In 1702 the peace of Europe was disturbed by the war of the Spanish succession. It lasted for eleven years. It was a curious war to have been fought within a hundred years of Philip II’s death. A Bourbon prince, the grandson of Louis XIV, was sitting on the throne of Spain, Louis was proudly announcing that there were no longer any Pyrenees, and the other kings of Europe were uniting in a grand alliance to prevent the complete subjugation of Spain by France. It has been described as a war with limited aims, waged by monarchs with mercenary forces, in their personal, dynastic interests. As far as England and Holland were concerned, it was waged to curtail Louis XIV’s ambitions.
Labat was in Guadeloupe when war broke out. That was in May. The news reached the English islands in July, but the French did not learn of it until the capture of their ships by English corsairs warned them of trouble in the air. That kind of thing was likely to happen in the Caribbean. Eighty years later Rodney was to sack St Eustatius when the Dutch believed themselves to be at peace, and in 1667 the French government was so dilatory in warning their colony in St Kitts that its governor had been killed in action before the news of war had reached the island.
Labat’s accounts of the steps taken at Guadeloupe to alert the populace is typical of what a war was like at that time, in that area. A muster was taken of all the inhabitants capable of bearing arms, and an inventory of all the available military supplies. A store of manioc was requisitioned, to be lodged in the fort and to be renewed every three months. Manioc, peas and potatoes were to be planted in high areas and in valleys distant from the sea; a team of patrols and coast guards was enrolled. The inhabitants of remote districts were instructed to take their families into the hills. Alarm posts were established. Inhabitants were told where to muster in case of crisis. It was all very much what happened in England in the summer of 1940. And as the inhabitants of England were a quarter of a century later to remember that time in terms of their personal peradventures, Labat was in the main concerned with an earthquake that shook Martinique and a whitlow that afflicted his left hand. His doctor wished to operate, but Labat preferred to experiment with a local remedy that he had not yet tried. He took an egg that had just been laid and broke it with a piece of clean wood shaped like a spatula, since it was essential that iron should not touch it. The white of the egg was separated from the yolk; twice as much salt as would be needed for the eating of an egg was then mixed with the yolk. This was spread on a feather and wrapped round the finger; a compress was put on top which was strapped on firmly but not tightly. After two days Labat found that the whitlow had dissolved into a small hole in the flesh through which the pus had flowed. A little oil was applied to soften and close the wound and the good father’s discomfort was at an end.
The war followed its course desultorily, as far as the West Indies were concerned. The British took over the French section of St Kitts, the French raided St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat. Although one of the main aims of the Grand Alliance had been to prevent Louis XIV from gaining control of Spain’s colonial interests, the monarchs involved were more concerned with the European than the colonial battlefields, believing that they could settle the Caribbean issue in Flanders; and indeed Marlborough’s succession of victories – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet – did effectively contain Louis within his frontiers. It was a humiliating war for France. The only benefit that she derived was the beaver catch of Hudson Bay, which established her supremacy in the hat trade. But that was not an immediate advantage. Spain too fared badly. Gibraltar was captured by the British, and at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 she surrendered her Italian and her French possessions. But in terms of her eventual interests, she was better off without a stake in Flanders, and with a Bourbon on her throne, her finances were in the hands of French advisers. The internal custom houses were put down; Castile was no longer the administrative centre of the country; the American trade was centred in Cádiz. States once independent lost local privileges, and though there were separatist agitations in Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia which had to be reduced by armed campaigns, a unification of the country started. A genuine measure of prosperity returned to the Spanish people; the population rose, public works were undertaken, industry and shipping increased, the power of the Inquisition was reduced, and the country as a whole began to shake off the sloth which had settled on it during the seventeenth century. And all the time the treasure fleets were sailing from Panama.
When the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, it may well have seemed that the development of the West Indies had reached a decisive stage. Spain’s monopoly had been broken, and Spain had accepted her limited position as owner of the treasure fleets, with stout bastions in Cuba and Puerto Rico. The buccaneers were a common black market enemy. France was established between Guadeloupe and Grenada; she had originally owned St Croix, and a small but prosperous colony had taken root there, but it was too close to the Danish island of St Thomas and was trading with it in defiance of Colbert’s pacte coloniale; orders were consequently issued to the colonists to move to Hispaniola, where there was a need of colonists, and they established themselves at Léogane. The British owned what are now known as the Leeward Islands – St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat – along with Jamaica and Barbados. The Danes held St Thomas. Labat considered St Thomas the most prosperous of all the islands because Denmark was never involved in wars, and it was one of the first points of call for ships bound westward on the north-east trade. Her warehouses were invaluable for privateers. The Dutch, who were more interested in the East Indies than the West, and whose concern in the area was less agricultural than mercantile, owned Curaçao, Saba and St Eustatius.
