A History of Britain, Volume 2 (59 page)

Since the reign of Elizabeth, English interlopers (competing with the Dutch) had been buying slaves on the coast of West Africa and selling them to Hispanic America. But by the middle of the seventeenth century envious glances were being cast in the direction of Brazil (where the Portuguese and Dutch were slugging it out for sovereignty), and where it was obvious immense fortunes were to be made. The Dutch – as any quick visit to an Amsterdam baker or confectioner would have made apparent – had already succeeded in introducing sugar as a staple of daily diet rather than a rare and expensive luxury. And the English were aware that, even if it were highly volatile in the early stages of production, sugar was extremely stable in shipping and warehousing. It was marvellously versatile and market-adaptable, yielding not just two qualities of sugar (refined and cruder ‘muscovado') but also molasses, treacle and rum. As a commodity for long-distance trade it was impossible to beat.

But where could the English find a place to grow it, safe from the long arm and the heavy hand of the Spanish? Early attempts were made in Bermuda, but the tiny island off the coast of South Carolina was too dry, too cool and too remote. Barbados, on the other hand, seemed the answer to their prayers. Hanging out in the ocean, on the extremed windward edge of the Antilles, its annual rainfall averaged 60 inches (over 1500 mm) a year – all the moisture the sugar cane could possibly need; and its breezy exposure could be harnessed to turn the sails of windmills to crush the cane. It was as far as it could be from the Spanish centres of power in Cuba and Hispaniola while still being in the Caribbean, and it was the first port of call for ships coming across the Atlantic from either Africa or England. Even its topography seemed perfect, with lowlands sloping down to a coast with some hospitable natural harbours in the south and a wet, upland northern plateau quickly named ‘Scotland'.

Perhaps sugar may have been on the mind of the mariner John Powell when he first made landfall on Barbados en route back from the Guianas in 1625. But the colonial product of choice at this time was tobacco, and for a generation or two efforts were made to grow a crop on Barbados. Competing with Virginia and Maryland, however, was hard work. The island was covered with a dense canopy of rainforest – mastic and ironwood, poisonwood, hoe-stick wood and locust – which took twenty years to clear for adequate growing space. Even then, the leaf never managed to achieve the vaunted quality of Virginia tobacco. And there were the same labour troubles that plagued the Chesapeake Bay plantations. The Irish indentured labourers were especially restive under their crippling regime of toil, and the teenage boys who came from England wilted and collapsed in the heat. In 1649 – the year of revolution in England – there was a slave plot on Barbados, suppressed with merciless, characteristically Cromwellian brutality. Even before the rebellion some of the first-generation planters such as James Drax, a landowner of Anglo-Dutch background, had been experimenting with slave labour shipped on his own account from Africa. Now the slave–sugar nexus seemed a much better bet than the struggle with tobacco, especially when the Dutch were prepared to advance planters capital for milling equipment and even show them how to use it. The crop took off. As early as 1647 an owner of 50 acres reported that ‘provisions for the belly . . . at present is very scarce [since] men are so intent upon planting sugar that they had rather buy foode at very dear, rather than produce it by labour, soe infinite is the profitt of sugar workes'.

As early as 1655, three years after that first coffee-house opened in London, Barbados was shipping 7787 tons of sugar back to England, and there were already 20,000 slaves on the island against 23,000 whites, well over half of whom were probably indentured servants. When Richard Ligon arrived two years later, the well-founded reputation of Barbados as a gold-mine had already been established. Drax had built himself a Jacobean manor house on the upland plateau and ‘as we passed along the shoar', Ligon wrote, ‘the Plantations appeared to us one above the other like several stories in stately buildings which afforded us a large proportion of delight'. It was common knowledge that an up-front outlay of £1000 (advanced from the Dutch) invested in 200 acres, a windmill (sometimes, along with the boiling house, shared with a neighbour), a distillery to make rum and a hundred odd slaves would yield, within a very few years, an annual income of £2000. No wonder, as Henry Whistler noted in 1655, ‘the gentry here doth live far better than ours do in England'. They were, by far, the richest men in British America.

