Barbados Merchants

Topic: Gullah History
Barbados was never a self-sustaining colony.  From the beginning it imported labor from England and purchased manufactured goods from whatever ship arrived in the port of Bridgetown.

When planters began growing sugar, draught animals were added to the import list.  Dutch merchants were preferred because their quality was good, prices were lower, and terms of sale better.  However, as historians have begun to research the role of the Dutch, they have found it was a broad term and could include anyone who used a Dutch flag.

For instance, Constant Silvester [1] left Amsterdam in late 1644 for La Rochelle, France, where he probably purchased wine.  From there he sailed to Cape Verde in January where it is assumed he bought cows, donkeys, and horses, and thence to Barbados. [2]  In 1613, Silvester’s parents had moved to the area of Amsterdam where English separatists were allowed to settle. [3]  Soon after, his father, Giles Silvester, began leasing Dutch ships to trade wine from El Condado, Spain. [4]  They were English merchants with a Dutch veneer.

After leaving Barbados in 1645, Silvester went back to La Rochelle for more goods to sell in Barbados.  In September, he acquired land on the waterfront from John Crispe for storage. [5]  By then, London merchants were buying plantations as safe harbors for their money during the during the Civil War that began in England in 1642. [6]  For instance, Andrew Riccard, William Williams, and Edwin Browne bought 300 acres in 1646 through their local factor, Thomas Middleton.  Their land rose from the waterfront, where they could construct a pier and warehouse, through some land cleared for cultivation to woodland. [7]

By 1647, individuals had put more land into cultivation, and more settlers increased the demand for food.  The Silvester family had two plantations when Constant’s brother, Nathaniel, arrived in 1646. [8]  Richard Vines moved to the island in 1646 from Maine, [9] and by 1647 had purchased two plantations.  He wrote John Winthrop that year that men were “so intent upon planting sugar they had rather buy food at very dear rates than produce it by labor.” [10]

A smooth running economy can support what today are called long-distance supply chains, but as we have learned in the past two years any disruption in those chains can cause severe problems.  Barbados dependence on outsiders for food became a problem in 1647 when John Winthrop heard a drought had destroyed their potatoes and corn. [11]

The importance of those two crops is hard to overemphasize.  By the time Richard Ligon arrived in late 1647, bread was made from mixing maize and cassava, while corn boiled in water was a mainstay.  Potatoes were used for bread. [12]  Crops like wheat could not grow in the tropical heat, and were too bulky to ship cheaply. [13]  Other foods, like cheese, did not survive the long voyages from Europe. [14]  Barbadian settlers had had to adapt to a tropical diet.

The drought was accompanied by an epidemic now known to have been yellow fever.  Ligon recalled that soon after he arrived, “the living were hardly able to bury the dead.” [15]  He added, “it was a doubt whether this disease, or famine threatened most: there being a general scarcity of victuals throughout the whole island.” [16]

The next year Vines wrote Winthrop that:

“The sickness was an absolute plague; very infectious and destroying, in so much that our parish there were buried 20 in a week, and many weeks together, 15 or 16.  It first seized on the ablest men both for account and ability of body.  Many who had begun and almost finished greater sugar works, who dandled themselves in their hopes, but were suddenly laid in the dust, and their estates left unto strangers.  Our New England men had their share, and so had all nations especially Dutchmen, of whom died a great company, even the wisest of them.” [17]

By 1650, yellow fever had killed 20% of the population [18] on an island where, even before the epidemic, there had been a chronic shortage of labor.  This was when Barbados began to import convict labor and kidnapping increased in London to supply indentured servants. [19]

The immediate cause was a mosquito that bred in fresh water, [20] especially in the discarded clay containers used to drain moisture from sugar and in the cisterns used to collect rain water. [21]  James Goodyear said Aedes aegypti alternated between eating sugar and blood, and suggested yellow fever appeared whenever adequate food supplies developed for the females. [22]

The hidden cause was an RNA Flavivirus [23] native to Africa.  It could have come anytime after trade was opened with the continent through either mosquitos or human traders, seamen or slaves, and bred quietly until enough mosquitoes and enough people existed for it to spread.  John McNeill thinks cutting trees for firewood abetted its diffusion because birds that fed on the insect’s eggs and larvae lost their homes. [24]