The Caribs, who had proved so truculent to the Spanish settlers in Guadeloupe, had been for the most part reduced or domesticated. In Dominica, where today their last settlement remains, they capitulated peacefully. In Grenada they put up a desperate resistance. They signed a treaty with the French but made no attempt to keep it. Forming themselves into small squads, they ambushed and killed every Frenchman whom they found travelling alone; finally a troop of three hundred Frenchmen was sent to deal with them. After a series of savage battles a remnant of forty men were surrounded on a mountain; rather than surrender they jumped to their destruction. The rock is named today Carib’s Leap, and the village beside it, Sotairs, an anglicizing of the French Sauteurs. Fighting continued until the last Carib had been slain. In St Lucia and St Vincent the Caribs were more successful, but the area as a whole was engaged in a brisk and broadening economy.
Conditions were in fact sufficiently stable for white women to accompany their husbands to the Caribbean and for marriages to be contracted by young persons of good family. A new word was coined, ‘Creole’, meaning native to the colonies. It bore no relation to the colour of the skin; in terms of human beings it meant ‘born in the islands’. You could have a black, white or mulatto Creole. In the same way you could have Creole cooking – dishes prepared out of local ingredients – and Creole dresses – costumes that were appropriate to the climate. Men and women were being born in the West Indies, were growing up and being educated there; families who thought of Barbados, Martinique and Cuba as their homes were creating a civilization of their own.
In each case that civilization was an echo, a reflection, an amplification of the home country. Colonies bear the same resemblances to their mother country that children do to their parents. Cuba and Puerto Rico were Spanish, just as Martinique was French and Barbados English. Cuba reproduced the life of the Hidalgos of Seville and Andalusia; the sugar planters of Barbados lived on their estates as did titled Englishmen in their country seats; the French tried to reproduce in Fort Royal and Cap Français the life of Versailles and Fontainebleau.
The extent of these differences was to have an effect upon the course of history. England in the eighteenth century was Whig and Protestant, with a German-speaking King who ‘did not like boetry and did not like bainting.’ Squire Western in Tom Jones is the prototype of the eighteenth-century English gentleman; they were hard-hunting, hard-drinking men consuming their daily bottle of port; and port at that time was very different from the noble and mellowed wine that today graces our dinner table. It was a fierce mixture of rough wine and raw spirit. They were heavy trenchermen with florid complexions and persistent gout. They lived in the Caribbean as they lived in Shropshire.
In France, on the other hand, under Louis XV, the worst punishment that could befall a nobleman was expulsion from Versailles to an exile on his own estate, and in St Domingue and Martinique the French planters laboured in the sun so that they could return with full pockets to a holiday at home. Paris, Paris, Paris. That was their constant dream. They relieved their loneliness and boredom, as their cousins did in France, with gallantry. The British, fettered by a Puritan conscience, though not addicted to excessive chastity, concentrated upon sport. In Jamaica, as in Wiltshire, they rated the pleasures of the table more highly than the pleasures of the bed.
Père Labat was deeply impressed by the comfort of the Barbadians’ plantation houses. He would not, fifty years later, have found a parallel situation in Jamaica, both because it was colonized more recently and because the climate was less clement. The Jamaican was more concerned than the Barbadian with making a quick profit and getting back to England. He did not spend as much money upon his home. Lady Nugent referred to the contrast between the general plenty and magnificence of their tables and the meanness of their houses and apartments, it being no uncommon thing to find, at the country habitations of the planters, a splendid sideboard loaded with plate and vintage wines, a table covered with the finest damask and a dinner of perhaps sixteen or twenty courses, and all this in a hovel not superior to an English barn. A stranger could not fail also to observe a strange incongruity and inconsistency between the great number of Negro domestics and their appearance and apparel, the butler, and he but seldom, being the only attendant who was allowed the luxury of shoes and stockings. All the others, and there was usually one to each guest, waited at table in barefooted majesty, some of them perhaps half naked.