It was precisely between 1640 and 1660, when the rhetoric of liberty was being most noisily shouted at home, that the slave economy of the British Empire was being created in the Caribbean. (Cromwell's baffled disappointment that God had somehow decided that Hispaniola should not, after all, be British was partly consoled by the capture of Jamaica in 1655.) And this timing was not, alas, a coincidence. For if making an ‘empire of liberty' meant keeping it clean of Catholics, no one wanted this more than the hard-nosed, coffer-counting men of the Protectorate (in many cases, of course, identical with the hard-nosed men of the Restoration). The impeccably Puritan Earl of Warwick had, after all, been among the most enthusiastic pioneers of settlement and slaving in the Caribbean two decades earlier. So Barbados filled up with shackled Africans while its white Assembly resounded with the pieties of self-government. The island became a little Commonwealth, but without the gloomy inconvenience of the morals police. Barbados was divided into parishes, each run by a vestry (as is still the case), and its manorial gentry, in their magisterial role, adjudicated the common law much as they did in Berkshire or Cheshire. But they also adjudicated the slave code, which declared the punishment for running away to be mutilation and the penalty for theft of any article worth more than a shilling death. Wilfully killing a negro might incur an inconvenient fine, but it was virtually impossible to prove it. And with Bridgetown and its other harbours made easily defensible, the island was safe from the Catholic scourge. It was a planting full of blessings, an Ulster in the sun.

The restoration of the monarchy only made things better. On vacation from losing battles, Prince Rupert of the Rhine went slaving up the Gambia in West Africa and made a tidy profit on it. Once his cousin Charles II was king he became instrumental in founding the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa in 1660. Initially chartered with a 1000-year monopoly of trading rights in western Africa, it was re-chartered in 1663 as the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, commonly known as the Royal African Company. By the time its ships deposited their first human cargoes at Bridgetown there were already well over 30,000 slaves on Barbados, twice as many blacks as whites on the island. By 1700 the number had risen to around 50,000. (A century later the slave population on Barbados would number some 70,000, with roughly another 400,000 on Jamaica.) Barbados had become the forcing house of high-end, fast-profit, industrially organized slave capitalism. The patchwork landscape of relatively small farms – 10 acres or so on average – worked by racially mixed gangs of indentured servants and slaves had gone forever. In its place were 350 large estates of more than 200 acres
and scores more of about 100 acres, all of them worked almost exclusively with African slave labour. Quakers like George Fox visited Barbados, preached that ‘all blacks, whites and tawnies' were equally God's creatures and asked the planters to use the slaves gently and free them after a period – but stopped short of demanding abolition. The indefatigable old Puritan Richard Baxter, though, was more damning in 1673 when he asked, ‘How cursed a crime is it to equal men to beasts. Is this not your practice? Do you not buy them and use them merely as you do horses to labour for your commodity . . . Do you not see how you reproach and condemn yourselves while you vilify them all as savages?' But even when they were occasionally embarrassed into conceding the human cost, the planters (and indeed the merchants at home) shrugged their shoulders and asked what a Negro would do with liberty. The bottom line, always, was money. Daniel Defoe, as usual, was shockingly blunt and absolutely truthful: ‘No African Trade, no Negroes; no Negroes, no Sugars . . . no Sugars . . . no Islands, no Islands, no [American] Continent; no Continent, no Trade; that is say farewell to all your American Trade, your West Indian Trade.' The poet William Cowper was later to write a little comic verse on this predicament:

