laden down by the timber it had taken on board in Barbados, the
Alexander
was handicapped and a fight became inevitable. Fortified by “Hott Water” (alcohol), the
Alexander
’s crew confronted their pursuers and musket shots were exchanged. It was only the realization that the
Alexander
had a large contingent of fighting men on deck that saved it from
being boarded and sacked. Colt, an ex-soldier, relished the prospect of a fight, concluding that “
Death is better to happen once than to fear it always; even those that fear it most must still come unto it.”

Despite the difficulties and worries, most passengers attempted to maintain some kind of familiar daily routine. Daylight and darkness regulated their behaviour at sea as much as on land; so did the rituals of preparing and partaking of meals. These took a bit more planning and time because of the limited food stocks and lack of equipment and space. They fished to supplement their meagre rations and occasionally butchered the livestock they had brought on board. And there were entertainments. The passengers would get together to sing, play backgammon or cards and gamble in the moonlight.

Life on board was strictly stratified, replicating the class divisions of life on land. (These hierarchies operated alongside the social world of the sailors, who formed a fraternity of their own, with a different language and code of conduct, largely impenetrable to the other passengers.) Henry Colt, for example, marked out his privileged position by insisting on wearing the uniform of a gentleman at all times: “
a long sleeved shirt reaching to the knees, a suit of jerkin and hose (that is, a sleeveless jacket and puffed knee breeches), a handkerchief around the neck, a feathered hat, beads, boot hose, stockings and shoes.” He also wore a stomacher—the seventeenth-century equivalent of a sweater—to guard against the wind. The only concession he made to the rigours of the sea journey was to discard his quilted doublet, because they rotted in the humidity.

As the journey progressed, George would have become familiar with his fellow passengers, forging the kind of friendships that were only possible on a passage as long and significant as this one. Those berthed between decks had a certain amount in common, since they were largely of the same estate: small and middling men. But beneath the similarities in their backgrounds were any number of individual stories and colourful personalities. Some travellers were bold and ambitious, others merely curious; some were in flight from creditors or angry relatives, others were broken-hearted or bereaved. These men were brought together by a common goal: all dreamt of improving their fortunes. At
the very least they desired “
a competency”—a popular seventeenth-century term that indicated “a sufficiency, although not an abundance, of worldly goods.” But the word also signified “independence, the possession of property sufficient to free oneself from reliance on others.” Since only one in seven English heads of households owned freehold land and almost all of them owed at least token payments to a manorial lord, for most men the prospect of a “competency”—and the security and respectability it represented—was alluring.

And the journey did have its consolations: many travellers were enthralled with the sea itself, “
sometimes rough with mighty mountains and deep valleys, sometimes smooth like a level meadow.” As the days passed and the ship moved nearer to the Tropic of Cancer, a perceptible change in climate occurred and a balmy quality filled the air. The passengers could not help but be bewitched by the changing hues of the ocean: the dark petrol bleeding into beautiful bright blue and creamy foam. As they entered Caribbean waters, they were joined by wondrous creatures: leaping shoals of flying fish, schools of dolphins swimming alongside the ship, their silvery skins shimmering like gossamer in the sunlight. Colt marvelled that his ship was surrounded by porpoises and fish called grampuses, which were blackish-coloured and much bigger than “
our greatest bullocks of England, and they spout out water like the whale.”

Richard Ligon was fascinated by the birds: great gulls that “attend the rising of the fishes and if they be within distance, seldom fail to make them their own,” and by the turtles that “lye and sleep upon the waves, for a longtime together.” As time passed, however, he recognized that the sea’s pleasures were often “mixt with Cruelties”: “I have seen 20 Porpisces very large of that kind, Cross the Prow of our Ship one behind another in so steady and constant a course, in chase of some other fishes; as I have seen a kennel of large Hounds, In Windsor Forrest in the chase of a Stag; one following directly in a track.”

Even the skies were different from anything they had seen before. Ligon wrote of the pleasures of viewing “the heavens and the beauty of them, which were objects of so great glory, that the Inhabitants of the world from 40 degrees to either pole can never be witness of.” The sunsets delighted him, the “sun then there being far brighter than with us here in England, caused such glorious colours to rest upon those
clouds, as ’tis not possible to be believed by them that hath not seen it, nor can imagination frame so great a beauty.” He noted that though the stars seemed much more brilliant in the tropics, they also seemed disordered: a particular star that appeared large and bright at home was hardly visible in this hemisphere. There were also celestial phenomena that he had never encountered before: for example, when a perfect confluence of moon shining onto clouds produced a rainbow in the night sky.

The length of the voyage also meant that George Ashby and his fellow travellers would have had the time to acclimatize to the profoundly alien conditions of the tropics: the sun so dazzling they couldn’t look at it directly and so hot that it burnt their pale skins. “
One might almost believe,” wrote one startled traveller, “that the puny sun that peeps out upon Old England, is not the same refulgent orb that glows within the Tropics.”

