Barbados Tobacco

Topic: Gullah History
The lack of labor was the greatest impediment to settling Barbados: it was uninhabited.  Henry Winthrop arrived on the first ship in 1627.  After working a few months, he calculated in August that he needed “to have every year some 2 or 3 servants over, and to have them bound to me for 3 years for so much a year, some 5 pounds or 6 pounds a year.” [1]  By October, when he asked his father to “send me over 2 or 3 men that they be bound to serve me,” [2] he told him to offer “not above 10 pounds a year.” [3]

By then, what had begun as an expedient in Virginia had become the norm.  Agriculture was not mechanized, and men capable of physical labor were needed to plant and harvest crops.  If one was not encouraging families to migrate like New England, then one had to have indentured servants as help.  Even in Massachusetts, many arrived with two or more servants. [4]

Winthrop’s sponsor, William Courteen [5] established the colony to grow tobacco.  Seeds and skilled Arawak workers from Guyana were the first thing his agent, Henry Powell, supplied. [6]  When Winthrop wrote in August, he already had “a crop of tobacco on the ground,” [7] and may have begun realizing its labor requirements.

The market for tobacco already existed.  Nicholas Monardes’ account of its medicinal qualities had been translated into English in 1577, [8] while Walter Raleigh had introduced smoking to the court of Elizabeth I in 1586. [9]  Information on how to grow it probably came from the Arawak and Gervase Markham’s translation of The Country Farm in 1616. [10]  It warned the seeds are so tiny, individuals neede to start a number in a single hole, then transplant them later. [11]  That is twice the labor of wheat, after time is spent clearing a field.

The first results showed there still was much to learn.  Winthrop was told his tobacco was “very ill-conditioned, foul, and full of stalks, and evil colored” and not seen as at all satisfactory by English grocers. [12]

The introduction of a new crop occurs in three phases.  During the pioneer period legends arise that ascribe the success to one individual who shares his knowledge freely.  Melissa Morris summarizes what she calls tobacco’s “origin story” as:

“the French ambassador Jean Nicot was visiting the gardens of the Portuguese king, and someone gave him a tobacco plant from Florida.  Nicot carried the plant back to France, where he made people aware of it and its medicinal properties.  In some versions, he even goes on to cure several people of a whole host of different ailments.” [13]

Historians counter legends with Guinness lists of names of men who deserve credit, including more specific details on how Nicot acquired his seeds.

A great innovator appears in the second phase who makes the plant a commercial success.  John Rolfe saw local Natives growing the North American species when he arrived in Virginia in 1610.  From that he knew it would grow. [14]  However, he realized the local Nicotiana rustica could not compete with the Nicotiana tabacum being produced by the Spanish. [15]  He procured seeds from the Trinidad-Guyana area in 1612, [16] but still had an inferior product.  It was only after a man named Lambert found a better way to dry the leaves [17] that Rolfe had success on the London market in 1617. [18]

Barbados initiated tobacco production during the third phase when men imitate the work of their predecessors, sometimes making improvements, sometimes failing.  The Arawak obviously were not curing their tobacco like Rolfe.

Before Winthrop could react, James Hay sent a group from Saint Kitts to take over Barbados in 1628. [19]  He had financed a colony there in 1623, [20] but attracted various investors with competing interests.  As a result, “the settlers were prone to violent conflict among themselves.” [21]  When the Spanish attacked neighboring Nevis [22] in 1629, the indentured servants ran away and “swam aboard and told them where” the English hide their provisions, and how the island stood. [23]

As is obvious from the behavior of the indentured servants, planters on Saint Kitts and Nevis had more exploitive views of labor than Winthrop professed.  Later in 1629, the Barbados governor responded to complaints of abusive treatment by threatening to give their servants to better masters.  The planters rebelled, and the governor was recalled by Hay. [24]

Henry Colt spent two weeks in the harbor at Barbados in 1631.  While his ship was stopped on its way to Saint Kitts, forty indentured servants “stole away in a Dutch” ship. [25]  They came on board his ship uninvited, and hung around for hours to avoid work. [26]  He found their masters were prone to drunkenness and quarrels. [27]

The labor contracts in Barbados were merging several English traditions. [28]  As mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021, men in rural areas agreed to do specified work for a year at a set wage.  Winthrop had this in mind when he told his uncle he expected to pay two men an annual wage from the hundred pounds he was being paid by Courteen [29] to raise tobacco.

When his father sent two boys from London, he was working under the rules of the apprenticeship system. [30]  This was changing rapidly in London, not so much in form, as in numbers.  The population of the city had more than doubled in size between 1550 and 1600, when it was about 200,000. [31]  Bruce Robinson suggests the growth came from activities at court and the port. [32]

However, life expectancy was low in the city, [33] with only seventeen good years between 1618 and 1661.  Three plagues killed 20% of the population [34] each time in 1603, 1625, and 1636–1641; epidemics raged in thirteen years. [35]  Only 10% of live births lived to age 45, with 36% dead before age five, 24% by age 15, and 15% more before age 25. [36]  At one time apprenticeships were used to train individuals to perpetuate businesses; now skilled tradesmen and merchants needed apprentices just to stay in business.

