Rice’s Origin Tale

Topic: Gullah History - Early Legends
Thomas Smith, mentioned in the post for 11 September 2022, governed at the time when South Carolina did not have a commercial crop.  Without a steady flow of income, settlers traded with pirates for hard currency [1] and, according to Peter Wood, occasional lots of slaves. [2]  Their tolerance changed when pirates disrupted the movement of their commodities.  Eugene Sirmans claims Smith was the “first governor to enjoy a lasting success in suppressing the pirate trade.” [3]

Rice, the first successful staple crop, was introduced at least three times: first in the early years of the colony, again after the revolution when planters needed to replace their lost seed grain, and then again when Joshua John Ward made his improved selection available in 1844. [4]

The first occurred before there were many written records and has become the subject of folk history; the second is remembered in family tradition, and the third, a commercial transaction, was recorded for all to know by the participants.

Alexander Salley found the only public record of what became the folk tradition was a 1715 entry in the journal of the House of Commons noting the body had agreed to pay a gratuity of one hundred pounds to John Thurber for “bringing the first Madagascar Rice into this province.” [5]

He found the first narrative explanation appeared sixteen years later in a pamphlet he attributed to Fayrer Hall, who had served in expeditions against pirates in 1718. [6]  Hall wrote the introduction of rice

“was owing to the following Accident.  A Brigantine from the Island Madagascar happened to put in there; they had a little Seed Rice left, not exceeding a Peck or Quarter of a bushel, which the Captain offered and gave to a Gentlemen of the Name of Woodward.  From Part of this he had a very good Crop, but was ignorant for some Years how to clean it.  It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection, that it is thought it exceeds any other in Value.  The Writer of this hath seen the Captain in Carolina, where he received a handsome gratuity from the Gentlemen of that Country.” [7]

The basic motifs of the folk narrative, told in several variants, are that:

1.  Someone, usually unnamed
2.  From Madagascar
3.  Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4.  Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5.  To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6.  A peck or some other small amount of rice
7.  Which was distributed free to the other planters
8.  Who proved rice could grow in the colony

Item 1.  In the first retelling, the identity of Thurber was reduced to a sea captain, who was now the one from Madagascar.

Item 2.  Between the time Charles II granted Carolina to eight proprietors in 1663 and Thurber’s petition, Madagascar was not controlled by any western power.  When the Portuguese arrived, Swahili-speaking traders were shipping rice and slaves to the African and Arabian coasts. [8]  The Europeans made a few cursory attempts that primarily resulted in disrupting existing trade networks without replacing them. [9]  French attempts begun in 1643 [10] and English experiments in 1649 [11] ended in massacres.

The only westerners who visited the island after that were pirates.  Charles had used privateers as part of naval offence against Spain and Dutch. [12]  Later, peace treaties forced him to forbid Carolina from consorting with them. [13]  In 1683, Thomas Lynch, the governor of Jamaica, began discouraging pirates [14] who, he claimed, moved to the northern Carolina coast. [15] Alexander Hewat says Robert Quarry, governor for a few months in 1685, welcomed them to Charles Town in 1685. [16]

Charles’ brother, James II, became more assertive, [17] and dispatched a small fleet to Jamaica to arrest pirates in 1687. [18]  James Colleton then was governor of Charles Town, and he assured the proprietors that no “pirates nor other Sea Robbers” had been allowed in port. [19]  This, apparently, was when the pirates, now aware of Jamaica’s need for slaves, moved to Madagascar. [20]

With another turn of fortune, James was ousted by William of Orange in 1688, and Colleton by Seth Sothell in 1690. [21]  Sothell again welcomed pirates in Charles Town. [22]

Item 3.  Hall used the word “accident” to suggest the introduction was a chance, not deliberate act.  From the first the proprietors wanted to develop a colony and listed rice as one of the crops that was both suitable to the climate and congruent with the throne’s desire to establish a completely self-sufficient mercantile economy. [23]  In 1672, William Jeffereys sent a barrel of rice “for the prop. acct of the Lords Proprs of Carolina” which was received by the governor. [24]

Many of the early settlers never accepted the legitimacy of the proprietors and had thrown off their power in 1720.  The use of the word “accident,” like the hidden reference to pirates, may have been an attempt to suggest the proprietors had nothing to do with the introduction of rice as a crop and, by extension, the success of the colony.