Yet the Jamaican as much as the Barbadian tried to take root in the country of his adoption and to reproduce the customs of the shires. Labat, by no means an abstemious man, commented both on the heavy drinking and the copious meals of the British colonists. Lady Nugent, a century later, was shocked by their gluttony. ‘I don’t wonder now at the fever that people suffer from here,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Such eating and drinking I never saw. Such loads of all sorts of high, rich and seasoned things and really gallons of wine and mixed liquors. They eat a late breakfast as if they had never eaten before. It is as astonishing as it is disgusting.’ She described as typical a dinner that started with black-crab pepper pot. The pepper pot consisted of a capon ‘stewed down’, a ham also stewed to a jelly, six dozen land crabs with their eggs and fat, flavoured with onions, okra, sweet herbs and such vegetables as were in season, the whole well-stewed. This was the prelude to further courses of turtle, mutton, beef, turkey, goose, duck, chickens, capons, ham, tongues, crab patties. The meal was rounded off with various sweets and fruits.
Such a regime was not conducive to a life of gallantry, and though Lady Nugent was continually deploring the moral lapses of the young Jamaicans, the British way of life did not lead, to anything like the extent that the French way did, to the creation of an important half-white class. Jamaica and Barbados were reproducing the atmosphere of Tom Jones, Martinique and St Domingue that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In Jamaica most of the young unmarried planters had native housekeepers who spoke of them as their husbands, but these were established relationships, and Monk Lewis considered that mulatto girls would not accept such relationships unless they could think of themselves as morganatic wives. In St Domingue, on the other hand, the dusky mistress was as accepted a feature of Creole as of Parisian life, and the children of these unions had a status in the French islands that they did not have in the British. Their fathers sent them back to the Sorbonne for their education, and Paris took kindly to the type. It was an exciting novelty. These young men were handsome, dashing, lively; they had money to spend. Why should not Paris welcome them? Paris could afford to welcome them. Paris had not a colour problem. The Parisians, indeed, preferred them to the Creole planters who annoyed them with their ostentation and thoughtless extravagance. There was no equivalent to this class in London.
These differences in national characteristics were to have important consequences later.
Throughout the eighteenth century the Caribbean was a boom area, and the phrase ‘rich as a Creole’ was in familiar use in London and in Paris. Yet the life of the planter was very far from easy. At the moment of writing – the 1960s – the West Indies are the most favoured playground in the world. The most popular period for tourists is from December 15 to April 15. But this is only because the climate in northern latitudes is then at its worst. From the Caribbean point of view one month is very like another. There is officially a dry and a wet season, but a Rip Van Winkle suddenly marooned there could only recognize the season from the shrubs and trees that were in flower. The only poor period is in the early autumn when there is danger of a hurricane. These come, when they do, between late August and late September. As the jingle has it:
June too soon,
July stand by,
August you must
Remember September.
October all over.
The hurricanes blow at a speed of 150 miles an hour, and most islands have been visited by them at some time or another. They inflict great damage, destroying houses and uprooting trees. The gaps between their visitations are considerable, and it is the custom every year nowadays, when the hurricane season approaches, for the prudent family to ensure that their shutters and locks are firm, and that there is a store of food and blankets in case of trouble. But otherwise there is little difference between June and January. One day is like another; too like another. There is no variety. When Lady Nugent arrived in Jamaica in 1800 as the wife of its governor, she remarked to Lord Balcarres that it was a very fine day. His Lordship replied, ‘I assure you that you will be tired of saying this before many days are over.’
To the contemporary tourist, as to Christopher Columbus, the West Indies seem an earthly paradise, but the lack of variety in the climate has a deleterious and debilitating effect upon the northern settler. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the incidence of fever was very great. Lady Nugent’s diary is full of references to residents and members of her husband’s staff who suddenly fall sick and die. She was soon writing of ‘this dreadful, this deceitful climate’.
The planter had a great deal to contend with besides the climate. The sugar islands were mainly in the hands of the French and British, and each group of settlers had their separate problems. The French and English managed their estates on a different method. The English planter had an agent in London with whom he placed his orders and he sent home sugar on his own account. The French merchants resident in France sent out cargoes at their own risk, which were sold for them by agents in the islands or by captains of the ships; the proceeds were invested in West Indian produce. To a far greater extent, therefore, the English planter had a stake in the colony, and from the start the system of absentee ownership was more firmly established in the French islands.