But these wonders aside, there came a point in every journey when the travellers’ spirits began to sag. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, boredom became the defining characteristic of the passage, and the two months at sea often seemed as long as two years. Even swashbuckling Henry Colt found himself lamenting, “
Surely the Journey is as great and further by a 1000 miles than ever I supposed it to be.” The challenge of a journey like this transcended mere discomfort and became almost existential. Whatever order and routine were observed on board ship, they were mocked by the untameable vastness of the surrounding sea. As Ligon wrote gloomily, “
There is no place so void and empty.” Confined for weeks within a small space, afloat on the great wilderness of the ocean, every traveller became aware of his frailty and insignificance.

Eventually, though, they neared the island. The ship’s master proceeded warily. Barbados is the easternmost island in the Caribbean and lies somewhat apart from its neighbours, which made its longitude difficult to calculate. Sir Henry Colt described the challenge of locating the island as being like finding “
sixpence throwne downe upon New Market heath.” This problem had dogged sailors throughout the century, and many ships had inadvertently overshot the island. But it was
a mistake that was strenuously avoided because once a ship found itself leeward of any Caribbean island it was extremely hard to tack back against the wind and recover position.

It was said that landfall was always made at night, leaving passengers awaiting daylight like “
the woman with childe for her good hour.” And so the ship’s inmates’ first glimpse of their destination was often a shadowy one, blurred outlines of the land and buildings only barely illuminated by flickers of candlelight, the water lit by the rays from the moon and stars.

That my forefather should choose to settle in Barbados was in many ways predictable. If the Caribbean was considered more desirable than the American mainland for most seventeenth-century migrants, then Barbados was the most popular choice among the islands. One of the earliest colonizing expeditions in the area noted that Barbados resembled England, was “
more healthful than any of hir neighbours” and therefore “better agreeing with the temper of the English Nacon.”

Barbados is geographically and geologically different from its neighbours because it is not part of the long volcanic mountain range in which the Caribbees are rooted. Instead it is a coral island which has fortuitously worked its way out of the sea. Shaped like a leg of mutton, Barbados feels like two islands rolled into one. The eastern coast, which borders the Atlantic, is wild and steep, dotted with huge, sculptural limestone outcrops, while the Caribbean coast is as tame and smooth as a turquoise rug. In 1690, Governor James Kendall described it as “the beauty-fullst spot of ground I ever saw.”

Barbados has a complex history. Columbus did not actually land on the island during any of his four visits to the Caribbean, but Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors reported a number of visits there during the sixteenth century. It was one of the first islands settled in the British Americas, claimed in 1625 when Captain John Powell landed there on his way back to England from Brazil. The party erected a wooden cross at the site of what would become St. James Town, later known as Holetown, and inscribed on a nearby tree: “James King of England and this island.” After inspecting the south and west coasts, the party realized what a promising prospect for “planting” the island offered. It
was lush, with rich open land, and entirely uninhabited: the Amerindian population that had once lived there had long since deserted the island. The settlers of Barbados, therefore, would avoid the years of tumultuous and bloody battles that their brethren on the American mainland, and nearby islands such as Martinique, endured in order to settle their colonies.

Two years after Powell’s reconnaissance mission, a colonizing expedition led by his brother Henry and funded by two London merchants—Peter and William Courteen—set out for the island. Their ship set sail with eighty settlers and managed to capture eight African slaves en route, stolen from another ship. Their numbers were supplemented by thirty-two Indians from Maine who had been “hired” to teach the settlers how to plant, and were promptly enslaved as soon as they landed. The two groups, Africans and Indians, were the first slaves to land in the British Caribbean. These original settlers had a simple plan for life in Barbados: they were going to make a living cultivating tobacco and cotton and they would sustain themselves with the unfamiliar crops they had brought with them—cassava, yams, Indian corn, potatoes, plantains, bananas, oranges, lemons, limes, pineapples and melons. Over the next decades, more pioneers—including George Ashby—would swell the ranks of this first wave and the island would emerge as the most important in the region.

As George Ashby saw his new home for the first time, he would have had no idea what a tumultuous story he had been catapulted into. As well as being caught up in the more quotidian dramas of the region—hurricanes, rebellions and famine—he would also survive an outbreak of plague and a civil war with his own homeland, which would see Barbados besieged for months by Cromwellian forces. But most significantly, he would be a witness to a seismic shift in world events, when his little island successfully pioneered the production of sugar through the industrial exploitation of enslaved human beings. And in other colonies in Cuba or Brazil, or Martinique and Guadeloupe, in Louisiana or Georgia, other men and women would soon witness the same.

But for now, morning dawned and the excited immigrants rushed from their berths, clambered on deck and crowded against the rails,
pushing and jostling for a view. The first sight of the island evoked rhapsodies in Ligon: “
The nearer we came, the more beautiful it appeared to our eyes.” Indeed, Barbados approached by sea was a wonderful sight, as the ship cut through the water and the seafarers were first assailed by the fresh, tangy air. The land was lush and green, covered by “high, large and lofty trees, with their spreading branches and flourishing tops.” As the ship moved on, sailing through the turquoise waters, George Ashby would have been able to see, clustered around the shoreline, several plantations—small and large—carved out of the woods.