Item 4.  The gift of rice may have alluded to some bribe paid by pirates to an authority in Charles Town.  It also may have been another attempt to contrast proper behavior with that of the proprietors.  The third governor of the colony, John Yeamans, shipped his surplus food to Barbados where he could make a profit rather than sell it to the settlers he’d brought with him who didn’t have enough to eat. [25]

Item 5.  Woodward is assumed to have been Henry Woodward.  He had come to the area on the exploratory voyage of 1666 [26] and stayed with the Natives on Port Royale sound. [27]  He was captured by the Spanish the next year. [28]  When Robert Searle raided Saint Augustine in 1668 Woodward escaped and stayed with the pirates until shipwrecked on Nevis in 1669. [29]

He returned to the area with the expedition that founded Charles Town in 1670, and explored the interior. [30]  As mentioned in the post for 21 August 2022, the proprietors were not happy with the progress of the colony and one, Anthony Ashley Cooper, planned a new venture on Edisto Island in 1674. [31]  He hired Woodward to establish trade relations with the Westo. [32]

Cooper may have snared Woodward into his political campaign against Roman Catholics, mentioned in the post for 11 September 2022.  In 1677, just before Cooper was jailed the first time, Woodward signed an agreement with Cooper and three of the proprietors’ heirs [33] to work as their agent for a 20% commission of the profits. [34]  Cooper later promoted a Scots settlement near Edisto. [35]  After Cooper’s death in 1683, Woodward supported the Yamasee and Stuart Town against the proprietors.  Woodward died sometime between 1685 and 1690. [36]

His ambiguous loyalties to pirates, proprietors, rebellious settlers and native Americans made him a figure suspect to all.  He’s the element in Hall’s narrative that became the least stable.

Item 6.  The quantity of rice usually struck the narrator as too small to explain the spread or variations in the crop, and so a second introduction was often mentioned, much like the story of Seth resolves problems of ancestry introduced by the fight between Cain and Abel.  Hall suggested that

“Mr. Du Bois, Treasurer of the East-India Company, did send to that Country a small Bag of Seed-Rice some short Time after, from whence it is reasonable enough to suppose might come these two Sorts of that Commodity, one called Red Rice in Contradistinction to the White.” [37]

This addendum introduces the remaining motifs in the origin tale:

9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice

End Notes
1.  Pirates were mentioned by Alexander Hewat in the first history of the colony, [38] and the information was elaborated by William James Rivers. [39]  Edward McCrady went to some lengths to dispute the importance of piracy, while also trying to document its extent. [40]  Most recently, Eugene Sirmans addressed it in the context of factional politics. [41]

2.  Peter H. Wood.  Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carlina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion.  New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1974.  44.

3.  M. Eugene Sirmans.  Colonial South Carolina: A Political History 1663–1764.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966.  54.

4.  Ward is discussed in the post for 6 August 2023.

5.  Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina.  Journal, 16 February 1715.  Quoted by A. S. Salley, Jr.  “The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina.”  Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina.  Columbia, South Carolina: State Company, 1919.  Bulletin 6.  9.

6.  Salley.  10.

7.  Fayrer Hall.  The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom.  London: J. Peele, 1731.  Quoted by Salley.  10.

8.  R. K. Kent.  “Madagascar and the Islands of the Indian Ocean.”  849–894 in Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century.  Edited by B. A. Ogot.  Paris: UNESCO, 1992.  859.

9.  The Cambridge History of Africa. IV: From c. 1600 to c. 1790.  Edited by Richard Gray.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.  231.  Kent said the Portuguese lost interest after 1620. [42]

10.  Kent.  864.  The French fort lasted until 1674.

11.  Alison Games.  “Oceans, Migrants, and the Character of Empires: English Colonial Schemes in the Seventeenth Century.”  Library of Congress conference on Seascapes, Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges, 12 February–15 February 2003.  Visitors to the colony found slain bodies in 1650.