Vines saw the epidemic as the Lord’s “heavy hand in wrath.” [25]  Winthrop was facing economic problems caused by the Dutch interfering with Boston’s trade with Native Americans, when drought struck the island.  He believed that just “as our means of returns for English commodities were grown very short, it pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and
other Islands in the West Indies, which as it proved gainful, so the commodities we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions, as sugar, cotton, tobacco, and indigo, were a good
help.” [26]

William Vassal moved from Massachusetts to Barbados in May 1648 [27] where he became a factor for merchants in Boston. [28]  Boston shipped 80 horses that year, and a merchant in Rhode Island sent cattle in 1649. [29]  By 1650, Massachusetts was sending nails and rod iron. [30]

End Notes
1.  In the 1640s, the family surname was spelled Silvester.  Today it has changed to Sylvester.  I am using the name used at the time.

2.  Rachel Love Monroy.  “On the Trade Winds of Faith: Puritan Networks in the Making of an Atlantic World.”  PhD dissertation.  University of South Carolina, 2015.  31 and 171.  Her source is the Dutch archives.  Since Sylvester’s father, Giles, was known to evade Dutch taxes, [31] I am not sure if the archives have records of his cargoes or only of his stops.

3.  The family history is confused, with no two sources agreeing in detail or citing primary sources. [32]  A Mennonite historian [33] says Giles Silvester moved from Stafford, [34] and Mary Arnold from Leicester in 1613.  He says her parents were Anthony and Ellen.  Most claim her parents were Nathaniel Arnold and Alice Wylde of Suffolk. [37]

4.  Monroy.  30.  The destination was Condaet, which appeared on a 1608 Dutch map as “El Condado.” [38]  The area was between the mouth of the Río Guadalquivir and Seville where the Casa de Medina Sidonia produced wine. [39]

5.  Monroy.  176.

6.  This is mentioned briefly in the posts for 17 January 2022 3 April 2022.

7.  Michael D. Bennett.  “Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627-1672.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Sheffield, June 2020.  153.

8.  Monroy.  175.
9.  “Richard Vines (Colonist).”  Wikipedia website.

10.  Richard Vines.  Letter to John Winthrop, 9 July 1647.  Original in Hutchinson Collection I:250–253.  Reprinted by Darnell Davis in 1887 [40] and the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1947. [41]  The original wording is: “men are so intent upon planting sugar they had rather buy foode at very deare rates than product it by labor.”

11.  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.  2:328, entry for June 1647.  The original is: “so great a drouth, as their potatoes and corn, etc., were burnt up; and divers London ships which rode there were so short of provisions as, if our vessels had not supplied them, they could not have returned.”

12.  Richard Ligon.  A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes.  London: Peter Parker, 1673.  31.  On the plantation where Ligon lived, a Native woman did the cooking.  Boiling corn is more typical of Native diets than others.  Slaves refused to eat the gruel, and instead roasted the ears.

13.  Temperatures in Barbados range from 75 to 82 degrees F. [42]  Spring wheat flowers when temperatures are between 44 and 64 F, and yields decline with high temperatures.  Winter wheat, like that grown on the Great Plains in this country, requires even colder temperatures. [43] Scientists who grew specialized wheat under optimal conditions in central México, a few degrees north in latitude from Barbados, found yields were “clearly poorest at the lowest” altitude site.  This “was probably due to higher temperatures accelerating development, to lower solar radiation reducing assimilation rates, and possibly to reduced diurnal temperature range; specific leaf area was however greatest at this site.” [44]

14.  Ligon.  30.

15.  Ligon.  21.  The original is: “were fo grievoufly vifited with the plague, (or as killing a difeafe,) that before a month was expired, after our arrival, the living were hardly able to bury the dead.”

16.  Ligon.  21.  The original is: “it was a doubt whether this difeafe, or famine threatned moft: There being a general fcarcity of Victuals throughout the whole ifland.”