The French planter was harassed by the restrictions of the pacte coloniale, but the administrative difficulties of the English planters were in their own way just as great. Bryan Edwards, who at the moment of his death in 1793 had nearly finished a history of the British West Indies, is our most reliable informant on those difficulties. He himself was a typical example of a Jamaican planter; he was born in Wiltshire, in Westbury, in 1743. His father inherited a small estate which yielded him about £100 a year. Without any experience, he tried to supplement this income by trading in malt and corn; he was not successful, and when he died in 1756 his widow and six children found themselves in distressed circumstances. Luckily this widow had two rich brothers in Jamaica; one of them undertook the education of Bryan, who was the eldest son, and sent him to a French boarding school in Bristol. He spent three years at this school, acquiring there a knowledge of French and a love of literature. When he was sixteen, his younger uncle returned to England, established himself in London in a style worthy of a rich Creole, and soon had a seat in Parliament. Nephew and uncle did not, however, get on well together, and Bryan was dispatched to Jamaica, where his education was continued.
He was to write, in describing the planter’s life, ‘There seems universally a promptitude for pleasure. This has been ascribed, perhaps justly, to the levity of the atmosphere. To the same cause is commonly imputed the propensity observable in most of the West Indians to indulge extravagant ideas of their riches, to view their circumstances through a magnifying medium and to feast their fancies on what another year will effect. This anticipation of imaginary wealth is so prevalent as to become justly ridiculous; yet I am inclined to think that it is a propensity that exists independent of the climate and atmosphere and that it arises principally from the peculiar situation of the West Indian planters as landholders. Not having, like the proprietors of landed estates in Great Britain, frequent opportunities of letting their plantations to substantial tenants, they are for the most part compelled to become practical farmers on their own lands, of which the returns are in the highest degree fluctuating and uncertain. Under these circumstances a West Indian property is a species of lottery. As such it gives birth to a spirit of adventure and enterprise and awakens extravagant hopes and expectations – too frequently terminating in perplexity and disappointment,
‘The business of sugar planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages must engage deeply. There is very seldom the possibility of retreat; a British country gentleman who is content to jog on without risk on the modest profits of his own moderate farm will be startled to hear that it requires a capital of no less than thirty thousand pounds to embark in this employment with a fair prospect of advantage. To elucidate this position, it must be understood that the annual contingencies of a small or moderate plantation are very nearly equal to those of an estate of three times the magnitude. ... In speaking of capital, I mean either money or a solid, well-established credit; for there is this essential difference attending loans obtained on landed estates in Great Britain and those which are advanced on the credit of West Indian plantations. An English mortgage is a marketable commodity while a West Indian mortgage is not. In England if a mortgagee calls for his money other persons are ready to advance it; now this seldom happens in regard to property in the West Indies. The credit obtained by the sugar planter is commonly given by men in trade, on the prospect of speedy returns and considerable advantage, but as men in trade seldom find it convenient to place their money out of their reach for any length of time the credit which they give is ofttimes suddenly withdrawn and the ill-fated planter compelled, on this account, to sell his property at much less than half its first cost. The credit therefore must not only be extensive but permanent.’
Every colonist complained about the trade restrictions that were imposed on him. At the very start of the colonial period Sir Thomas Warner had written: ‘Through the restraint on tobacco, the poor planters are debarred from Free Trade and unable to furnish themselves with necessities, much less to buy ammunition,’ while the Barbadians were later to complain: ‘If our island is an integral part of the British Commonwealth, we have a right to that trade with foreign nations that is enjoyed by Britain.’ They objected to having to buy in Britain goods produced abroad. The citizens of Rome, though they lived in the remotest parts of the world, were still Roman citizens to all extents. ‘But we poor citizens of England, as soon as our backs are turned, and we are gone a spit and a stride, are presently reputed aliens and used accordingly.’
The planters’ political situation also was anomalous. The governor was a go-between. He was the King’s representative, working under the privy council, but he was also part of the colonial legislature. The legislature of Jamaica, for instance, was composed of the governor, of a council nominated by the crown consisting of twelve gentlemen, and a house of assembly containing forty-three members who were elected by the freeholders. The qualification required in the elector was a freehold of ten pounds a year in the parish where the election was made, and in the representative a landed freehold of three hundred pounds per annum in any part of the island, or a personal estate of three thousand pounds. The assembly copied, as nearly as local circumstances permitted, the legislature of Great Britain, all their bills having the force of laws as soon as the governor’s assent was obtained. The most important of these laws dealt with regulations of local policy, to which the laws of England were not applicable, such as the slave system; on which, and other cases, the English laws were silent. The colonial legislation made such provision as the exigencies of the colony were supposed to require. But the crown retained the right of veto.