12.  After Charles I was executed, his son Charles commissioned privateers to attack English ships. [43] After he was crowned Charles II, he expected privateers to pay for his war with the Dutch by seizing their ships. [44]

13.  Wm. Jas. Rivers.  A Sketch of the History of South Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: McCarter and Company, 1856.  138.  147.  He mentions the 1670 Treaty of Madrid, which recognized England’s claim to Jamaica in exchange for suppressing “piracy in the Caribbean.” [45]

14.  Mark G. Hanna.  “Contesting Jamaica’s Future, 1655–1688.”  In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.  Online version does not have page numbers.

15.  Edward McCrady.  The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government, 1670-1719.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897.  204.

16.  Alexander Hewatt.  An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia.  London: A. Donaldson, 1779.  Volume 1, chapter 2, section “The toleration of pirates in Carolina.”  Quarry served from 1 July 1685 to Oct 1685. [46]

17.  Rivers.  147.
18.  Hanna.

19.  M. Eugene Sirmans.  Colonial South Carolina: A Political History 1663–1764.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966.  45.  Colleton is mentioned in the post for 11 September 2022.

20.  Angus Konstam and Roger Michael Kean.  Pirates: Predators of the Seas.  New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016.  219.

21.  Sothell was not named, but was alluded to in the post for 11 September 2022.
22.  Sirmans.  50.
23.  Salley.  5.
24.  Salley.  5.
25.  Yeamans’ tenure as governor is discussed in the post for 21 August 2022.

26.  McCrady.  83.  This account is based on the papers of Anthony Ashley Cooper, [47] which became public in 1897. [48]  Thus, Woodward is not mentioned by Hewat or David Ramsay, [49] and only briefly by Rivers.

27.  McCrady.  90.
28.  McCrady.  123.

29.  Joseph W. Barnwell.  “Dr. Henry Woodward, the First English Settler in South Carolina, and Some of His Descendants.”  The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 8(1):29–41:January 1907.  31.

30.  Barnwell.  32.

31.  L. H. Roper.  Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662–1729.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.  48 and 174 note 144.

32.  McCrady.  177.  The arrangement was rejected by later settlers who precipitated a war that exterminated the tribe and replaced them with the Savannah. [50]

33.  George Monck died in 1669, and his son inherited his share of the proprietorship.  Edward Hyde died in 1674, and Sothel had purchased his part.  John Colleton still was represented by his son, Peter Colleton. [51]

34.  Rivers.  122.
35.  Roper.  73–81.
36.  Barnwell.  32.
37.  Hall.  Quoted by Salley.  11.
38.  Hewatt, Toleration of Pirates.  Hewat is discussed in the post for 12 June 2022.
39.  Rivers.  138.  He is discussed in the post for 12 June 2022.
40.  McCrady.  201.
41.  Sirmans.  40.
42.  Kent.  863.
43.  This is discussed in the post for 17 April 2022.

44.  Gijs Rommelse.  “Prizes and Profits: Dutch Maritime Trade during the Second Anglo-Dutch War.”  International Journal of Maritime History 19(2):139–159:2007.  Cited by “Anglo-Dutch Wars.”  Wikipedia website.  The war is mentioned in the post for 21 August 2022.

45.  “Treaty of Madrid (1670).”  Wikipedia website.
46.  “List of Colonial Governors of South Carolina.”  Wikipedia website.
47.  Barnwell.  30.

48.  Landon Cheves.  “The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records Relating to Carolina and the First Settlement on Ashley River prior to the Year 1676.”  South Carolina Historical Society.  Collections 5:1897.

49.  David Ramsey.  The History of South-Carolina.  Charleston, South Carolina: David Longworth, 1809.  Reprinted as Ramsay’s History of South Carolina.  Newberry, South Carolina: W. J. Duffie, 1858.  He is discussed in the posts for 10 July 2022.

50.  Alan Gallay.  The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.  55.

51.  McCrady.  268.