Barbados Early Slave Trade

Topic: Gullah History
Slavery existed before the settlement of Barbados.  Africans arrived on the first ship of settlers that landed on the island in 1627. [1]  When Henry Hawley was reappointed governor in 1636, after the island’s proprietor, James Hay died, he declared all Africans and Native Americans on the island were slaves for life. [2]  Thus, before the island had a successful commercial crop, it had established mores.

Information on the number of slaves on Barbados before 1645 is unreliable.  Demographic statistics are maintained by governments as ways to collect money through taxation.  Most of the men Hay or his estate sent as governors paid more attention to the plantations they acquired than to Hay’s interest.  After he died, an agent for his trust found Hawley should have collected 72,000 pounds of commodities for taxes, but only collected 22,909.  After deducting expenses, the financially strapped trustees received 11,000. [3]

One particularly egregious example was what Hilary Beckles called Hawley’s land racket.  He overstated the number of indentured servants eligible for ten acres of land at the end of their contracts, then kept the land for himself and his brother.  Hawley gained 2,000 acres this way, of which he sold 430 to William Hilliard. [4]  In another questionable transaction, he sold 4,500 to Hilliard’s brother-in-law, Francis Skeete. [5]

Only two numbers exist for the numbers of slaves.  John Scott, who arrived on the island around 1667, [6] claimed there were 6,000 in 1643. [7]  George Downing visited the island in 1645, and wrote his cousin, John Winthrop, [8] that he thought planters on Barbados had “bought this year no less than a thousand Negroes.” [9]  As mentioned in the post for 31 October 2021, many think Scott is unreliable.  Hugh Thomas calls Downing “a villainous individual.” [10]

Information on the sources for slaves is equally fragmentary.  Thanks to Pope Alexander VI’s bull of 1493, Spain controlled everything west of a line through eastern Brazil, and Portugal everything to the east. [11]  Thus, the Portuguese maintained their monopoly for Africa.

The Portuguese first interest was the gold mentioned in the post for 24 March 2019.  Its first permanent installation was at El Mina on the coast of what today is Ghana. [12]  Independent Dutch, English, and French traders were out-competing them by the 1520s because they had better manufactured goods to swap at lower costs to themselves. [13]

Spain stimulated the slave trade in the New World for its mines and farms, [14] and used Portuguese suppliers, especially after it took control of that country in 1581.  The Dutch responded by building its own forts on the Ghanian shore in 1611. [15]  By 1617, it controlled Gorée island off the coast of Sénégal. [16]  As Portugal lost control of its western Africa posts, it depended more upon Angola.  By 1621, when the Pilgrims had been at Plymouth for just a year, more than 50% of the slaves were shipped from western Central Africa. [17]

The Thirty-Years War began in 1618, and the Twelve-Year Truce between Spain and the Netherlands expired in 1621. [18]  Since Portugal then was controlled by Spain, the Dutch began attacking its trade.  They took over Gorée in 1621 [19] and El Mina in 1637. [20]  In 1641, the Dutch extended their monopoly to São Tomé [21] and Angola. [22]

In the Caribbean, the Dutch organized the West India Company to “centralize privateering” on Portuguese ships carrying slaves. [23]  Other ships simply preyed where they could.  The first slaves on Barbados, brought by Henry Powell, were seized en route to the island. [24]

Charles I granted a monopoly on the slave trade along the Guinea Coast in 1630 to a group headed by Nicholas Crisp.  [25]  When it failed in 1644, thirteen Barbados planters owed it cotton they had promised to pay for slaves.  The governor, Philip Bell, was the largest debtor. [26]

Crisp already was complaining, in 1637, that interlopers were harming his business. [27]  Winthrop noted in 1645 that some Boston merchants shipped pipe staves to the Canary Islands, then picked up some “Africoes” from the Cape Verde Islands, which they exchanged for sugar and tobacco in Barbados. [28]  The ship that brought Richard Ligon in 1647 carried a supply of goods to trade for cattle, horses, and slaves at Cape Verde. [29]