While London was prospering, population growth in England dropped to 50%, from 79% in the previous half century [37] that coincided with the inflation mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021.  The population increase on a fixed quantity of land meant per capital income increased 5% between 1600 and 1690, rather than the 12% before. [38]  With less money, men married later. [39]

Anthony Garvan notes that, among emigrants who settled Connecticut in the 1630s, a family head and his oldest son might be classed as yeomen, while the younger sons were listed as husbandmen. [40]  Both were rural, but the yeoman “generally had a freehold.” [41]  Usage suggests the husbandman was “a kind of meaner yeoman who might with the improvement of his estate become a yeoman himself.” [42]

The answer, as suggested by Garvan, was leaving. [43]  In Hampshire in southern England, John Graunt found one parish increased by 300 during a forty year period, while 300 to 400 went to London.  Rather than adapt to urban life, another 400 went to rural colonies in the New World, including the Carribelands. [44]

Barbados never improved its tobacco.  In 1650, it still was considered “the worst that grows in the world.” [45]  Enslaving the Arawak by the men from Saint Kitts stopped any cultural exchange that might have helped. [46]  The high-handed treatment of the planters kept them from experimenting. [47]  Henry Colt complained he never saw anyone working in 1631. [48]  Mistreating indentured servants made it difficult to get them to do more than the minimum work.

At this point Barbados was not a successful model for others, although its evolving attitude toward labor would persist in South Carolina.

End Notes
1.  Henry Winthrop.  Letter to Thomas Fones, his uncle, 22 August 1627.  Quoted by N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  32.  His source is the Winthrop papers in the Massachusetts Historical Collections. Spelling modernized; the original is: “I do intend to have everye yere some 2 or 3 servents over, and to have them bound to me for 3 yerres for so muche a yere, some 5 lbs or 6 lbs a yere.”

2.  Henry Winthrop.  Letter to John Winthrop, 15 October 1627.  Quoted by Davis, 33.  Spelling modernized; the original is: “send me ouer 2 or 3 men yt they be bound to searve me.”  John Winthrop was active in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

3.  Henry Winthrop, 15 October 1627.  Spelling modernized; the original is “not aboue 10 pd a yere.”

4.  Anthony N. B. Garvan.  Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.  9.

5.  Courteen is mentioned in the posts for 31 October 2021 and 7 November 2021.
6.  Powell and the Arawak are mentioned in the post for 30 October 2021.

7.  Henry Winthrop, 22 August 1627.  Quoted by Davis.  32.  “We have a crop of tobacco on the ground.”

8.  Nicholas Monardes.  The Newe Founde Worlde.  Seville: Alonso Escrivano, 1574.  Translated by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Found Worlde.  London: Willyam Norton, 1577.  Reissued by London: Constable, 1925.
 
9.  E. R. Billings.  Tobacco: Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce.  Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Company, 1875.  Chapters 3 and 4.

10.  Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault.  Praedium Rusticum.  1554.  Translated from Latin into French by Estienne as Maison Rustique in 1564.  Translated into English as The Country Farme by Gervase Markham.  London: Adam Jslip for John Bill, 1616. [49]  Individuals were growing different species of tobacco in their gardens according to Monardes [50] and Gerard. [51]

11.  Estienne.  Quoted by Billings.  Chapter 1.  He Anglicized Estienne’s name to Stevens.

“For to sow it, you must make a hole in the earth with your finger and that as deep as your finger is long, then you must cast into the same hole ten or twelve seeds of the said Nicotiana together, and fill up the hole again: for it is so small, as that if you should put in but four or five seeds the earth would choake it: and if the time be dry, you must water the place easily some five days after: And when the herb is grown out of the earth, inasmuch as every seed will have put up his sprout and stalk, and that the small thready roots are intangled the one within the other, you must with a great knife make a composs within the earth in the places about this plot where they grow and take up the earth and all together, and cast them into a bucket full of water, to the end that the earth may be seperated, and the small and tender impes swim about the water; and so you shall sunder them one after another without breaking of them.”

Methods became more complex later in Virginia with the use of seed beds.

12.  John Winthrop.  Letter to Henry Winthrop, 30 January 1628.  Quoted by Davis.  36.  His source is Robert C. Winthrop.  Life and Letters of John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, at Their Emigration to New England, 1630.  Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.

13.  Melissa N. Morris.  “Cultivating Colonies: Tobacco and the Upstart Empires, 1580-1640.”  PhD dissertation.  Columbia University, 2017.  76–77.

14.  Lee Pelham Cotton.  “Tobacco: The Early History of a New World Crop.”  National Park Service, Historic Jamestown website.

15.  Morris has maps showing the distribution of the two species on page 61.

16.  Melvin Herndon.  Tobacco in Colonial Virginia.  Williamsburg, Virginia: Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.  2.