‘Rich as a Creole’ had its obverse side, and Edwards is the planter’s advocate with this special pleading. ‘Seeing,’ he argues, ‘that a capital is wanted which few men can command and considering withal that the returns are in general but small, and at best uncertain, how has it happened that the sugar islands have been so rapidly settled and many a great estate purchased in the mother country from the profits that have accrued from their cultivation? It is to be wished that those who make such enquiry should note on the other hand how many unhappy persons have been totally and irretrievably ruined by adventuring in the cultivation of these islands, without possessing any adequate means to support them in such great undertakings. On the failure of some of these unfortunate men, vast estates have indeed been raised by persons who have had money at command; men there are who, reflecting on the advantages to be derived from this circumstance, behold a sugar planter struggling in distress with the same emotions that are felt by the Cornish peasants in contemplating a shipwreck on the coast, who hasten with equal rapaciousness to participate in the spoil. Like them too, they sometimes hold out false lights to lead the unwary adventurer to destruction; more especially if he has anything considerable of his own to set out with.
‘Money is advanced and encouragement given, to a certain point, but a skilful practitioner well knows where to stop; he very well knows what very large sums must be expended in the purchase of the freehold, and in the first operations of clearing and planting the lands and erecting the buildings, before any return can be made. One third of the money thus expended he has perhaps furnished, but the time soon arrives when a further advance is requisite to give life and activity to the system by the addition of the Negroes and the stock. This is the moment for oppression, aided by the letter of the law and the process of office, to reap a golden harvest. If the property answers expectation and the lands promise great returns, the sagacious creditor, instead of giving further aid or leaving his too confident debtor to make the best of his way by his own exertions, pleads a sudden and unexpected emergency and insists on immediate repayment of the sum already lent. The law on this occasion is far from being chargeable with delay, and avarice is inexorable. A sale is hurried on and no bidders appear but the creditor himself. Ready money is required in payment and everyone sees that a further sum will be wanting to make the estate productive. Few therefore have the means who even have the wish efficaciously to assist the victim. Thus the creditor gets the estate at his own price, usually for his first advance, while the miserable debtor has reason to thank his stars if, consoling himself with only the loss of his own original capital and his labour for a series of years, he escapes a prison for life.’ Piracy, in fact, under a different banner, was still afloat in the Caribbean.
Richard Pares in A West India Fortune – a book of exceptionally alert erudition, the result of long and acute research – has told the story of an English west country family whose prosperity was based on a West Indian adventure. Pinney is one of the best-known and respected family names in Dorset. In 1685 Azariah Pinney, a refugee from the Monmouth Rebellion, landed in Nevis with £15 in his pocket. He died in 1719. His son survived him by only a few months, but his grandson’s plantations were to be valued at £20,000, and his great-grandson John Pinney, when he retired to settle in England in 1783, was worth £70,000. For another thirty years, John Pinney, an absentee owner, acted as a merchant and a factor in Bristol. In September 1817, a few years before his death, he distributed his wealth among his children. The paper value of his assets was estimated at £267,000 and the moneys that were owed him in debts and mortgages raised the score to £340,000.
This clearly is one of those West Indian fortunes that justified the label ‘rich as a Creole’, but Richard Pares’ narrative explains to what extent John Pinney was exceptional, in his prudence, caution, temperance and meticulous regard for detail. He made substantial profits as a planter, and as a factor he drew a 2\ per cent, commission on the consignments of sugar that he handled, but the great part of his wealth came from the interest on his loans to planters. Most of his friends were in debt and he was very careful how he invested his money. He never, for instance, loaned money to planters who had coloured heirs. ‘Judgment,’ says Pares, ‘rather than activity, was the factor’s contribution to the sugar market.’
Bryan Edwards’ contemporary estimate of the situation is amply endorsed by Pares’ twentieth-century researches. Pares points out that so heavily were the estates in debt in the 1830s that only a small proportion of the £20,000,000 compensation that the British government paid to the planters, when slavery was abolished, reached the planters’ pockets. Most of it went to the mortgagors. Of the £145,000 that was paid to Nevis, £32,500 went to the Pinney estate in England, and Pinney was only one of the mortgagors in Nevis.
Merchants and financiers made money much faster out of the sugar estates than the planters did.
Another constant problem for all the settlers in the Caribbean was the long-distance control exercised over them by the home government – British, Spanish, French and Dutch. It was very difficult for the home government to obtain exact information from and about the colonies. It was easy to make a mistake in their administration. And since a letter could not receive an answer for many weeks, it took a long time to rectify a mistake once it had been made. The history of Antigua during the first decade of the eighteenth century provides a pertinent example of these conditions.
