Barbados White Labor

Topic: Gullah History
The capacity of mills determined the profitability of sugar operations on Barbados.  If a planter produced more cane than his mill could handle, the excess was a loss.  If he did not grow enough, he would have been dependent on others to supply cane whose quality was not assured.  Drax initially “persuaded a number of smallholders nearby to grow canes for his mill.”  However, not everyone was as scientific as he, and they sent cane of different qualities.  In chemistry, that matters.  Matthew Parker said “they made a mess of it.” [1]

This led to an important concept that was transferred to South Carolina, the belief there was an optimal size for a plantation. [2]  Men calculated how many acres it would take to produce the ideal amount of cane for their mills.  Land consolidation, which already had begun, accelerated.

The harvest period was compressed by the requirements of sugar.  The most profitable time to cut cane stalks was when they held the most sugar.  Given the plants dependence on the sun, that ideal time was relatively short. [3]  As soon as canes were cut, they began to rot.  This quickly led to fermentation. [4]

Next, planters figured out how much labor they needed during the harvest season.  The mill and the boiling house ran continuously, so men had to keep cutting cane and bringing wood for the boilers.

The need for firewood led to cutting trees in the inland.  This, in turn, opened more land for cultivation.  The planting period was as compressed as the harvesting.  If the canes were all to ripen at the same time, they had to be planted at the same time.

Weeds flourished in newly planted cane fields.  In Brazil, weeding was “as labor intensive as planting, and an activity that required as much labor as the cutting and carting of cane combined.” [5]  Many of the invasive plants on Barbados were brought from Europe. [6]

The only work that required some skill was in the boiling house.  The rest was manual labor done by groups working under threats of beatings. [7]  The need to extract as much effort as possible in peak periods deadened the senses of planters and their overseers.  Richard Ligon was shocked by the level of cruelty he saw in some places in the late 1640s. [8]

Laborers still were imported from England as indentured servants.  As soon as their contracts expired, they could and did leave.  This meant planters not only had to acquire new labor in the first years of their operations, but then had to pay for both new workers and replacements.

Alison Grimes suggests the first round of terminations occurred in 1640, during a year when the cotton crop had done poorly and many faced starvation.  Peter Hay, the agent for James Hay’s estate, reported many of the newly freed men were leaving for Trinidad. [9]  This was the year when Thomas Verney asked his father to send men from a prison in England.  As mentioned in the post for 9 January 2022, he probably wanted to resell their contracts.

By then, James Hay’s son was feuding with the estate’s trustees; [10] he could not assume his property until all his father’s debts were paid. [11]  In 1641, he sent Philip Bell to govern the island with instructions to “sell the land in large units to the colonists in return for a quit rent of forty pounds of tobacco annually.”  While this accelerated the aggrandizement of plantations, it also “reduced the possibility of men without substantial sums of capital becoming landholders.” [12]

At the same time, planters were increasing their demands for labor and failing to retain the help of men freed from their indentures, the labor supply from England may have been disrupted.  In August 1642, conflict between Charles I and Parliament broke into open hostilities with both sides recruiting young men for their armies.  In London, the war seems to have drained the pool of apprentices who were the same age as indentured servants. [13]  John Winthrop said servants stopped coming to Boston, where the price of labor rose. [14]

Whenever a gap opens between supply and demand, black markets develop. By its very nature, the number of youth kidnapped in London for sale on Barbardos is not known.  By 9 May 1645, it must have reached a new high because Parliament ordered ships be searched. [15]  However, the act had little effect.  As Anna Suranyi suggests, too many people with influence made money on the trade. The actual spiriters, who captured the youth, might be fined but the owners of ships that carried them were not. [16]

James Drax’ great success with his sugar crop in 1645, which coincided with a drop in sugar exports from Brazil, [17] led to an expansion of cane production on Barbados.  The first crops probably were processed in 1646.  This is when the Island turned to convict labor.