17.  Morris.  96.  Her source is The Records of the Virginia Company of London, edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury.  Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1905.  III:92.  Lambert is a critical figure who has been lost in the tale of the great innovator who saved the Virginia colony from economic oblivion. It is odd no settler with named Lambert has been identified since so much research has been on done on the history of Jamestown and early Virginia.

18.  Herndon.  2.

19.  Davis.  44.  This is mentioned in the post for 31 October 2021.

20.  Roy E. Schreiber.  “The First Carlisle, Sir James Hay, First Earl of Carlisle as Courtier, Diplomat and Entrepreneur, 1580–1636.”  American Philosophical Society Transactions 74(7):1–155:1984.  170.

21.  Schreiber.  174.

22.  Nevis is two miles from Saint Kitts.  During the ice age, when water levels were lower, they were one island. [52]

23.  John Hilton.  Relation of the First Settlement of St. Christophers and Nevins.  29 April 1675.  Reprinted in Vincent T. Harlow.  Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667.  London: The Hakluyt Society, 1925; since reprinted.  10.  Paraphrase of “runn away from vs and Swimed aboard & told them were w hid our provissions, & in what case our Islands stood in.”  Original document in British Museum, Egerton MSS 2395.

24.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  36.  His source is Gary A. Puckrein.  Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627-1700.  New York: New York University Press, 1984.  37–9.

25.  Henry Colt.  “The Voyage of Sir Henrye Colt Knight to the Ilands of the Antilleas.”  Cambridge University Library MSS, Mm. 3, 9.  74 in Harlow.  “Forty of ye seruants when I was now ther, stoll away in a Dutch pinnace.”

26.  Colt.  65–66.
27.  Colt.  66.

28.  John Wareing.  Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618-1718.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.  40.  “The colonial indenture system originated in conditions of husbandry in England, and were temporary, contractual, and provided maintenance for the servant [ . . . ] also influenced by the system of apprenticeship for adolescents, the Vagrancy Laws, and the practices of the Virginia Company in binding their servants.”

29.  Henry Winthrop, 22 August 1627.  Quoted by Davis.  32.  He wrote: “paid 100 pounds a piece for our labors.”  [“paid 100li a yere apeece for or labors.”]

30.  John Winthrop.  Quoted by Davis.  36.  “but I knew not what to do for their binding, being not able to walk or write, and they being but youths.”  Winthrop had been sick that winter.

31.  Stephen Alford.  London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.  13.
 
32.  Bruce Robinson.  “London: Brighter Lights, Bigger City.”  BBC website, 17 February 2011.

33.  Economists at the London School of Economics show “natural increase varied widely across the city in the early seventeenth century, with the wealthier central parishes experiencing a positive natural increase outside plague years, the surrounding poorer parishes suffering an average deficit of 10 per cent, but with average deficits of 30 per cent occurring in the out-parishes.” [53]

34.  Neil Cummins, Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda. “Living Standards and Plague in London, 1560–1665.”  Economic History Review 69:3–34:2016.  4.
 
35.  John Graunt.  Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a following Index, and made upon the Bills of Mortality.  London: Tho. Roycroft for John Martin, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas, 1662, second edition.  27.  The 14 plague years were 1603, 1625, 1636 which lasted 12 years, and 1642.  Sickly years in which the death rate was higher than in subsequent years were 1618, 1620, 1623, 1624, 1632, 1633, 1634, 1649, 1652, 1654. 1656, 1658, and 1661.  That left 17 good years in the 44 years between 1618 and 1661.

36.  Graunt.  58.

37.  Stephen Broadberry, Stephen, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, and Bas van Leeuwen.  “British Economic Growth, 1270-1870.”  14 July 2010.  52.

38.  Broadberry.  53.

39.  Broadberry.  25.  “Although it is not known when it first became the norm, late marriage is known to have been prevalent in early modern England.”

40.  Garvan.  8.
41.  Garvan.  8.
42.  Garvan.  9.

43.  Garvan.  9.  He believed the servant group “was generally made up of countrymen; rural distress shared with the husbandmen made both groups migrate and the husbandman paid the poorer servant’s fare in return for his promise of labor.”

44.  Graunt.  61.  The parish suffered its greatest mortality from the plague in 1638. [54]

45.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  113.  The original is “theirs at Barbadoes is the worft I think that growes in the world.”

46.  For more on the Arawak, see the post for 31 October 2021.
47.  Harlow.  67, note 1.

48.  Colt.  67.  “In ten days travel about them, I never saw any man at work.” [“in 10 days trauayle about them, I neuer saw any man at work.”

49.  “ESTIENNE, Charles.”  Donald Heald website.
50.  Monardes.  1:75.

51.  John Gerard.  The Herbal.  1633 edition reprinted by Dover Publications of New York City in 1975.  356–358.  His first edition was published in London by John Norton in 1597.

52.  “Nevis.”  Wikipedia website.
53.  Cummins.  5.
54.  Graunt.  62.