Russell Menard has more details on one ship that arrived in 1644 with 251 slaves.  The captain gave Bell seven.  Eighteen planters bought one or two, fifteen bought three to nine, and six bought ten.  The largest sales were lots of twelve, thirty, and thirty-four, [30] with the last two going to Hilliard and James Drax. [31]

The source of the Africans is not known, but in October 1642, the Mary Bonaventure had been hired by the English navy. [32]  In 1644, Robert Rich, [33] then with the navy, authorized the captain, George Richardson, [34] to seize “ships belonging to the Irish rebels or to any port in England hostile to parliament.” [35]  Legitimate trade and privateering often were one and the same.

End Notes
1.  N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  28, 37.

2.  John Scott.  “Descriptions of Guiana, Tobago, and Barbados.”  British Museum, Sloane mss 3662.  Cited by Davis.  67.

3.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  38.

4.  Hilary MacDonald Beckles.  “White Labour in Black Slave Plantation Society and Economy: A Case Study of Indentured Labour in Seventeenth Century Barbados.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Hull, August 1980.  250–251.

5.  “Golden Grove House History.”  Golden Grove House, Barbados, website, 8 September 2014.  The committee reviewing Hawley’s activities found at least part of this sale legitimate.

6.  For more on Scott, see the post for 31 October 2021.

7.  William A Green.  “Race and Slavery: Considerations on the Williams Thesis.  25–50 in British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams, edited by Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.  38.  Many quote this number, but Green is one of the few who identify the source.

8.  Hugh Thomas.  The Slave Trade.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.  196.

9.  George Downing, Newfoundland.  Letter to John Winthrop, Jr., 26 August 1645.  Quoted by Bernard Bailyn.  The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century.  Cambridge. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1955.  85.

10.  Thomas.  197.
11.  “Inter caetera.”  Wikipedia website.

12.  T. C. McCaskie.  “The Beginnings of European Activity.”  Encyclopædia Britannica website, 24 August 1998; last updated 6 October 2020.

13.  M. Malowist.  “The Struggle for International Trade and Its Implications for Africa.” 1–22 in Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century.  Edited by B. A. Ogot.  Paris: UNESCO, 1992.  6.

14.  Thomas.  182.
15.  Malowist.  12.
16.  Malowist.  12.

17.  John K. Thornton.  “The Kingdom of Kongo and the Thirty Years’ War.”  Journal of World History  27(2):189–213:June 2016.  202.

18.  The Thirty-Years War is mentioned in the posts for 7 November 2021 and 9 January 2022.  The truce is mentioned in the post for 31 October 2021.

19.  C. Wondji.  “The States and Cultures of the Upper Guinean Coast.”  368–398 in Ogot.  386.

20.  “Elmina Castle.”  Wikipedia website.
21.  Hughes.  185.
22.  Thornton.  193.
23.  Thornton.  192.
24.  Davis.  25.
25.  Thomas.  175.

26.  Michael D. Bennett.  “Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1672.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Sheffield, June 2020.  202.

27.  Thomas.  175.

28.  John Winthrop.  "Journal," edited by James Kendall Hosmer as Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England” 1630–1649.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. 2:227, entry for 13 April 1645.  This was brought to my attention by Bailyn on page 85 and note 29.

29.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  2.  They only managed to acquire cattle and horses, both of which were considered contraband by the Portuguese (page 18).

30.  Russell R. Menard.  Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.  63.  His source was recopied deed books in the Barbados National Archives.

31.  Bennett.  202.  Drax is mentioned in the posts for 17 January 2022 and 23 January 2022.

32.  Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles I, 1641-1643, edited by William Douglas Hamilton.  London: published for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887.  402, item 40.

33.  Rich is mentioned in note 31 of the post for 7 November 2021 as working with Hay’s heir to overturn the trust.

34.  Menard calls the ship the Marie Bonaventure, but names Richardson as ship master.

35.  “Warrant from Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, Lord High Admiral etc., to Captain George Richardson.”  United Kingdom National Archives website, C8671805.