17.  Richard Vines.  Letter to John Winthrop, 29 April 1648.  Reprinted by N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  74.  The original is: “The sickness was an absolute plague; very infectious and destroying, in so much that our parish there were buried 20 in a weeke, and many weekes together, 15 or 16.  It first seased on the ablest men both for account and ability of body.  Many who had begun and almost finished greater sugar workes, who dandled themselves in their hopes, but were suddenly laid in the dust, and their estates left unto strangers.  Our New England men had their share, and so had all nations especially Dutchmen, of whom died a great company, even the wisest of them.”

18.  David Watts.  “Cycles of Famine in Islands of Plenty.”  49–70 in Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon, edited by Bruce Currey and Graeme Hugo.  Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984.  57.

19.  Spiriting is mentioned in the post for 23 January 2022.

20.  The mosquito that causes malaria, Anopheles, lives in stagnant water.  As mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019, it prospered in South Carolina when rice was grown in swamps.

21.  The need for cisterns is discussed in the post for 14 November 2021.

22.  James D. Goodyear.  “The Sugar Connection: A New Perspective on the History of Yellow Fever.”  Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52(1):5–21:Spring 1978.

23.  “Flaviviridae.”  United States, Center for Disease Control website.

24.  J. R. McNeill. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.  32.

25.  Vines, 1648.

26.  Winthrop, June 1647.  2:328.  If this sounds callous, one must remember epidemic diseases were ever present in England.  See the post for November 2021 for more details on the morality rates from epidemics in London in the years when Massachusetts and Barbados were being settled.  He did not rely entirely on God for protection.  He noted Boston quarantined ships coming from Barbados.

27.  Winthrop, 10 May 1648.  2:339.

28.  Bernard Bailyn.  The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1955; New York: Harper and Row, 1964 reprint.  88.

29.  Bailyn.  85.
30.  Bailyn.  68–69.
31.  Monroy.  170.

32.  I understand Henry Hoff has studied the family, and his research is quoted by some.  However, his article is not available online or from an online bookseller.  His article is “The Sylvester Family of Shelter Island.”  The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 125:1:January 1994.  Cited by Mark E. Armstrong.  “The Ancestry of Mary Sylvester, wife of Richard Edgerton.”  Roots Web website, 15 November 2001.  Armstrong says, Hoff says, Giles and Mary married in 1913.

33.  Jacob Gysbert de Hoop Scheffer.  W. T. Whitley extracted some of Scheffer’s notes in “English in Amsterdam about the time of John Smyth.”  The Baptist Quarterly  357–367.  Errors could have entered in a number of places between the original Dutch records and Whitley.  Smyth is the father of Baptists in England, and is mentioned in the post for 19 January 2020.

34.  Mormons also mention Stafford, but have Giles and Mary married in 1610, and two different birth dates for Constant. [35]  Others list Giles’ birthplace as London. [36]

35.  “The Life Summary of Giles.”  Mormon’s Family Search website.
36.  “Giles Sylvester, Sr.”  Geni website, last updated 19 September 2017.

37.  “Mary Sylvester.”  Geni website, 17 July 2017; last updated 19 September 2017.

Joe Cochoit.  “Mary (Arnold) Sylvester (1595 - 1657).”  Wiki Tree website, 20 July 2014; last updated 21 August 2021.

38.  Willem Janszoon Blaeu.  “Algarve to Marbella.”  Het Licht der Zee-vaert daerinne.  Amsterdam: Willem Janszoon, 1608.  Google translates the subtitle “de groote Condaet” as: “Depiction of the sea coasts, between the C. de S. Vincente and the Strate of Gibraltar: as a part of Algarve, the great Condaet, and the coasts of Andalusia.”  While the description is in Dutch, the map uses Spanish names.

39.  Chris Chaplow.  “El Condado.”  Andalucia website.
40.  Davis.  72–73.

41.  Winthrop Papers, Volume 5, 1645–1649, edited by Adam Winthrop.  Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1946.  171–172.

42.  “Geography of Barbados.”  Wikipedia website.

43.  E. Acevedo, P. Silva, and H. Silva.  “Wheat Growth and Physiology.”  Soil Crop and More website.

44.  D. J. Midmore, P. M. Cartwright, and R. A. Fischer.  “Wheat in Tropical Environments.  II. Crop Growth and Grain Yield.”  Field Crops Research 8:207–227:1984.