In 1704 a Mr Park, while serving as an officer in Flanders, had the good luck to attract the notice of the Duke of Marlborough, whom he served as an aide-de-camp and by whom he was sent to England to announce to the Queen the victory of Ramillies. The Queen rewarded him with a purse of a thousand guineas and her picture richly set in diamonds. In the following year, when the government of the Leeward Islands became vacant, Mr Park was offered the appointment.
A less judicious choice could not have been made. Mr Park, a native of Virginia, was a man of singularly dissolute behaviour. Having married a rich American woman, he possessed himself of her wealth and deserted her. With this money he came to England and obtained a seat in Parliament. Exceptional bribery having been proved against him, he was dismissed from the House. A friend whose wife he had seduced having opened proceedings against him, he escaped, as other men have done, by accepting his sovereign’s service in a foreign field. Here, as has been already told, fortune smiled on him.
He arrived in Antigua in July 1706, and was warmly welcomed by the community, who believed that his connection with America would prove profitable to their commerce; they added a thousand pounds a year to his income to relieve him of the expense of house rent. But their delight in him was of short duration. Having seduced the wife of a Mr Chester, the most considerable merchant in the country and the factor to the Royal African Company, and fearing that the injured husband might attempt revenge, he decided to protect himself ‘by adding the crime of murder to the misdemeanour of adultery’. Chester had recently by accident killed a man. The governor brought him to trial for his life, having first taken the precaution of raising a common soldier to the office of provost marshal, directing ‘his creature’ to impound a jury of persons who would bring in Chester guilty. The evidence was, however, so overwhelmingly in the defendant’s favour that even a pressed jury was compelled to acquit him.
Mr Park then got the bit between his teeth. He ordered the Codrington family to prove before himself and his council their title to the island of Barbuda, of which they had held unchallenged possession for thirty years; an act which made every proprietor in the island wonder whether he himself held any other security for his own possessions than the governor’s forbearance.
Park insisted that the provost marshal should always summon juries of his own selection; he changed the mode of electing members to the assembly so that he would be able to exclude persons he did not like, and when he failed even by these means to procure a subservient assembly, he refused to summon it, even when the French threatened an invasion. He raided Mr Chester’s house, arrested a number of the men he found there, on the grounds that they were concerting measures against himself, and kept them in the common jail without bail or trial.
The community in their indignation sent an agent to England to complain against him, but, unable to endure the delay that was inevitable in such a case, they had resort to violence. Several attempts were made upon His Excellency’s life, through one of which Park was seriously wounded. His behaviour now became more arrogant and unrestrained. At last instructions came from the crown, ordering him to resign his command to the lieutenant governor and return to England by the first convenient opportunity; at the same time commissioners were appointed to listen to evidence on the spot. The Antiguans gave way to transports of delight not dissimilar to those which they were to exhibit two and a half centuries later when Lord Baldwin returned to the island confirmed in office. Their exuberance provoked the governor beyond the frontiers of sanity. He announced that he had no intention of leaving the country, although a ship was about to sail for Europe, and issued a proclamation dissolving the assembly. The assembly, however, refused to be dissolved, asserting that, since Mr Park had been recalled by his sovereign, his continuance in the government was usurpation and tyranny, and that it was their duty to protect the peace and safety of the island.
The governor retorted by surrounding the assembly house with troops. But the representatives had been warned; they escaped and summoned the inhabitants from all parts of the island to gather, armed, to protect their rights and representatives. They intended no ill to the governor, they asserted. They were concerned only with his removal from the island.
A body of five hundred colonists marched upon Government House, which Park had converted into a garrison to be defended by every regular soldier at his command. At this point Park lost his nerve, and when it was too late attempted a concession. He sent by his provost marshal a promise that he would meet the assembly and consent to whatever laws they might think fit to pass; moreover, he offered to dismiss his soldiers, provided six of the principal inhabitants would remain with him as hostages for the safety of his person.
The speaker of the assembly and one of the members of the council offered themselves as hostages, but the crowd was not prepared to prevaricate; delay might prove fatal to their cause. In two divisions they marched upon Government House. For a couple of hours there was a fierce exchange of fire, then the assailants burst through the palisades. The governor, at the last, showed courage. With his own hand he shot dead one of the chief men in the assembly, but a bullet brought him to his knees. His attendants, seeing him fall, threw down their arms and the enraged populace seized the prostrate governor and, tearing him to pieces, ‘scattered the street,’ so the record has it, ‘with his reeking limbs’.
It was an episode without parallel in British colonial history, and the people of England heard of it with astonishment and indignation, looking upon it ‘as an act of rebellion against the crown’. But when the British government had investigated the matter, they were so satisfied of Park’s misconduct that they issued a general pardon to all who were concerned in his death; two of the principal actors in the drama were later promoted to seats in the council.