The first months of the year were marked by defeats of Charles’ forces in England, with royal garrisons surrendering in Dartmouth on January 18, in Chester on February 3, and in Cornwall on March 10. [18]  On March 20, the House of Lords agreed to accept an offer from William Fortescue to take prisoners from Winchester Prison to Barbados.  Fortescue, who was described as a “Gentleman of Quality,” offered “good Security.” [19]

When Ligon sailed from England in 1647, he noticed his ship carried men educated at Bridewell and Turnball Street. [20]  Since Turnball was a London area known for its criminal activity, [21] these may not have been prisoners but people who had been kidnapped and sold to ships bound for Barbados. [22] The illicit trade increased when more land was put into production.

Unrelenting demands for hard labor by indentured and involuntary servants had the expected affect.  Just before Ligon arrived on the island, someone betrayed a plot to kill planters and take over the island. [23]  More devious ways of passive resistence were more common by the “carelessness and slothfulness of retched servants.” [24]  While he was there, two plantations were destroyed by fires. [25]

Hilary Beckles notes the more common forms of resistence were running way [26] and emigration when indentures were completed. [27]  However, he said they did not move to mainland colonies.  In 1671, Carolina made clear it only wanted planters, not the ones who “serve only to fill up numbers and live upon us.” [28]

Instead, promoters of sugar plantations on other Caribbean islands recruited them.  Hay’s son was forced to sign away his last remaining rights on Barbados to a creditor on 17 February 1647. [29]  In November, the man responsible for promoting large plantations, offered land on other islands he still controlled because land prices were “too high for the purchase of poor servants.” [30]

End Notes
1.  Matthew Parker.  The Sugar Barons.  New York: Walker and Company, 2011.  34.

2.  Hilary Beckles.  A History of Barbados.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.  23.  He notes that, while many plantations created by combining smaller ones, the larger properties were being subdivided “into more manageable unites of 300–500 acres.”

3.  Russell Menard suggests they eventually were able to extend the harvest season over a long period, but he does not give dates.  His book covers both the 1600s and 1700s. [31]

4.  George Richardson Porter.  The Nature and Property of the Sugar Cane.  London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1831.  220.

5.  Jason W. Moore.  “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From ‘Island of Timber’ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506.”  Fernand Braudel Center Review 32:345–390:2009.  372.

6.  J. R. McNeill.  Mosquito Empires.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.  28.

7.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  44.

8.  Ligon.  44.  The full quotation is: “Truly, I have seen such cruelty there done to servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another.” (“Truly, I have fecn fuch cruelty there done to Servants, as I did not think one Chriftian could have done to another.”)

9.  Alison Games.  Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.  125.

10.  Robert W. Baird.  “Peter Hay the Envoy.”  Gen Files website.

11.  J. Harry Bennett.  “Peter Hay, Proprietary Agent in Barbados, 1636-1641.”  Jamaican Historical Review 5(2):9:1 November 1965.

12.  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.  15.

13.  Ben Coates.  “The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642-1650.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Leicester, June 1997.  He notes numbers varied by trade, but there was a general drop between 1642 and 1643.  He also notes few complained about a lack of labor.  This led him to think general business activity had declined, which led to the drop in taking on apprentices.

14.  John Winthrop.  Winthrop’s Journal “History of New England”, 1630-1649, edited by J. K. Hosmer.  New York: Scribner, 1908.  II:228.  This was brought to my attention by Abbot Emerson Smith.  Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America 1607–1776.  University of North Carolina Press, 1947.  29.

15.  C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait.  Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660.  London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911.  681, probably in volume 1.  Cited by Anna Suranyi.  “Indenture, Transportation, and Spiriting: Seventeenth Century English Penal Policy and ‘Superfluous’ Populations.”  In Building the Atlantic Empires, edited by John Donoghue and Evelyn P. Jennings.  Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1 January 2016.  153.

16.  Suranyi.  153.

17.  The post for 17 January 2022 has more on Drax and the introduction of sugar in Barbados.

18.  “Timeline of the English Civil War.”  Wikipedia website.