In the century and a half of the slave trade, from the 1650s to 1807, between three and four million Africans were transported out of their homelands to the New World in British ships. Between nine and twelve million were abducted and sold as chattel property by the traders of all the European nations involved: it was the single largest mass abduction in human history. A million and a half of those died en route during the hellish crossing known as the Middle Passage, the second leg of the Britain– Africa–West Indies–Britain route that gave rise to the term ‘triangular trade'. Of course, it was not only white Europeans and Americans who were responsible for this enormity. It had been the Portuguese discovery of a thriving trans-Sahara slave trade, harvested and delivered by African warrior dealers, which had made the traffic possible in the first place. But the demand for slaves trans-shipped to the New World became so voracious in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it
created incentives for the raiders – usually native or Portuguese – to reach far beyond their traditional catchment zones, to make opportunistic descents on stricken and defenceless villages. By the early eighteenth century, raiding parties were moving well north of the Niger and deep into western Sudan. And a region already suffering from repeated plagues of locusts and droughts was now made even more insecure. In some of the worst-hit areas it was not uncommon for desperate villagers to sell their children or even themselves.

There was another sense in which the transatlantic slave trade was qualitatively more inhuman than the norms of slavery prevailing in the Islamic and pagan African worlds. For slaves in these regions, while indisputably unfree, were made into status objects, attached to the households, court and military retinues or seraglios of their owners. They were, in every sense, prized. And this had also been true for slaves in urban Europe: blacks in Dutch or English households were shown off and cosseted as if they were exotic pets. Never before, though, had masses of one particular race – black Africans – been treated as mere units of production in the calculus of profit. By definition, slaves had always been property. But now they were inventory: priced, sold, packaged, freighted, resold, amortized, depreciated, written off and replaced. They were, as Baxter had said, nothing more than beasts of burden. Perhaps the most shaming aspect of that dehumanization was the retrospective adoption of a set of racist commonplaces in the apologetic literature claiming that Africans were animal-like in their incapacity to feel pain or even emotion in the same manner experienced by the white races.

Who knows when the awareness of their bestialization made itself inescapably clear to the terrified Africans themselves? By the time they reached their first selling point – from the holding pens at places like Cape Coast Castle – they had already endured a succession of traumas. Olaudah Equiano, the Ibo who wrote his memoirs in the mid-eighteenth century under his bizarre slave name of Gustavus Vasa, taken from the Swedish kings, had been well aware of the dangers of abduction as a child. When the adults of his village were away at work in the fields he would climb trees to sound the alarm when suspicious persons made an appearance. One day, none the less, he and his sister were taken. It was when they were separated that misery first took hold: ‘I was left in a state of distraction not to be described. I cried and grieved continually and for several days did not eat anything but what they forced in my mouth.' Though he was to see his sister again, it was a moment of false hope, for Equiano, like countless others, was deliberately uprooted from any kind of familiarity – country, customs, language, kin. When he was taken on board the slave
ship and ‘tossed up to see if I was sound', the sense that he had been reduced to a workhorse must have been unmistakable. The master of the
Hannibal
, Thomas Phillips, who wrote an account of a typical voyage of the 1690s, described even more degrading procedures when inspecting the shipment supplied by the African dealers at Ouidah. Searching for signs of the yaws that ‘discovers itself by almost the same symptoms . . . as clap does for us . . . our surgeon is forced to examine the privities of both men and women with the nicest scrutiny, which is a great slavery but what can't be omitted'. Once purchased, the slave was branded on the breast or shoulder with the letter of the ship's name, ‘the place before being anointed with a little palm oil which caused but little pain, the mark being usually well in four or five days, appearing very plain and white'.

There were other regrettable inconveniences that marred the smoothness of the loading process: negroes who were ‘so wilful and loth to leave their own country that they have often leapt out of the canoes, boat and ship into the sea and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats which pursued them, they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we can have of hell'. Once on board there were still possibilities for suicide, especially since the slavers usually prowled the coast to take on extra cargo: the Africans would jump overboard, shackled or not. ‘We have . . . seen divers of them eaten by the sharks,' wrote Phillips, ‘of which a prodigious number kept about the ships in this place [Ouidah] and I have been told will follow her to Barbadoes for the dead negroes that are thrown overboard in the passage . . . I am certain in our voyage there we did not want the sight of some every day . . . we had about twelve negroes did wilfully drown themselves and others starvd themselves to death for 'tis their belief that when they die they return home to their own country and friends.'