The episode is important because it shows how easily an unsuitable man could be appointed to an important post, how difficult it was for the victims of this appointment to obtain redress, and to what lengths of savagery a mob can go under a tropic sun. It must be remembered that the mob in question was composed of white men, and it was a white man who was dismembered.
There was another phrase, too, that was familiar to Europeans: ‘beautiful as a Creole’. The exotic conditions of the tropics were breeding a special type of woman, pale and languid, with small hands and feet, with luminous long-lashed eyes, with indolent and graceful movements, and the slow singsong voice which had been acquired from a coloured nurse. It was from this type of beauty that was to spring Josephine de Beauharnais.
Bryan Edwards, with appropriate Anglican reserve, was temperate in his encomia, but he was far from unimpressed. He spoke of ‘the even tenor of their lives and of their habitual temperance and self-denial. . . . Except the exercise of dancing, in which they excel, they have no amusement or avocation to impel them to much exertion of either mind or body. Those midnight assemblies and gambling conventions, wherein health, fortune and beauty are so frequently sacrificed in the cities of Europe, are here happily unknown. In their diet the Creole women are, I think, abstemious even to a fault. Simple water or lemonade is the strongest beverage in which they indulge; and a vegetable meal at noon, seasoned with cayenne pepper, constitutes their principal repast. The effect of this mode of life, in a hot and oppressive atmosphere, is a lax fibre and a complexion in which the lily predominates over the rose. To the stranger newly arrived, the ladies appear as just risen from the bed of sickness. Their voice is soft and spiritless and every step betrays languor and lassitude; they lack that glow of health in the countenance, that delicious crimson which in colder countries enlivens the coarsest set of features and renders a beautiful one irresistible. ... In one of the principal features of beauty, however, few ladies surpass the Creoles, for they have, in general, the finest eyes in the world, large, languishing, expressive, sometimes beaming with animation and sometimes melting with tenderness.’ In Bryan Edwards’ opinion, no women on earth made better wives or better mothers. The Creole ladies were also noted for their white teeth, which they polished with juice of a withe called the chewstick; it was strong, bitter and a powerful detergent. The withe was cut into small pieces and used as a toothbrush.
The beauty of Creole women did not, however, do more than meagrely diminish the loneliness of the planter’s life. Creole women might be exquisite, but there were deplorably few of them.
From the very beginning, indeed, the lack of white women had been a problem in the islands, and Colbert’s insistence on the need for engagées was due to a recognition of the inevitable consequences of this lack. In the early days it was possible for French officers and officials to get leave on the grounds that they were returning to France to find a wife. Anxious to restrict illicit unions between planters and their slaves, Colbert issued a number of discriminatory measures. The father of a mulatto child was fined two thousand pounds of sugar if the mother of the child was the master’s slave; in addition to this fine, the Negress and the child were confiscated and sold for the benefit of the hospital.
This ordinance Labat heartily approved, though he regretted that it led to an even graver offence – the practice of abortion. Very often a master who saw himself likely to be convicted of paternity promised the Negress her release if she would deny his guilt. At one time it was the custom for masters to free their mulatto sons when they reached the age of twenty-four, the argument being that the youth by his work from the age of sixteen had repaid his father for the expense of his upbringing. But when the French islands passed under the direct rule of the throne, this law was changed and it was ruled that the child of a slave was a slave no matter who the father was. Labat only met two instances of a white man marrying a black woman, and nowhere does he approve of such marriages. When a young white girl seduced a black man and became pregnant, his advice was rationalistic. Send the slave to St Domingue, where he could be sold, and the girl to Grenada, where she could have the child in secret. It could be adopted and she could pretend on her return that she had been on a holiday.
In Labat’s time the problem of the half-coloured and quarter-coloured population was not as acute as it was to become in the course of the eighteenth century. Although colonization in the islands by the French and British was eighty years old, stability had been existing there for barely the length of a generation, and only recently had the scene been crowded by the large half-coloured class which was to present so very acute a temptation to the young emigrant.