19.  House of Lords Journal, volume 8: 20 March 1646; reprinted in 1802 as Journal of the House of Lords, volume 8, 1645-1647, pages 222–224. [32]  Beckles claims the first shipment arrived in 1642, [33] but this was impossible.  The House of Commons voted to establish the prison in the Bishop of Winchester’s palace, south of London, in November 1642, and appointed Thomas Devenish as keeper in December 1642. [34]

20.  Ligon.  13. [35]  He describes an incident where some men and women left the ship to do laundry and attracted the attention of locals. [36]  They were rude, but Ligon did not think they did more because the men were “from Bridewell and Turnball Street, and such like places of education, were better natured than to suffer such violence.” [37]  Bridewell has been established as the first workhouse to train unemployed youth in 1555.  By Ligon’s time it had become the generic name for a jail. [38]

21.  “Turnmill Street.”  Wikipedia website.

22.  Smith says the Spirits, as kidnappers were called, maintained depots in “less reputable sections of London, especially on St. Katherine’s near the Tower” where kidnappers brought their victims to await ships. [39]  Bridewell was in St. Katherine’s.

23.  Ligon.  46.

24.  Ligon.  45.  The full quotation is: “the love of the servants there, is of much concern to the masters, not only in their diligent and painful labor, but in foreseeing and preventing mischiefs that often happen by the carelessness and slothfulness of retched servants; sometimes by laying fire so negligently as whole lands of canes and houses too are burned down and consumed to the utter ruin and undoing of their masters.” (“the love of the fervants there, is of much concernment to the Mafters, not only in their diligent and painful labour, but in fore-feeing and preventing mifchiefs that often happen; by the careleffnefs and flothfulnefs of retchlefs fervants; fometimes by laying fire fo negligently, as whole lands of Canes and Houfcs too are burnt down and confumed, to the utter ruine and undoing of their Mafters.”)

25.  Ligon.  45.  The destructive fires were on the lands of James Holdip and Constantine Silvester.  Silvester is discussed in the post for 27 March 2022.

26.  Beckles, Labour.  234–235.
27.  Beckles, Labour.  291–292.

28.  Lord Ashley.  Letter to Sir John Yeamans, 15 December, 1671.  In Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series.  Volume 7, America and West Indies, 1669-1674, edited by W. Noël Sainsbury.  London: published for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1889.  295.  Quoted by Beckles, Labour.  299.  Ashley is Anthony Ashley Cooper.

29.  N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  138.  “The Deed of Demise from the Earl of Carlisle [40] to Lord Willoughby [41] is dated 17th Feby., 1646-47” [42] and is located at Trinity College, Dublin, mss. G. 4. 15.

30.  “The Proclamation of the Earl of Carlisle [43] (Proprietor) Offering Barbadian Servants Land in the Leeward Islands, 22 November 1647.”  Reprinted by Beckles, Labour.  309.  The original is in the British Library, Thomasson Tracts, 669; 11, (115).

31.  Russell R. Menard.  Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.

32.  Quoted by Michael Russell.  “Thomas DEVENISH (c1589 - Aft 1638).”  Fordington Dorset section of Roots Web website, March 2009.

33.  Beckles, Labour.  96.
34.  Russell.
35.  Beckles, Labour, brought this to my attention on page 97.

36.  Smith said landing women to do the laundry was common, but gave no source (page 65).

37.  The original is: “from Bridewel, Turnball ftreet, and fuch like places of education, vvere better natur’d than to fuffer fuch violence.”

38.  “Bridewell Palace.”  Wikipedia website.  Smith notes records are sparse, but believes the number of scattered references “make plain that Bridewell was in fact a source of supply for the servant trade” (page 140).

39.  Smith.  69.
40.  Carlisle is James Hay, Jr.
41.  Willoughby is Francis Willoughby.

42.  England had not yet moved the New Year to January 1, and so actions in February carried both the Julian (1646) and the Gregorian (1647) years.

43.  Carlisle is James Hay, Jr.