European men have not generally considered the pure bred African woman physically attractive. Her features are coarse, her hair short and crinkly, the nose squashed back against the cheeks, the lips large and protuberant. For such a woman a European man was unlikely to form a strong and permanent attraction. On the other hand, the mixture of African and European blood produced a highly attractive female, for whom it was most natural for a young man to form a strong attachment. The prevalence of such attachments became the problem of the eighteenth century, particularly in the French islands, where the establishment of a mistress was a national institution. In St Domingue, even married planters kept coloured women, whose children they displayed proudly as their own, brought up in the same nursery as their legitimate offspring and made allowance for in their wills. The wives submitted to the system on the excuse that the black mistress was invaluable as a spy, and that there was no other sure means of knowing what the slaves were planning. For bachelors it was the invariable custom. To be the mistress of a white planter was the goal of a coloured girl’s ambition. It was, among other things, her only avenue to freedom. For it was by no means rare for a man to free his mistress and have her children educated. Such a relationship was indeed the chief distraction in his life.
Except during crop time, the work on a plantation was unvaried and uninteresting. Cane grew itself. There was little for the planter to do except to ride round his estate and supervise the discipline of the slaves, the digging of the ditches, the weeding of the fields. When crop time came, there was, in contrast, a wave of such intense concentration in the heat of the factories that he soon longed for the quiet boredom of the planting season.
The best picture of that life is to be found in Matthew Lewis’ Journal of a West Indian Planter, which was published after his death in 1817, and was highly praised by Coleridge. Lewis was a remarkable man. Born in 1775, he did not inherit his West Indian estate until 1812, and was not able to visit it until after the Napoleonic Wars, when the slave trade had been abolished, though the slaves had not yet been freed. His early years were devoted to the pleasures of Bohemian society; he was the friend of Byron and Shelley, and he frequented Madame de Staël’s salon. At the age of twenty, when he was an attaché at the British Embassy at the Hague, he wrote a lurid novel called Ambrosia, or The Monk, and was nearly prosecuted for its indecency. Byron said it ‘ought to have been written by Tiberius at Capri. . . .’ He dismissed it as ‘the philtred ideas of a jaded voluptuary; they have no nature, all the sour cream of cantharides. ... It is to me inconceivable that they could have been composed by a man of only twenty.’ Yet it sold prodigiously and earned its author the nickname ‘Monk’.
Lewis exasperated his friends. ‘Short-sighted and loquacious’, Byron found him, ‘pestilently prolix’, and he wished that ‘he would but talk half and reduce his visits to an hour’. Yet Byron was fond of him:
I would give many a sugar cane
Matt Lewis were alive again.
Lewis was clearly a generous, warmhearted man. He knew Wilberforce and was anxious to improve the conditions of the slaves, though he was not in favour of their emancipation, and considered that The African Reporter – the organ of the abolitionists – presented a highly biased picture of plantation life. He recognized the dangers of the absentee system, with an attorney managing the estate, a salaried lawyer supervising the planting and in charge of labour, with white subordinates, known as bookkeepers, who were nursing their own interests, not those of the proprietor or his slaves, and he inserted a clause in his own will to the effect that his heirs would forfeit their rights to his Jamaican estates unless they spent three months every third year there. He disapproved of flogging, and such a humanitarian was he that other planters accused him of spoiling his Negroes and spreading dissatisfaction. But in spite of his genuine affection for his slaves, he had no illusions about them. He knew that they were indiscriminate poisoners, that they grew arsenic beans in their gardens, although the beans were of no use for food or ornament, and that they fermented the juice of the cassava root until it produced a worm which they hid under their thumbnail until an opportunity occurred to drop it in the victim’s drink. He knew that they were subject to the orders of their Obeah men.
He was exasperated by their idleness, stupidity and secretiveness. ‘There is no folly and imprudence like unto Negro folly and imprudence.’ The slaves often went lame, because a small fly, the chica, would work its way into their feet and lay its eggs. They were provided with small knives to extract the eggs, but as there was no pain until the sore had formed they were too lazy to use them. Frequent foot inspections had to be ordered. The slaves were constantly reporting sick, to avoid work, yet when they were ill they concealed the nature of their illness. It was thus very difficult to diagnose the nature of the complaint. A woman, for instance, who had allowed her baby to slip out of her arms, vigorously denied that the child had had a fall, although another woman insisted that she had. After the closing of the slave trade, there was a shortage of labour in the canefields, and the planters tried to replace Negroes with machinery and cattle, but the Negroes distrusted these innovations; they broke the ploughs and starved the cattle. Lewis soon realized that a little flogging was necessary.
He presents the planter’s life as an endless succession of irritations and complaints. His patience needs to be inexhaustible, and all the time his nerves are exposed to the strain of an exhausting climate. Lewis himself caught fever during his second visit, and died on the voyage home.
‘Rich as a Creole’ indeed, but it is not surprising that many planters dreamed of the day when they could retire and live in Europe on the revenue of their estates.